Fertility in high-income countries has fallen faster than any official projection assumed. Korea's total fertility rate reached 0.72 in 2023 and rose only slightly in 2024; Japan, England and Wales, and most of the Nordic countries recorded their lowest rates on record in the last three years, with the Nordic fall the most surprising because those countries were the model of family-friendly policy. The UN's 2024 revision brought forward the peak of world population and lowered it. National statistical offices are revising long-run fertility assumptions down and, in some cases, moving from a single assumption to a range. The unresolved question is how much of the decline is postponement — births delayed, to be recovered later — and how much is a fall in completed family size. The cohorts that would answer it, women born in the 1990s, have not finished childbearing, so the evidence on projections is strong and the evidence on causes is not.