Check out some stats in the January 9th edition of Time Magazine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CIA World Fact Book, Demographic Intelligence, Pew Research, SSA, U.N., the U.S. Census and others….

  • 4 million babies will be born in the U.S. in 2012
  • China will add 16 million babies to their population this year
  • A baby girl born in the U.S. today can expect to live to the age of 81.3–until 2093!
  • A baby girl in the U.S. will grow up (on average) to have two babies of her own (2.09 to be precise)
  • A Nigerian girl born this year will give birth to an average of 4.82 children
  • A U.S. baby girl born in 2012 will have a 23% chance her marriage will end in divorce
  • A U.S. baby girl born inย  2012 will have a 41% chance that she will not marry
  • There is a good chance this girl will be named Sophie!

Starting from the bottom up, details and reactions:

  • Laura Wattenberg,author of The Baby Name Wizard, projects that this will be the most popular baby girl name this year.
  • On marriage, that’s higher than I thought. Not too long ago Time did an article on marriage, and while many aren’t marrying these days, as I recall they reported most did.
  • Divorce: that seems a better stat that the common percentage thrown around for some time now -50% or one out of two.
  • Work to be done in Nigeria: Clearly better access to birth control!
  • About 2 babies per woman: Continued increases in population mean more women, and more women giving birth even at this low rate compared to most countries still means population explosion!
  • More people living longer will “continue to make a major contribution to world population expansion over the next half century, regardless of whatever progress might be made reducing fertility says Dave Foreman, author of Man Swarm.
  • China–16 million-and that is still with a one child policy–wow.
  • Foreman would say 4 million more babies this year is too many: At 310 million right now, unless we don’t do something right now, the U.S. population will “double in the next hundred years to above 600 million to even more than 800 million!”

Numbers like that make me pause.ย  Ok, I will no longer be here, but is this the direction I want the world to be going when I do leave it? I think not.

Time did a nice visual to lay out these numbers and more (like Brazil–a Brazilian girl born in 2012 has 25% chance of marrying before age 18; in the U.S. it is now the age of 30 if she has a college education), but even so, like I have felt since traveling to Brazil and Argentina, when it comes to population, I am left feeling, well, disturbed, and motivated to action.

Place to start: Check out the Rewilding Website Population Page, Optimum Population Trust, and get your socks knocked off with Foreman’s Man Swarm.

Who else is concerned about how we are going to pull off stabilizing the world’s population?

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