Depopulation a danger, researcher warns
Executive Intelligence Review, Oct. 31, 1997, p. 17

Nicholas Eberstand, from the American Enterprise Institute and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, warns that if current trends in fertility decline continue, the world could see "a future whose social, political, and economic outlines promise to break sharply with anything in recorded experience." His remarks, in a commentary in the Oct. 16 (1997) Wall Street Journal, were adapted from an article in the autumn issue in the autumn issue of the Public Interest.

While most of the news from  the Twenty-Third General Population Conference, held in Beijing in October (1997), focussed on the "threat" of overpopulation, Eberstadt states, "this danger may be a myth." He restates the drops in fertility rates in the advanced sector, and reports that the UN Population Division now projects the decline in fertility to continue also in the developing sector.

This fall in fertility will have dramatic consequences for the age distribution of the population, Eberstadt states. In 1900, the median age of the world's population was about 20. By 1995, it had reached 25. If fertility continues to fall, by the year 2050 the median age worldwide could be 42, and in Japan, it could be 53, in Germany, 55, and Italy, 58. However, even these figures may be optimistic,  because Eberstadt assumes that life expectancy will continue to rise, which is clearly impossible under the economic catastrophe that is befalling the world's population.

To give a flavor of what the world would look like under depopulation, Eberstandt states: "Consider the possibilities for Italy, currently the country with the world's lowest fertility level. If Italy's current regimes is extended for two generations, almost three-fifths of the nation's children will have no siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles; they will only have parents, grandpaents, and perhaps great-grandparents. "The UN proections, based on the trends today, Eberstandt states, "imagine a world in which the only biological relatives for many people will be their ancestors."