The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter (DVD)

You probably do not want to watch this documentary film—you will simply learn too much. It is easier, and frankly more comfortable to watch football and hope that this just "goes away." Unfortunately, this documentary in set in concrete, the demographic die is cast, and as a global economy we are in for a world of hurt. You can ignore and suffer, or learn and prepare—it's your call.

The world's population is still growing, thanks to rising longevity. But fertility rates—the average number of children born per woman—are falling nearly everywhere. More and more adults are deciding to have fewer and fewer children. Worldwide, reports the UN, there are 6 million fewer babies and young children today than there were in 1990. By 2015, according to one calculation, there will be 83 million fewer. By 2025, 127 million fewer. By 2050, the world's supply of the youngest children may have plunged by a quarter of a billion, and will amount to less than 5 percent of the human family.

The reasons for this birth dearth are many. Among them:

• As the number of women in the workforce has soared, many have delayed marriage and childbearing, or decided against them altogether.
• The Sexual Revolution, by making sex readily available without marriage, removed what for many men had been a powerful motive to marry.
• Skyrocketing rates of divorce have made women less likely to have as many children as in generations past.
• Years of indoctrination about the perils of "overpopulation" have led many couples to embrace childlessness as a virtue.

The result: a dramatic and inexorable aging of society. In the years ahead, the ranks of the elderly are going to swell to unprecedented levels, while the number of young people continues to dwindle. The working-age population will shrink, first in relation to the population of retirees, then in absolute terms.

A world without children will be a poorer world—grayer, lonelier, less creative, less confident. Children are a great blessing, but it may take their disappearance for the world to remember why.

Details

• 2 DVD documentary
• 120 minutes playing time