Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.
At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded—and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.
Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.
On the other hand:
The Malthusians are right that the world’s population is still increasing and can do a lot more environmental damage before it peaks at just over 9 billion in 2050.
On a vaguely related topic, many Chinese never learned how not to get pregnant.
Overdue.
Picture should have been from “Children of Men”.
What are the religious leaders doing to control population growth?
#3, Dallas,
Swallowing.
# 4 Mr. Fusion — FTW !!!
#4 LOL. I love it.
Hey, every little bit helps.
Those who say they don’t believe in human evolution by means of Natural Selection may be on to something. U.S. government policies for over half a century have promoted drastic DEVOLUTION, not evolution of its residents. (Notice I didn’t use the word “citizens” to be PC.)
The HIV scare is finally paying off. More people around the world are using condoms.
All the chemicals being used in food and dumped in the environment are poisoning us all. Reducing our fertility (unknowingly?) will enhance our civilization. The Black Death led to the flowering of the Renaissance!
Yup. This is why Europe will be Islamic pretty soon.
Natural selection at work here. Those who can mutate and reproduce will be the next generations. Those who do not, will die out.
Oddly an article supporting the need to reduce population appears on TOD today. Good read.
http://theoildrum.com/node/5925
Also, there have been many calls in China lately to lift the one child per family ban. Already some families are allowed to have two if the parents were from single child families. Here’s one such article from the China Daily. “China’s one-child policy needs to be changed”
So, as the western world works to stabilize the population, Islam and China may encourage their citizens to “be fruitful.”
The population decline in the west could be far quicker than the Economist suggests – economic duress of the most fertile age groups, escalation in numbers of global pandemics, wars, reduced biological fertility due to obesity and drug use, environmental and foodchain contamination by hormones and antibiotics. They are looking at a “trend” without understanding the underlying causes and then extrapolating the data at hand.