An Educated Guess: The Problem with Fertility Rates
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios


Defined Tag: Fertility Rate.

Many people who advocate family planning will often point to fertility rates to prove their point that the world is racing towards destruction and will soon be grossly overpopulated. The upright woman owes it to humanity to have no more than 2.2 children (or, at the most, 2.5), lest the population explodes and we find ourselves suddenly faced with too many people and not enough world to put them in. And, while their warnings are often well-intentioned and their underlying point may have some validity to it, the problem with these kinds of assessments is that they are based on faulty numbers, or at the very least numbers which can only be called, at best, an educated guess.

The problem with their principles is that fertility rates are *not* good evidence of how many children a woman needs to have to maintain the population without creating a population explosion. The necessary information to calculate how many children women should have to replace the population without increasing it simply doesn't exist; it's information that can only be gathered accurately over a 40 or 50 year time span, and yet is only effective when applied to a single year. So instead, those people responsible for calculating percentages of the kind have come up with a formula which allows them to take the percentage of women of a given age who have children in a given year, make adjustments for death rates and for women who die young, and come up with a number that may or may not resemble something somewhat close to reality.

What does this rate have to do with the average family? Very little. Family planning choices are more likely to be based on the family's income and convenience than on any desire to reach a particular population balance, and that is the only logical way to do it. For example, what about the women who are unable to have children? Who will replace them? What about those women who never marry or who choose not to have children? What about all the women and girls who die before they have any children at all?

In short: fertility rates are fun things for scientists to play around with. But no couple should ever plan their family around the idea that if they have more than three children, the world will explode.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, Amazon, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.