The Baby Boom
by Arctotherium, The Daily Sceptic:
Since the beginnings of the First Demographic Transition in 1760s France, there has been a near monotonic decrease in fertility rates in affected countries, which now include every country on Earth. Birth rates in most of the Western world have been well below replacement for two generations. It appears to be the inevitable price of modernity; today, almost every country in the world is facing the same problem. Pro-natal policies from Hungary to South Korea have barely even slowed this trend.
[…] Despite worsening the dependency ratio, children are actually good for growth, investment and especially savings. Young societies look to the future, old ones to the past.
Below replacement fertility means declining group power1 and lowered individual fitness2. In the long run, it means extinction or conquest by younger and more numerous invaders. It is a very bad thing to have happen to your society.
But this isn’t the first time this has happened. Many Western countries had below replacement fertility in the 1920s and 1930s after decades of rapid fertility decline. Demographers predicted this would continue and foresaw a future of stagnation, decline and weakness against the rising tide of colour. They were wrong.
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