At a weekly American Community Media national briefing moderated by Sunita Sohrabji, panelists examined what she called “America’s incredibly shrinking population,” situating U.S. demographic trends within a global shift marked by falling birth rates, aging societies, and slower immigration. Citing U.S. Census Bureau and UN data, Sohrabji noted that under low-immigration scenarios the U.S. population could begin to decline by the end of the century, mirroring patterns already reshaping Europe and East Asia, where fertility rates have fallen well below replacement levels.
The discussion opened with Dr. Anna Langer, director of the Women and Health Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor emerita of global health and population. Drawing on more than three decades of work in global reproductive health, Langer framed population change as the outcome of four interlocking forces: fertility, mortality, migration, and age structure, all shaped by education, women’s rights, healthcare access, and public policy. She emphasized that declining fertility is a long-term, global phenomenon. “Births are declining everywhere,” Langer said, noting that the global fertility rate has fallen from about five children per woman in 1970 to roughly 2.2 today. In the United States, she added, fertility has dropped to about 1.6, well below replacement level.
Langer stressed that economic pressures and gender inequality play a central role. High housing and childcare costs, insecure work-life balance, and women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic labor all discourage family formation. “Women cannot play well the two roles that are expected from them,” she said, referring to full participation in the labor market alongside primary responsibility for caregiving. While some governments have turned to pronatalist incentives, Langer argued these measures rarely reverse demographic trends and should instead be understood as fulfilling basic rights. “These policies should exist not to increase population growth,” she said, “but because people need to be able to afford children, housing, and child care.”
Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, shifted the lens to economic consequences. She described demographic change as the cumulative result of millions of individual decisions that, taken together, are reshaping labor markets, productivity, and public finances. According to McKinsey’s research, shrinking working-age populations could reduce per-capita GDP growth by about half a percentage point in many advanced economies over the coming decades. “Half a percentage point is a lot,” Madgavkar said, warning that slower growth combined with rising old-age dependency will strain social safety nets, including Social Security. She argued that boosting productivity, particularly through responsible use of automation and artificial intelligence, represents one of the few viable ways to sustain living standards as populations age.
The final speaker, Dr. Philip Cafaro, associate professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, offered a starkly different framing, focusing on environmental limits. While acknowledging that the U.S. population is still growing, Cafaro argued that humanity as a whole is already in ecological overshoot. “Humanity is in ecological overshoot on planet Earth,” he said, pointing to climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse as symptoms of an economy demanding too much from natural systems. Rather than treating population decline as a crisis to be reversed, Cafaro urged policymakers to see it as an opportunity. “Instead of trying to fight that,” he said, referring to falling fertility, “we need to lean into population decrease” as part of building sustainable societies.
Together, the speakers outlined a debate that cuts across public health, economics, environmental ethics, and human rights. While they differed sharply on whether population decline should be resisted or embraced, they converged on one point: demographic change is not a temporary anomaly but a structural shift that will shape economies, social contracts, and the planet for generations to come.
