Problems of a declining fertility rate

‘As populations dwindle and as the young increasingly have to bear the burden of an ever older population, the pressure on the few young people will increase drastically.’

Both the US and UK’s birth rate have been below the replacement level since the early 1970’s. For the last fifty years, immigration has been used as a method to solve this problem; but it is a stop gap measure, a temporary fix that no one has yet seemed to realise is temporary. Questions of how long immigration can realistically be sustained, or whether there will even be enough immigrants to come here in the first place or if those immigrants even want to come to Britain at all are ignored.

The world’s fertility rate is plummeting as a rule and those nations, like Poland, who we have been consistently stealing skilled labour from, have even worse problems with fertility than we have.

As populations dwindle and as the young increasingly have to bear the burden of an ever older population, the pressure on the few young people will increase drastically.

Workers will become a valuable commodity in a world where labour is scarce; but potentially more importantly demand will wither, and the economy will produce less and less until we slip into permanent negative growth.

Nations will start to compete over the slowing supply of immigrants and will have a permanent shortage of medical professionals, simply due to the overwhelming numbers of the retired compared to the working population. Dreams of space colonisation will die with population decline as we struggle greatly to find colonists.

The collapse of feudalism can be linked to a decline in population, feudalism’s end ultimately being hastened by the many deaths sustained from the Black Death. The demographic shift we now undergo is bound to either coincide with, or cause a massive change in our world and the way we live. Right now, the status quo has died and all we can do about it is wait and watch.