Australian women are having fewer children, later in life
painauchoripan.blogspot.com
painauchoripan.blogspot.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
My great-grandmother (mom's mom's mom) had 16 children. My mom had 4. My mom's 4 children are done having children, and my mom currently has 3 grandchildren.
Life expectancy at birth has increased 6 hours every day since 1850. That trend has been surprisingly steady, despite a few World Wars and depressions. 6 hours every day. That works out to 2.5 years per decade, and over 16 decades, that works out to 40 years. Thus the average lifespan has moved from around the age of 40 to around the age of 80.
Occasionally I read an article with a sensational headline such as "A new baby boom!" because fertility has moved from some small number to some slightly larger, but still small, number. Or other times the sensational headline goes the other way: "Baby Bust! Is your retirement fund in peril?"
Against all such minor variations in the medium-term trend, it is worth remembering that the the long-term trend has been down. In 16 decades, the only really serious, world-wide break from the trend was 1945 to 1953, and that was clearly a response to the war.
The most interesting break from the trend was the so-called English-speaking Baby Boom, which occurred in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain and the USA. It started in the late 1930s, then stopped due to the war, then started again in 1945, and the birth rate climbed until 1958, and it remained high till the mid 1960s.
Outside of that one major deviation, the trend has been down for a very long time.
Meanwhile, the Earth's overall population has had its biggest run ever. The last time the human population of the Earth fell is thought to have been the Great Plague of 1347 to 1350, but the boom since 1800 has no precedent. There were 1 billion humans alive in 1800, 2 billion in 1900, 3 billion in 1950, 4 billion in the 1970s.
There are roughly 7 billion people alive today.
Try to keep all that in mind when you read about variations in the birth trend.
This shows what you are talking about.
https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...
EDIT: why downvote? I am not saying immigration is wrong. I was saying its the only way western countries will maintain their growth rates. If you think immigration is wrong or right is irrelevant to what I am saying.
Trends show that women in the U.S. and Canada are also having fewer children than in generations past and trending towards having children at a later age.
Canada
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2014002-eng.ht...
U.S.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/03/birth-rates-...
If we want people to have more kids, say, up to the replacement rate, then that means subsidies. Cheaper childcare seems to be the main thing that encourages more kids: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21659763-people-...
Go look at Japan to see what happens when you reduce both births and immigration.
An aging population, combined with falling fertility rates and no immigration is a disaster waiting to happen.
You need fresh blood to keep an economy going - they form the backbone of the workforce (read: taxes) - and in general, they're not scared of trying new things.
No, that's what's going to happen in Europe.
Japan will just have to make some deep, technical changes to budget and taxes in a culturally and ethnically homogeneous civilization, not have to deal with social upheaval.
Sure, so the inheritors of my civilization might share like, only 99.95% of my DNA instead of 99.99%, but so what?
Yeah, it only gets replaced.
> More diversity, more innovation.
Sure, sure.
I live in Australia where the financial support for parents is IMHO actually very good. "Family Tax Benefit" direct payments to parents are quite generous (http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/enablers/centrelink...) to the point that my effective income tax rate is negligible.
Quite apart from Australia's universal Medicare, supplementary private health insurance is quite reasonable (e.g., I pay $320/month for a family of five, regardless of my employment status) so I have none of the concerns about affording healthcare that I did when we lived in the US.
Humans are frankly, financially retarded. Getting married? Having kids? Dying? Why can't they just live eternally childless like a smart, economically motivated person should?
Don't even get me started on how much it costs to be born and educated. A really smart human would just pop into existence with a masters degree.
Something you can count, use "fewer".
No similar construct in the other direction. You say "more" of anything. English, feh! :-)
Probably one of the best examples of a rule that should be dropped from the English language, imo.
"i before e" apparently has more words that violate the rule than follow it, and the possessive apostrophe rule runs opposite to spoken English: "This is James's book". The fewer/less thing is a general rule, not an ironclad one - there's plenty of examples where it sounds natural to use either.
I'd also argue that with a demographic the size of Australia (~22M), the number of children in it are not feasibly countable (like grains of sand), and as such, 'less' is fine. :)
Which reminds me, the 'split infinitive' rule is yet another nonsense grammatical rule that is overapplied.
Until the language is remade to conform to logic though, I think it's best to learn countable and uncountable distinctions. At the very least it's an advantage not to have others underestimate you based on grammar issues in your writing.
But quite a few will still notice and wonder why you didn't say "fewer", even if it's less of an issue than it used to be.
I think it's still worth it to get this "right", if only because fewer people will think less of your writing.
Watch out for that wiki page, if we're looking at the same one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less
This page seems rather biased; it's easily earned its "neutrality of this article is disputed" tag with crazy stuff like this:
> even most prescriptivists accept the most common usage "there are less cups of flour in this canister" [emphasis added]
Instead of worrying about the opinions of "prescriptivists" and "descriptivists", just listen to the people you know, hear, and read: would most of them really say "there are less cups of flour in this canister"? And does that sound fine, or a bit off, to your ear?
Of course, no one I know would say "there are fewer cups of flour in this canister" either - they would simply say "there's less flour in this canister". What do cups have to do with it?
Language does change, and usage that was once "wrong" becomes right. A good example is "because of" and "due to". There was a terribly confusing rule about which to use, but these days fewer and fewer people will care if you simply use "due to" in every context. "Due to" has won, and it's nice to have one less rule to worry about.
Alas, I don't think "fewer" and "less" are quite there yet.
This should be "couldn't care less."
I used "could care less" deliberately, in keeping with the cheeky spirit of my comment:
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/01/i-could-care-less....
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm
https://newrepublic.com/article/77732/grammar-puss-steven-pi... (scroll down)
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-13/features/ct-tr...
Well played. And I mean that not in the sarcastic sense! :-)
Also, depending how it modifies the succeeding word, if can change meaning: "There are less busy people." There are people who are not as busy, or, alternatively, there are fewer busy people.
But generally the context makes it clear. However context can pretty much make anything clear.