was actually only 3 kids. I realize this film is focusing on the UK, but I find it hard to believe that the average family had 5 kids in the 1970s.
There's a very good book out there called Great Expectations by Landon Y. Jones. It came out in 1980, and while it's been quite a while since I last read it, one of the important points he made about the Baby Boom numbers was that for a period of time almost every man and woman got married, almost all of them had children, and they most typically had three kids. It's still in print and well worth reading.
During the Great Depression people put off marrying and having children, and in fact there was a cohort of women born around 1905-1915 who had a relatively large number who never had kids. By the late 1930s demographers were very worried that our population would start declining. Then the Baby Boom happened.
I do believe that native born Americans (not Native Americans, just those born in this country) are collectively having children at less than the replacement rate, and that if it were not for immigrants, who simply by coming here increase the population, but who tend to have larger families in that first generation, we would be looking at a stable population.
It's my personal opinion that there are already too many people on this planet to sustain a decent life for all. It might be comforting to think that the demographic transition will neatly take care of everything, but while we're waiting for that to happen there are going to be a lot more of us on the planet. There is already a lot of environmental degradation (China, anyone? Leaking oil pipelines.), a lot of refugees both political and economic, and serious fears of a global epidemic of some sort that could kill a huge percentage of the population, given the right conditions.
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