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In 1775, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth sat down and did some math. The American colonies were doubling in population every 20 years, primarily due to a high birth rate. Projecting forward, he calculated that by the year 2000, America would have a population of 1.28 billion people. He wrote the number in capital letters, as he was so overwhelmed by the thought.
When the year 2000 arrived, we came in about a billion short.
A new report from the Institute for Family Studies, “The Demographic Dead End,” opens with Wigglesworth’s forecast and then explains, in careful and sometimes alarming detail, why it failed and what comes next. The authors, demographer Lyman Stone and researcher Peter Foreshaw Brookes, have built what they call the most reliable published reconstruction of historic American fertility: birth rates for every state back to 1917, and for Massachusetts back to 1660. The report was released to mark the country’s 250th birthday.
Note this is a reprint of his CJ article: https://www.city-journal.org/article/us-birthrate-fertility-population
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Daily Wire
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the best-selling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.” This piece is reprinted from City Journal.