After nine years of global research into birthrate decline, my findings were recently published in Nature Portfolio’s Scientific Reports (August 21, 2025, link below). With the upcoming mid-September release of my feature-length documentary Birthgap, this first Inverted World Report sets the stage for the new era of our times: the era of ultra-low birthrates.
I’m an optimist about almost everything — but not about this. As a published independent researcher in data science and demography, and the filmmaker behind Birthgap, I'm a rea
list. Because the data shows we simply haven't grasped the scale of the birthrate crisis — or what must happen to avoid civilizational collapse. Yes, collapse.
Crisis? What Crisis?
Not everyone sees falling birthrates as a problem. My research and media work attract a loose collection of innocent voices who care little about fertility decline, yet often for contradictory reasons. For some, falling wealth will supposedly lift the poor. For others, “boomer selfishness” will somehow be transformed into prosperity for the young. Still others imagine that peace will blossom, or that we’ll finally find harmony with nature.
The reality, however, is very different. We are staring down the barrel of a world in decline — marked by rising poverty, political instability, worsening health, shrinking opportunity, fractured communities, and, ultimately, the erosion of everything we once took for granted. Positives are hard to find — unless we count the cold comfort that, as we fade, so too will all our other crises. This really is the crisis to end all crises.
Faced with such stark realities, it’s no wonder that many prefer to look away. Blind spots, optimism, and even denial often serve as natural shields against painful truths. But in the era of birthrate collapse, less innocent voices have also played their part — as I know firsthand, from organized attacks on my work, including the cancellation of a screening of an early version of the Birthgap documentary at Cambridge University in 2023. Certain voices are over-eager to persuade the young that their hopes for family can — or even should — be sacrificed for a supposed higher cause: modern Pied Pipers, leading with seductive half-truths. But the message distills to a single absurdity: “Wouldn’t we all be happier if most of us weren’t here?”
For some of these pipers, the mission is nothing less than human extinction — though it is rarely admitted outright. I’ve come to learn that nihilism is alive and well, another anomaly of our age. Other voices verge on innocence, urging only that young people can have it all, but should prioritize education and careers. What could go wrong with that, after all?
Collectively, anti-natalism relies on partial truths. “There will still be billions of us in 2100,” they insist — without noting that those billions will be far older than any world we’ve ever known, and that life will be far harder for the few young and the many old. Or that the collapse in births will continue relentlessly even then, unless something fundamentally changes. As always, it’s what they don’t say that speaks loudest.
What is often missed is that birthrate decline isn’t a gentle glide toward some “perfect” lower population. Mathematically, it is Exponential Decay — a relentless contraction, too often blurred by focusing on total population headcounts. That reality unsettles the young audiences I’ve screened my documentary to, and rightly so. As they progress from youth to old age, they will witness the full context of this collapse — their future is the one most at risk. Yet younger minds have been told a very different story.
Living in the Past
Sadly, in almost every high school textbook on geography or environmental science from recent decades, we find page after page warning about population growth — but barely a line acknowledging birthrate decline. It’s like teaching a physics class that “what goes up” — and ending the lesson without mentioning that it must also come down.
In demographic terms, what’s ignored isn’t just that birthrates can fall, but that they’ve been falling for decades. Then take our biology textbooks which often focus on pregnancy avoidance, while skipping over the long-term realities of declining fertility outcomes for many. It often shocks young people to learn that, in many nations, a woman who reaches age 30 without a child has less than a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother. In some countries, that “50/50” threshold arrives even earlier.
Transitioning to a fact-based narrative in the classroom is the first step toward giving our societies a fighting chance. Yet even the most comprehensive human geography and fertility education may not be enough. The data points to something much, much larger at work.
The arithmetic is stark: what we call “birthrate decline” can be better understood as The Great Recursion — births halving, then halving again, and again and again… a downward spiral from which no society in history has been known to recover. Such recursion is how civilizations unravel — and ultimately collapse.
After nine years of research, the cause of this crisis no longer haunts me — its nature is clear, as I reveal in my documentary. What keeps me awake now is the scale of the solution. Yes — there is one — one way to pull the emergency escape lever, if nations are willing. Tinkering won’t do; that has long been tried—and it has failed. The answer is in the data.
Next in this Series
In my next Inverted World Report, I’ll explain why this trend began in multiple nations at the exact same time, how it has spread relentlessly ever since — and why the hard data shows our options are far more limited than we think.
Mark your Calendars
The full two-hour version of the Birthgap documentary launches in mid-September 2025 — premiering first on YouTube and X. Stay tuned here for updates and new articles.
Watch Birthgap from mid-September 2025 — viewing links will be available at www.birthgap.org
Follow me on X: @stephenjshaw
Read my published research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-11522-9
The bulk of our issues lie in the hubris of modern businesspeople who deny that what comes up, must come down. We have artificially raised the "highs" and ignored the "lows" in a way that makes any drop in our economy seem like a disaster, when in fact contracture is necessary for growth. Uncontrolled unsustainable growth on an organism is known as cancer; uncontrolled unsustainable growth in our economy is seen as a win.
The wealthiest people need to lose massive amounts of wealth in order for anything to change, but that will never happen. So until then, we get socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and economic measures that mean nothing for the average person. The ponzi scheme will continue until "demographic collapse", which is actually just economic contracture that cannot be shown numerically because of our global system of debt, inflation, and overspeculation.
Hi Stephen -- just watched your film Birthgap on YouTube. Thanks so much for this important work. Something I wish the film had spent more time on was the lack of a program in any country (apparently?) to teach teens and young adults about what it's like to date, to be in long-term relationships, to work out problems, and what it's like to actually be a parent. Without a generationally integrated culture, how will they go through these dramatic passages in life and grow as people? It's so easy with things like social media to just sink into the comforts of your own cohort without thinking ahead and imagining your life could be different -- more challenging, but more fulfilling. I believe the much-maligned older generations, rather than being shunned and blamed and isolated, should be put to work just talking to young people about the relationships in their lives. Young people have to be brought along in these things with role models and friends to turn to. In the US we used to have corny classroom films from the 1950s about "how to go on a date" or "how to make friends" or "the responsibilities of adulthood"... we laughed at them, but now I see the point! We seriously need something like that now. How many of these people are saying, "I never found anyone"? It takes work to be people worth finding. Again, thanks for the film, from San Francisco.