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People are having fewer kids. Their choice is transforming the world’s economy
Ashley and Nick Evancho’s 3-year-old daughter, Sophia, plays with their dog in front of their home near Buffalo, N.Y. Ashley and Nick have decided to have only one child, a choice many people are making around the world. The trend is triggering an unprecedented shift toward rapidly aging and gradually shrinking populations.
Lauren Petracca for NPR
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Lauren Petracca for NPR
Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR’s series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World explores the causes and implications of this trend.
Ashley and Nick Evancho say raising their 3-year-old, Sophia, is one of the most joyous things they’ve ever done. “Watching my daughter run around in the yard is otherworldly for me,” Ashley said on a recent afternoon in their home in Grand Island, a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y.
But the Evanchos also made a decision that’s increasingly common for families in the U.S. and around the world: One is enough.
“I don’t need another one. I don’t want another one. I love having only one child,” said Ashley Evancho, who works as a financial planner.
Her husband, Nick, an Episcopal priest, agreed that big families make less sense in today’s economy. “It really stacks the chips economically against you,” he said.
Sophia and her mom play together at home. “I don’t need another one. I don’t want another one. I love having only one child,” Ashley Evancho told NPR.
Lauren Petracca for NPR
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Lauren Petracca for NPR
Worldwide, the number of children born to the average family has dropped by more than half since the 1970s, according to the latest United Nations data. Economists say having fewer children is the norm for many families, especially in relatively prosperous countries like the U.S.
The trend is leading to populations that are dramatically older, and beginning to shrink, in many of the world’s biggest economies.
“This demographic issue is poised to potentially remake so much of our society,” said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Notre Dame.
Experts say a rapidly aging and gradually shrinking population in the world’s wealthiest countries could force sweeping changes in people’s lives, causing many to work longer before retirement, making it harder for business owners to find employees and destabilizing eldercare and health insurance programs.
Already, women in the 15 countries that account for 75% of global gross domestic product, including the U.S., are having too few children to maintain a stable population. Many of those nations have fallen into the “very low” category of “total fertility rate” identified by the U.N. as a serious concern.
“For the countries below 1.4 births per woman, we see much faster population decline and a pronounced shift in the population age distribution to the older ages,” said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.’s chief population scientist. The rate of births per woman in the U.S. dropped to 1.6 in 2024, the lowest ever.
In China, Japan, Italy and South Korea, deaths already outpace births. Demographers say more high-income countries would face population decline, if not for high rates of immigration.
“We seem to be kind of watching a science fiction novel,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.
According to Eberstadt, worker shortages, shrinking numbers of young consumers and a growing wave of elderly retirees relying on pension and health care systems could challenge basic assumptions about global capitalism. This trend is being heightened by the fact that people in the U.S. and many other countries are living longer. The global population of people age 80 or older will triple between 2020 and 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
“Turning the population pyramid upside down basically upsets the business model, the background music, that we’ve had in modern life for as long as we can remember,” he said.
In one U.S. town, plenty of jobs and few young workers
Some parts of the U.S. are already feeling the population shift as communities age and begin to shrink. In Franklin County, N.Y., where storefronts sit empty in Malone, the county seat, the population has declined by roughly 10% since 2010. Half the counties in the U.S. now have more elderly retirees than children, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
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Brian Mann/NPR
In the U.S., the world’s largest economy, this trend has been building for decades. Families started shrinking in the 1960s, when the average American woman had between three and four children.
Now, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Bank data, the typical woman will have one or two children in her lifetime, with a growing number of families opting for no children at all.
“I think it raises questions about do we want to be a more dynamic, forward-looking economy where people are optimistic about the future and about their ability to have kids?” said Kearney at Notre Dame.
With fewer children being born, population growth in the U.S. has already slowed. The population is expected to begin shrinking later this century, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Americans are also significantly older, with the median age rising from 28.1 in 1970 to a record high last year of 39.1.
Many communities, especially in rural America, already face serious demographic challenges.
“The decline here you see started a long time ago,” said Jeremy Evans, head of the Franklin County Industrial Development Agency in rural upstate New York.
Jeremy Evans heads the Franklin County Industrial Development Agency. In developing a new economic plan for his community, Evans concluded that population loss, especially the declining population of young people, is the top concern. In many parts of the U.S., elderly retirees outnumber children.
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Franklin County, which lies near the U.S.-Canada border, has lost roughly 10% of its population since 2010. Some of that is due to young people leaving, but so few babies are born here that the local hospital closed its maternity ward three years ago.
According to Evans, there are plenty of good jobs, with an unemployment rate of just 3.8%, but not enough workers to fill them. “It became obvious: We have to make this the No. 1 focus,” he said. “Our No. 1 mission is [attracting] 18-to-39-year-olds,” he said.
But economists say recruiting young people will get harder nationwide as smaller families continue to transform the American population. Last year, the number of children in the U.S. declined slightly, while the number of seniors surged to 61 million.
Eberstadt, at the American Enterprise Institute, thinks the population shift could destabilize key U.S. programs that underpin the economy, including Social Security and Medicare.
“The way public finances are organized makes no sense if you’re heading into an aging, shrinking world,” he said.
Many experts told NPR the shift toward an older, smaller population with fewer working-age residents will accelerate, if the U.S. maintains strict new limits on migrants imposed by the Trump administration.
For America’s trading partners, a demographic cliff
A man walks past a Human Resources and Social Security Bureau office, with the Chinese characters for “Social Security” visible in the background, on Sept. 2 in Chongqing, China. China’s population of retirees is expected to surge by more than 200 million people by 2050.
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Cheng Xin/Getty Images
If this demographic earthquake were only reshaping the U.S. economy, researchers say it would already pose serious challenges. But rapid aging and population decline are hitting America’s biggest trading partners far harder and much faster.
“If you live in Europe or parts of Asia, this [population shift] is everything,” said Lant Pritchett, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
He noted that basic assumptions about capitalism and economic growth evolved when nearly every country was experiencing rapid population increases. Now that era is over.
“Hard to tell what’s going to happen when things that have never happened before happen. We just don’t have any examples of countries doing this successfully,” Pritchett said.
This population shift is happening fastest and on the largest scale in China, the world’s second-biggest economy. According to Pritchett, China’s working-age population will crash by 2050, losing more than 211 million workers.
On a recent morning outside one of Beijing’s busy shopping malls, it was hard to see the massive change underway here. But Mia Li, 20, who works in China’s struggling real estate sector, said she’s already feeling it.
“Housing prices will fall and the number of homebuyers will decrease as well,” Li said. She doesn’t have children and worries that motherhood would be expensive and risky. “Having children requires financial support, but if the economy goes down, how can you possibly afford to raise them?”
Xiujian Peng, an expert on China’s population at Victoria University in Australia, said the economic impact of the trend could be profound.
“Population will decline very fast,” she said, adding that vast areas of rural China, home to many of the country’s elderly, could face “a huge problem.”
Fears of a backlash as countries adapt to fewer children
Ashley and Nick Evancho prepare dinner as Sophia plays in the kitchen. Nick Evancho told NPR that big families often make less sense in today’s economy. “It really stacks the chips economically against you,” he said.
Lauren Petracca for NPR
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Lauren Petracca for NPR
Some researchers, including Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin, think fears about shrinking families are overblown. Goldin described much of the concern as a political backlash against high rates of immigration and women’s empowerment.
Asked about economic impacts of an aging, declining workforce, Goldin said, “I am not worried about that. Scarcity is everywhere; trade-offs are everywhere. There is no optimal birth rate.”
But many economists believe nations, and companies, that hope to remain stable and prosperous through this transition need to begin adapting. Some may be able to compensate by attracting more migrant workers or boosting the efficiency of the labor force through education, automation and AI.
Experts: Small families here to stay
In Greece, the birth rate is so low that the population is shrinking and aging. On the tiny Greek island of Thymaina, schoolchildren commute by ferry to another island as a decreasing birth rate has led to school closures.
Ayman Oghanna for NPR
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Ayman Oghanna for NPR
Many countries are also rolling out programs designed to encourage a return to larger families. The Trump administration included a modest package of incentives in this year’s budget, including an expanded child tax credit and a temporary program offering $1,000 investment accounts to babies born during Trump’s current term.
Some governments are going much further. Last month, the Greek government approved a multibillion-dollar tax package aimed at slowing Greece’s rapid depopulation.
“This is an existential problem for us,” Greece’s minister of economy and finance, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, said in an interview with NPR.
But many experts are skeptical of policies aimed at boosting birth rates. Past programs have shown limited or no success, apparently because much of the trend toward fewer children is driven by improvements in society — from economic progress for women to declining teen pregnancies.
“One thing about [smaller families] is that it’s all accounted for by good things, which means it’s not turning around,” said Pritchett, at the London School of Economics.
Ashley Evancho reads to Sophia before bed.
Lauren Petracca for NPR
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Lauren Petracca for NPR
Ashley Evancho, the financial planner and mom who lives near Buffalo, agrees families like hers aren’t likely to have more kids, even if governments offer incentives and benefits.
“My opportunity cost, the opportunity cost to my career or my education [of having more children] is so much higher,” she said. “So the economy, the way it works, will probably have to fundamentally change.”
Reporting contributed by Jasmine Ling, NPR Beijing producer.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.
“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.
The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The center has been targeted by Republicans
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
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Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
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April 20, 2026
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