An “avalanche” of “expanding and accelerating” demographic forces is driving global birth rates down at alarming rates, demographers warned The New York Times.
German demographer Frank Swiaczny, former United Nations chief of population trends and analysis, told the Times – “A paradigm shift is necessary. Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline.”
The publication described ghost cities in northeastern China, South Korean universities scrambling for students, hundreds of thousands of demolished properties in Germany, and shut down maternity wards in Italy, and warned that countries like Hungary, China, Sweden and Japan are already pushing to balance the combination of “swelling” older populations with the needs of young people.
Professor Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, called the report “jaw-dropping.”
He warned — “From South Korea to South America, from Italy to the U.S., we’re witnessing an epochal fall in fertility.”
A host of factors, which the Times described as “an avalanche” of “demographic forces,” appear to be accelerating toward more deaths than births almost globally, except in Africa.
Demographers predicted to the Times that by the second half of the century — or earlier — the global population will enter a sustained decline.
U.S. fertility rates are at their lowest since the government began tracking such data in the 1930s.