Remember environmentalist Paul Ehrlich’s 1960s-vintage prediction about how overpopulation would deplete the Earth’s resources and condemn millions to starvation? His Malthusian condemnation of humanity’s voracious appetite has kept a grip on the debate over the future of the planet, even scaring the young out of having children.
Ehrlich was wrong. Yet as we have come around to the thought that overpopulation won’t kill us all, we are being walloped by another demographic emergency: we are not having too many kids, we are having too few. This problem is real.
The most recent scare came from government figures released last week suggesting the fall in US fertility – the number of children a woman will have over her lifetime – may be speeding up, hitting a record low of 1.57 in 2025, below the 1.62 projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January last year.
This…
