There’s a constant refrain among statisticians who focus on the overall population–demographics are destiny. If you want to see what the future looks like, it’s always helpful to look at the current trend lines and then project them out ten or twenty years in the future. That will give you a reasonable picture of how things will stand in the intermediate future. For instance, China had a roaring economy for the last several decades. They built some of the most extensive manufacturing facilities the world has ever seen and made products for some of the most well-known brands in the United States. Now, their economy is starting to cool. One simple reason exists for this cooling. Their birth rate plummeted. In the 1960s, the average Chinese woman gave birth to 6 or 7 children. Today, the Chinese birth rate is 1.16, which puts it lower than that of Japan. It’s
