GTBT - The Beginning of the End of Humanity?

: Mateusz Łakomy; Created: 10 January 2025

The end of humanity?

Humanity. The emergence of humans as a species was one of the most significant events in Earth's history. While the age of the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years, humans appeared on the planet only about 250,000 years ago. In this short time, however, humans have created a remarkable civilisation, learned to exploit a range of natural resources and adapted to survive in the face of many climatic difficulties and natural disasters. However, the demographic processes of recent decades, particularly those associated with low fertility rates in the developed world, make us wonder whether man is failing to adapt to the impact of the development of his own civilisation. Are we witnessing a turning point in human history, or just the beginning of human extinction? Will man be only a temporary ephemera in the history of the cosmos? Or is this a new challenge that man can rise to?

Mankind was born in Africa. As a result of migration, it settled latter in other areas of Asia and Europe. Prehistoric population estimates suggest that the world population of Homo sapiens was only two million in 50,000 BC. This population grew gradually and very slowly, reaching five million by 8,000 BC, but periods of population growth were interspersed with periods of local decline. The reason for this was that for most of human history Homo sapiens functioned as hunter-gatherers and the number of people in a given area was determined by the availability of food and the incidence of disease. When the population of an area grew beyond the capacity of the area to support such a population, there was a 'mortality catastrophe' as a result of famine and disease, combined with the debilitation and death of those able to maintain the social fabric. Over time, wars between different human populations began to take on a certain significance as a result of deaths caused by warfare, destruction and the frequent periods of famine and epidemics that followed wars, reducing the capacity for population growth.

Over time, however, people learned how to increase the availability of food and protect themselves from starvation. This was achieved through the spread of animal husbandry and agriculture, such as the cultivation of figs, peas and cereals in the Middle East, rice and millet in China and maize in Central America, which laid the foundations for population growth.

By 5,000 BC, the population of Europe was estimated at 3 million, living mainly in the climatically favourable areas of the Mediterranean basin. At the same time, the main population centres in Asia were around the East China Sea and the Indian peninsula, including the Ganges valley. The population of Asia was about 9 million. In the Middle East, the most densely populated areas were Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent along the Euphrates, Tigris, through Syria to the Jordan valley. In Africa, the population lived mainly in the Nile Delta. In the Americas, the population was concentrated in Central America.

The slow spread of the ability to control nature meant that the world's population grew more rapidly, but still slowly. A thousand years before Christ it was 125 million, in the first year of our era 240 million and a thousand years later 335 million. It was not until the second millennium that population growth began to accelerate. In 1300 the world population was 435 million, in 1500 480 million and in 1700 645 million.

Throughout this period, however, humanity still had problems with epidemics. The largest of these caused enormous loss of life and did not spare the elite. Suffice it to say that the victim of the Athenian Pestilence, which broke out during the Peloponnesian War and the siege of Athens by Sparta and which was also the greatest epidemic in ancient Hellada, was Pericles himself.

One in three people in the Roman Empire died from the Antonine Plague, the worst epidemic in ancient Rome. Even two emperors, including the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, lost their lives. The Justinian plague, which began in Byzantium in the mid-6th century, claimed an even greater number of victims. Some estimates suggest that as many as 100 million people may have died as a result of several waves. The greatest epidemic of the Middle Ages, the plague known as the Black Death, claimed between 25 and 50 million victims, killing up to half the continent's population. The toll was even higher in successive waves of epidemics in Mexico, where previously unknown diseases introduced from Europe caused a mass extinction in the 16th century, wiping out most of the indigenous population.

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, a real revolution began in Europe. A demographic explosion began, the result of the most fundamental demographic change in human history, known as the demographic transition. What did it consist of?

The first stage of the demographic transition covers almost the entire history of mankind up to the industrial revolution. For most of it, the number of children a woman would have was determined primarily by the length of time she remained in a relationship with a man. However, the difficult living conditions meant that either the mother or the father often died before the woman reached the age of biological unfitness to have children. Nevertheless, for most of human history, it is estimated that a woman gave birth to an average of about six children. However, such large numbers of births did not contribute significantly to population growth due to high mortality rates, especially of infants and young children. It is estimated that between 40% and 50% of girls born did not live to the age of first menstruation, the age of acquiring the ability to have children of their own. The average age at which the first child was born was close to 25, and this age was rarely lived to more than an average of one daughter. Thus, the high fertility rate was offset by a relatively low life expectancy which meant that the population did not change significantly. This is the first stage of the demographic transition.

In the 18th century, the first European countries entered a second phase, the phase of increasing life expectancy. This was driven by medical discoveries, such as the breakthrough discovery of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, improvements in hygiene and the increased availability of clean water. Other improvements related to agricultural productivity, such as the introduction of the four-field system, the development of the agricultural market, transport, irrigation, the development of cross-breeding between plants and animals. We should also mention the development of agricultural tools and, finally, the introduction of new crops, notably potatoes imported from South America and, to some extent, maize, was also significant. As a result, mortality rates, especially among infants and young children, fell significantly, allowing an increasing percentage of children to grow up and have children of their own. Significantly, fertility rates also remained high during this period, due to pro-child norms, including high religiosity, and a lack of individual need to reduce birth rates. As a result, the population began to grow rapidly.

The third stage is one in which mortality fell as a result of further medical discoveries and improvements in hygiene, such as the spread of water supply, sanitation and latrines. But in this phase, fertility rates also begin to fall, partly because of economic development that favours urbanisation or the spread of norms that favour birth control. Nevertheless, the decline in mortality is still faster than the decline in fertility and the population continues to grow rapidly.

Stage IV is the stage in which medical and health care advances continue to contribute to the decline in mortality, but fertility declines at the same rate, so that population growth slows and begins to stabilise. Nevertheless, the population is already significantly larger than in Stage 1.

Stage V - is the current stage, the stage of greatest uncertainty, because it is not clear whether this is the final stage of the demographic transition or the next transitional stage. In this stage, fertility falls so much that it is no longer sufficient to maintain the stability of the population, which begins to decline. Hygiene and medicine are already at very high levels, so people live long and rarely die young, but this is still not enough to keep the population from falling. The future of humanity depends on whether Stage V is the final stage of the demographic transition or whether we find a way to increase fertility rates.

So much for the theory. What has happened in practice? Different countries around the world entered the next stages of the demographic transition at different times and the length of the different stages varied too. France was the first country to enter the second stage of longevity. France was also the first country to begin a fertility decline, triggered by the change in values in the 18th century associated with secularisation and the intensification of the birth control process. Subsequently, the fertility decline spread from west to east in successive European countries, including Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and also England, and later southwards to Italy and Spain.

As a result of the second and third stages of the demographic transition, Europe's population grew enormously, from less than 225 million in 1820 to almost 500 million in 1913, despite the departure of almost 60 million emigrants from Europe to the New World, mainly to North America. The war losses of the First World War, which resulted in 13 million deaths in Europe, and the subsequent Spanish flu, which claimed 2.6 million lives in Europe, were quickly compensated for. By 1924, Europe's population had already exceeded that of 1913, only to reach almost 580 million 15 years later, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War.

The uneven start to the different stages of the demographic transition in different countries and regions also had a significant impact on the population shares between countries. In Napoleonic times, France was the most populous country in Europe, excluding Russia, with a population of around 30 million. The population of France at the beginning of the 19th century was twice that of Germany and larger than that of Austria or the Italian states. This gave Napoleon a demographic advantage, which he used efficiently to raise and replenish armies that overran much of Europe within a decade. But throughout the 19th century, the birth rate in Germany was significantly higher than in France, and population growth was much faster than on the Seine, so that by the second half of the 19th century the two countries' populations were equal. By the start of the First World War, Germany's population of over 66 million was almost 60 per cent larger than France's, and by the eve of the Second World War, with a population of almost 70 million, Germany was already two-thirds more populous than France. Meanwhile, at the start of the two wars, France's population was almost identical at just under 41.5 million.

As mentioned above, the effect of secularisation and birth control in France from the mid-18th century was a much lower fertility rate than in other countries, followed by much slower population growth. But the authorities began to take action. As early as 1791, during the French Revolution, tax breaks were introduced for families with at least three children. But the real shock was the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1870, which made the French aware of their worsening demographic situation. According to the French demographer and historian Hervé Le Bras, "population growth became a republican value, on a par with liberty, equality and fraternity". In the 1930s, the first family benefit schemes were introduced, and in 1939 the Family Code was adopted, which explicitly expressed the pro-natalist aims of family policy. After 1945, Charles de Gaulle played a major role in shaping demographic policy. The fundamental aim of his policy was to restore the glory of France by encouraging and stimulating fertility. The de Gaulle government defined population policy as a priority of the French state.

After the Second World War, Europe was already well advanced in its fertility decline. In 1975, the fertility rate in Europe had fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, and since 1990, almost 35 years ago, the fertility rate in Europe has been around 1.5. Europe is therefore the first continent to enter stage 5 of the demographic transition. North America is moving in a similar direction, with fertility rates falling below the replacement level earlier, as early as 1972, but approaching the replacement level again in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. The situation in Asia is different. In the late 1960s fertility was still close to 6 children per woman, but since the 1970s there has been a very sharp decline. In 2020 the fertility rate in Asia will be below replacement level. Africa's fertility rate remained relatively high for the longest time, at around 6.5 children per woman, until the early 1980s. Since then, however, there has also been a clear downward trend, with the fertility rate barely exceeding 4 children per woman in 2023.

However, the demographic transition is at different stages in different countries. The most extreme situations are in Africa and Asia. In Africa, the most developed countries, such as South Africa, Tunisia or Morocco, have experienced a decline in fertility rates since the second half of the 1960s and are now close to replacement levels. On the other hand, there are the poorest countries such as Chad, Mali, Niger or the Democratic Republic of Congo. But even in these countries, there has been a clear downward trend in recent years, at the latest 15 years ago. Asia, on the other hand, is a continent where the transition from high to very low fertility has been extremely rapid. South Korea took 24 years to go from a fertility rate of six children per woman to below replacement level. In China, where such a change started 10 years later, it took only 22 years to achieve such a significant fertility decline. The exception among the Far East countries is Japan, where fertility was already relatively low in the 1950s, fell below replacement level by the end of that decade and has remained low ever since. One of the clear leaders in fertility decline is Iran. In the country ruled by the Ayatollahs, it took only the last 15 years of the 20th century for the fertility rate to fall from 6 children to below replacement level. India, the world's most populous country, took a little longer but has also gone down this path, while Bangladesh, a country with a population half the that of the United States, is barely below replacement level. In Asia, too, the last countries with high fertility rates have started to decline. This began in Pakistan in the 1990s and in Afghanistan a decade later.

Fertility rates are therefore heading for their lowest levels on all continents, although they are currently at different levels and the decline is staggered over time. From a global perspective, UN demographic projections to the end of the century show that by the middle of the 21st century, i.e. in about 25 years, human fertility will fall below replacement level. By the end of the 21st century, all continents, including Africa, will have fertility rates below an average of 2.1 children per woman. Even if the global fertility decline is slower than projected, mainly because of a slower decline in Africa, it is still expected to occur.

Due to human biological limitations, the possibility of increasing life expectancy is limited. Therefore, a fertility rate well below replacement will sooner or later lead to the onset of population decline. Let us look at world history. Since the 19th century, we have seen a real demographic explosion. The world reached the first billion inhabitants in its history in 1818; it took 105 years to reach the second, only 36 years for the third and only 15 years for the fourth. Later humanity has regularly passed the billion mark every 12 years, most recently reaching 8 billion in 2022. But UN projections show that we will have to wait longer for the next billion. It will take 15 years to reach the ninth billion, and another 23 years to reach the tenth. And that is when population growth will start to come to a halt. From the 1980s, when a peak of around 10.3 billion is expected, the world's population will begin to decline. This decline will be in Europe, which has already started to decline from 2021 onwards, in Asia, which is expected to peak in the 2050s, and in South America. Africa's population will continue to grow, but at an increasingly slower rate from the second half of the 21st century onwards, and will not be able to compensate for the population decline in the other continents and will itself approach a peak that it is expected to reach in the next century, at which point Africa will also enter a period of population decline.

As we can see, the planet is not threatened by overpopulation. Humanity is threatened by the exact opposite, a progressive, never-ending decline in population, if it turns out that stage V of the demographic transition is not the next transitional stage, but the last stage of human history. So where does the popular thesis of global overpopulation come from? You have to go back to the end of the 18th century. In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. According to Malthus, the earth's population grows exponentially, while the production of basic goods, especially food, grows linearly. As a result, there will eventually be a phenomenon known as the Malthusian trap, in which population growth will outstrip humanity's ability to feed itself, leading inevitably to famine, poverty, the spread of disease and wars over resources. Malthus therefore argued for a limit to population growth. In the twentieth century, however, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, which among other things led to the significant increase in agricultural productivity mentioned above, this phenomenon did not occur, because although the population grew rapidly, humanity was able to keep up with feeding it.

Malthusian thought had a renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s, when the neo-Malthusian movement emerged in the midst of significant world population growth. Its main positions were Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book ‘The Population Bomb' and the 1972 Club of Rome report “Barriers to Growth”. The authors argued that population growth is slower than agricultural productivity growth and leads to the consumption of land resources, advocating the reduction of fertility through the spread of contraception and abortion and, if necessary, the reduction of fertility by forced methods. Meanwhile, another revolution in productivity was already taking place in world agriculture, which was termed the ‘green revolution’, resulting from the spread of mechanisation, fertilisers, plant protection products or the introduction of new varieties. At the same time, Julian Simon, among others, pointed out that mankind was able to discover, over time, the use of many resources that had hitherto been regarded as useless and thus achieve viability. To corroborate Simon's words, let us at least recall the relatively short but significant career of oil, natural gas and uranium as energy sources for which mankind has relatively recently found a use, or the rare earth elements. Although the world's population has more than doubled since these reports were published, the history of this time shows that population growth has not been associated with an increase in poverty. In fact, in recent decades there has been a spectacular decline in poverty, and if there is a significant scourge of hunger somewhere, it is the result of wars, corruption or state weakness. As we can see, the scare of overpopulation, still present in many science fiction books or films, does not apply to the most likely future.

The question is the opposite - to what extent low fertility is a problem. The challenges can be divided into two groups: those affecting the world as a whole and those affecting individual countries. In the first group, despite the expected population decline, humanity will continue to exist well beyond our lifetimes. But from the perspective of the history of human existence on Earth, if nothing changes, the decline in human population will be lightning fast. This is different from the perspective of individual countries, which have already entered the fifth stage of the demographic transition. In this case, if nothing changes, by the end of the 21st century—just 75 years from now, which some of those alive today may already witness—countries with the lowest fertility rates will experience a significant population decline.

East Asian countries will be most affected. If current fertility rates remain unchanged, by the end of the century China's population alone will have shrunk by the unimaginable figure of more than a billion people, a 72% decline from its current size. A comparable, if not slightly larger, decline is expected in South Korea, where the population will fall by 73% from its current level of just under 52 million to 14 million. Japan, on the other hand, will lose more than half its population, from 122 million today to less than 60 million. And it is important to remember that the story will not end in 2100, and the decline will continue in the years that follow.

In Europe, the biggest declines will be in its Central-Eastern part. Poland will lead the decline, with its population falling by 62%, from almost 38 million today to 14 million. Not much better off will be Romania, whose population will fall by more than half, and the Czech Republic, which will lose almost 40% of its population. A similar situation could occur in the countries of southern Europe, with the population decline being driven by Italy, Greece and Spain, which will lose around half their population. If nothing changes, the population of individual countries will continue to fall to drastic levels. Take Poland, for example. If current trends continue, its population will fall to 4 million by 2200, and to less than a million by 2307. But can the country survive such a population decline? We do not have a clear answer to this question, and the phenomena associated with depopulation suggest that it could be a major challenge.

Population decline will be accompanied by another phenomenon, demographic ageing. Demographic ageing is characterised by an increase in the proportion of people of retirement age and a decrease in the proportion of people of working age, i.e., in simple terms, there will be fewer people able to work for each pensioner. This is not a new phenomenon, as the ageing of the population has been going on for a long time. In 1980, for example, half of Europeans were under 32; by 2023, Europeans were 10 years older on average. Population ageing will continue, especially in countries with the lowest fertility rates. UN projections show that, if nothing changes, by the end of the 21st century China will not only have a billion fewer people, but half of them will still be over 58. In South Korea, the population will be even older, with half of Koreans over the age of 61. This is causing panic in terms of economic growth opportunities and the provision of pensions and adequate healthcare in old age. At the end of September, South Korea's Vice Minister of Health and Welfare, Lee Ki-Il, announced that South Korea's state pension fund, one of the largest in the world, will run out of money by 2056 if reforms are not implemented. As Bloomberg points out, the risk of the fund running out of money highlights the dire future for pensioners in South Korea's rapidly ageing population. As a result, the government has proposed raising insurance premiums from 9% to 13%, the first change since 1998.

These are not the only steps taken by the Seoul government. In May 2024, it was reported that the government was looking into the possibility of providing an astronomical birth grant, eqivualent of over $70 000. In June, however, the government announced plans to set up a special Ministry of Population Strategy, headed by a minister with the rank of deputy prime minister, which would, among other things, develop policies to counter low fertility rates and coordinate the work of various ministries in this regard.

The economic consequences of demographic change include a rapid decline in the working-age population. Since the proportion of older people will increase as the population declines, the decline in the working-age population will be even faster than the decline in the total population. This is important because the working-age population is the demographic base of the economy and the potential for economic growth. Meanwhile, the latest analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research shows that the changing age structure in Germany, France, the UK and Italy has already had a negative impact on economic growth since the mid-1990s, and the model suggests that this negative impact will worsen. Recall that these three countries are not the ones with the biggest demographic problems in Europe.

For countries with big problems like Poland, the McKinsey report 'How to lift Poland's ambitions? On the threshold of a new era', points out that demographic and social trends will be an obstacle to maintaining economic growth at the rate achieved since the 1990s. One of the obstacles to economic growth will be a decline in domestic demand. As POLNTA's research shows, due to demographic changes, Poland's total labour income in 2080 will be 40% lower than in 2012, and this assumes a significantly higher fertility rate in this period than in recent years, which will translate into a significantly lower market demand.

The famous Draghi report on the European Union, on the other hand, indicates that by 2050, due to the decline in the working-age population and assuming that productivity growth is maintained, this will only be enough to keep the EU's GDP stable. The report does not indicate what will happen if the decline in the working-age population accelerates during this period, or if productivity growth slows, or what will happen after 2050.

So can higher productivity compensate for the loss of labour to sustain economic growth? Among the solutions for achieving a leap in productivity, many are pinning their hopes on a revolution in the application of artificial intelligence. However, it is important to remember that we are only at the very beginning of significant activity in this area and we cannot yet determine what it will actually bring. While investment in its development is growing rapidly, the list of obstacles to overcome is very long, including the limits of computing power, the quality of models, legal issues, data protection, or even the bias of AI towards political issues. And although a recent report from Stanford University suggests that AI is already improving work in some areas related to graphics or working with text, as the Economist article concludes, the significant impact of AI on the economy is yet to be seen. In contrast, MIT professor and recent Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, quoted in a Goldman Sachs report from June 2024, predicts, quote: "Given the focus and architecture of today's generative AI, truly disruptive change will not come quickly". AI therefore has the potential to deliver significant productivity gains, but not all hope should be pinned on it as a potential answer to demographic challenges.

Finally, it remains to be answered whether the remedy to the demographic problem is migration. From the perspective of the human population of the entire world, of course not, as displacement does not change the total population of the planet. However, the answer to the question of whether migration can be a remedy for individual countries with low fertility rates was already settled at the beginning of the 21st century, when UN demographers drew up a model of what kind of migration European countries might need in order to be able to reproduce the population numbers that are being lost due to low fertility rates. According to these calculations, in order for Europe to maintain a stable population over 50 years, it would need to attract more than 95 million migrants during this time, and to maintain a stable working-age population, the number of migrants would need to exceed 160 million during this time. It is difficult to expect that it would be possible to attract such a number of migrants with adequate adaptability. The conclusion is therefore that migration is not the solution to demographic problems. Selective migration and the brain drain of highly competent people may contribute to filling vacancies in highly specialised areas, but it is still not enough to bridge the demographic gap in all areas.

It should be noted, therefore, that the solution to the demographic challenge lies in increasing fertility rates. This is essential not only for the long-term survival of humanity on Earth but also for the development and even endurance of individual states and nations. To increase fertility, the focus must be on the most developed countries, as it is in these nations that fertility rates are dropping far below replacement levels.

The factors limiting fertility in the most developed countries are universal, although each is of a different magnitude from country to country, and therefore affects the total fertility rate of a country more strongly in one country and less in another. In presenting the various barriers, we need one country to serve as an example. The ideal candidate is Poland. This is not only because it’s the author’s home country but, more importantly, because this country has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

On the one hand, Poland, after the collapse of the communist system in the 1990s, is the undisputed European leader in economic growth. After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Poland took in millions of war refugees, who were given shelter in their own homes by Polish citizens, some of whom stayed for longer. On the other hand, Poland is a country with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and, according to estimates for 2024, the second lowest in Europe, except, of course, for the war-ravaged Ukraine.

So what are the most important aspects influencing fertility rates? Of course, for each of us, the decision to start a family will be determined by other factors. However, there is no doubt that (usually) first you need a relationship that gives you a sense of security, commitment from your partner and at least some guarantee of permanence. The features of such a relationship are usually best fulfilled by marriage. In Poland, especially young people thinking about children want to precede their efforts to have offspring with marriage. The lack of a relationship with such characteristics in the vast majority of cases practically eliminates the possibility of having children. In Poland, 40% of persons aged 20-39, i.e. the age group in which significantly more than 90% of children are born, are not in any relationship and therefore in practice have no possibility of having their own offspring.

However, couples do not form at random, but only when the man and woman are similar in many ways. The most important, from the point of view of the decision to have children, is similarity in terms of socio-economic status. This is influenced by many things, such as occupation, income, social status or education.

Research, including that summarised in David Buss's famous book The Evolution of Desire, shows that while it is important for a man and a woman to have similar status, known as homogamy, ideally the man should have slightly higher status, known as hypergamy. This may be a politically incorrect observation, but these are the facts.

At the most general level, in the long run, social status is most influenced by education, which, for example, determines future earnings and is the basis for opening more doors to social advancement over time. In the developed world, however, there is a widespread education gap, with a higher proportion of young women than men in higher education. This gap is particularly large in Central and Eastern European countries. In Poland, more than half of young women and only one in three men have completed tertiary education, i.e. the gap is almost 20 percentage points, although in some countries of the region the gap is even higher. As a result, a significant proportion of women with tertiary education will never find a partner and have children, as will a proportion of men with secondary and vocational education.

However, if we assume that a couple is building a successful relationship, we face another obstacle: job instability. The lack of a sense of predictability of future income leads couples not only to refrain from trying to have a child, but also often to decide against marriage. The reason for this is the multiple employment of one person on temporary contracts. This is a major obstacle to having children, especially in Western European countries, but also in Poland, where the proportion of young people in temporary employment is particularly high. This is not the only work-related challenge. For the decision to have a first child, it is important for parents to work full-time, which at the beginning of labour market activity provides relatively the highest possible earnings and, in the case of mothers, maternity benefit is calculated on the basis of salary, so full-time work guarantees a higher benefit. On the other hand, for those having a second or third child, the possibility of working part-time is important, as it makes it easier to combine work and care. While the availability of part-time work is not a significant problem in Western or Northern European countries, with more women working part-time than full-time in Switzerland, Austria or the Netherlands, very few women in Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, have this opportunity. It’s important to note that, with the region's rapid income growth, low wages are less of a factor in explaining the low share of part-time work; instead, the bigger challenge is the inflexibility of the labor market.

Work flexibility from the perspective of parents is particularly important in the first years after the birth of a child, when parents are wondering how to take care of the child while it is still very young and how to combine care and income generation for the family. Contrary to popular belief, nurseries are generally not, or only very poorly, conducive to having children. Much more effective are relatively long and well-paid leaves after the birth of a child, which allow parents, especially mothers, to concentrate on the child while maintaining the family's financial security and avoiding the stress of having to combine work with childcare. In this respect, Central and Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland or Romania offer a better deal for parents, often with substantial benefits for more than a year, while countries in the West and North of the continent focus on the provision of crèches.

The willingness to have children is also strongly linked to housing conditions. High prices relative to median wages reduce their availability, leading people to postpone having children and often to give up. In addition, high prices increase the propensity to buy smaller and smaller dwellings, limiting the possibility of having more than one child. The most expensive place in the world in terms of housing affordability is currently Hong Kong, where 19 times the average annual family income is needed to buy an average-sized home. It is estimated that rising housing prices in Hong Kong between 1971 and 2005 accounted for as much as 65% of the decline in the fertility rate over this period, which fell from 3.46 to just 0.96 children per woman. It should be added that having children is best facilitated by owning a single-family home. In Poland, owning instead of renting a house is also important for having the first child.

The family background of potential parents is also important for fertility. People who come from families that have broken up - whether married parents have divorced or those in an informal relationship have separated - are at greater risk of their own relationship breaking up. This weakens the perception of marriage as an essentially permanent and therefore secure relationship, and reduces the ability of adult children to have their own. In Europe, divorces have increased since the 1960s, from 10 divorces per 100 marriages in 1965 to 45 divorces per 100 marriages 50 years later, an increase from less than 300,000 to more than 830,000 per year. So the next generation is growing up in a period of widespread relationship breakdown. Unfortunately, we do not know what percentage has experienced the breakdown of an informal relationship that the couple intended to be a permanent substitute for marriage. In Poland, one in ten marriages break up, which is relatively low, but it is still 10%, and there are 1.7 million children growing up in single-parent families.

These are just some of the reasons for low fertility rates in the most developed countries. In addition to a long list of barriers, motivation has also changed. The motivation to have children is different today than it was 1,000, 200 or even 20 years ago (depending on the country). Whereas once a person had a clear 'interest' in having offspring - it might have been to increase the numbers of a particular tribe (in prehistory), or to provide extra help on the farm (until recently) - now the motivation is almost entirely driven by love and the wider emotional values that children bring, and by, let's call it, metaphysical issues. A person does this not to gain anything measurable, but to give of themselves: their time, their money, their commitment, without expecting anything in return.

The complexity of the factors that simultaneously influence low fertility rates makes it so difficult to find a single example in the world today of a comprehensive policy that would reverse negative trends. Many developed countries, especially in Western Europe, are pouring huge amounts of money into fertility promotion, but in none of these countries is it difficult to find a sustained reversal of the trend and a return to a rate above 2.1 children per woman. One of the reasons for this is that this money is spent almost exclusively on family policies, i.e. various types of tax concessions, transfers, allowances, the construction of crèches or differentiated leave for mothers and fathers. It could even be said that the most developed countries are caught in a "family policy trap", more or less consciously equating them with measures aimed at increasing fertility rates, while ignoring, for example, the issues mentioned earlier in the film, such as equalising educational outcomes between men and women, improving labour market conditions, the availability of housing for the youngest adults, or psychological support and relationship-building skills. However, this is not a reason to abandon family policy - skilfully implemented, it is a necessary but still not sufficient condition for increasing the fertility rate. At the same time, there is a lot to fight for - a TFR of 1.9, in the case of Poland as discussed above, means twice as many citizens in 2100 (over 28 million) as in the case of a TFR of 1.3 (about 14 million), and any further approximation of the fertility rate to generational replacement means, in the long term, stabilising the population and avoiding the risk of an endless decline in its numbers. From a national point of view, therefore, every fraction of a per mille is worth its weight in gold.

In fairness, however, there is one exception in the world - Israel. It is the only developed country whose population continues to grow and which is well above replacement level, with a fertility rate of 3.0. While the fertility rate of Israelis is influenced by positive family-friendly policies, there is no denying that Israel's international location and constant sense of insecurity, and the resulting internal need to mobilise, provide it with considerable resources of social energy conducive to having children. The attitude of Orthodox Jews is also very important. Israel is therefore a rather unique example that is difficult to replicate, but it should be noted that religiosity in Christianity, which is the main religion in Europe, is also significantly conducive to fertility.

So how can we sum it all up?

Declining fertility is an existential problem facing the whole of humanity. Family policy is a good place to start, and it is worth taking the financial burden off those who make the effort to raise children. But a second, perhaps no less important factor is to go beyond its limits and implement holistic measures in other areas as well. It is also important to build a positive message about having a family - something that is often at odds with the ideas of the modern world, which is often dominated by consumption, career, convenience or the self-image created by social media.

As Arnold Toynbee, described as the greatest philosopher of history of all time, concluded in his book “A Study of History”, by tracing the rise and fall of all civilisations in world history, he saw the regularity that civilisations rise when they are able to respond creatively to the challenges of the world around them. Civilisations decline when they lose this capacity.

So will humanity take action to protect itself from its own 'slow extinction'? We don't know, but it's clear that humanity has overcome all sorts of problems along the way, so there's a chance we'll find the energy to do it again.

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