I learned (or had my memory refreshed) when reading this article on Spiked, composed of selections from an interview with the demographer **Stephen J Shaw** of documentary [*Birth Gap*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuQHXH0DkPI)*.* 

You can watch the complete interview [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXF-lVbn2cc).

I hope that the article (and the interview, and the documentary) is useful and enlightening to you, too.

A few choice quotes from the Spiked interview from Mr. Shaw:

>You can only be master of your own destiny if you’re fully informed of the realities behind the choices you’re making. That’s the heart of the problem. People don’t know the brevity of the fertility window. We are very good at teaching young people – rightly so – about how to avoid pregnancy at the wrong time. But we stop there. We don’t explain that there isn’t infinite time to make that call, and that this affects both men and women. Men seem to think they’ve got so much longer – which, technically, they do. But if they wait, they’ll still need to find a younger woman who they’re able to have children with.

>\[...\]

>When I ask British people at what age a childless woman might have a 50 per cent chance of ever becoming a mother, the answers I get are somewhere between 35 and 40. Actually, in the UK, it’s 28. In Japan it’s even lower, at just 26. I haven’t come across a nation where that age is more than 30. So people are really out of tune with biological reality. We simply haven’t given them the facts they need to make fully informed decisions.

>\[...\]

>In that sense, I look at today as ‘the good old days’. Right now, most of us are accustomed to having schools as part of our neighbourhoods – maybe even the same one we ourselves attended as children. If you take a school away from anywhere, the community around it collapses. Why? Because young parents, or potential parents, move to where there still *is* a school. And then they move again and again and again. What you’re left with are areas abundant in housing where nobody really wants to live, because there’s no community. The older people who remain there can’t afford to move, because the areas where the younger people are going – where the jobs are, where the schools are – are getting more and more expensive. So the idea that there will be some good things to come out of this, that you’ll be able to have ‘more space’, is wishful thinking. Parts of society will simply be left to decline. Buildings won’t be repaired, streets won’t be maintained and vermin will appear.

Shaw also mentions the decline of Detroit, as a possible model for a shrinking society. I am unconvinced, but within a decade we will have a larger variety of shrinking societies to choose and source data from, ranging from Japan to Spain to Thailand.

Two bits of data that Shaw also mentioned:

* the number of children born per mother is \~2.3 across decades
* the number of children born per American mother is actually increasing 

Shaw is a demographic expert, and I am not: but even so, a casual (five minute) web search could not substantiate these claims. The data may well be out there, but expect to dig a bit to find it.

One truth that shines out: **women need to know their actual fertility window,** so they can make an informed decision should they desire marriage and children.

Also: you must have families with children, if you want a viable local community.

Spiked: Falling birth rates are the greatest crisis facing humanity – bar none