China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.

The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.

Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children —and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.

Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022 . Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”

Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.

Following the data release, researchers from Victoria University in Australia and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China will have just 525 million people by the end of the century. That’s down from their previous forecast of 597 million and a precipitous drop from 1.4 billion now.

“Our forecasts for 2022 and 2023 were already low but the real situation has turned out to be worse,” said Xiujian Peng, a senior research fellow at Victoria University who leads the population research in Melbourne.

China’s fertility rate is approaching one birth for every woman , less than half the 2.1 replacement rate that keeps a population stable. In the late 1970s, the fertility rate hovered around 3.

At the time, China was coming out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and about to embark on economic reforms. The country’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, and other officials became alarmed when a group of scientists told them that unless they started restricting births, China would have more than four billion mouths to feed in a hundred years.

An essay by some of the scientists published by the official People’s Daily in early 1980 suggested China’s search for a response to overpopulation “points to bringing the fertility rate down to 1…each couple having only one child.”

That fall, China started enforcing the one-child policy nationwide—but the calculations had missed some crucial factors.

Population fears

China wasn’t the only country worried about overpopulation at the time. The rapid rise in the global population in the 1960s and ‘70s prompted fears that humanity would reproduce faster than food production could rise, an idea argued nearly two centuries earlier by economist Thomas Malthus.

Chinese officials were increasingly reviving scientific research after the Cultural Revolution. While social scientists had been persecuted by Mao’s Red Guards, others doing work related to the military had been partly shielded.

The group included Song Jian, a protégé of the father of China’s atomic-bomb program and one of China’s top scientists working on satellites and rockets. Song had studied in Moscow, where he got advanced degrees in a branch of mathematics known as control theory and in military science. Military officials sent him to a launch site for rockets and satellites in the Gobi Desert to escape the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

Song, who eventually became China’s senior cabinet member heading science and technology, is now 92. He didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to the State Council and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

In 1975, Song had been part of a Chinese academic delegation visiting the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where he got to know a Dutch mathematician, Geert Jan Olsder. Three years later, the two met a second time, at a conference in Finland.

Olsder, now in his 80s, said he talked about how his research with other mathematicians had been inspired by the warnings about finite global resources and how mathematical models could be applied to birthrates.

Song spoke with the others in fluent English and showed a clear interest in mathematical modelling, Olsder wrote in an email. If the two hadn’t met, he said, he’s sure that some kind of population policy would have started in China, but perhaps a little later. “I feel like a domino stone in a long series of such stones,” he wrote.

Song refined his modelling over the next few years, and with a team of scientists began calculating how different fertility rates could affect China’s population size. In late 1979 he began to present officials with reports based on their modelling. He calculated that, at a constant fertility rate of three babies for every woman, China’s population would hit 4.26 billion by 2080.

With his computer-assisted mathematical models and political connections, Song caught the attention of top leaders. He argued that rapid population growth would prevent China from becoming a rich, modern country, said Susan Greenhalgh, an anthropologist at Harvard University who has written books about the one-child policy.

“He used a frightening narrative of a coming demographic-economic-ecological crisis to persuade people,” she said.

To ward off skepticism, officials said China could switch gears if births dropped too much. “In 30 years, the current problem of especially dreadful population growth may be alleviated and then [we can] adopt different population policies,” the Communist Party said in an open letter in 1980.

Within a little more than a decade, the fertility rate had dipped below the replacement rate. The cohort of young women was still massive, which kept the population growing. But the number of newborn girls was quickly dwindling.

Impact

As the decades passed, a growing number of demographers and economists called out the policy as outdated and flawed. China’s fertility rate would have gone down on its own as life expectancies rose and economic conditions improved, they say.

One factor missing from Song’s population math was human behaviour. The government’s sometimes brutal enforcement, including forced abortions and sterilisations, as well as decades-long propaganda about the benefits of having a small family , left a lasting one-child mindset. The modelling also failed to take into account the traditional preference for sons. If couples could only have one child, they would prefer to have a boy.

Young women are now at the core of China’s demographic dilemma. They are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year.

Greenhalgh, the Harvard anthropologist, said that the women growing up under the one-child policy were raised in line with Beijing’s goals of a smaller but what it called “higher-quality” population: well-educated, savvy and independent. “These women are not going to accept going back to the family to be housewives,” she said.

Apart from cultural and social changes, Song’s model hadn’t taken into account economic forces, such as the enormous migration flows to cities unleashed by Deng’s reforms, which played a bigger role than anyone had imagined in pushing down fertility rates, researchers have said.

Zuo Xuejin, a retired demographer who is leading the research team at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, sounded alarms about demographic implosion more than a decade ago, saying the conditions that may have warranted birth-restriction measures had all faded away.

“For many years overpopulation was China’s major concern. It was difficult to convince the government and the public that China will have the problem of fast decline and aging of the population,” Zuo wrote in an email.

Song has said he believed it had been a good call. China had successfully defused the bomb that could have led to a “population explosion,” he wrote in a 2010 essay published by the University of Jinan, his alma mater. “Zero growth [in population] is the destiny of modern mankind and an urgent task for contemporary China,” Song wrote. He estimated China’s population wouldn’t start shrinking until after 2035. He was off by more than a decade, with official data showing the drop starting in 2022.

Beijing has said the policy prevented 400 million births, a claim it has often put forth as a kind of Chinese gift to the world, including at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen. Demographers have disputed the figure, saying China’s fertility rate would have gone down on its own as economic conditions improved.

Demographer scramble

Even when Beijing dropped the one-child policy in 2015, leaders didn’t abolish birth restrictions altogether. Instead, it just pivoted to a two-child policy. Now, Beijing is urging people to have three, trumpeting the need to return to a “birth-friendly culture.”

Entrepreneurs, economists and demographers have tried to convey the idea that China needs more babies .

James Liang , co-founder and chairman of travel service provider Trip.com Group and a research professor of economics at Peking University, co-founded YuWa Population Research Institute, a private think tank focused on demographic and public policy analysis.

Liang estimated that China needs to devote 5% of its gross domestic product—roughly equivalent to its education spending—on direct subsidies to promote births and lower the costs of raising children in order for the fertility rate to recover to 1.4, the average rate of advanced economies. His company gives its long-term employees an annual cash bonus of 10,000 yuan ($1,406) for each of their children until they are 5 years old.

Demographers are trying to catch up on the rapidly falling births. The United Nations’ population predictions for China, which were based on the country’s 2020 census and assumed a fertility rate of 1.19, are already out of step with reality.

Patrick Gerland, head of the U.N.’s population estimates and projection section, said their computing tries to capture long-term trends and isn’t made for rapid changes. He agrees with other researchers that put China’s fertility rate closer to 1.0.

“In the case of a country like China where the fertility from one year to the next year has been changing so fast, we’ll have smaller population [projections] than what we had expected two years ago,” he said. The U.N. plans to update its forecasts in July.

Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a critic of China’s birth restrictions, has long argued the situation is even worse than official data suggests. Yi believes China’s population actually started shrinking years ago, based on birth estimates pieced together from other available data, such as school enrolment and the number of vaccines for newborns.

“All of China’s population policies for decades have been based on erroneous projections,” Yi said. “China’s demographic crisis is beyond the imagination of Chinese officials and the international community.”

Once a generation of young people has made up their minds, it’s hard to change them, said Cai Yong, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It’s possible fertility rates could now increase with official messages and policies promoting bigger families to a newer generation, said Cai, but “if it’s going to happen, it’s not going to happen in the short term.”

China’s massive rollout of renewable energy is accelerating, its investments in the sector growing so large that international climate watchdogs now expect the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions to peak years earlier than anticipated—possibly as soon as this year.

China installed 217 gigawatts worth of solar power last year alone, a 55% increase, according to new government data. That is more than 500 million solar panels and well above the total installed solar capacity of the U.S. They appeared everywhere from the deserts of Inner Mongolia to the mountains of southwest China to rooftops across the country, including on the Great Hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square.

Wind-energy installation additions were 76 gigawatts last year, more than the rest of the world combined. That amounted to more than 20,000 new turbines across the country, including the world’s largest, planted on towers in the sea off China’s east coast.

The low-carbon capacity additions, which also included hydropower and nuclear, were for the first time large enough that their power output could cover the entire annual increase in Chinese electricity demand, analysts say. The dynamic suggests that coal-fired generation—which accounts for 70% of overall emissions for the world’s biggest polluter—is set to decline in the years to come, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency and Lauri Myllyvirta , the Helsinki-based lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

China’s expanding renewables footprint is shaping the global response to climate change. Its companies are the leading manufacturers of clean-energy technology, from solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles. That is stoking concerns in the rest of the industrialised world about depending on China for their energy supplies in the future.

At the same time, China’s deployment of renewables at home is breathing new life into international climate diplomacy . Its rapid emissions growth long provided fodder for critics who said Beijing wasn’t committed to fighting climate change or supporting the Paris accord , the landmark climate agreement that calls for governments to attempt to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. Now, analysts and officials say Beijing’s efforts are lending momentum to the Paris process, which requires governments to draft new emissions plans every five years.

“An early peak would have a lot of symbolic value and send a signal to the world that we’ve turned a corner,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, a senior researcher at the Oslo-based Center for International Climate and Environmental Research.

In 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that the country’s emissions would begin falling before 2030 and hit net zero before 2060, part of its plan prepared under the Paris accord. He also said China would have 1,200 gigawatts of total solar- and wind-power capacity by the end of this decade. The country is six years ahead of schedule: China reached 1,050 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity at the end of 2023, and the China Electricity Council forecast last month that capacity would top 1,300 gigawatts by the end of this year.

“China’s acceleration was extraordinary,” said Fatih Birol , the executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Chinese authorities publish regular data on energy consumption and generation but not overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Transition Zero, a U.K.-based nonprofit that uses satellite images to monitor industrial activity and emissions in China, says the official data are “broadly aligned and consistent” with theirs.

Once the peak arrives, some analysts expect an emissions plateau to follow rather than a rapid fall in the following years. That is a problem, scientists say, because the world’s major emitters must sharply cut global emissions this decade—by 43% compared with 2019—to fulfill the Paris accord.

Climate Action Tracker, a scientific consortium that evaluates governments’ emissions plans, rates China’s current policies as “highly insufficient” to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal . Its latest analysis, published in November, says China’s emissions should peak by 2025. If wind and solar installations can average 300 gigawatts a year—as they did last year—China’s emissions should fall significantly by the end of the decade, the consortium says. The actions and policies of the U.S., where emissions have been falling, were graded as “insufficient.”

Still, moving China’s timeline for an overall emissions peak forward could shave off around 0.3 to 0.4 degrees Celsius of projected global warming if emissions started to decline next decade, analysts say. Emissions plans submitted to date under the Paris accord would put the world on track to warm by 2.5 degrees Celsius this century, a United Nations Environment Program report said in November.

China is still building coal-fired power plants , fuelling criticism from Western officials that it is locking in carbon-dioxide emissions years into the future. Beijing has been telling Western officials that the new plants won’t be as polluting as they fear. They are replacing older, higher-emitting plants, and will run far below full capacity, used largely to maintain electric-grid stability as China generates more of its power from intermittent wind and solar. In November, China unveiled a system of capacity payments for coal-fired plants that will allow them to earn money even when they are running as backup power sources. Xi said in 2021 that China would begin to phase down its coal consumption starting in 2026.

The exact timing of China’s peak depends on factors such as economic growth and weather in the next few years, analysts say. Growth is expected to slow following China’s real-estate sector slump —unless Beijing undertakes a major new program of economic stimulus that would boost industrial emissions. Another spell of drought this summer would push the country’s coal plants to run harder to replace lost hydropower generation.

The most certain variable in the equation is the breakneck pace of China’s renewable-energy rollout, which analysts expect will continue to add 200 to 300 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity a year. The investments in renewable energy have become a major driver of the Chinese economy. The country’s clean-energy spending totaled $890 billion last year, up 40%. Without that growth, investment in China would have been flat as the country reels from the slump in its real-estate sector, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

The investments include clean-energy installations and the construction of enormous factories to produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles—turning the country into the leading manufacturer of clean tech. Its factories in those sectors now have plenty of unused capacity . The adoption of electric vehicles is happening so rapidly that analysts say peak gasoline demand in China was already reached last year.

At the United Nations COP28 climate conference in Dubai in November, Xie Zhenhua , then China’s climate envoy , said the government would calculate the year and absolute volume of the country’s emissions peak. He also said Beijing is drawing up its next emissions plan under the Paris accord.

“Our country will do as it’s said and strive to do even better,” he said. “I have faith.”

Clayton Wiles, a truck driver in North Carolina, earns about 20% more than three years ago. Kristine Funck, a nurse in Ohio, has won steady pay raises, built retirement savings and owns her home. Alfredo Arguello, who opened a restaurant outside Nashville when the pandemic hit, now owns a second one and employs close to 50 people. But ask any of them about the state of the American economy, and the same gloominess surfaces. “Unstable” is how Arguello describes it. Said Funck:

“Even though I’m OK right now, there’s a sense it could all go away in a second.”

There’s a striking disconnect between the widely shared pessimism among Americans and measures that show the economy is actually robust. Consumers are spending briskly —behaviour that suggests optimism, not retrenchment. Inflation has tempered . Unemployment has been below 4% for 24 straight months, the longest such stretch since the 1960s. The disconnect has puzzled economists, investors and business owners. But press Americans harder, and the immediate economy emerges as only one factor in the gloomy outlook.

Americans feel sour about the economy, many say, because their long-term financial security feels fragile and vulnerable to wide-ranging social and political threats. Reliable steps up the economic ladder, such as a college degree, no longer look like a good investment. War overseas, and an emboldened set of hostile nations, have made the world feel dangerous.

Uninspiring leaders at home, running a government widely seen as dysfunctional, have left people without hope that America is up to the challenge of fixing its problems. The broad reasons for America’s dim outlook suggest that even further improvement in the economy might not be enough to lift the nation’s mood.

In an election year, that is shaping up as one of President Biden’s biggest impediments to winning a second term. He has received little credit so far for an economy that has foiled predictions of a recession and instead grew 3.1% in the past year, far ahead of the pace in 2022. By some metrics, that improvement is starting to give way to slightly rosier views of the economy. Consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, recently posted the biggest two-month increase since 1991 .

Yet it remains about 20% lower than during the robust economy of early 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic started, and it stands at about levels typically seen at the end of a recession rather than in an economy posting solid growth. Interviews with Americans across the country—some affluent, some just scraping by; some with advanced degrees and others with blue-collar jobs; some Republican, some Democrat—show they are weighed down by fears of an unpredictable world in which no one in government or business is competent to steer the nation through precarious times.

“You could argue unemployment is 3.7%, but who cares with this level of uncertainty?” said Arguello. “Because that’s what people are feeling. They’re not feeling hope. They’re not feeling one country. They’re feeling a divisive, divided United States of America.”

No ‘coherent plan’

Theresa Foster estimates her family’s net worth is up because the value of their home in suburban Albany, N.Y., has risen around 20% since the pandemic started.

“But every time I go to the store I am shocked by the prices,” said Foster, who earns more than $200,000 combined with her husband’s income. “I feel like we’re on really thin ice, that it’s really fragile, that neither political party has any theoretical foundation for what they want to do with the economy.”

Foster, 57, earned a master’s degree on GI Bill benefits and works part time at a nonprofit, while her husband works full time in human resources. To her, the notion that cooling inflation should ease her financial worries is akin to telling a person who is bleeding out that the flow of blood has slowed.  What upsets her, she said, is that the government continues to spend money while racking up blunders, such as the botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. None of that instills confidence in leaders’ ability to handle other complex issues.

“I feel like no matter what they tell me about the economy, they don’t really know, because they don’t have a coherent plan,” she said.  The coming election has left her dispirited about the likely nominees, President Biden and Donald Trump , whom she calls “Loser 1 and Loser 2.”

Foster voted libertarian in the last two presidential elections in protest and was registered independent until she recently registered as a Republican to vote against Trump in New York’s presidential primary in April. Funck, the nurse in Milford, Ohio, said she sees the country’s decline in the high number of uninsured and unhoused patients whom she cares for at a large Cincinnati medical centre.

“The politicians seem to be making out really good and then everybody else is struggling,” said Funck, who is 52 and an independent voter who backed Biden in 2020.

She earns about $90,000 a year, had her student loans forgiven after two decades, and has no children to support. Still, she constantly fears she’ll be derailed by an unexpected expense, and worries that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine could push up the prices of oil and grain.  After her mortgage and car payments, groceries and utility bills, there’s very little left over, she said. She’s prioritised saving for retirement “because I’m not expecting Social Security to be around, and I have to be able to support myself.”

Economic cracks

While many groups of Americans have made gains during the pandemic recovery, some cracks have emerged.  Americans in lower-paying industries saw some of the strongest pay raises in recent years, but wage growth is now slowing overall, and more so for these workers.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that low-income households disproportionately bear the brunt of inflation , in part because of the high share of their income that goes toward food, gas and rent.  While inflation has cooled substantially from its peak in 2022, wage growth only began to outpace price increases in mid-2023 , meaning many Americans are still reeling from a long stretch in which it felt like their earnings couldn’t go far enough. The unemployment rate remains at near-record lows, but layoffs have hit some sectors of the economy with force, including technology and some other white-collar fields, such as accounting and media.

James Welch, a married father of two, moved his family from Atlanta to Plano, Texas, to take a job as a manager at an online fitness company after he was laid off early in the pandemic from a hotel company. Last July, he was laid off again. Welch, 49, said he’s depleted close to $450,000 in retirement and emergency savings in recent years to fund the move, medical expenses and costs for two children in college. His wife’s salary of roughly $72,000 annually as an operations manager is keeping the family afloat.  Welch said he thinks he was the victim of cost-cutting moves at the company. He said shortly after he was laid off, he saw his job reposted for lower pay.

Mood mismatch

To many economists, the negative outlook doesn’t reflect the current economic life of most Americans.

“There’s some justification for some negativity about the economy, but nothing resembling the amount of negativity seen in some of the survey data,” said Jason Furman , a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama.

Furman said that, historically, inflation and unemployment levels have been predictors of consumer sentiment, and that the recent spate of rising prices had unsettled consumers.

“It’s just not a good enough reason for them to be as down on the economy as they say they are,” he said.

Many Americans point to structural changes in the economy that have left them anxious about the future. The decline of company pensions has shifted more of the risk of funding retirement from employers to workers. And many who once thought they could count on a college degree as a ticket into the middle class now question its value.

Amy Bos, 44, a married mother of three in Jackson, Mich., said she wouldn’t necessarily recommend college for her 18-year-old daughter. Bos herself returned to college in her 30s to help her upgrade from a job as a pharmacy technician to higher-paying work in human resources, which roughly doubled her pay to $30 an hour. But she said she sacrificed immensely to pay off $41,000 in student loans, which she did only recently.

“A lot of people go to college and either don’t work in their degree field or get a lot of debt for a job that doesn’t have the ability to make very much money,” Bos said.

Some 78% of Americans said they aren’t confident their children’s lives will be better than their own, a Journal-NORC survey found last year. That’s a record in surveys dating to 1990. Only 36% said the American dream— the idea that anyone can get ahead with hard work —still holds true, down from 53% who had said so about a decade earlier, another Journal-NORC poll found. In Wilmington, N.C., the Wiles family feels like they’re sliding backward financially despite pay raises and frugal habits.

Clayton, 44 years old, makes $10,000 more than he did three years ago in his job as a tow-truck driver, bringing the family’s annual income to $58,000. But the Wiles can’t afford to fix their broken-down truck and plan to draw from modest retirement savings to pay for health insurance for their two children when they lose Medicaid eligibility this year.

Haleigh, 30, is in school to become a teacher, but worries that even the addition of an extra salary won’t enable them to start saving for a down payment on a house.  The combination of higher borrowing costs and higher home prices has made buying a home much less affordable. New 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, though down about a percentage point from last fall, are close to 7%, compared with under 3% three years ago. The increase in rates means a borrower typically has to pay hundreds of dollars more a month for a house that costs the same.

“I don’t think the American dream still exists,’’ said Haleigh. “I don’t think it’s attainable anymore. Because you need money to make money, and I think you either start out ahead or you’re constantly playing catch-up now.”

Political skew

One factor in the downbeat outlook is that many Americans view the economy through a political lens. Their opinion is more optimistic when the party of their choice holds the White House. In the weeks before the 2016 election, only 11% of Republicans rated the economy as excellent or good, CNBC polling found. That jumped to 26% right after the election, even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and rose to 73% within a year. By contrast, Democratic views of the economy turned more negative over the same period.

Some analysts find signs that the partisan skew in views of the economy is particularly powerful now, with Biden in the White House, because Republicans are more likely than Democrats to adopt a negative view when their party is out of power.

“We find that Republicans cheer louder when their party is in control and boo louder when their party is out of control,’’ wrote Stanford University economics professor Neale Mahoney, who held White House positions under Biden and Obama, and Ryan Cummings, a Ph.D. student, in a November Substack posting.

By statistically “adjusting the decibel level’’ so that the two parties cheer equally, they found that about 30% of the gap between consumer sentiment and what would be predicted by the economic data could be explained by what they called “asymmetric amplification” of consumer sentiment according to a person’s political party.

In a complementary study, two Brookings Institution analysts found that news about the economy reported in legacy news media—big-city papers such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal—has been more negative than what would be predicted by actual measures of the economy. The San Francisco Fed’s index of daily news sentiment, which measures the positive or negative outlook of economic stories in news publications, had correlated well for several decades with measures of unemployment, gross domestic product, inflation and stock prices, according to research by Ben Harris, who was the top economist in the Biden administration’s Treasury Department, and Aaron Sojourner.

But in 2018, news sentiment turned more negative than the economic fundamentals, and the negativity gap has widened during the Biden administration. The study didn’t include broadcast media, such as Fox News or MSNBC, that are widely seen as tilted toward one party or the other. Nor did it prove that negative news caused lower consumer sentiment.

Michael Strain , director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said that the economy as people experience it in their daily lives explains most of the disconnect. While he sees some mismatch between sentiment and economic fundamentals, he believes that the corrosive impact of inflation accounts for much of it given its broad reach and because people became accustomed to very small price increases in recent years.

“When people say they don’t feel good about the economy, we should believe them,” Strain said.

‘Dark clouds’

Arguello, the Nashville-area restaurant owner, got into the food-service industry in May 2020, early in the pandemic. After ending a 30-year career at General Electric , where he was most recently a senior executive, the 65-year-old decided to buy and operate a burger franchise with his son, a recent college graduate, as a way to teach him how to run a business while deepening his own roots in his community after years of travel.

The Mooyah burger franchise they opened was successful enough that they opened a second location. Fourth-quarter revenues in 2023 were 15% higher than in the prior year, Arguello said. Despite his personal success, Arguello said he believes that “the light at the end of the tunnel is not there yet” for a nation emerging from the pandemic and its high-inflation trauma. Many other nearby restaurants have recently closed, he said, and more broadly, he’s concerned that America is suffering because political leaders are putting their party’s needs above the country’s.

“You have this political instability, a world that is very unstable, with this economic uncertainty,’’ said Arguello, who is originally from Nicaragua. He considers himself right-of-centre politically and would vote reluctantly for Trump this year if he is the GOP nominee. “What people are sensing is not whether the inflation is becoming moderate,” he said. “It’s that the dark clouds remain.”

Would work be better if we all took a collective coffee break?

Workers in Sweden certainly think so. There, work life has long revolved around fika, a once- or twice-a-day ritual in which colleagues put away phones, laptops and any shoptalk to commune over coffee, pastries or other snacks. Swedish employees and their managers say the cultural tradition helps drive employee well-being, productivity and innovation by clearing the mind and fostering togetherness.

Now, as bosses and workers elsewhere try to reinvigorate office life and flagging job satisfaction, fika fascination is seeping into other workplaces.

The Grand, a New York-based career and leadership coaching platform, summons its all-remote staff of 10 every other Friday for coffee and conversation over Zoom. London-based Hubble, a website for finding flexible workspaces, took up the tradition after being introduced to it by a Swedish staff member.

“Everyone has an excuse to log off and let their hair down,” said Tushar Agarwal, chief executive of Hubble, where staff gather the last Thursday of every month for baked goods, chitchat and, of course, coffee.

A recent product offering—for part-time office space with new contract terms—sprang from a discussion that took place during fika, says chief of staff Charlie Bastier. It’s now one of the fastest-growing revenue streams, he says.

Not a Starbucks run

The pressure to make tweaks to the daily ritual is particularly acute in the U.S. Employees continue to report feeling less engaged in their jobs than in pre pandemic times, Gallup data show.

In addition, bonding with colleagues has become harder and less of a priority for many people in the hybrid world of work. Some employers worry the lack of social cohesion is harming company culture and operations.

At The Grand’s regular fika, staffers take turns hosting, leading with casual conversation or a board game such as Code Names or a drawing competition. The Grand’s co-founder Rei Wang says that fika allows her to spend time with her staff, making her a better leader.

“Learning more about their passions and their geniuses helps me understand and collaborate with them,” she says.

Pronounced “fee-kah,” the Swedish culture of breaking for coffee involves much more than a schlep to Starbucks. It’s meant to be a deliberate pause to provide space and time for people to connect. Many Swedish companies build a mandatory fika into the workday, while the Embassy of Sweden in Washington holds one for staff weekly. IKEA, promoting its Upphetta coffee maker on the corporate website, extols the virtues of fika: “When we disconnect for a short period, our productivity increases significantly.”

“Fika is where we talk life, we talk everything but work itself,” said Micael Dahlen, professor of well-being, welfare and happiness at the Stockholm School of Economics. The ritual helps drive trivsel, he says, a term that means a combination of workplace enjoyment and thriving. The concept is so fundamental to Swedish workplaces that many companies in Sweden have trivselcommittees, he said.

Dahlen said he suspects a pandemic-era drop in office fikas contributed to a sharp decline in Swedes’ happiness at work. Just over half of workers in Sweden reported a high level of job satisfaction in 2022, according to Eurostat, compared with 69.5% in 2017.

A productivity booster

There’s some evidence that communal coffee breaks help boost productivity. In a study of call-centre workers at Bank of America, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that teams that scheduled 15-minute breaks together were 18% more communicative with one another through the workday than groups with staggered breaks.

Annual turnover, likewise, was 12% among teams that held collective coffee breaks versus 40% among other workers. In all, the teamwork fostered via the breaks led to an estimated $15 million in increased annual productivity, says lead researcher Ben Waber.

“People who are in a tight knit social group have higher levels of trust,” said Waber, who has since founded a behavioural analytics company called Humanyze.

Hubble employees take turns baking and get a stipend of about $20 for supplies for the company’s monthly fikas. Last week, 26 staff members gathered in a communal area away from desks and cubicles.

Kate Mehigan, an account manager, brought in homemade arancini balls and Eliot Dixon, an account team lead, laid out a Basque cheesecake from a recipe he’d found online. Some people played ping pong.

Fleur Sylvester, a Hubble account executive, used the time to quiz a colleague on training advice for running a half-marathon. Sylvester says when she joined the company over a year ago the gatherings were invaluable for helping put faces to names.

“You get an opportunity to speak to other team members that you don’t get to talk to on a day-to-day basis,” Sylvester said. “When you’re online you don’t get the opportunity to have those chats.”

Peter Linder, head of thought leadership in North America for Swedish telecom giant Ericsson, recently introduced the fika concept to Jason Inskeep, senior director at management consulting company Slalom. The two men had initially met on a joint panel discussion, and Linder wanted to congratulate Inskeep on his new job at Slalom. He sent Inskeep a Zoom invite for a 20-minute fika one-on-one.

“I didn’t know what it was,” Inskeep said.

The vibe of the midmorning conversation—which meandered from the future of artificial intelligence to Inskeep’s own feelings navigating a new company culture—was different from the usual business tête-à-têtehe said. Bouncing ideas back and forth in a relaxed way left him feeling energized the rest of the morning.

“It was a mix of coffee shop and barber shop,” he said.