ShareThisIn the beginning, God blessed his creatures and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number"-- a commandment that men and women happily obeyed for ages with little regard for the consequences. But in 1798 Thomas Malthus warned that population growth, left unchecked, would outstrip the resources needed to feed, house, and employ the world's peoples.
A century earlier Thomas Hobbes had depicted such an overpopulated world, with its "continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The soaring Third World birth rate during subsequent centuries seemed to bear out his dire predictions.
Now, despite the rash of multiple births in the United States from in vitro fertilization, there is no longer a population explosion, but an implosion, and it is worldwide. The United Nations predicts that within less than a decade most of the world's women will be producing fewer than two children, and by mid-century the world's population will shrink for the first time since the Black Death in the 14th century.
At the moment, world fertility is only half what it was in the 1960s. The prevailing wisdom holds that, as nations develop their economies, women will increasingly favor conventional families of two parents and two children, stabilizing the human race at 10 billion to 12 billion people compared to 6 billion today.
But now it appears more likely that world population will peak at just 8 billion, then shrink in the second half of the century.
Russian women today average only 1.2 children, while Russia's death rate is nearly twice its birth rate, meaning the nation will have 11 million fewer citizens by 2017 -- equivalent to eliminating the population of Moscow itself.
Joseph Chamie, who directs the UN's population division, reports that fertility in more than 60 nations is already below replacement levels, and that actual population decline has been postponed only because people are living longer. By some estimates, the world's population will be cut in half within the next century and a half. In Mexico, Brazil, and India, birth rates are plummeting. In Africa, the effect of the AIDS epidemic has been to cut average life expectancy by more than 10 years.
Religion, which traditionally encourages childbirth, is effectively being ignored. Although church opposition has long discouraged family planning in Brazil, its women cut the birth rate by half in just a generation. There are 40 million fewer Brazilians as a result. Even in Catholic Italy and Spain most women now choose to have just one child. Nor have the mullahs been able to prevent three-quarters of Iranian women from using contraceptives and cutting the nation's birth rate by two-thirds.
Most of the world's people now live in towns and cities where, unlike on farms, children have become a financial liability rather than an asset.
With fewer births and longer life expectancy, we must prepare for a world in which the old will predominate and the young will be the exceptions.
David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Single Life: Keys to Successful Living on Your Own" (Praeger). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31(at)verizon.net.
AMAZING GRACE
