Fertility Rate
On or around October 17th, the number of people in the US hit 300m, up from 200m in 1967. By as early as 2043 there will probably be 400m Americans. As America adds 100m people over the next four decades, Japan and the EU are expected to lose almost 15m.
American women today can expect to have an average of 2.1 children. That is the number needed to keep a population stable.
The fertility rate in the EU is 1.47. By 2010, deaths there are expected to start outnumbering births. The fertility rate in Italy and Spain is 1.28, which, without immigration, would cause the number of Spaniards and Italians to halve in 42 years.
People in very poor countries tend to have lots of babies because they expect some of them to die in infancy, and because they need help in the fields and someone to care for them in their old age. The fertility rate in Niger and Mali, for example, is over 7 children per woman.
According to Philip Morgan and Miles Taylor, birth rates are lower in more patriarchal rich countries, such as Japan and Italy, than in places where the sexes are more equal, such as America and Scandinavia.
Space also make child-rearing more attractive. The world’s lowest fertility rates are in super-crowded Hong Kong (0.95), Macau (1.02) and Singapore (1.06). In America the average family-home has doubled in size in the past half-century, from 1,000 square feet (93 square metres) in 1950 to 2,100 square feet in 2001.
The mean center of America’s population — ie, the point at which an imaginary, flat US would balance if only the people on it weighed anything — keeps moving south and west. In 1800 it was still near the eastern seaboard, in Maryland. By 2000 it was in Phelps County, Missouri, and heading for Oklahoma.
According to Joel Kotkin, as the US’s population surges, it will become more ethnically mixed and especially more Hispanic. Whereas in the EU by 2050 there will be fewer than two adults of working age for every person over 65, the proportion in America will be almost three to one.
The fertility rate in China is only 1.7, and there are almost no immigrants.
“Now we are 300,000,000,” The Economist