"The voting rate of citizens who were registered rose sharply in 2000 as 86 percent cast ballots, compared with the all-time low of 82 percent in 1996."

Between 105.6 and 111 million people voted in the November 2000 election.

"The voting rate of all citizens both registered and nonregistered rose from 58 percent to 60 percent and their registration rate dropped slightly, from 71 percent to 70 percent, between the 1996 and 2000 elections."

(Source: Michael Bergman, "Registered Voter Turnout Improved in 2000 Presidential Election, Census Bureau Reports," United States Census Bureau, CB02-31, February 27, 2002; http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/voting/000505.html .)

"'The vote was so close four years ago, people are now thinking, hey, maybe my vote does count,' said Joseph R. Passarella, the director of voter services in Montgomery County."  

(Source: Kate Zernike and Ford Fessenden, "As Deadlines Hit, Rolls of Voters Show Big Surge," The New York Times, October 4, 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/politics/campaign/04vote.html?oref=login&th .)

For decades, the American media have warned of the catastrophic consequences of world population explosion.  Strangely, the media have continued their warnings even as global fertility rates have plummeted.  However, while the media irrationally fixate on an imaginary population explosion, serious scholars are beginning to examine the consequences of real-world population decline.  In a recent issue of Futures, for instance, economist Sanghan Yea of Kyung Hee University in South Korea ponders the demographic trends implicit in new data from the United Nations and from the U.S. Census Bureau.  What he sees in these trends is deeply sobering.

"By 2050," Yea notes, "people aged 60 and over are expected to outnumber those under 15 for the first time in known history."  But what concerns Yea even more than the aging of the world's population is its anticipated shrinkage, with plausible statistical models already predicting that if current trends were to hold, "between 2040 and 2050, the world's population would fall by about 85 million ... and would [then] shrink by roughly 25% with each successive generation."  Yea underscores U.S. Census analyses predicting that the population of some industrialized countries-including Germany, France, Italy, and Japan-will "reach its highest point around 2020 and fall thereafter."  "We are going to face," Yea predicts, "not only aging, but also imploding (as opposed to exploding) world population."

The likely economic consequences of global population contraction particularly worry Yea, who discerns "a clear positive relationship between economic prosperity and number of people," with global population growth playing "an important role in bringing economic prosperity to human beings."  Seen from this perspective, a growing world population has "helped the great advancements in science and technology materialize into wealth."  Consequently, as the global population shrinks, it appears to Yea that "the world economy is going to get worse."  Because a shrinking world population means "sharply winnowed and less competitive work forces," "surfeits of retirees," and overall "efficiency decline," Yea anticipates a "chain reaction" entailing a series of shocks from which "the economy would never recover."  

Using economic data collected from North Korea and Russia-two countries that have already experienced population contraction in recent years-Yea argues that population decline has a "more damaging impact on the economy than we expect presently."  "Depopulation," Yea writes, "not only stops economic growth completely, but also reverses it."   Indeed, Yea predicts a potentially "disastrous situation," an economic "crash" in which "the world economy will contract faster than [the world population] does and [will] never reach the previous levels attained with the earlier smaller populations."

Perhaps, Yea suggests in his conclusion, "all countries should try to maintain their birth rates above the replacement level" by developing "a society in which babies are welcomed, not destroyed" and in which "children are regarded as a blessing, not an inconvenience; and motherhood is treasured as an honorable vocation."