The Human Race is Dying Out – Or Is It?

There are conservative podcasts and web sites I follow that have been sounding the alarm over the declining birth rate worldwide. For most of my life I've been hearing those sounding the alarm on overpopulation, and only recently have the alarmists turned the other direction.

The conservative sites that are sounding this alarm have a religious bent to them, often Catholic, like National Review and Daily Wire (their prominent podcasters include 2 Catholics, one Orthodox Jew, and one Christian who leans Catholic without being one).

One hundred years ago, the population of the world was roughly 1/3 of today's population, or, to put it another way, the population increased by 300 percent. At that time, my grandparents were transitioning from teens to young adulthood.

Compare that with the previous 100 years, where the population increased by roughly 70 percent. I didn't find numbers for the 100 year period before that, but I'll bet that the rate of increase was even lower.

Here is a chart I grabbed from Wikipedia:

So it used to be the brakes on human population increases were famine, pestilence, and disease. In modern times, humans have mostly overcome these hinderances.

There are many reasons why humans are choosing to have fewer children, or to even go childless. But they essentially come down to two: Less religion and more prosperity. And prosperity probably affects religious adherence, unless you count secular ideologies, such as Marxism, a form of religion. But then, Marxist countries are also depopulating.

But is the human race really going to die out? I say no. What will probably happen is that those without religion will continue to have fewer children, while those more orthodox religious denominations will continue to have large families as a part of their membership. Eventually that core religious grouping will be a majority of the reduced population and you'll likely see (I probably won't, I'll have passed on by then) a birth rate that will increase again. You'll also see a religious resurgence as a result. It's the stricter religious denominations that will see an increase in adherents, whether you talk about the Mormons, the Amish, or those Catholics that attend Latin Mass. Other examples abound, including Orthodox Jews.

I'm not a Malthusian. But maybe there are too many of us — in the sense that we bump into each other too much — and nature has found another way to reduce the number of humans now that the older tools, such as famine and disease, aren't correctives anymore.