"Overpopulation" = Over Exaggeration

This week within my Family Relations class we discussed the moment in the mid 20th Century when many thought that the world was overpopulated and was on the verge of starvation. Um, let's look at a few details.

All information I am going to refer to in this post can be found in this video and this  second video.

When the "baby boom" occurred after WWII there was a scare that the population was growing rapidly. However, when looking at the Fertility Rate (number of babies born per average fertile woman) it was only 3.7. That doesn't really seem like that many kids. When thinking logically about it, it was a scare because the fertility rate was low during and before WWII, and then it increased, which has been happening for hundreds of years. There is also the fact that life expectancy was increasing. This meant that people were living longer. At the time scientists were mostly looking at the fertility rate, when they needed to also be looking at the life expectancy and the death rate.

With the death rate being lower and life expectancy being longer, this means that there are more retiring, and more money from social security paying for their retirement. (I will come back to this in a second).

With this scare of "overpopulation" and starvation, people didn't have as many kids. Of course other movements--woman's revolution, sexual revolution, divorce revolution--led to this decision of not having as many or no kids. Here is the issue with this: population decline. We have now seen the affects of population decline in Japan. Japan didn't have a "baby boom" and didn't have as many children, their fertility rate was 1.2. Now, 60 years later, we see that their population seems large, but really isn't; it is mostly made up of elderly folks and not as many youth.

When there aren't as many, if not more, youth than elderly, what happens when the elderly die? the population is astronomically decreased. Now with there being less youth than elderly, the youth have to work enough to cover the amount social security is putting toward the retired, because instead of three or more workers covering one retiree it is one or two workers covering two or three retirees. Does that make sense?

And with a decline in fertility rate (keeping a steady population growth requires 2.13 FR) of 1.2-1.3 in most countries this could lead to a possible slow extinction if not reversed. I am not saying, "go out and make babies." No, I am saying, make sure you have your facts straight and you make careful decisions about whether or not you will have children and how many you should have.