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Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it 'the age of depopulation.' For the first time since the Black Death [...]

Ilya Baburin is an IT specialist living in Novosibirsk who has been opposed to Moscow's War on Ukraine since its inception. This year he was convicted on an array of […]

Last December, one of the world's wealthiest men, with public pretensions to being an intellectual, took the stage at a hard-right festival in Rome named after a character from a […]

Across london, primary schools are under threat. In Tulse Hill, in the south of the capital, parents and local politicians are trying to save Fenstanton Primary School, pleading that it [...]

POSTERITY HAS not been kind to Widow Luo. Bereaved as a young mother in the late Qing dynasty, her refusal to remarry earned her the emperor's praise and a zhenjie [...]

SO-CALLED SHOCK polls seldom shock. But in April, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of U.S. adults and found something revelatory. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said that life, 'for [...]

If current forecasts are accurate, 2064 will be the first year in centuries when fewer babies are born than people die. Birth rates in India will fall to below the [...]

WE have two covers this week. In most of the world we consider why baby-boosting policies won't work. As birth rates plunge in rich countries, many politicians are keen to [...]

As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he [...]

Three decades ago, when women now entering their 40s became fertile, East Asian governments had reason to celebrate. If a South Korean woman behaved in the same way as her [...]

Los Angeles CA (SPX) May 06, 2024 The narrative of a childless future, once relegated to dystopian fiction, resonates eerily in today's societal context, where declining birth rates present a [...]

Philadelphia PA (SPX) May 06, 2024 In the 1992 dystopian novel 'Children of Men,' later adapted to film, humanity faces the chilling reality of a world without children, a global [...]

For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity's future, Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world [...]

IT'S EARLY AUTUMN IN CENTRAL CHINA, AND THE STREETS OF DING OINGZI'S VILLAGE ARE TDRNING INTO GOLD. Thousands of husked corncobs lie in orderly rectangles in front of homes, their [...]

To read more of The Economist's data journalism visit our https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail page. BABYMAKING, IT SEEMS, is not as popular as it used to be. In 1990 America's fertility rate—the number [...]

TO DRIVE AROUND Lathrop, a small town in California's Central Valley, is to see a rural community in the throes of rapid development. Shelley Burcham is the town's economic-development administrator. [...]

Who could have foreseen that half a century after the sexual revolution we'd be facing its exact opposite: an asexual revolution? There's a crisis of fertility across the West, with [...]

We had two covers this week. Our British edition looks at https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/scotland-has-been-on-a-ten-year-holiday-from-reality . Everywhere else we focus on the profound economic consequences of https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/global-fertility-has-collapsed-with-profound-economic-consequences . In 2000 the world's fertility [...]

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world's population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the [...]

The scars left by China's population-control policies are clear. Last year, its population started to fall for the first time since 1962; its working-age population has been declining for a [...]

Byline: John Feng Familiar alarm bells sounded in Japan this month as year-end population figures and new projections combined to paint an uncertain future for Asia's No. 2 economy. Japan's [...]

THE DEMOGRAPHIC milestones come thick and fast in 'My Home in the Forest', the official tourism anthem of Yichun, a sprawling city in China's far north-east. The song was released [...]

In the weeks leading up to the lunar new year on January 22nd, millions of people in China travelled back to their home towns to celebrate the country's biggest holiday. [...]

'WE ARE THE last generation.' As news, released on January 17th, that the country's population had fallen last year for the first time in decades swept Chinese social media, some [...]

Innovative ways to cope with demographic decline I N RELATION TO demography, as well as public debt, Italy is often compared to Japan. It has Europe's second-lowest birth rate, at [...]

Native-born women in America had more babies during the pandemic B IRTH RATES often fall during hard times, but the covid-19 pandemic was no ordinary economic downturn. On the one [...]

In early 2019 awareness that human population growth was ending began to spread more widely. To much acclaim, Darrell Bricker, the chief operating officer of the polling firm Ipsos Public [...]