Defying predictions of the world's birthrates

From Usnews.com

"Something dramatic has happened to the world's birthrates. Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady population growth through the middle of the century," Walker writes, noting that the phenomenon of rising birthrates is not exclusive to Europe. "In North America, the trends are similar. In 2050, according to United Nations projections, it is possible that nearly as many babies will be born in the United States as in China. Indeed, the population of the world's current demographic colossus will be shrinking. And China is but one particularly sharp example of a widespread fall in birthrates that is occurring across most of the developing world, including much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East."

Policymakers here in Washington would do well to read Walker's analysis. The idea, for example, that the birthrate among Muslim immigrants living in Europe and elsewhere is declining should have a profound impact on U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and toward Iran and Israel. The uptick in the U.S. birthrate, which reached 2.1 children per woman in 2006—2.1 being the "magic number" to keep a nation's population steady, sometimes called "the replacement rate"—could have a major impact on a number of government entitlement programs, like Social Security, where the retirement of the baby-boom generation is projected to bankrupt the program when there are far too many retirees in the system for each person still working to make the books balance.

"Perhaps the most striking fact about the demographic transformation now unfolding," Walker reports, "is that it is going to make the world look a lot more like Europe.

"The world is aging in an unprecedented way. A milepost in this process came in 1998, when for the first time the number of people in the developed world over the age of 60 outnumbered those below the age of 15. By 2047, the world as a whole will reach the same point," he says, while the United States may be the only country in the West "to have been in the top 10 largest countries in terms of population size in both 1950 and 2050."