Kevin Dolan: If Birth Rates Continue To Plummet, Civilization Will End
Birth rates inevitably decline for the economic reasons with which Mr. Dolan says he's primarily concerned. But he himself doesn't seem to reckon with the fact that the spread of prosperity has produced population growth to the point of its current natural limit. Years ago already it was predicted that global population would peak around 9 billion before falling. It falls because that's what prosperity does. Prosperity dulls the natural response to want, which is reproduction.
Meanwhile Mao killed his millions by the tens from 1949 and America killed its millions by the tens from 1973 and few have been the wiser.
Oddly, we still call this civilization.
Be that as it may, failure to reproduce eventually will necessitate a gradual and huge redistribution of wealth from the older population to the younger population, involving sometimes quite dramatic repricing of goods and services in the process because of the law of supply and demand.
And then at some point the natural response to reproduce will reassert itself "after the money's gone".
Once in a lifetime.