What do you make of there being lower birth-rates than ever before in the West?

[gedalyahu]

This is one of those issues where saying what's true can make people a little twitchy, so I'll qualify this statement by saying there are lots of exceptions.

Statistically speaking, having children is something people do when they're done with their ambitions. Most people don't have a kid while they're going through medical school, or building their career climbing the ladder at a legal firm, or going on globetrotting lecture tours to talk about their groundbreaking scientific work. It's something people do when they're done with their personal lives, but still want to feel useful.

Highly educated people with demanding careers typically don't have children until they're in their 30s, and are much more likely not to have children at all. (Furthermore, they have LESS children than people with less education and less demanding careers, stopping at one or two, but that's beside the point.) On the other end of the spectrum, people who have children very early (teenagers to early 20s) are MUCH less likely to ever complete a college degree of any kind or to pursue a demanding career.

When people wait to have kids, and they don't have as many kids, that's actually a positive commentary on our society: it means people have bigger ambitions and more to do with their lives before they're content to settle down and raise the next generation. With 7 billion people on the planet and the population exponentiating, I don't think we have to worry about running out of people any time soon :)