The Gray Tsunami
The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.
If the 20th century was the century of the population explosion, the 21st century, as Eberstadt notes, is looking like the century of the fertility implosion.
Full editorial by David Brooks in The New York Times worth reading.
I think the decline will slow for a period of time in many places, and then drop again in a few decades.
Nicholas Eberstadt does good work. I’ve cited him on numerous occasions. Generally, as countries develop, women begin to have fewer children. Families with only a few children tend to invest more in each child in terms of education. Children in low-fertility households also tend to be net liabilities rather than assets. In other words, in high-fertility societies, parents invest littlte in their (many) children, who function as a form of security in old age. But when you only have one or two kids, you tend to invest more in them.
Big fan of Eberstadt’s, I enjoy following his work.
That’s an apt answer to an interesting qeusiton