Good news fellow breeders!

I stumbled upon this article in the Economist which uses straight line demographic extrapolations to predict the extinction of certain countries based on trends in fertility rates.

Primer on population demographics

 Fertility rate is births per woman over her lifetime. Replacement rate is the fertility rate at which a population does not grow or shrink. The math tells us that rate should be 2, but factoring in infant mortality rates, it varies from 2.1 in developed countries to up to 3.3 in developing countries. The average worldwide replacement rate is 2.33.

They miss the point

There are a few problems of course, with their results, the biggest of which is pushing numbers out into the distant future based on current trends. I mean, who knows what fertility rates will look like in 20 years let alone 200. And some of these predictions go 500 to 1000 years into the future. Who knows what they will even look like after the current worldwide economic crisis. But still, it is interesting to speculate.

But another thing I noticed was they are simply taking fertility rate which are less than replacement (or those which are predicted to be going less than replacement) for large populations and extrapolating them into the future until they reach Zero population. This won't work in most countries because there are always subsets of the population with a much higher than average fertility rate. Perhaps in a more homogeneous culture like Japan, with it's imploding 1.39 fertility rate this will work, but not in places like the US or Europe. This is because I can foresee there always being certain groups of people that will always have well above replacement level.

I will use my own family as an example: My mother was born in the forties, one of 4 children. That is twice the replacement rate. She in turn had four children. From her four children she currently has 24 grand kids (8+6+5+5=24). And one of her children (moi) may well have more. And she is just getting started on great-grand kids with a measly 5 so far. Anyway, my point is that my extended family has an average fertility rate of 6. That is triple the replacement level folks. So lets say the United States fertility level drops below it's current fertility rate of 2.06 (which is just at or slightly below replacement for us). Does that mean our population is going to hit zero eventually?
No way!
What it means is 2 things are going to happen: One, for a few decades the total population numbers will begin to decline right along with the fertility rate. Two, once the population declines enough, the fertility rate will begin to exponentially increase. Why? Because the population will begin to be exponentially composed of breeders whose rate is 4+.

What we need to do is not see fertility rate delineated by national boundaries. We need to see it based on ideology. The fact that I am an American says not that much about me. The fact that I am a conservative Christian says a lot more. Being a conservative Catholic Christian also means that my offspring are more likely to stay Catholic and be breeders with a high fertility rate like their parents.

Now where it starts to get weird is when you look at the other groups with high fertility rates. Islam is at the top of the list. What the picture of the world 75 years from now begins to look like as it comes into focus is a a big cross and a big scimitar.

See you in the future! I know my 500 great-great-grand kids will be enjoying it!

Sci Fi scenario

2085. 17 Billion people on the Earth. Western culture has imploded through evil philosophy, their cities are filled with second and third generation immigrants from the global south, with the minority whites in Europe and America aging and still exponentially shrinking. European Cathedrals have been sold and are now mosques filled with young Muslims, while in Uganda, Catholics and Pentecostals are building 10 churches a week to keep up with the exploding Christian population. Vatican City remains the lone sovereign nation in Europe that is not a secular Islamic state (like Turkey is in 2011). The 1.2 billion Catholics of 2011 have exploded and are now 5 billion strong, with 85% of them being in South America, Asia, and most of all... Africa. Along with them have grown the Pentecostals (which now number 3 million) in the same areas, who have overtaken the rest of Protestantism which mostly died out in obscurity mid century, although there are minority pockets tolerated in the 90% Catholic USA. Europe is Muslim. Sunni Islam now numbers 6 billion and is centered in the Islamic Republic of France which is the founding member of the Islamic European Union (IEU, formerly the EU), Which has been at war with China and the Americas for the last 10 years. Atheism and non-religion is unheard of, having killed itself through lack of replication and genetic tampering. Most nations instituted laws against "irreligion" after the DNA War of 2047, in which 280 million people in industrialized western countries were killed by their own bio-mechanical cyborgs by either interbreeding with them or direct warfare.