Europe Disappearing II

A follow-up to this post:

“The salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Russia is that they’re running out of babies. What’s happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history.

Most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies—’My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ and its ilk—in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast, loving, fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of ‘lowest-low’ fertility from which no human society has ever recovered.

And Greece’s fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have ‘big’ families these days, it’s the Anglo democracies: America’s fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand’s a little below. Hollywood should be making ‘My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding’, in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling... This isn’t a projection—it’s happening now.” —Mark Steyn via Gazizza