Well, it sounds like population growth isn't what they thought it was going to be...
The total fertility rate in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, is just 0.91 children per woman, lower than in Tokyo. India’s tfr has fallen below the level needed to keep its population stable in the long run. It is more-or-less bound to start shrinking around mid-century.China’s population is already contracting. Mexico’s tfr stands at 1.6, about the same as that of its richer northern neighbour, the United States. In 2024 France recorded fewer births than in 1806, when the population was less than half its current size. Italy registered its lowest count since unification in 1861.
Population numbers she like they are particular full of momentum. Once they get headed in a direction, they really go in that direction.
What is striking and unexpected is that the decline in fertility is accelerating. The pace of global falls doubled between the 2000s and 2010s and has doubled again in this decade, sinking, on average, by almost 2% a year. In many places the fertility rate is dropping much faster.
What did people expect? Every message since the boomer generation has been: Don't have kids yet, if at all.
The lesson has clearly been taken to heart. It seems that most of the kids these days aren't having kids. But we all knew this thirty years ago.
But the big question is: are we doomed?
The last paragraph in this article is the most important: "Gee, we sure do get it wrong a lot."
“Replacement fertility is a knife-edge,” says Lant Pritchett of the London School of Economics. “Over the very long run, humans shrink to zero or swell to huge numbers, depending on whether they stay below or above the replacement rate.” The assumption that TFR must trend towards replacement is alluring, simply because “It makes the maths embarrassing if you don’t.” Alarmist predictions of a “population bomb”, which were trendy in the 1960s, may have made demographers hesitant to predict the opposite: that humanity will soon be shrinking. And yet, alarming or not, that will soon be happening.
Yes, predictions about individual behaviors generalized over a long time horizon often get it horribly wrong. But people react much more quickly to changes in society than you expect. My sense is that the roots to the reversal of the population decrease trend are already at work.