A Town Without Children
Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches. Faded toys in second-hand markets. Towns like these are not unusual in Italy, a country with the lowest birth-rate in Europe (1.2 per woman, 2023). Their world is our world: the world of a society going into retirement.
As you cycle through this world, nothing happens. In the countryside, the houses decay, first lone houses, then villages, then small towns. In the city where housing pressure is stronger, dilapidation is more unusual; instead, lone elderly residents – the ‘final generation’ – retreat ever deeper into their overly-large homes, waiting to die. But even in the city, dilapidation is possible. Where property rights are poorly managed, or probate is slow, empty homes can persist in prime real estate. Last time I visited Kamakura in Japan and saw the ruined luxury homes, I asked a friend ‘how could this be?’; the answer: ‘no-one knows who owns them.’ It is not laziness or a lack of acquisitive urges: the flow of property rights has merely ceased. When someone in Japan dies without a will (intestate succession), inheritance goes to branches of the family; when they are part of ‘the last generation’, these branches grow fuzzy and obscure. Finding distant relatives can be costly and time-consuming; combine this with a slow court system and nothing happens.
The same issues apply in Italy, with large quantities of real estate falling into null ownership. Empty homes are not the only vacant buildings. Without children, there is no more need for the infrastructure designed to raise them. It starts with nurseries and day-care centres closing; then primary schools; then secondaries. The first and second of these stages is already happening throughout Europe. And without schools there is no walking to school, no school-bus, and no need for children-crossings. Nor are there school concerts, sports matches, charity fundraisers, or field trips. There is no ‘last day of school’, no school-break, and no graduation. There is merely a ‘final class’ – perhaps of two or three students, and then: nothing.
My mother, who works in publishing, tells me the market for children’s books has collapsed. The remaining families who read prefer to buy classics, whilst tablets have swallowed up the rest of the ever-shrinking market. Books were a huge part of my childhood: The National Book day, book tokens, book fairs, going to see authors and getting your book signed, having authors come to read at school, adolescent reading obsessions, in the way only children can be obsessed. Without children none of this will exist in the same way. There will be no more new readers. That entire ecosystem vanishes, as it does across countless areas, from the childish rhythms of zoos, museums, and the seaside, to sports, swimming pools, and fireworks displays. And after this disappearance, it comes for the adolescent ecosystems, and teenage ecosystems, and young adults, and students, and ‘youngsters’, and poof!
For most readers, these visions exist solely in the abstract. There is a good chance you live in a city or a university town, in which case you live in an artificially youthful area. But scratch the surface a little – go out to the countryside, knock on a few suburban doors, visit the centres of rural towns – and you will discover the extent of our collective ageing. My hometown in Scotland, for instance, has a large population of young families and it feels quite alive – but a third of the population is already retired. They simply do not go out in public. I discovered these silent minority whilst knocking on doors to canvas for a local political party. Small flats, the television on, food delivered remotely. Offended at their bubble being poked. They showed up somewhere else too: in the ever-increasing social care costs on my local authority, ring-fenced and thus slowly killing council spending on other amenities, such as swimming pools or public infrastructure.
I do not have the luxury of ignoring these troubling signs. I am not wealthy enough to insulate myself from public sector collapse, nor to hide my wealth from ever-rising taxes imposed to avert it. More importantly, I want children myself, and this desire starts to change one’s picture of the future. My partner and I think five would be a good number (depending on how things go), but I often wonder what would happen to them. Is there a way, I wonder, to insulate our children from the burden of our peers’ desire to go childless? In South Korea the current birth-rate means 100 South Koreans will produce around 13 grandchildren. Imagine, amongst those 100, that five families were responsible for the 13. They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after, those who, during their youth, were richer, had more free time, and more individualistic political views. And they start to wonder: why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?
In my fantasies, I imagine a country radically re-wilded thanks to the falling population. One without queues, or busy highways, or the other inelegancies of mass society. My partner and I live in a city surrounded by other parents, inheriting the positions and responsibilities necessary for society to function. Elsewhere, beyond the horizon, is an enormous structure. A pleasure dome-retirement home, one for each region, designed carefully for the needs of pensioners of different decades. Imagine huge, glitzy towers lined with comfortable flats, each brimming with televisions and other entertainment devices. There are casinos, cinemas, shopping malls, municipal swimming pools and gyms for self-improvement; endless sports facilities; libraries for bookish obsessions; concert halls for snobs, trendy venues for sticking it to the man. The tidy streets are interspersed with parks for yoga, jogging, chess, socialising, peaceful protests about this or that. Each dome has an associated cruise-liner and they open out to walks in a variety of natural settings. New luxuries and fashions are constantly being recycled, often in mock-authentic cultural forms. Everything is optional, nothing is mandatory. Safe, recreational drugs flow freely, as does contraception and STI testing. There are no schools, nor are there any children.
Somehow, in this fantasy, all this can be paid for by the productivity of the remaining citizens. Perhaps the flats, being heavily centralised, are cleverly designed to minimise care costs; perhaps they come equipped with state-of-the-art robot assistance. Whatever the case is, these domes do not break our backs. They are a beautiful monument. The pleasure domers, all over retirement age, are free to enter and leave. Outside, pensions and retirement care still exist, but in a much-diminished form, relying more heavily on savings and familial support. Luxury, pleasure, and leisure still exist, but are adjacent to something else. The city dwellers are expected to take on responsibilities appropriate for their age, whatever those might be given their ability and characteristics. Failing to do so is met with shame: “if you don’t like this… perhaps the dome would better for you…?” In return, those who remain are given something which cannot be found in the Pleasure-Dome-Retirement-Home: power. The power to make political decisions governing our society; more than that, the power to spend time with the generations who are to come, influencing and teaching them. They are given something very small, but precious.
The right to live in a town with children.
As a relatively old person and a relative anti-natalist, I say they shouldn’t. It’s not their doing.
Unfortunately I can’t offer them a good alternative. Even if they don’t support all those old people, they’re still burdened by a world full of those people’s misery.
I have to own all that. What you are saying is important. A fair amount of it is already baked in. Denying it would be delusion.
Yet if I don’t want the young to break themselves trying to feed the old, I also don’t want anybody obliged to be breeding stock for somebody else’s Grand Plan. Slavery is slavery, however either of those might be dressed up as “duty”. And “voluntary” can be a dangerously elastic word.
All this is, in small part, the doing of people who set up public pension plans that promised an endless future payment stream, relying on the assumption that there’d always be new members. That’s an insolvent system that can never be wound up: a Ponzi scheme. But no matter how much money some pension system had put aside, there’d only be so many people to actually do the work. Money can only move real wealth around, not magic it into being. At best money can lubricate economic realignments, let productive systems get set up… but it can’t do that if you’re forced to spend it all on consumption. Prices just go up.
… but another reason I dislike natalism is that it’s another Ponzi “solution”. If your system can’t handle population contraction, or at least stability, then your physical arrangemenent can’t be “wound up”. Growth just sets up a bigger failure when you hit some real, physical limit. [1]
Such limits really do exist, and we don’t actually know where they are. In fact, we don’t even know if we’ve already passed them. We may not be sustainable right now. The climate’s looking pretty rickety, and it’s not the only thing, and nobody really knows the end state. Even after they pass tipping points, things that big take a long time to hit their new equilibria. Decades, and not just one or two decades. People who say tech or lifestyle changes will fix any of that, or just brush it off to assume that any new equilibrium will be tolerable, seem to be relatively long on talk and relatively short on substance. It might be a more realistic assumption that a major transition would at least fix your demographic imbalance by killing all the old people… but the way would happen would be… unpleasant. And not completely restricted to the old.
Anyway, my hope, if not my faith, is in the robots. And maybe anti-aging. Seriously, the whole demographic thing, and, if we’re incredibly lucky, maybe even much of the environmental thing, may be moot in 20 years.
If nothing else, paperclips don’t have a lot of needs and don’t care much about the climate.
Not that anybody seems to know how to get stability or sustainability either.
I think there’s a band of birthrates that a society can survive without trouble, and anything outside of that band will result in issues no matter how you organize things. If everyone suddenly had 15 kids, the education and childcare sectors would be overwhelmed. Likewise if everyone had 0.5, as after 20 years there’d be roughly the same demand for infrastructure but substantially fewer people to maintain it[1]. The expectation is that each generation replaces itself with its children, and that expansions and contractions occur slowly enough that they can be accommodated with raises and recruiting campaigns for the relevant professions.
This differs from a Ponzi scheme because a Ponzi scheme requires a larger base at each step, recruited from the same broader population, inevitably exhausting the supply of marks. Some lobbyists will demand a growing population, or use the lack of one as an excuse to import cheaper labor, but, realistically, we could sustain an exactly-replacement birthrate forever with no real consequences for the average person, and we could sustain a slightly sub-replacement birthrate for quite a bit longer than many expect. It’s just that we’re dealing with numbers like 1.1 instead of 1.9.
Even taking the callous option and playing Logan’s Run doesn’t save us, here. There’s no clean way to scale down our food, housing, and electricity production by a factor of 2 such that we produce and maintain half of those things with half the workers.
Fermi’s paradox answered? Any sufficiently advanced civilization will develop contraception, choose “self-fulfillment” over procreation, and fade into blackness musing at the irony of evolved motive-functions inadequate to ensure the survival of the species, once intelligence learns to short-circuit them and enjoy the endorphins without the anchor of unintended consequences crying in their cribs and pulling sometimes-begrudged but reliably generated obedience to duty.
An entertaining idea, but I don’t think we’re going to run out of people. Within even apparently-very-homogeneous populations, there are subpopulations that are, for a variety of reasons, more inclined to have more kids. The sorts of people that kids just “happen to” will become rarer as contraception precludes this, and the sorts of people who see children as a vital part of their lives will become more common[1].
A lot of people model the decline in birthrate as an iron law that will keep going forever, but it’s more that wanting kids wasn’t mercilessly selected for for most of our history and now it is.
Less happily, the sorts of people that don’t particularly want kids but struggle to properly operate contraception will also grow as a share of the total population.
Just a random idea—one reason why starting your own country is difficult, is that land is scarce and everyone is fighting over it. So the obvious thing the dying-out countries should do is rent their land to charter cities. If your own population is not using that land anyway, why not rent it to someone else who will contribute to your pension funds?
(And more generally, here we arrive at Georgism again. The old are dying out, and some of the young are considering having children… but all the land belongs to the old, so the new children are born into debt.)
Nevermind the economic burden of looking after anybody else: I can think of few greater psychological burdens than knowing I was brought into the world primarily in order to look after just my parents when they were old, or—perhaps even worse—because my parents figured that they and their peers might enjoy their public spaces more if they were decorated with children. I would resent parents who thought like that a great deal, I think.
I think it’s the other way around! People deliberately having children in order to have somebody around to do all the work when they are elderly seem to be the ones “expecting to be looked-after”!
Suppose a terminally-ageing population such that each generation is 50% the size of the previous one: each adult would need to generate an economic surplus of 100% during their working life so that the next generation had sufficient resources to care for them. This seems difficult, I know, and I am glad we have social safety nets for people who fail to do this (paid-for by the people generating more than 100% economic surplus), but:
Firstly, it’s not as difficult as it seems: if the work you do only earns you £20 per hour but your employer generates a profit of £40 per hour of your labour—in other words your £20 of labour generates £40 of goods or services—then you have probably generated the requisite 100% surplus. Note that dividing the annual profits of a medium-sized company by their employee count generally yields a surplus figure of several thousand percent: the fact that only 2 to 8 percent of this 3000-odd percent is typically set-aside by the company (in the form of a pension contribution) to provide for the employee at the end of their lifetime of labour seems to me like a problem with how companies work, not a problem with some other entirely unrelated people not having enough children.
Secondly, no matter how difficult generating sufficient surplus was, intentionally planning to generate less and use the labour of some large number of children to make-up the shortfall seems like an incredibly selfish choice, to me. (Difficult to do “explain, not persuade” on this one, I admit! I think it just seems wrong as essentially a final, non-instrumental value, and I don’t think “it’s natural”, “it’s just the way of the world”, or “there’s no other way” are sufficient justification for inflicting that burden on the beings one is supposed to love and protect above all others.)
Separately: we absolutely have the resources to support our ageing population! The UK’s purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita is just over £50,000. Meanwhile, the highest birthrates and largest family sizes are almost-universally found in regions with catastrophically low domestic product per capita. Speaking for myself, I would prefer solutions involving better distribution of our really-quite-plentiful resources over solutions involving manufacturing people and expecting them to do the work for us.