Citizen Cartwright

Trend: Falling birthrates in developing countries

In an article focusing on Thailand, The Wall Street Journal examines problems of shrinking labor pools and an aging population that are familiar in Europe and Japan but used to be "unheard of" in the up-and-coming economies of Southeast Asia.

Thailand's fertility rate has dropped to an average of 1.6 children per woman, from seven in the 1970s, disrupting centuries of tradition in which children cared for their parents.

And that's forcing political leaders to look for new sources of economic growth and community leaders to pursue ways to make the elderly more self-sufficient, the WSJ says.

Other pockets of the developing world that have seen sharp declines in fertility rates include Brazil, Mexico and parts of India.

Some developing countries that built their economies on an expanding supply of young people entering the workforce are rethinking their growth plans, says the WSJ.

Forecasting 'deep future' risks to global stability

That was the topic of a panel at the Association of the U.S. Army conference this week — an annual trade show that's attended by top Pentagon officials and defense contractors, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

Here, the "deep future" refers to 2030 and beyond — another indication of how short-term America's long-term thinking tends to be.

Anyway, the three top threats, according to the panel, are:

— The growth of cities, with an estimated 2 billion people living by 2040 in a "slumlike situation" with a “very high potential for lack of governance,"

— A "significant and lengthy" period of Sunni-Shiite violence in the Mideast, and

— The potential for the militarization of technology, where, for example, U.S. troops might be sent into battle against adversaries able to tweet the location of those soldiers.

Earth's aging population

The number and proportion of older people is increasing at an unprecedented rate, and by 2050 — for the first time in history — people older than 60 will outnumber those younger than 15, says a U.N.-backed report.

The best place to be old? Sweden. The United States ranks eighth. Afghanistan is worst.

Watch America age in this chart

You can see the Baby Boomers, for example, growing inexorably older in this ingenious animated bar graph by Bill McBride of Calculated Risk.

Best zip codes to find singles of the opposite sex

In the runup to Valentine’s Day, Jed Kolko, chief economist and head of analytics at the residential real estate website Trulia, offers data to people looking for love.

He says men living alone most outnumber women living alone in Las Vegas; Honolulu; Palm Bay, Fla.; Gary, Ind.; and San Jose, Calif.

And women most outnumber men in Bethesda, Md.; Washington; Boston; New York; and Raleigh, N.C.

Men tend to live near downtown or in recently redeveloped neighborhoods like the Waterfront in Boston or Long Island City in New York, Kolko says.

Women are more likely to live in residential areas, including the Marina in San Francisco and Queen Anne in Seattle, and neighborhoods that are perceived as safe and are more affluent, such as New York's Upper East Side and Upper Connecticut Avenue in Washington.

How the children of China's one-child policy turn out

The "little emperors" born since the government limited urban families to having just one child are less trusting, less competitive, more pessimistic, less conscientious and more risk-averse than people born before the policy was implemented, according to a study published online in the journal Science.

"Only children in Chinese families are loved and given almost everything by their families and they can get resources at home without competition," says Zou Hong of the School of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, who wasn't involved in the research. "Once they enter society, they are no different from other people. Having been overly protected, they feel a sense of loss and show less competitiveness."

What the drop in the birthrate means

The U.S. birthrate fell last year to the lowest level since 1920, and the drop was biggest among immigrant women hit hard by the recession, according to a Pew Research Center study released Thursday.

It had been assumed that births to immigrants would help maintain the U.S. population and create the taxpaying workforce needed to support the aging baby-boom generation, says The Washington Post.

The global population explosion

There are more than 3 billion people worldwide under the age of 25, the biggest generation in history, says the Los Angeles Times in a 5-part series.

And depending on the family planning decisions of those young people, the global population will reach between 9 billion and 11 billion by midcentury, according to U.N. projections.

Now, about 1 in 8 people around the world lives in a slum. By midcentury, with a population of more than 9 billion, the ratio would be 1 in 3, assuming that poverty and migration to cities continue at their current rates.

Yet population growth gets less attention now than it did in the late 1960s, when there were half as many people on the planet, the Times says.