Top Highlights

• For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.
• By 2050, nearly three-quarters of humanity will reside in countries with below-replacement fertility. This nearly global shift has had enormous demographic, economic, and strategic implications. European importance has diminished (in 1900 the continent had about 18 percent of the world’s population; in 2020 it has only 9.5 percent) and Asia has asc...
• So far, no pro-natalist government policies have brought any major reversal, and the only obvious option to prevent depopulation is to open the gates for immigration—but that looks unlikely to happen.
• What is not in doubt is that infant mortalities remain unacceptably high in a dozen of sub-Saharan nations. Their rates (above 60 per 1,000) are equal to those in western Europe some 100 years ago, a timespan that evokes the developmental gap those nations have to close in order to catch up with affluent economies.
• Before the Second World War, Dutch males were smaller than American men, but post-1950 US milk consumption declined while in the Netherlands it rose until the 1960s—and it remains higher than in the US.