WAS “CHILDREN OF MEN” REALLY FICTION? Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed.
The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
Some demographers think the world’s population could start within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
Donald Trump, this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called collapsing fertility a bigger threat to Western civilization than Russia. A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has prioritized raising the country’s “demographic GDP.”
Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
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About the Author: Patriotman
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GUNS N GEAR
The sky is falling!
An economic growth plan based on “make more babies” is a bad idea, unless we want to live on a planet covered in urban sprawl and populated by government-dependent city people.
Planning for “Economic Growth” for it’s own sake, like all “progressive” central planning, social, economic or otherwise, is usually fraught with bad ideas. First, the planners are human with all the potential for error that that implies. Second, the planners are all, without fail, self interested, convinced that their interests and intentions coincide with “the good of all.” And, third, the problems, now more than ever, are beyond mere complexity, and the data inaccurate and incomplete to say the least. Add to that the necessity for the planners to compel to compliance several billion people with beliefs, needs and agendas of their own, limited to their immediate needs, environment and understanding…. all of which is a recipe for not only failure of The Plan, but also for human disaster and massive suffering.
That is why not only does communism always massively fail, but all such grandiose scheming and tyrannical machinations. Hence, schools boards, elected from their own local communities, who think they should be promoting the mutilation and psychological destruction of children rather than their benign education. And this is but a microcosm of a world wide phenomenon.
“God made and idiot for practice… then he made a school board.” Mark Twain
Ditto all boards of whatever stripe who think it is their job to rule.
Many folks are not having children, or even getting married because the see, or merely feel, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Evidence is rife on every hand. I have heard many, many young people say, “Why would I want to bring a child into a world like this?”
Indeed.