Fertility rates have been falling in most of the developed world since the 1950s, falling below the replacement rate of 2.1 in many countries in the 1970s before reaching “lowest-low fertility rates” of 1.2–1.4 in Japan, Korea, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Greece, and many of the former socialist eastern European nations in the first decade of the 2000s. 1 For much of this period, this “second demographic transition” has been celebrated as a rational result of the birth control technologies and wealth that have enabled families in the industrialized nations to reduce the size of their families in order to invest in the education and nurturing of a smaller number of children. We celebrated the fact that, in the industrialized world at least, mankind has been able to avoid the threat of over-population forecast by demographers since Malthus made his predictions of disaster 200 years ago.
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