Last week in class we spent a long time talking about the fertility rates around the world and how they are dropping. This is strange because popular belief is the opposite because the population number in the world is increasing. How is this happening? Well, even though people are having less babies because of the advancement in medicine they are living longer. There is a quote about how instead of multiplying we are instead just not "dropping like flies". So if the population is still growing why does it matter that the fertility rate is decreasing? This matters because in many countries right now the rate is in a sub replacement state. This rate means that women are having less than 2.1 children each. This is too low to keep the population going. If we keep this up then within the next couple of generations there will be nobody left. I find this all very interesting because it a lot of it started after a book called the population bomb came out right in middle of the "Baby Boom". Peoples mind set changed drastically with this idea that if the population grew it would lead to a poor economy and mass starvation. The thing I found the most interesting is that you can see this mentality in so many things, such as the statistics but also in the media. Take the books "Enders Game" and "Among the Hidden" for example. In these books they have a limit to how many kids they have and that is two. But they also try to have that many. This is cool because they are cutting down the population but trying to stay out of the sub replacement level. I hope this gives you a little insight as to why having more kids is important and if you want to look deeper into this topic here is a video that explains it in more depth:
http://www.byutv.org/watch/b3dfa9f3-6e20-4d64-af96-fbf3fd64670a/new-economic-reality-demographic-winter-part-2
http://www.byutv.org/watch/59b6b917-984a-478f-93b1-521a647779c4/new-economic-reality-demographic-winter-part-1
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