With both countries’ fertility rates continuing to decrease, it is tempting to invoke the term “timebomb.” Demographers, who study population change, loathe it considerably.
“Number one, I hate the phrase,” says Sarah Harper, a gerontology (the study of the consequences of aging) professor at the University of Oxford.
“I don’t believe there is a demographic timebomb; it is part of the demographic change. We knew this was going to happen throughout the twenty-first century. So it is not surprising, and we should have been planning for it for some time.”
