America's Baby Bust. The nation's falling fertility rate is the root cause [View all]

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If the world fertility rate is truly dropping at the rate they discuss, it'll be pretty ugly for the elderly middle class in about 50 years, but after that (100 years) when the economy's finally collapse and those referred to as the useless eaters (children of the poor and middle class) are dead, those wealthy (who can afford children) left living will live a lot more comfortable lifestyle than most of us know today. The world will be more sustainable, cleaner, greener, and that, no matter how we get there is the goal for most of us.

It sounds bad when you lay it on the line like that but in all reality population control is what's best for the world as whole in the long run. The dropping fertility rates are voluntary population control. I know I participated, choosing to adopt children and only having one of my own and discouraging my children from having children for financial reasons.

Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.

The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.

For two generations we've been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America's environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable—even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.

Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

The rest of the article is very good, worth the read
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578270053387770718.html