If you woke up this morning to the news that a meteor was headed for earth, certain to hit us in 20 years time, it’s unlikely that another day would go by during which you didn’t think about the civilisation-ending event coming down the tracks. What’s more, if you were in a position to do something about it, it’s likely that you’d drop whatever you were doing and redirect your efforts towards finding some way to stop the impending disaster.
That’s precisely the dilemma data scientist and demographer, Stephen Shaw, found himself facing nearly a decade ago when he started doing some research into Germany’s birth rate data. He found no meteor threatening civilisation as we know it, but rather dismal numbers suggesting that Germans were having ever fewer children, leading to a widening ‘birthgap’: the distance between the number of newborns and the number of people aged 50 in a country.
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