Two events with global ramifications unfolded in 2007: the onset of the financial crisis, which culminated in Lehman Brothers’ collapse a year later, and Apple’s launch of the iPhone. The so-called Great Recession that followed the former was of a severity and scope not seen in the West since the 1930s. The technological revolution caused by the latter would spread faster than any other innovation in human history. I was 42 at the time, and, like so many of my Finnish compatriots, a proud user of my Nokia Communicator, which, with its foldable keyboard, fit just into the spacious pockets of my winter duvet. While it is by now tricky to recall what one actually did on that device—called and wrote text messages, I assume?—I do remember asking what an “app” was.

Since Finland-based Nokia had taken the now-infamous board decision to ignore touchscreens, the company’s eclipse and the rapid ascent of smartphones aggravated the economic crisis for our country. The effects of large layoffs reached my team at the Population Research Institute in Helsinki as well. Finland’s total fertility rate declined from 1.87 in 2010 to 1.83 in 2011. It was an inconspicuous change. Fertility rates estimate how many children will on average be born per woman of reproductive age should current birth rates continue. Fluctuations on a monthly or yearly basis are common, and this particular downturn was easily explained with the state of the economy.

By 2016, as Finland’s economic crisis finally eased somewhat later than in most Western countries, the total fertility rate had fallen to 1.57. Compared to an average of 1.8 in the first decade of the century, this was a clear change. (Back then, we thought around 1.6 was low—little did we know the decline would continue, with a total fertility rate of 1.25 at the time of writing and no recovery in sight.) We could have stuck with the economic constraints explanation, were it not for several signs that something else was going on.

The first canary in the coal mine was the trend in other Nordic countries. In all of them, birth rates were falling. The slope of decline in Norway mirrored that of Finland, yet our wealthy Scandinavian neighbor’s economic situation was in a league of its own, as spectacular oil revenues bankrolled the Norwegian state. The Vienna-based demographer Tomas Sobotka demonstrated that in most European regions, unemployment—particularly as experienced during the recession—correlates with declining fertility.

But the economic crisis triggered in 2007/08 could not fully explain fertility trends in all Western European countries, with Norway and Finland as prime examples; nor could national contexts or changes in family policy—a cost of living crisis here, an added month of paternity leave there—explain the downturn. A pioneering paper by my Swedish colleague Gunnar Andersson’s team argued that we needed to look “beyond the economic gaze” to understand shifts in childbearing.

Fewer babies were born also outside the Nordics. True, in some European countries with notoriously low birth rates such as Germany, fertility rates slowly recovered after changes in family and workplace policies. But other Western countries with formerly high(ish) rates regressed to the mean. The total fertility rate of the European Union, which had inched up from 1.43 in 2000 to 1.57 in 2010, hovered between 1.5 and 1.6 in the 2010s and has remained below 1.5 since 2020. It receded to 1.4 in 2023 and likely fell further in 2024, meaning that Europe for the first time approaches what demographers refer to as “lowest-low” or “ultra-low” fertility levels.