There are a couple of misconceptions in the world today. I myself
had fallen prey to them. But no more! Today I am going to talk about just one.
The misconstrued idea of population growth. (What does this have to do with the
family? Keep reading I’ll explain.) In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich published a book
called The Population Bomb. In this
book he described how if the population kept growing at the current rate then
by 1970 there would be worldwide starvation because the world would be over populated.
That of course did not happen. One of the biggest reasons was that shortly
after this time period we basically doubled our food production due to
technological advances. The other reason why this didn’t happen was because fertility
rates were already dropping. (The definition of fertility rate is the number of
children born to the average women in her life time.)
Why does this even matter?
Because in order for a population to be stable and be able to
repopulate as the older generations die the fertility rate needs to be 2.15. At
the height of the “Baby Boom” the fertility rate was barely over a 3. Which
means that there were only on average 3 children in each household. (Not at all
what I pictured for the baby boom. I was thinking more like 6 or 7 kids per
family. Nope!) So when Ehrlich published his book the fertility rates were already
on their way down. Slowly, but still going down. With this book, society’s
mindset was changed. Everyone started looking at population grow as a bad thing
and fertility rates dropped even more. Remember that number 2.15 for a stable
population? Well, the United States at one of the highest fertility rates in
the world is at 1.8. A 1.8! We are going to be in serious trouble if our mind
set doesn’t start changing.
Now I’m not saying that everyone should start having a million
kids as fast as they can. I am just saying that it is something interesting to
think about. (By the way, all of the information found above comes from a study,
called the Demographic Winter. Here
is a link if you are interested. http://www.byutv.org/watch/59b6b917-984a-478f-93b1-521a647779c4/new-economic-reality-demographic-winter-part-1 You can
also find it on Youtube. It was not done by the LDS church, even though it was
broadcasted on BYUTV. Anyway, I have just given an overview of the things that I
that where most interesting.) As a result of population decline, there could be
economic trouble as well. For economics only works when there are enough people
to keep it going.
