//("how many grandmothers do you have?" asks the bursar)//

:)

If memory serves, Corporal "Nobby" Nobbs of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is entitled to at least three 'Grandmother's funerals' per year.

Hi Toni,

I'm slow this morning, but was that an attempt at humour. Ho ho, I think.

But you make an interesting point: the self-indulgent classes will - as in China - have few or no children, and of course homosexual relationships support that trend, notwithstanding some token homosexuals demanding IVF because they love children so much. So, yes, each child will, in time, have many more grandparents than those grandparents have grandchildren.

Without being too apocalyptic about it, the logic of childless relations leads to an accelerating reduction in population from one generation to the next. Australia already has sub-ZPG, balanced only by a comparatively large migrant population. So we can already see a slowing-down, or halting, in the growth in the Australian-born population. Half of the population growth from one Census to the next is made up by migrants, from all over the world, around 200,000 per year, roughly balancing our annual birth-rate.

From one generation to the next, demographic change can be very rapid, and perhaps irreversible. Bernard Salt would have a much more informed contribution to make here. But the simple logic of childlessness, or one child families, is eventual (say, in two or three generations, population reduction
Without being too apocalyptic about it, the logic of childless relations leads to a reduction in population from one generation to the next. Australia already has sub-ZPG, balanced only by a comparatively large migrant population. So we can already see a slowing-down, or halting, in the growth in the Australian-born population. Half of the population growth from one Census to the next is made up by migrants, from all over the world, around 200,000 per year, roughly balancing our annual birth-rate.

From one generation to the next, demographic change can be very rapid, and perhaps irreversible. Bernard Salt would have a much more informed contribution to make here. But the simple logic of childlessness, or one child families, is eventual (say, in two or three generations) population reduction, perhaps catastrophically. We'll see with the disastrous Chinese experiment, by about 2050.

Cheers,

Joe