Understanding the Baby Boom - Works in Progress

The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust.

In 1800, the average British woman had 4.97 children over the course of her life, about the same amount as the average woman living in Burkina Faso today. A century later, Britain’s fertility rate had slipped to 3.9 children per woman. And thirty years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1.79, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 – the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady. This trend occurred across Europe. By the 1920s, over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below-replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The US and

saved by

• Arielle Lok
• res ipsa
• nicolas

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