Read The End of Doom for Free Online

children. For India the corresponding figures for 1970 were forty-eight years and 4.9 children, and are now sixty-seven years and 2.5 children. In Brazil, female life expectancy in 1970 was sixty-one and total fertility was 4.3 children. Today, Brazilian women average seventy-eight years and total fertility stands at 1.8 children. The threshold, however, is not perfectly predictive; there are lags. Female life expectancy in Mexico was sixty-five in 1970 at a time when its total fertility rate was 5.5 children. Today, Mexican women can expect to live to about seventy-eight, and they bear 2.2 children on average. For comparison, in 1970 American women could expect to live about seventy-five years, bore 2.1 children, and infant mortality was 20 per 1,000 births. In 2012, American female life expectancy had risen to eighty-one years, births averaged 1.86 children per woman, and infant mortality had fallen to 6 per 1,000 births. By the way, the only years in which the US general fertility rate was lower than 1.86 occurred during the 1970s, when the rate fell to 1.74 births in 1976.
    UN demographers expect global average life expectancy at birth to rise to seventy-six by 2050 and eighty-two by 2100. If the evolutionary biologists are right, rising life expectancy will result in falling fertility. Unfortunately, the demographers estimate that life expectancy in the world’s poorest countries—many of which are severely afflicted with HIV/AIDS—is now just fifty-eight, and they project that it will reach the current global average of about seventy by 2050 and eventually rise to seventy-eight by 2100.
    With regard to countries where female life expectancy is below sixty years, life-history theory frequently fails to correlate well with actual fertility rates. Some countries with low female life expectancy also have relatively low total fertility rates. For example, the increased prevalence of HIV/AIDS dramatically lowered life expectancy in a lot of African countries. According to the most recent World Bank data (2011), female life expectancy in South Africa reached sixty-two years in 1990 and has now fallen to fifty-five today. Similarly, the average Namibian woman in 1990 could expect to live to age sixty-three; that has dropped to sixty-one today. In 1990 the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean woman was fifty-nine; it is now fifty-six. In 1990, the total fertility rates for South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe were 3.7, 5.2, and 5.2, respectively. Today, despite the fact that average female life expectancy has declined, totality fertility rates in those countries have fallen to 2.4, 3.2, and 3.6 children, respectively.
    On the other hand, life-history predictions with regard to fertility rates do appear to pertain to lawless countries. According to the latest World Bank data (2011), female life expectancy in Mali, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Ivory Coast, and Afghanistan averages at fifty-four, fifty-two, forty-nine, fifty-three, fifty, and sixty years, respectively. Their corresponding total fertility rates are 6.9, 6.0, 6.1 6.2, 4.9, and 5.4 children per woman. Social, political, and economic chaos certainly afflicts those countries. George Mason University’s Center for Systemic Peace has devised a State Fragility Index as a way to measure a country’s stability, with scores ranging from 0, meaning no fragility, to a high of 23, denoting a failed state.
    On the index, Mali scores 19, Nigeria 16, Congo 23, Burundi 18, Ivory Coast 16, and Afghanistan 22. In contrast, all twenty-two countries with a fragility score of 0 have below replacement fertility rates. Tragically, the political violence and economic chaos endemic in so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the ongoing food insecurity, the pervasive risk of disease, a high before-age-five child mortality rate, the lack of education, and their low social status provide African women many grounds to wonder just how long they may expect