They continue to. By 1979 the global fertility rate was 6.0, and now it’s 2.52, according to UN data. All first-world countries are already below a 2.1 rate, the “replacement level” needed to keep a population constant, and fertility rates are plummeting throughout developing nations as well. “Today,” writes Last, “only 3 percent of the world’s population lives in a country whose fertility rate is
not declining.” The UN projects that world population, currently around seven billion, will peak over the next eighty-five years between ten billion and twelve billion people before starting a long and inexorable decline. Which is, Last argues, precisely the
real cataclysm humanity faces. Though he says he isn’t “selling doom,” Last’s own last-days prediction is right there in his book’s sub le:
America’s Coming Demographic Disaster. Building on trends identified and anxieties aired by writers such as Phillip Longman (author of 2004’s
The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It), Last invokes a vision of the future that is basically a photographic negative of Ehrlich’s.
Absent massive, sustained levels of immigration, he writes, low-birthrate countries such as Italy, Spain, Germany, and Greece will by century’s end see “their populations . . . shrink by 86 percent, 85 percent, 83 percent, and 74 percent, respectively.” This is already happening in Japan, where the population peaked a few years back at around 127 million, and is now contracting. “If Japan’s fertility stays where it is,” Last writes, “the country will contract by more than half—to 56.8 million—by the end of the century.”
In the United States, our fertility rate of around 2.0 has been inflated by immigrant mothers, who tend to have more kids than native-born women. But not only is a thirty-year wave of immigration subsiding; the women who are still coming to America are also starting to have fewer babies.
Reply With Quote
