More than two centuries ago, the English
scholar Thomas Malthus did some calculations and decided that the population
was growing so fast that people would soon be starving en masse. He wrote,
“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to
produce subsistence for man.” He was right about the growing population.
What he failed to see was that people
were clever enough to invent new technologies that would feed the world.
Another trend that he could not see at that time — and probably no one could —
was that as the standard of living rose, fertility rates would decline.
In 1775, when Malthus was a teenager,
women in England had nearly 6 children, on average. But in 1875, when Malthus
was already dead, the birth rate had fallen to 3.35. Today, it is less than 2.1
Germany followed a similar pattern. In
1850, the birth rate was 5 children per woman. Today, it’s a scant 1.4. In
Italy, the rate went from 5 children in 1850 to 1.3 today.
For a time, the fact that the average
lifespan was increasing in developed countries masked the true effects of
declining fertility. The population kept expanding. But as the trends
converged and leveled off, it became obvious by the 1970s that numerous nations
were seeing their birth rates fall below the level where a population could
grow or even remain stable.
Today, women in Japan, Singapore,
Austria, Canada, Poland, South Korea, and 53 other countries do not bear enough
children to keep those nations populated. In some countries, the rate has
fallen to one child per woman per lifetime. Of course, since every child is
actually replacing two parents in the next generation, it’s easy to see
how quickly a country’s population can plummet.
One of the big changes that set this
trend in motion was the Industrial Revolution, a switch from an agrarian
economy to an urban, mechanized economy. On rural farms, the family benefited
from having lots of children, who grew up to help produce more crops, needed no
schooling, and could take care of the parents as they got old. With the
Industrial Revolution, people moved to cities and worked in factories.
Children were costly and became a burden rather than a benefit.
For people living in the...
