Declining population or depopulation has emerged after years of warnings about overpopulation. While biologists see benefits from depopulation, some economists fear reduced investment, slower economic growth, and stress to social assistance systems. Is depopulation a cause for alarm?

The demographic “transition” refers to a decline in death rates leading to significant population growth and then a decline in birth rates. Western European nations experienced a decline in fertility to around replacement level over 80 years. The
transition has diffused and accelerated, now occurring in less than twenty years.

Prosperity drives the transition. Improved nutrition and medicine reduce deaths, particularly among infants and children. Prosperous parents have fewer children when most reach adulthood and invest more time and money in each child.

The transition has occurred across cultures, including some where women lack full rights and began before modern feminism or birth control. Western Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and China are all well below the replacement fertility level.

Falling birthrates took experts by surprise. Only in 2022 did the United Nations begin projecting global population to peak during the 21st Century. Population change provides another example of the limits of expertise.

Policy can reduce birth rates as China’s disastrous one child rule demonstrates. But once people decide they do not want children, government policies seem unable to change minds.

Will depopulation wreck the economy? I see no cause for panic.

A market economy has no fixed number of jobs. Enough jobs were created that the U.S. unemployment rate was four percent in 1970 and 2025 even with 70 percent population growth. An economy should be able to scale down.

A shrinking workforce may cause shortages in some occupations; imagine many dentists retiring within a few years. But salaries will adjust to address shortages in specific fields.

Less total human ingenuity could reduce growth. Economist Julian Simon recognized how humans are the ultimate resource. A smaller human population may mean fewer brilliant new ideas.

But poverty has kept many humans from achieving their potential. Extreme poverty has fallen rapidly since 1990. With continued economic development, the global talent capable of generating brilliant new ideas should not decline soon.

Declining populations threaten retirement systems, particularly Social Security. But retirement saving and planning are individual actions. Sufficient saving during working years allows a comfortable retirement regardless of population change.

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go transfer system, never accumulating assets like a genuine pension system. It flourished for decades with more Americans paying in than drawing benefits. Constitutional constraints on government’s economic powers are needed to check such frauds by elected officials.

Some claim that mass immigration is needed to prevent a declining workforce and save Social Security. Since I do not see a potential catastrophe, I am unconvinced.

Talented, ambitious, hard-working individuals, not government, create prosperity. Historically America’s immigration policy enticed such individuals move here and they helped our nation thrive. But immigration based on welfare benefits for unvetted new arrivals does not build prosperity.

Depopulation could produce benefits. Infrastructure and the built environment will have excess capacity. More capital per worker should boost labor productivity and real wages.

Nobel Prize winners Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson examined how the Black Death affected Europe. The plague killed between a quarter and half of Europe’s population within a few years. Under the feudal system, peasants had to work a lord’s land and were serfs, not far removed from slaves.

Too few peasants remained to cultivate all the land. In Western Europe and Britain, nobles competed to attract enough people to grow crops, effectively ending serfdom. But in Eastern Europe, nobles consolidated control over land and tightened controls on serfs.

The decision to have children is one of life’s most important; free people must be allowed to decide this for themselves. The resulting population change should not even be a policy issue. Declining population growth will pose challenges, as life always does, but not ones necessitating surrendering a fundamental human right to government.

Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.