Something positive that could be taken from the lower births-per-woman rate would be an emphasis on adoption. Many working women do not want to put themselves in a position of a 9-month pregnancy, especially if their employer is not required to give them maternity leave. Stringent restrictions on who can adopt is a big pet peeve of mine, when any two morons can conceive a child.

Why are declining birth rates a bad thing? If the rates increase, aren’t we at risk for overpopulation?

This is a very interesting discussion.

Shaun: If governments continue giving larger incentives for having children, I could certainly see more people (especially low income couples) having children and then giving them up for adoption. However, the morality of this practice opens up an entirely new debate.

Jaclyn: As Don points out, birth rates have decreased so far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per person that the population is shrinking too rapidly. This becomes a concern when our social welfare system is contingent on the younger, working population supporting an older, retired population. It places a large burden on the Net Generation.

The systems we have in place work best when the population remains constant or is growing. However, you are quite right in saying that overpopulation is a concern if the birth rate is considerably higher than 2.1. Before the single child policy, China was fighting a huge overpopulation problem. Much of Africa is facing a similar problem as well.

All countries should be aiming to be in stage 3.

There is a very good argument that can be made that Stage 4 is a WONDERFUL place for a country to be in – and things like Social Security and other support systems just need to be adapted to suit it, which requires certain sacrifices (such as delayed retirements, etc).

The problem is these changes our hard, because our entire economic system – from banking itself all the way down to social security – has been built on a leverage model that depends on continuous population growth continuing forever. If you think that sounds like a pyramid scheme, you’re not far off.

It’s a peculiar aspect of economics, and our markets in general, that we’ve been conditioned to think of a gradual decline in population as a bad thing / something to panic about – like more resources per-capita is somehow an awful outcome. I think a global birth rate below replacement levels doesn’t sound that bad at all… we just need to think about things a little differently to make it work.

You might want to study the work of Charles Darwin and perhaps also note that it took almost the entire human history to get to 1 billion people, then took two hundred years to reach 6 billion. I’m quite sure that this “falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover” is completely irrelevant on a global scale.

For a long time, the cities of Britain were making a net loss in population (i.e. eating people) while the countryside was producing a net surplus (large numbers of whom would move to the cities) but the system as a whole still operated and the cities still expanded.

Jaclyn: As Don points out, birth rates have decreased so far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per person that the population is shrinking too rapidly. This becomes a concern when our social welfare system is contingent on the younger, working population supporting an older, retired population. It places a large burden on the Net Generation.

It is going to place a much larger burden on those who believe that the Net Generation is under some obligation to support them and who also seem to believe that our economic system has no ability to “correct” for such imbalances.

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I’m only 24, so I don’t know much about a lot of these things. But I found this TED video of a lecture given by Hans Rosling. He’s a Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet in Sweeden.

His presentation talks about some of the topics everyone is discussing here. It’s worth checking out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Perhaps collecting tax on employment and consumption causes low birth rate. Loan shark too.