By the early nineteen sixties demographers were already warning people about the dangers of rapid population growth. These dangers included things like higher rates of disease, starvation and social welfare programs. But a funny thing happened during the 1960's — the growth rate in most industrialised nations suddenly started to decline.
In fact, the rate has been cut in half from a high of 2.20 percent in 1963 to a record low of 1.10 percent in 2009. There are many reasons why population growth has slowed over the past four decades. The two most obvious explanations are that birth control has become more popular and that working women are having far fewer children in most wealthy nations. That may be why Barcelona apartments are mostly empty these days.
Is slowing growth a problem? Well, one phenomenon that is a bit disconcerting is that populations are still growing rapidly in impoverished parts of the globe. For example, growth rates in parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa are still well above two percent. This is a problem because most of the countries in these regions suffer from diseases like AIDS that have become pandemics due to the increasing number of children that are born with the disease.
By comparison, most western European countries actually have negative population growth, which means that residents are dying faster than they can be replaced. This problem is often a result of larger social issues like skyrocketing divorce and dwindling marriage rates.
What can be done? The only modern solution to aging populations is to increase immigration. After all, someone has to take over when older workers retire and start collecting from the government. The only problem is that this may well expose the populations to the diseasese that the immigrants may bring with them.