Is the World Running Out of People?

Running Out of People

The world is in danger of running out of people. Forget the bogus idea that there is a population explosion and we are going to run out of food. That was never true; it was a convincing piece of progressive hype. The opposite is the real problem—not enough people to grow the food, run society’s services, and produce children to people energetic, bustling nations.

Stand for the Family, a national conference on family issues worldwide, was held in the Salt Lake City area on 15 November, 2013. The thought-provoking conference presented national experts on a large variety of topics dealing with the integrity and well-being of the basic unit of society—the family.

Don Feder, Director of Communications for the World Congress of Families, told the conference that the biggest crisis of the 21^st century is declining fertility worldwide, which has fallen 50% in less than 50 years. This fertility decline has hit every industrialized nation, with developing nations now trending downward, as well.

In order for a population to remain stable, with neither growth nor decline, the fertility rate must be 2.1: every woman in the society, on average, must produce one child to replace herself and one to replace a man, and one woman in 10 must have a third child to compensate for infant deaths and a slightly higher birth rates among males. Mr. Feder’s statistics on Japan, for instance, give an example of what is happening across the world. Japan’s birthrate is 1.39, meaning that the nation, which does not allow immigration, will be reduced in size by one-half in the next 45 years. Japan’s population is rapidly aging and the nation now uses more adult diapers than baby diapers. Thousands of schools close every year, and, as one national expert put it, Japan is quietly and comfortably dying.

Other countries are following suit: Italy, Greece and Spain, the European triumvirate of failed socialist policies, is experiencing population rates below 1.5; Italy’s fertility rate is 1.26. Bulgaria has a 1.2 fertility rate. These are becoming vanishing cultures.

The United States has a birthrate of 1.93 in 2011, the lowest in our history. While this rate is better than European countries, it is still well below replacement levels. When that number is broken down to Caucasian and minority figures, it becomes more worrisome: Caucasian Americans have a birthrate of 1.65, taking them to a few generations away from half its current size.  The birthrate among Hispanic Americans is also plummeting.

Mr. Feder warned that, at some point, the population decline will become population freefall, with drastic consequences. Like a train chugging slowly up a steep hill, once the summit is reached and the train starts down the other side, or in this case, the population issue reaches critical mass, the momentum of decline will rapidly pick up speed and the population drop will produce serious, immediate problems.

This issue is a reversal for those of us who endured the contempt of population explosion fanatics a few decades back. The “We-are-going-to-starve-to-death” crowd taunted those of us who had more than the two children population explosion theorists allowed. We were living in California at the time, the hotbed of this emerging philosophy, and I was hissed on the streets, held up to public ridicule, and threatened with involuntary sterilization by a military doctor after the birth of our fourth child. He told me I was irresponsible and was destroying the world. Now we know it was all a hoax; there is no threat of starvation from too many of us, but rather a threat from too few of us.

In the next few posts we will look at the effect a declining population has on the economy (just a hint: declining population means a declining economy), and then we’ll look at what is causing this worldwide phenomenon.