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July 27, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Amidst all the gloom and doom about overpopulation, occasionally someone actually takes a hard look at the numbers and accurately reports what they see. This is what a team of researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and evaluation did. Their findings, newly published in The Lancet, are eye-popping. 

First, the UW researchers noted that family sizes have been dropping for decades. Whereas in 1950 women worldwide had an average of 4.7 children over their reproductive lifetimes, by 2017 that number had been cut in half, to 2.4 children. They predicted that the number of children per woman will continue to decline, falling to well below 2.1 children by the year 2100.

A fertility rate of 2.1 children constitutes “replacement rate fertility.” It’s called this because at that level of fertility the father and the mother have merely “replaced” themselves, neither adding to, nor subtracting from, the population.  

Any fertility rate above 2.1 means the population will keep growing. Any fertility rate below that level means that the population will be shrinking over time.  

This is already the case in dozens of countries around the world, where for a generation or more couples have been averaging fewer than two children. Italian women, for instance, are averaging only 1.33 children. This means that – barring a huge uptick in Italian fertility – the Italians won’t be around for much longer, at least in any numbers.

But when will the entire world fall below replacement rate fertility? How far below replacement will it fall? And what does this mean in terms of total numbers?

For decades the doomsayers at the U.N. Population Division (UNPD), UNFPA, WHO and elsewhere have insisted that the population of the world will continue growing throughout the present century. The U.N. Population Division’s latest forecast predicts that the population will reach almost 11 billion by 2100 (10,880,000,000) and will still be growing

Nonsense, say the UW researchers. (They didn’t put it exactly like that, of course.) They predict that global population will peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling to only 8.8 billion by the end of the century. This is 2 billion fewer than the U.N. projects.

How does the U.N. massage the numbers to manufacture 2 billion additional people?

It’s actually not very complicated.  

As I have been saying for at least two decades, U.N. population projections exaggerate future numbers because they hang upon a single, unexplained, and completely unreasonable assumption about future fertility patterns.  

The UNPD has long assumed that fertility rates in every country in the world will, within a generation or so, reach a “fertility floor” of 1.85 children per woman. Countries where fertility rates are above 1.85 will gradually fall to that level, while countries like Italy which are below 1.85 will gradually rise to that level.

As I wrote in my 2008 book, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits

How was this “fertility floor” determined? The UNPD report does not say. Why would fertility in Mexico fall to 1.85 and no further? The UNPD report offers no explanation, despite the fact that many countries have already fallen through this supposedly solid “floor.” And what about those countries? How will Italy or Spain, for example, manage to climb back up to the “fertility floor” after spending the last two decades in the “fertility basement”. The UNPD report is silent.

In a belated recognition of plummeting birth rates worldwide, the UNDP has recently lowered its “fertility floor” to 1.75. But it continues to insist that this is where birthrates will stabilize for all of humanity, pointing to a couple of countries which have seen mild fertility rebounds from very low fertility.

The UW researchers beg to differ.  

The evidence shows, they say, that once the fertility of a country falls to extremely low levels of 1.35 or so, it stays at low levels. They criticize the U.N. for ignoring data from the many countries with very low fertility that not only show no signs of recovering to 1.75, but show no signs of fertility recovery at all. (“Several countries with sustained low fertility were excluded from their modelling exercise,” they say of the UNDP.) They criticize the UNDP’s claim of “fertility rebounds” as well, saying that these were simply women delaying childbirth.

The UW researchers are too polite to say so, but they are basically accusing the U.N. demographers of rigging the data set to produce an inflated number.

So where did the 2 billion people come from?  

The UW researchers explained: “Our analysis also showed that slight differences (0.1 difference in global total fertility rate) in this equilibrium total fertility rate translate into a difference of approximately 500 million individuals on the planet in 2100.”

In other words, for every 0.1 difference in your projected global total fertility rate (TFR), you gain or lose 500 million people.

The UW researchers realistically predicted a future TFR of 1.35. The UNDP, on the other hand, artificially inflated the future population by “installing” an “imaginary floor” of 1.75. This 0.4 increase in TFR produced 2 billion “imaginary people” in the future population.

The UW study still exaggerates future fertility, primarily by assuming widespread lack of access to “modern methods of contraception.” In fact African, Asian, and Latin American countries are flooded with contraceptives, available free to virtually anyone who wants them.  The claim that there are vast numbers of Third World women with an unmet need for contraception, like the UNDP’s “fertility floor”, is not grounded in reality.

The UW’s lowest projection, which assumes that contraceptives are available to everyone who wants them on an accelerated schedule, forecasts that global population will peak in 2046 at 8.5 billion, declining by 2100 to 6.289 billion.

I suspect this latter is closer to the mark.

Whichever scenario turns out to be correct, the closing words of the study are sobering:  “Global population is likely to peak well before the end of the century. Given that we forecasted that societies tend towards a TFR lower than 1.5, once global population decline begins, it will probably continue inexorably.” 

In other words, as I wrote in the pages of the Wall Street Journal way back in 1997: 

Humanity’s long-term problem is not going to be too many children, but too few: too few children to fill the schools and universities, too few young people entering the work force, too few couples buying homes and second cars. In short, too few consumers and producers to drive the economy forward. The imploding markets of Europe and the economic sluggishness of Japan will spread soon enough to the U.S. and the rest of the world. Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on contraception and sterilization that will only bring that day closer?

Steven W. Mosher (@StevenWMosher) is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.

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Steven Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and an internationally recognised authority on China and population issues. He was the first American social scientist allowed to do fieldwork in Communist China (1979-80), where he witnessed women being forcibly aborted and sterilized under the new “one-child-policy”.   Mosher’s groundbreaking reports on these barbaric practices led to his termination from Stanford University.  A pro-choice atheist at the time, the soul-searching that followed this experience led him to reconsider his convictions and become a practicing, pro-life Roman Catholic.

Mosher has testified two dozen times before the US Congress as an expert in world population, China and human rights. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, NewsMax and other television shows, well as being a regular guest on talk radio shows across the nation.

He is the author of a dozen books on China, including the best-selling A Mother’s Ordeal: One woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child-Policy. His latest books are Bully of Asia (2022) about the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to the U.S. and the world, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics. (2022).

Articles by Steve have also appeared in The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest, The New Republic, The Washington Post, National Review, Reason, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Freedom Review, Linacre Quarterly, Catholic World Report, Human Life Review, First Things, and numerous other publications.

Steven Mosher lives in Florida with his wife, Vera, and a constant steam of children and grandchildren.