For two centuries, overpopulation has haunted the imagination of the modern world. According to Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, human population growth would always surpass agricultural production, meaning “gigantic inevitable famine” would “with one mighty blow level the population with the food of the world.” Later, eugenicists like Margaret Sanger in the 1920s fretted over the wrong people reproducing too much, creating what she called “human weeds,” a “dead weight of human waste” to inherit the earth. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” because of the “population bomb.” These days, environmentalists worry that too many people will overload the natural world’s resources and destroy the planet with excessive consumption and pollution, leading to catastrophic global warming. Bells and whistles for outlook keygen software generator pc. Photo credit: paparutzi A strain of anti-humanism has always run through population paranoia, a notion that human beings are a problem rather than a resource.

But as Jonathan Last documents in his new book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, it is not overpopulation that threatens the well-being of the human race, it is under-population. As Last writes, “Throughout recorded human history, declining populations have always been followed by Very Bad Things.” Particularly for our modern, high-tech, capitalist world of consumers who buy, entrepreneurs who create wealth and jobs, and workers whose taxes fund social welfare entitlements, people are an even more critical resource. The Facts of Population Decline Last, a senior writer for the Weekly Standard and father of three, provides a reader-friendly but thorough analysis of the demographic crisis afflicting the West and the “Very Bad Things” that will follow population decline.

Clearly argued and entertainingly written, Last covers the how and why of our refusal to reproduce, and the consequences that will follow. The facts of population decline are dramatic. Women must average a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children apiece for populations to remain stable. But across the developed world, and increasingly everywhere else, fertility is quickly declining below this number: “All First World countries are already below the 2.1 line,” Last writes, and the rates of decline among Third World countries “are, in most cases, even steeper than in the First World.” Japan and Italy, for example, have a 1.4 TFR, a “mathematical tipping point” at which the population will decline by 50 percent in 45 years. As for the rest of Europe, by 2050 only three countries in the E.U., which today has an average rate of 1.5 TFR, will not be experiencing population declines. Those countries are France, Luxembourg, and Ireland.