Empty Planet Quotes

“On a farm, a child is an investment—an extra pair of hands to milk the cow, or shoulders to work the fields. But in a city a child is a liability, just another mouth to feed.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“With populations aging and declining almost everywhere, countries may one day be competing for immigrants.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“The sooner we act to limit the warming of the air, the better it will be for our oceans. But ultimately, reducing the size of the human population is the best prescription for protecting the seas. Fewer mouths to eat fish.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“If you want to contribute to the fight against global warming, live in a city in a high-rise apartment—where radiant heat seeps through walls into other people’s units, lowering heating costs—and commute by subway.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“In the 1990s, as the consequences of a chronically low birth rate begin to sink in, Ottawa opened the floodgates, inviting 250,000 immigrants a year to come to Canada.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more; nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries; many of them are at or below replacement rate. No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it; the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and birth rates are falling rapidly. No, African Americans and Latino Americans are not overwhelming white America with their higher fertility rates. The fertility rates of all three groups have essentially converged.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“immigrants may soon be hard to come by. Fertility is declining everywhere, even in the poorest countries.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“By 1957, the pill was approved for women with severe menstrual disorders, which produced a sudden upsurge in women complaining of severe menstrual disorders. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for contraceptive use.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Canada used to be French and British. Now it was French and British and—a lot of other things. But what single thing made it Canadian? “Well, at least we’re not Americans,” people concluded.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Among millennials, especially, the fertility rate is very low. Between 2007 and 2012, the birth rate among Americans who came of age after 2000 dropped by 15 percent, to the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the United States: 0.95, less than one baby for every mother.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Almost everyone in India marries, and the marriages are arranged by the families of the bride and groom.308 This practice is reinforced by religion (both Hinduism and Islam), as well as by the pervasive clan and caste systems. “Love matches” do happen, but they are rare. If a woman wants to elope and marry someone not approved by her family, she might be taking her life into her hands. Women who bring “shame” to their families by marrying without permission can and do become victims of so-called honor killings.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Immigration is not a permanent solution to the problem of an aging and declining population. For one thing, migrants aren’t all that young; their median age is thirty-nine, according to the UN.276 At thirty-nine, most people are pretty much done producing children.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“What is the ideal number of children for a family to have?” The answer in almost all the countries was close to two. The average was 2.2, which was also the Brazilian average. The answer didn’t vary by any of the key demographic groups—gender, age, income, or education level. This shows that the norm hasn’t just been adopted by the affluent, better-educated, and younger population. It has become a new standard for nearly everyone, almost everywhere.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“242 In developed countries, women choose to marry later, and so have fewer children. In some developing countries like Brazil, women have no choice but to marry early, but they limit their family size through sterilization.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“One in three African women experiences physical or sexual violence. Because many African countries prohibit abortion on any grounds, even if the mother’s life is at risk, almost one third of all the unsafe abortions that occur in the world each year occur in Africa. Most of the 130 million women alive today who have undergone female genital mutilation live in Africa, and 125 million of the current population of African women were married before the age of eighteen.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“If Africa rises, as Kenya is starting to rise, then Africa will not produce the millions born in misery that theUN demographers predict.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“So the two-working-people-for-every-old-person ratio could arrive much sooner than many think. Already, several countries in Europe are close to 2 to 1.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“The low-fertility trap, once in place, is irreversible.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Yes, fathers could and should do more, but they often don’t. Studies show that childless women earn about the same as men. It’s having children that generates the pay gap.165”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“what makes population decline so implacable; once it sets in, it’s virtually impossible to stop, because every year there are fewer women of child-bearing age than there were the year before.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“U.K., like most developed countries, is having trouble financing its pension system. Ninety is the new eighty.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Belgium is hardly an outlier. In fact, its fertility rate is higher than the European Union average of 1.6. While the United Kingdom also has a fertility rate of 1.8, many countries are below that average, such as Greece (1.3), Italy (1.4), Romania (1.3), and Slovakia (1.4).100 Those countries are already losing population. Greece’s population started to decline in 2011.101 Fewer babies were born in Italy in 2015 than in any year since the state was formed in 1861.102 That same year, two hundred schools closed across Poland for lack of children.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“Populations are already declining in about two dozen states around the world; by 2050 the number will have climbed to three dozen. Some of the richest places on earth are shedding people every year: Japan, Korea, Spain, Italy, much of Eastern Europe. “We are a dying country,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, lamented in 2015.4”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

“All of this is completely, utterly wrong. The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
― Darrell Bricker, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline