The Baby Bust & Future Depopulation
The recent rash of articles about depopulation and the "baby bust" is not really new. There have been articles going back for several decades in all kinds of publications: The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, etc. Earlier entries seemed to focus more on establishment of the demographics and potential implications. The recent entries in the genre tend to fall towards the activist journalism approach. Essentially, they all accept the basic premise that fertility rates around the world are declining and that - eventually - humanity will inevitably go extinct if people do not start having more babies. Which is obviously true from a mathematical standpoint but makes someone sound deeply unserious in the context of a planet with 8 billion humans already here and poised to add at least another billion before peaking. Maybe. Possibly. Depending on the author's assumptions about historical trends and projecting them forward. ...