Mike Seccombe writes for The Global Mail about the subject of falling population rates around the world. Already half of the world's nations have fertility rates of less than 2.1 children per woman - the so-called "replacement rate."
It's a relatively long article and I won't try to summarize it all for you. Generally, the only places with growing populations are in Africa and southern Asia. Every place else is either stable or shrinking. The nation with the most rapidly shrinking population is Singapore, Japan isn't far behind.
As we've noted before, once women get education their fertility drops like a stone. The tough part of this is that over time the nation ends up with an aging population and relatively few young workers to support all those seniors.
A world with half the present population might be very nice - less crowded and more able to support us all. The hard part is getting there from where we are now.
