[applejuice]

In some areas, the birth rate is as low as it was during the Depression.

When I was in the first women's studies class in 1975 at UCLA, the professor put up a chart showing the fertility rates per woman dropping steadily since 1600 AD. Each woman of record typically has six children. The ONLY period of time in the last 400 years in which the birthrate per woman rose was the post WW2 period.

Did the baby boomers have lots of children?

I was looking at the women I grew up with. It is a large sampling, but not conclusive. About half of them did not have any children of their own. About a third of them had two children. The rest had more than two. I live in a large city with educated persons. Many moved away.

This article has interesting stats. One stat shows that even though the birth rate is dropping, the surgical delivery rate went up. Lots of theories about that.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticl...518_mscpedit&uac=135674FT&impID=1635700&faf=1

 

[Nisha101]

Funny that I should run into this post. Just this morning I read an article about the family policy in Sweden in the 1930s, which led to a sharp drop in the birth rate (can't post the link but google "What has government done to our families? at the Mises Institute). Essentially, the theory is that everyone has some form of dependency on something in order to survive - especially the young, the weak and the elderly. The state wanted to have control of the population by taking over family loyalty and substituting itself as the de facto "parent." It went on gradually - first mandatory state schooling, so parents were no longer the primary educators. Then banning child labour - so parents would no longer have children in order to gain help on the farm or to earn income. Then pension which replaced dependence on adult children to care for their elders. So if one had children, the parent would pay to raise them, but the parent could not profit from having a child. Society would profit instead, through the income tax generated by that worker. Eventually, Swedes decided that there was no point to having a family. Marriage and birth rates went down and there was a "depopulation crisis" - negative population growth.
Maybe the US is not socialist but the article does highlight the role of government policy in determining birth rates.

I imagine it would be difficult to have kids if I were American - no maternity leave, hardly any breastfeeding support, guns in schools... not a child-friendly climate. All of my female relatives in the States who had children gave up lucrative professional careers to do so, because they wanted to care for their kids and were unable to find a way to do both. Hard choice to make, and hard to restart a career after a few years off. I was lucky that the teacher's union here in Canada negotiated up to three years of unpaid leave and right of return to the same position after having a child. Policies like those certainly make having children an easier proposition.

 

[applejuice]

Thank you so much for your perspective. I do like the Mises Institute. I do not know if it is still true, but I seem to recall that Sweden in the past has had a high suicide rate.

I read the Population Bomb years ago. I watched the years 1999 and other years come and go without fulfilling the predictions made in that book. Monsanto and other companies supposedly made their innovations to forestall the disasters that were anticipated.

I wondered then, as a teenager, and now, why a book with that kind of mindset would be so popular in academic circles in a period of history in which two world wars, a worldwide influenza epidemic, and the inventions of mass destruction killed so many people. What has happened, at least in the US, is that women who are intelligent and better educated tend have a child late in life or NOT at all. So many more children are born to poorer, less educated women.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=population+bomb

The antidote - https://www.amazon.com/What-Expect-When-Ones-Expecting/dp/1594037310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527352051&sr=8-1&keywords=what+to+expect+when+no+one+is+expecting

Another note is that women who postpone childbearing to their later procreative years then to use more expensive technologies to achieve pregnancy and childbirth, a technology of which we do not know the full long term health repercussions.

I read somewhere that India was a thriving nation until the British took it as a colony - beggars were never seen, and crime was low. There is an economic and sociological component that causes overpopulation and its economic difficulties.

We know of the one child government experiment that is now being abandoned in China.

By 2050, the children born today will be 40+. That is the projected year for a population crisis of some kind, due to health or simple lack of healthy persons for the work force or educational institutions; it will be the end of natural immunity for some diseases also. We will see. All just my honest opinion.