THE TELEGRAPH: Why does an educated, prosperous society choose not to reproduce itself, asks Charles Moore.
Our village is unusual in having a mainline railway station. Each day, a small number of people walk up from the station and past our house on their way to work. It is quite a long walk – perhaps a mile and a half – but I imagine they walk because they do not earn enough to own cars. They are virtually all foreign. They are on their way to serve as carers and nurses in an old people's home, whose inmates are virtually all British.
This procession is a daily visual illustration of what happens to a country when it lives and, increasingly, dies, under an illusion.
If you raise the subject of population with British people, most will tell you that the problem is overpopulation. There are too many people in the world, they say, and our own island is overcrowded.
Certainly, population growth causes problems, of which the greatest is the contest for resources, which can lead to war. But, as we are rediscovering with the recession, something frightening happens when what promised to go up, goes down.
Even quite marginal change has big effects. If you are getting 2 or 3 per cent richer each year, you can see a path of widening opportunity ahead. If you are getting 2 or 3 per cent poorer (let alone, as is currently the case, nearly 5 per cent), the future prospect narrows.
So it is with population; and the change is not marginal, but drastic. In 1960, OECD countries had a fertility rate of 3.2 children. Today, they have one of 1.6, well below the "replacement rate" of 2.1. So the rate has halved in my lifetime, moving from fast increase to steady decline. We in the West are collectively deciding not to bestow on others the gift which we most value for ourselves – life. >>> Charles Moore | Friday, July 03, 2009
