This week's class we focus our discussion around family trends in the population. We watched, The New Economic Reality Demographic Winter, which provided a good deal of different information. To start out with, the video provided a gloomy feel to it with the way the researchers provided information and the subtle music in the background. What really surprised me was how in the beginning it talks about a book called, The Population Bomb, and how it affected the human society. It provides predictions that as the human population increases, the environment would be harmed causing mass starvation soon. This is interesting to me because more than fifty-two years after this was published the complete opposite happened. Why? What brought this to happen? The bringing forth of this book brought a huge impact to the people of those time. This impact was psychological, people thought that having many children would be more harmful than good. This led to a gradual decrease in the fertility rate according to these researchers. I have always been a firm believer that life finds a way. I know there are difficulties bound to happen, but there are happy days ahead of us as well. This includes with having more children as well; I know that nothing bad would happen by this increase. Now if the world continues to decrease in fertility rates, the population may degrade back to what it was before the so-called baby boom. Even now fertility rates are still low. Maybe this could be the cause of those who believe in the same ideology, whether it be intentionally after reading the book or just pure opinion. I believe that it should a natural flow of life and that things books likes these bring harm to the human society. Yes, it is important to be informed about the things going on in the world, but too much information can be detrimental. One of the effects can be seen through the fertility levels in states. Only two states had fertility levels above the replacement level in 2017. The replacement level is the number of births needed to maintain the population at its existing level.  If this ideology is not affecting the fertility rates, then what is causing this decline? In the video mentioned earlier, the professors discussed that some of the causes of the decline in fertility rates was due to the women’s revolution and the sexual revolution. Women were starting to go to school more and get jobs requiring them to be away from home which was the opposite than how it was before. The age in which women decide to get married effects the population growth in a big way because of this change the age of marriage grew while the fertility rate decreased. To me, I guess this was bound to happen and is a natural phenomenon of this change. In the Sexual Revolution, the birth control pill was created. Many were having sexual relations satisfy their intimate needs with a partner that they did not marry. They did not have children and continuing with life being single. When sex became separated from reproduction it affected the fertility rate. This change led to less marriages and more individuals living off on their own. The more individuals the world has the more there is a fertility decline. This fertility decline affects the economy. The reason that the economy is affected is because with more individuals staying off on their own it affects the overall Gross Domestic Product. The Gross Domestic Product is calculated through the product of the amount of people and productivity. Productivity here is human capital. There may be the only hope for helping the economy go stable, but it is a hard one. If there are broken families, we need to change it. Through better family structure it will bring an increase in human capital. Human capital is the skills, knowledge, and experience that someone has and is viewed as value or cost to a country. I believe we can change right now if we focus our attention to how we are teaching our children and what we are teaching them.