I headed off to college in 1970. One of the things about the timing of my undergraduate education is that, like many coeds of my time, I read the book “The Population Bomb” by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. It was read by most of the students in our college, and I think, by a very large percentage of students educated in that decade. The book was a best-seller and a lot of copies were sold beyond college campuses as well. It warns of mass starvation, societal upheaval, and environmental deterioration caused by overpopulation. As it has turned out in the decades since, the timing of many of the predictions of the book were wrong. Scholars have argued since its publication about whether or not the book was overly alarmist.

In a way, Ehrlich argued that the planet would self correct for overpopulation through mass death. He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. It didn’t quite turn out exactly the way he predicted, but it isn’t difficult to see that some of the predictions of the book have come to pass. Climate change and global pandemics were among the things that were predicted.

It is hard for me to say how much impact the book had on my personal life and decisions. I grew up in a large family with six siblings and can remember thinking that I was more fortunate than peers who had small families. By the time I married, during my college years, I had revised my thinking about family size and envisioned a smaller family. As it turned out, we became parents to two children and now are grandparents of four, soon to be five. That puts us somewhere in the range of the 2.1 births per woman generally considered to be “the rate of replacement” for a population.

On a wider basis, it is hard to assess the impact of the book and related discussions on the global birth rate. The global birth rate has been falling for all of my life, with the decline in recent years being dramatic. In 1990, the global birth rate was 3.2 births per woman. In 2021, it was 2.3. The birth rate in every European nation is below 2.1. In many of those countries 2021 marked record low birth rates. A new Pew Research Center study here in the United States found a growing percentage of childless US adults between the ages of 18 and 49 intend to remain that way.

One of the most common reasons cited for the decision to remain childless is financial instability. The costs of raising children are seen as a barrier. Many people believe that their personal finances may never recover from the pandemic. The threat of inflation looms over the world economy. Fewer families are able to achieve home ownership than was the case in previous generations.

However, I am not convinced that declines in birth rates are solely due to financial concerns. We were not what much of society considers to be financially stable at the point where our children were born. We didn’t own a house until after our children were born. We’ve always had careers in the nonprofit sector where accumulation of wealth is uncommon. We have been well treated by our employers all of our lives, and we have been able to have some financial stability through home ownership and modest savings. That level of success, however, is fairly recent. For most of our lives, we have lived modestly. On the other hand, I don’t believe that our children were a financial burden on us. When I think back on what purchases in my life have given me the most pleasure and meaning, investment in our children ranks very high. Perhaps nothing in life gave me more joy than investing in our children’s education. Although we struggled with college expenses, it has always seemed to me that it was one of the best things we did with our money. I’ve made some poor financial decisions and bought a lot of things that weren’t worth the price I paid. But investing in education for our children has always seemed like a good purchase for me. I value the modest savings we have for our grandchildren over the other assets we have. It feels good to invest in a future beyond the span of our lives.

If you look at the global economy and birth rates, smaller families are a product of wealth, not of poverty. It may be that the fear of financial instability is a stronger factor in family size than the reality of financial instability. And there is no shortage of fear in the world today.

More volatile than the population of the world has been the volatility of change in general. When the Erlich’s first published their book, it was impossible for us to envision the impact of computers and the Internet on human life. We thought that the shoe phone on the TV show “Get Smart” was a wild fantasy. We had no ability to imagine that we would carry smart phones with us wherever we went with continual access to communication, social media, and a vast information network. When the pandemic hit less than two years ago, we had no idea how it would impact our daily lives. I remember traveling to Japan in 2018 and thinking it a bit strange how some Japanese people wore face masks when going about their daily lives. Now I think it is strange when I see someone in the parking lot of a store who isn’t wearing a face mask. A lot has changed in a short period of time and rapid change results in anxieties and fear about the future. There is no indication that the rate of change will slow, either. Change and its related anxieties are accelerating.

I don’t envy young couples with their choice about becoming parents. I think that the decision is more complex and challenging today than it was when we were making those decisions. But I do wish that our grandchildren will know some of the joys of being parents and grandparents. It would be sad to have them denied that wonderful part of life. Parenting can be terrifying. It can also be the right choice, even when there are voices predicting doom and catastrophe. I’m glad we didn’t allow the Ehrlichs’ book to dissuade us from becoming parents.