People can’t decide on whether plummeting birth rates are bad thing or not

A recent YouGov survey revealed a startling split: 22% of Americans said they didn’t think enough children were being born, 23% said there were too many.

Economists, on the other hand, are a little more one-minded on the issue, as falling fertility rates spell only one thing in the future: a smaller number of working-age people supporting a larger number of older citizens.

For decades, population growth has been a tailwind to economic growth; in the future, population declines will be a headwind, and one that hits many of the wealthiest countries at the same time. Furthermore, unless these trends are reversed, they will last indefinitely. If a country’s birth rate stays below the threshold at, say, 1.5, it doesn’t mean that we go through a few generations of having more old people than young people before reaching a steady state… it means a shrinking population into perpetuity.

See the full article here.