by Michael Snyder, End Of The American Dream:
Fertility rates have fallen way below replacement level throughout the entire industrialized world, and this is starting to cause major problems all over the globe. Aging populations are counting on younger generations to take care of them as they get older, but younger generations are not nearly large enough to accomplish that task. Meanwhile, there aren’t enough qualified young workers in many fields to replace the expertise of older workers that are now retiring. Sadly, this is just the beginning. As I discuss in my new book entitled “Chaos”, if fertility rates continue to drop we could potentially be facing an unprecedented global population collapse in the decades ahead. This has become so evident that even the mainstream media is starting to do stories about this. In fact, an economist that was just interviewed by the Wall Street Journal is warning that “demographic winter is coming”…
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Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Here in the United States, if we want to maintain a stable population we need the fertility rate to be at 2.1 or above.
Unfortunately, our fertility rate dropped to just 1.62 last year, which was an all-time record low…
In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.
Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since, according to Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire.
Our native-born population has been in decline for quite some time.
The only reason why the U.S. population as a whole has not been shrinking is because of the tremendous amount of immigration that has been happening.
But even though it is not shrinking, the U.S. population has been rapidly getting older, and it is being projected that just six years from now seniors will actually outnumber children for the first time in our entire history…
Seniors are set to outnumber children for the first time in American history within six years, as experts warn that the country is about to struggle with a dramatically aging population.
The ‘silver tsunami’ has already seen the burden on working age people double since 1960 when there were six workers for every over-65.
Needless to say, seniors are counting on all the rest of us to fund Social Security and Medicare.
But there are way too few of us, and so a day of reckoning for those programs is quickly approaching…
Actuaries warned last year that Social Security’s trust fund is expected to be depleted by 2034, with spending on welfare and Medicare predicted to rise from 9.1 percent of US GDP to 11.5 in just 12 years.
And America’s changing age profile means there will be just 2.75 working-age people for every dependent-age person by 2030 when children are included.
Of course it isn’t just the U.S. that is dealing with such issues.
In Japan, South Korea and China, fertility rates are even lower than they are in the United States…
The problem is not confined to the US with most developed nations experiencing an aging population including Japan whose population is expected to shrink 30 percent by 2070 when four-in-ten will be over 65.
The situation is so stark in South Korea that Oxford University professor David Coleman predicted the entire country would be extinct at current rates by 2750.
And even China, which recently lost its status as the world’s most populous nation to India, is now shrinking at a rate of nearly a million people a year.
And fertility rates are also way below replacement level all over Europe…
The projected fertility rates in Central, Eastern, and Western European countries are all below the global average estimated for 2050 and 2100, and are already lower than what is needed to sustain population growth.
The total fertility rate in Western Europe is projected to fall from 1.53 in 2021 to 1.44 in 2050 and 1.37 in 2100.
Italy, Spain, and Andorra were projected to have the lowest fertility rates by then.
So what is causing this?
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