I've posted several times on the long-term risks posed by declining birthrates. You can read some of them here, here, and here. Slightly more than two years ago Jordan Ballor posted a short, trenchant observation titled The Hopes and Fears of All the Years here. A teaser:
Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, put it this way in a lecture earlier this year: “As you get past a certain level of prosperity, it will become not cost-effective to have children. If you don’t have beliefs that transcend your life you won’t have [children] anymore.” Brooks describes instead a society in “which people dedicate themselves to a higher purpose, most notably to God,” and in which therefore “people will live on into the next generation. The future of a prosperous society depends on a lot of things, but the fundamental currency of the success of any society is people, is humans. When you stop having the humans, your life is limited and your prosperity is doomed.”Ballor adds several valuable insights of his own. I recommend it.
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