More Deaths Than Births This Weird Year
It used to creep me out when a new baby was born somewhere in our extended family and one of our older members would say, "That means someone will die." While I'm not too terribly superstitious (knock on wood), that always used to make me look around uneasily when a baby was born, or when someone died. It seemed to be pretty true. The New York Times reports today that a baby is no longer being born every time someone dies . In fact, for whites, fewer babies were born this year than older folks dying. This year, for the first time in at least a century, according to Sam Roberts, the two did not cancel each other out. More people died. So? Actually, it's quite significant. Roberts calls it "a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change." The number of non-Hispanic white Americans is expected to begin declining by the end of this decade. “These new census estimates are an early signal alerting us to the impending decl...