Last European will die on 6 August 2960.
This is the bottom line of the United Nation's report on falling birth rates in the Western world, if population replacement levels continue to decline, says Fraser Nelson in the Spectator ("Where have all the babies gone?" 4th March 2006). Though the eventuality of this is extremely unlikely, it nonetheless highlights the gravity of a problem that has been apparent for several years: Europe is getting older and smaller.
According to UN figures, the population of France will begin its decline in about ten years, while in fifty years the Ukranian population will have been halved, and the number of Russians will be four-fifths of its present day size.
These statistics have off course worried the European Comission in Brussels, as the fall in population can only mean one thing: a pension crisis. Currently, for every pensioner there are four workers; however, as birth rates continue to drop and life expectancy rates continue to rise, the ratio is set to become two workers to every pensioner. The population of Europe is beginning to look like an inverted pyramid.
"The elderly may be drafted in to man the factories and soon the immigrants will go native and stop breeding. Take some UN forecasts to their extreme and they suggest that the last Frenchman dies in 2107, the last Italian in 2180 and the last Briton in 2780. The Irish hang on to the last.[...] No one has grasped the real implications of the sexual revolution in the 1960s."
Nelson continues, saying that the most important consequence of the contraceptive pill is not the liberation of women's sexual desires, but that it has allowed couples to plan their families according to their wishes. Consequently, birth rates have declines further and further. Not a single country in Europe has a birth rate that equals the natural replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.
However, whereas the number of births every year falls in Europe, America does not follow suit.
"Women in the United States are today having babies not seen in Britain since the Second World War. The trends are by no means universal, but in HIspanic and Bible Belt areas, people are breeding as if the 1960s had never happened. This baby rate is the object of much envy in Brussels, which points out that the Americans have an unfair advantage because of of the Hispanics, who average more than three kids per woman. But even the average white American female's birth ratio of 1.9 is higher than the average Irishwoman-whose average lifetime tally of 1.85 is the highest in Europe."
Tha author then discusses the issue of abortion (illegal in Ireland), saying that a quarter of all pregnancies in England and Wales are aborted. However, perhaps the single most important factor of declining birth rates is economics. Whereas in the Third World children are viewed as spare workers for families, bringing in extra income, or "walking pension policies" to support their parents in their dotage, in the Western world, especially in well-to-do couples,they are often seen as expensive luxury, to be indulged if you can afford the drain on finances, especially if those parents have "high aspirations for them". This case can also be seen among blacks in America who have grown wealthier, and whose reproduction rates have also slumped, almost equalling the average white woman's rate.
Nelson continues to develop this argument, saying that as global poverty will continue to fall, birth rates will fall with it, with UN figures indicating that the world's population will reach its zenith in about forty years from now, at a grand total of 7.75 billion people. From then on the decline shall begin, steadily accelerating until, if the trends fo not change, the human race will die out in ten thousand years, "having survived for far less time than the dinosaurs. Mankind may yet end up being a blip on the history of the planet, and Europeans a micro-blip."
Beginning of the article here.
So what do you think?Is ther anything that can be done to remedy this seemingly inescapable situation?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by the_mango55
)
