The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction, fast. Only 3 percent of the world’s population live in a country where the fertility rate is not dropping.What does this say about us? Like most issues, the answers are certainly complex and demand nuance, but I have to think that is points to one thing: a growing collective selfishness.
As fertility falls, populations shrink. As populations shrink, economies will sputter. Western countries will struggle to support too many retirees without enough workers, and the rest of the world (particularly places such as China and Russia) will be challenged just to maintain order as societies change in unprecedented ways: Most people will have neither brothers, sisters, aunts, nor uncles, and there will be no such thing as an extended family.
This forecast may sound apocalyptic, but it’s nearly conventional wisdom among the demographers and economists who study such things.
Parenting is hard. It demands a unique level of selflessness that is quite challenging. Of course you can be a bad parent, be quite selfish, and have kids who grow up to hate you but I think most people intuitively know that that don't want to do this. So what is the result? Just don't have kids.
If my theory is even at least partly true, what does that say about the world that we are inheriting?
What other reasons can you come up with for why these birthrate numbers are the way they are?
Could it be that so many of the up and coming generation come with the baggage of broken families that have tarnished their view of family and parenting?
I am curious as to your take.
2 comments:
I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how exceptional the last 100 years have been as far as population growth. For essentially all of human history, including even biblical times, even though the birth rate was fairly high (averaging about 5 children per woman), only about 2.1 of those children would survive to have children of their own. For example, of Abraham Lincoln's four children, only one of them survived to adulthood, with one dying while they lived in the White House. That is something that would be shocking today, yet was not unexpected back then.
It wasn't until the industrial revolution and subsequent medical advances that mortality rate for children dropped significantly. It was our grandparents and great grandparents that for the first time in history would raise an average of 5 children to adulthood.
The dropping fertility rate now, enabled through birth control and abortion, is sort of mimicking what disease, famine, and violence had done for the rest of human history prior to 1850, such that each family ends up with about two kids surviving to adulthood.
I'm not intending to judge the morality of declining fertility rates one way or another, just pointing out how truly exceptional that brief time period was when every family had five kids, and yet we often have this idea that the 1950s family is normal. Whether or not an average of five kids per family is good, it is very out of the ordinary when compared with the rest of history!
You could read this and its comments. http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/03/19/be-fruitful-and-multiply-or-else/
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