We think the collapse in birth rates is a modern problem. It is not. The most powerful man in the world once faced the exact same thing, and he was so alarmed he passed laws to force his people to have children. This was not a modern government: it was Rome 2000 years ago... The emperor was Augustus, and by his reign the Roman elite had grown wealthy, comfortable, and reluctant to marry or raise families. Men preferred bachelorhood and affairs to the burden of a wife and children. Augustus found it alarming enough to legislate. Around 18 BC and again in AD 9, he pushed through the Lex Julia and the Lex Papia Poppaea, a sweeping set of laws designed to engineer a baby boom by decree. The measures were direct: unmarried men and childless couples faced penalties on what they could inherit. Those who married and had children were rewarded with faster careers and public honors. Women who bore three or more children were granted a special legal freedom, the ius trium liberorum, the "right of three children," releasing them from male guardianship. The state was, quite literally, paying its citizens to reproduce and fining them when they did not. It didn't work... The laws were resented, evaded, and endlessly tinkered with, and Rome's elite went on having small families anyway. The historian Cassius Dio records Augustus standing before the childless men of Rome and shaming them to their faces: "You are committing murder in not begetting in the first place those who ought to be your descendants." A city, he warned them, is not its buildings but its people: "For it is human beings that constitute a city, not houses or porticos or market-places empty of men." Now look at the numbers today. For a population simply to hold steady, women need to average about 2.1 children each. South Korea recently hit 0.72, the lowest rate ever recorded for any country on earth, and even after a small rebound to 0.8 in 2025, it remains less than half of what a country needs to sustain itself. Italy and Japan sit near 1.2, China around 1.0, Spain near 1.1. The United States is about 1.6, the United Kingdom 1.5. According to the UN, more than half the world's countries are now below that line. History doesn't repeat itself, the saying goes, but it often rhymes, and this pattern is old and eerily familiar. A society climbs to the height of its wealth and comfort, and at that very peak its people stop having children, and no law, no incentive, no sum of money seems able to talk them back into it. Rome tried, with the full power of an empire behind it, and failed. At its height the city held more than a million people, a size no European city would reach again for 1700 years, until London in the 1800s. The Roman historian Livy, writing as the Republic gave way to the empire, said his was an age that "can endure neither its vices nor their cure." Two thousand years later, staring at the same problem and just as unable to solve it, we may be watching the beginning of the same story... A civilization does not always fall to an enemy at the gates. As the historian Arnold J. Toynbee once said: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

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