Prepare for a population explosion that will make immigration even worse

**Whitey Ford** · 03-24-2024, 01:57 AM

One thing we know about demographic projections is that they are nearly always wrong. In the early 1990s, for instance, it was confidently predicted in official circles that the UK population would by now be in steep decline.

This wasn’t altogether implausible. The so-called “fertility rate” – the number of newborns to each woman – was falling fast and increased longevity seemed to be reaching its upper limits. Hard though it is to believe today, we actually had net emigration, albeit very briefly; that is more people leaving the country than coming in.

In the event, the UK population has grown by nearly 10 million since then, the vast bulk of it migrants. Today’s very high levels of net immigration were not remotely anticipated.

As the authors of a new study published in The Lancet last week point out, the implications are immense. “Future trends in fertility rates ... will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power”, says Natalia V. Bhattacharjee, co-author of the study, and a lead research scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
What is so interesting about projections like these is that they have very little to do with the mass extinction events and Mad Max-like dystopia of much science fiction, but are instead simply a natural consequence of growing prosperity and abundance. Destitution has nothing to do with it.

In the high-income world, we are experiencing a “baby bust”, such that three quarters of nations globally are forecast to fall below population replacement birth rates by mid-century.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...se/ar-BB1kpnrO