Deceiving Statistics

Statistics can be deceiving. For example for over the last 30 or more years we have been told that the population is multiplying at an uncontrollably rate. That at this rate the world won’t be able to support the population any more. Because of this many families have started to have only one child or no children at all. The statistics are deceiving in this case. It is true that the population has been growing, but it’s not just from children being born. It also has to deal with the rise in better health care. Fewer people die from accident, and our elderly are living longer than ever before.  All of these cause the population to rise and the death rate to fall giving us the appearance that we are increasing at an amazing rate when in reality we aren’t.

But know we face a new problem with only an average of less than two children being born to each family. There is a statistic call the replacement rate which is 2.13. The replacement rate is the amount of children that need to be born to for every two people in order to keep the population we currently have. (The .13 accounts for all the children who do not make it into adult hood.) So if the average family is only having 1.8, even though we may not see the effect for over 50 years, the population will decline. When that happens we will have more old retired people then we have young working people. The taxes we pay now the ratio is about three working people paying for one retired person. If the trend continues it won’t be long until there are only two working people to every one retired and if nothing changes the trend will continue.

Another problem we will face is the number of children each of us choses to have depends greatly on how big our families were growing up. If all the families start just having one child then there children will only want one. By the time it becomes apparent that the population is decaling dramatically there will be no one who wants a big family. As I said statistics can be deceiving. Because we did not look deeply into what we were getting into and to see how it will affect our future, we may already have made a grievous error that we will never be able to fix. Japan is already on the decline in population. Most countries are already way below the 2.13 children for family. If something is not changed the whole world may fall into this increasingly common downhill spiral.