Is it true that global human fertility rates are declining worldwide?

[Mr Rayon]

Or is this all just some silly propaganda stuff?

[farmboy]

Where did you hear it?

[Mr Rayon]

Where did you hear it?

 

Umm...the internet.

 

I thought a while ago we were all producing too much babies.

 

Here's a good video about it:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG2IZEzUmA0

 

But there's also lots of other stuff like people speculating that Singapore will have only about half of its current total human population in 20 years time.

 

It all sounds very serious but it's the first I've heard of all this. Is this a big problem?

[Ringer]

That's strange since the current estimate for when the population hits 9 billion is about 2042.

 

Fertility rates haven't been dropping, but birth rates have. In most post-industrial countries the birth rate is less than 2 children per woman, while underdeveloped countries tend to have more. It doesn't mean more people are infertile, just means we know how not to have kids.

[JillSwift]

Umm...the internet.

 

I thought a while ago we were all producing too much babies.

 

Here's a good video about it:

 

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=IG2IZEzUmA0

 

But there's also lots of other stuff like people speculating that Singapore will have only about half of its current total human population in 20 years time.

 

It all sounds very serious but it's the first I've heard of all this. Is this a big problem?

I smell agenda in that video.

 

Plus, no evidence is given, only utterly vague references to "studies". I can't find any that suggest the conclusions they're claiming.

 

Finally, if this decline were so, why is it not showing up on the official population estimates?

Edited April 17, 2011 by JillSwift

[Marat]

Western Europe is certainly experiencing a serious population decline, and China, with its one-child policy, should eventually start to lose population numbers. The United States is still gaining, but that is only because of immigration. Essentially, when neo-liberal economic policy became dominant in the developed world in the 1980s, middle class families started realizing that they could no longer maintain their standard of living with so much wealth being skimmed off by the capitalists that middle class wages were now stagnant instead of rising, as had been the case for generations. So they responded by having fewer children to help preserve living standards, and thus the population of the developed world began to decline. AIDS also contributed to some slowing of population growth in subsaharan Africa at the same time.

 

To take a cruelly Malthusian view of the situation, however, I wonder if all the good work that the Gates Foundation is doing in wiping out malaria is going to create problems down the road when more people start surviving to adulthood in the Third World, producing children, and then creating a burgeoning population which the locally stagnant agricultural base cannot feed, so the Foundation just winds up trading off present deaths from malaria against future deaths from starvation.

[Mr Rayon]

I smell agenda in that video.

 

What do you mean? They seemed pretty sincere to me. How can you tell?