Missing children: can America duck the worldwide baby bust?

• Author: Longman, Phillip
• Position: Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future - Book Review

Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future. By Ben J. Wattenburg Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, $24.95

It's happening in rich countries. It's happening in poor countries. It's happening among Christians, Hindus, and especially Muslims. It's a trend that has everything to do with sex, death, money, and power, yet rarely draws a headline. Everywhere in the world, people are having fewer and fewer children.

Most everyone knows that Europeans are fading in number. Yet the most dramatic declines in fertility are occurring just where you'd least expect them. Even under the tight grip of an Islamic theocracy, for example, Iran has seen its fertility rates plunge to level that lead to long-term population loss. The same is true of Mexico and most of the rest of Latin America. Americans have a long history of fearing the Asian hordes, yet countries like China, Japan, and Korea now face the prospect of losing up to one third of their populations over the next generation.

All told, global fertility rates are half what they were in the early 1970s. The primary reason appears to be the rapid movement of people from farms to cities (nearly half the world's population today lives in urban areas), and the increasing social and economic opportunities available to women. Because of the large numbers of women still in childbearing age, world population will continue to grow for several decades, even as the average woman has fewer and fewer children. Yet within the lifetime of today's young adults, most demographers now believe, world population could well be falling. Long before then, the average age of the world's citizens will increase dramatically, leaving many fewer working aged people available to support each elder.

Two recent books document these trends and explore their long-term implications. Ben J. Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote one. I wrote the other. I suppose you can guess which book I think is more insightful.

That bias disclosed, let me hasten to say that Wattenberg and I essentially argue from the same facts. We both, for example, rely heavily on data and projections developed by the United Nation's Population Division, which in recent years has been ratcheting down its estimates of future population By 2300, the United Nations projects that world population could be below the level of 1960, and that the United States will shrink back to the population it had in 1950--only with a far...