Population boom goes bust. - Michael Meyer has an interesting article for Newsweek using United Nations data showing that there is, as he titled his piece, a "Birth Dearth."
Just last week the United Nations warned that many of the world's cities are becoming hopelessly overcrowded. Lagos alone will grow from 6.5 million people in 1995 to 16 million by 2015, a miasma of slums and decay where a fifth of all children will die before they are 5. At a conference in London, the U.N. Population Fund weighed in with a similarly bleak report: unless something dramatically changes, the world's 50 poorest countries will triple in size by 2050, to 1.7 billion people.
Yet this is not the full story. To the contrary, in fact. Across the globe, people are having fewer and fewer children. Fertility rates have dropped by half since 1972, from six children per woman to 2.9. And demographers say they're still falling, faster than ever. The world's population will continue to grow—from today's 6.4 billion to around 9 billion in 2050. But after that, it will go sharply into decline. Indeed, a phenomenon that we're destined to learn much more about—depopulation—has already begun in a number of countries. Welcome to the New Demography. It will change everything about our world, from the absolute size and power of nations to global economic growth to the quality of our lives.
A few things that occurred to me as I read this article:
- Same Sex Marriage didn't come up as a factor.
- With China's future declining population will they want to act soon to move militarily on countries like Taiwan?
- With Muslim people and the Middle East being one of the few populations increasing through birth rates across Africa and into Europe, what will the future hold for Muslim states and Terrorism?
