The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

the entire world is experiencing the second half of a ‘demographic transition’ from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility. It is a process that has occurred in many countries, starting with France at the end of the eighteenth century then spreading to Scandinavia and Britain in the nineteenth century and to the rest of Europe in the early twentieth century. Asia began to follow the same path in the 1960s, Latin America in the 1970s and most of Africa in the 1980s. It is now a worldwide phenomenon: with the exception of Kazakhstan, there is no country where birth rate is high and rising. The pattern is always the same: mortality falls first, causing a population boom, then a few decades later, fecundity falls quite suddenly and quite rapidly. It usually takes about fifteen years for birth rate to fall by 40 per cent. Even Yemen, the country with the highest birth rate in the world for most of the 1970s with an average of nearly nine babies per woman, has halved the number. Once the demographic transition starts happening in a country it happens at all levels of society pretty well at the same time.