In the face of , many of the world's major economies are trying to engineer higher birth rates. or signup to continue reading Policymakers from , and , for example, have all adopted so-called " in the belief that doing so will defuse a demographic time bomb. These range from tax breaks and housing benefits for couples who have children to subsidies for fertility treatments.
But here's the thing: low - or, for that matter high - birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves. Rather, they are perceived as a cause of or contributor to other problems: With low birth rates come and a ; high birth rates mean and . Moreover, birth rates are , and efforts to do so often become coercive, even if they don't start out that way.
As , we also know that such efforts are usually unnecessary. Manipulating fertility is an inefficient means of solving social, economic and environmental problems that are almost always better addressed more directly through regulation and redistribution. According to the most likely scenario, will peak around the beginning of 2084 at about 10.
3 billion people - approximately 2 billion more than we have today. After that, the global population is projected to stop growing and will likely shrink to just below 10.2 billion by 2100.
Yet many countries are already ahead of this curve, with in the next decade. And that has prompted concerns among some nations' economists over economic growth and old-age support. In some instances, it has also prompted nativist fe.