America’s Coming Demographic Disaster

from Stand Firm by Jackie

That’s right. We just aren’t having enough babies. It’s this amazing, amazing change in what is really the central fact of the human condition. Throughout recorded history people have always had—not always but almost always had enough people, enough babies to sustain themselves, to sustain their civilizations and their populations. In fact, throughout most of recorded history people have had more than enough to sustain. In fact, the populations have grown, but beginning in 1968 in American and the Western-industrialized countries, fertility rates dropped off the table. They fell by half in a matter of years. By 1973, America was below the replacement fertility rate and by the mid-1970s all of the West was. This was really interesting. This was a sort of calamity in many ways, but it was a subject of academic interest, but then as the professional academics and demographers were studying it they noticed that fertility decline spread to the rest of the world as well. So today, 97% of the world’s population lives in a country where the fertility rate is declining. Global population is going to peak, we believe, sometime in the next 50 or 60 years, and is then going to begin shrinking. For the first time in human-recorded history, population will shrink, not because of famines, not because of war or disease or pestilence, but because people simply can’t be bothered to have enough children.

Interesting subject.  You can read the entire transcript here.