Wednesday, 3 December 2025

13:00 - 14:00 (CEST) 

Location:

Meeting Room 4, 4th floor, PSK, Georg Coch Platz 2, 1010 Vienna.

Please register here.

Future Births: A Formal Perspective on Humanity’s Yet-to-Be-Born Generations

Miguel Sanchez Romero,
Technical University of Vienna

Tomas Sobotka

Vienna Institute of Demography

Abstract:

The global fall in fertility led to concerns about the prospects of population decline, with many discussions suggesting this trend presents a grave threat to humanity. Using UN WPP data we model future births over a very long-term period. We compute the total number and the relative fraction of births to be born in the future. We also consider different age at childbearing and compute the year when the global number of births would fall below one thousand.

Our study provides three key insights. First, indefinite scenarios of low fertility imply that most people who would ever live on Earth had already been born. Second, the mean age at childbearing strongly impacts population dynamics: longer inter-generational span slows down the pace of births and population decline. Third, even when assuming a permanent continuation of very low fertility humanity's final demise would occur very slowly, over the course of several thousand years.

About the presenters:

Miguel Sánchez-Romero is a senior researcher at the Technical University of Vienna and IIASA, and a guest researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is editor of the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research and an associate editor of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing and the Journal of Population Research. His work examines how demographic change and intergenerational transfers influence health, labour, human capital, climate change, and economic growth. His expertise spans formal demography, life-cycle models, and overlapping-generations frameworks.

Tomas Sobotka leads the research group on Fertility and Population Change and serves as deputy director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research and lectures at the Charles University in Prague (Czechia) and at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on global low fertility, fertility data and measurement, population and family changes in Europe, and assisted reproduction. Tomas Sobotka has helped launching and expanding several data repositories, including the Human Fertility Database (HFD, www.humanfertility.org ).

**********************************************************************************

PLEASE SEE https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/events/wic-colloquium FOR OUR UPCOMING AND PREVIOUS COLLOQUIA

**********************************************************************************