Birth Rates Are Collapsing. Here's Why.

Our numbers by puppets. Thus, a headline that more or less sums up life in Ichinono, a rural Japanese village where the 60 or so remaining residents have taken to creating life-sized dolls to make the place feel less isolated.

Whether or not you find that creepier than living in a largely empty town is up to you, but once you get past the dolls, Ichinono is less of an outlier than it might initially appear.

Across much of the world, birth rates have been steadily falling to levels that were previously thought to be impossible. It was after all just a few decades ago that many were raising a lawns about overpopulation. Unlike those warnings, population collapse isn't theoretical.