趣味预测：最后的女人和历史的终结

原作者：
来源End of history and the last woman
译者Lutz

As The Economist reports this week, many women in the richer parts of Asia have gone on “marriage strike”, preferring the single life to the marital yoke. That is one reason why their fertility rates have fallen. And they are not alone. In 83 countries and territories around the world, according to the United Nations, women will not have enough daughters to replace themselves, unless fertility rates rise. In Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of 1,000 women would be expected to give birth to just 547 daughters, at today’s fertility rates. (That gives Hong Kong a “net reproduction rate” of just 0.547, in the language of demographers.) If nothing changed, those 547 daughters would be succeeded by just 299 daughters of their own, and so on. At that rate, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations by The Economist, it would take about 25 generations for Hong Kong’s female population to shrink from 3.75m to just one. Given that Hong Kong’s average age of childbearing is 31.4 years, it could expect to give birth to its last woman in the year 2798. (That is some time after its neighbour, Macau, which has a higher reproduction rate, but a much smaller population.) By the same unflinching logic, Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain will not see out the next millennium. Even China, which has a recorded history stretching back at least 3,700 years, has only about 1,500 years left—if present trends continued unbroken.

《经济学人》本周报道，不少亚洲较富裕地区的妇女进行着「婚姻罢工」。她们喜欢单身日子多于婚姻围城，这是这些地区生育率下跌的原因之一。怀有这样观念的女人不止她们。据联合国数据，在全球83个国家及地区，若生育率不再提高，这些地区的妇女逝世后就不会有足够的女儿继承她们的空缺。例如在香港，以现时的人口增长率计算，1000名妇女仅会诞下547名女儿（以人口学术语来说，香港的「人口净增长率」仅为0.547）。若情况保持不变，这547位女性又仅会有299名女儿作后代。如此算下去，据《经济学人》粗略计算，经历25代以后，香港女性人口将会从375万人消亡到1人。而由香港平均生育年龄为31.4岁可知，2798年恐是香港最后一位女性出生之时（这比其邻居澳门来得稍迟。澳门的生育率相较更高，但人口少得多）。若继续这样狂野地推算下去，日本、德国、俄罗斯、意大利及西班牙都撑不过下一个千年。即使是中国，拥有3700年有记载的历史的古国，若现时的趋势不中断，也只剩1500年余寿。

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