Study: Global Fertility Falls Below Replacement for First Time

6 days ago·Updated 5 days ago

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The Spin

Global fertility has fallen below replacement for the first time in human history, and the real shock is that the collapse is hitting poor and middle-income countries hardest — Thailand sits at 0.87 births per woman, Colombia at 1.01, while modernity makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap everywhere. No economic mechanism pushes fertility back to replacement, meaning slower GDP growth, strained pensionpensions systems and shrinking labor forces are now the permanent new normal. TheU.N. UN's own projections are systematically too optimistic, and the true population peak is likely around 2056, decades earlier than official forecasts.

University of Pennsylvania

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