What to Expect When No One is Expecting

Since the time of Malthus, many people have feared an overpopulation of our globe. It is easy to generalize one’s experience of crowded cities and suburbs to a crowded planet. In the recent decades, we have reached a point where over 60% of the U.S. population lives in metropolitan areas.

This means that more of us encounter a high density of people on a daily basis than ever before. A needed antidote to our provincial conclusions about overpopulation has come out in the form of the book What to Expect When No One is Expecting. Jonathan Last cleverly and starkly details global declines in fertility rates and what that means for us.

He explains how our fears of overpopulation are exactly wrong. In fact, the last 40 years has seen the largest voluntary decline in the global population’s rate of growth in recorded history. Read that carefully. We have not seen an absolute decline in population. Rather, we have seen a decline in the rate of growth. What’s so bad about that? I would like less people on the Jersey Turnpike or in line at Starbucks.

The problem is the economy, stupid. Well, specifically the economic productivity that funds our entitlement programs. When you have 4 pensioners for every worker, your entitlement structure becomes unsustainable. This inverted pyramid is a virtual death sentence for these types of programs. This is just one of the problems that arise from declining fertility rates.

Most of the industrialized powers are in far worse shape than we in the U.S. are. Japan is about to experience this in the next few decades. The only reason the U.S. and a few other western nations don’t have even lower fertility rates is due to immigration. Without foreign-born Hispanic immigrants, the U.S. would be well below the 2.1 fertility rate needed to replace existing population.

One encouraging sign is the fact that deeply religious sub-populations are bucking the trend; specifically, conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews and Muslims. While the last group brings its own challenges for Western Civilization, we can still be encouraged that the religious will, quite literally, inherit the earth.