population decline

Suggested rule of thumb: "Take any prediction made by Paul Erlich in the first half of the 1970s and assume the precise opposite has happened since.”

Forget Overcrowding. The World Population Could Start Declining

Muslim fertility has remained high, relatively, but it's declining as would be expected. In poor African societies, high fertility is  partly due to high infant and child mortality -- have many kids to end up with a few -- partly to the status of women, partly to the usefulness of children in rural village life -- "every stomach comes with two hands for working." Muslims living in Europe have high fertility compared with Europeans, but it's already declined when compared with their countries of origin, and that will only accelerate the longer they live in Europe, for the same reasons the fertility of native Europeans is so low.

The reasons for the decline in birth rates are readily understood, and they have been repeatedly verified as economic development has proceeded in one country after another over the past century, and regardless of cultural and other differences.  There are no exceptions to the negative correlation between development and fertility.

And I know of no plausible scenario going forward that produces an upsurge in family size. A sudden decline in the independence and status of women? Raising kids suddenly becomes less and less expensive?  Age at marriage begins to drop? Masses of people decide to give up urban life and move back to a life of agricultural labor in the countryside? Social security systems are abandoned, so parents must depend on children for support in old age? Search in vain for anything plausible. Even countries that have adopted pro-fertility incentive programs have failed to move the needle -- for individual families the incentives to have fewer children are just too compelling. Once people move away from agricultural rural life where children are economic assets, to urban settings where children become economic liabilities, fertility decline becomes a virtual certainty. Against those economic incentives, even religious injunctions and condemnations have no force worth measuring -- your friend with the new house is a rare exception.

The one case where you do typically see a fertility upsurge is immediately following a war or natural disaster that involved a large loss of life. But even those are only temporary blips, make-up surges that do no more than reestablish the original downward trend line.

Byron