Perhaps - just perhaps - people facing a massive die off due to something like smallpox might view it as a crisis.
What is viewed as the "crisis" in places like Italy, is that people do want to have children, but feel they can't, because of the many reasons cited in the article.
First, "There is no crisis" refers to birthrates, not smallpox. Second, by "crisis" I mean existential crises, not personal. Even the black plague was not an existential crisis. For comparison, the Ottoman and Mongol expansions were.
because of the many reasons
Every western country has had its birthrate drop as the economy and education levels improved. It's a very solid correlation, and almost certainly the real reason. But people still say, "I can't afford children" (or whatever), even if the real reason is their large and distracting discretionary income. People rationalize, and certainly don't understand their own motivations.
Clearly it's a complex issue, but the whole point of the article is that the birth rate varies quite a bit from country to country: Japan and Italy have very low rates, places like France and Sweden do better.
2. If you reduce Americans to the wealthiest subset, you'd see the same trend. Historically, if you reduced Americans to their non-Irish subset, you'd see the same thing, because the Irish were the poor immigrant group of the time.
3. Europe isn't a thing. Very few people even think of themselves as Europeans. Well, so far anyway. I hold out hope the EU will gain currency. What's important is still national identity, and European countries have survived waves of immigration before.
4. Agreed. This isn't a crisis until population levels dip quite a bit more.
5. Mormons, albanian muslims, and ultra-orthodox jews haven't reversed any trend. Their birthrates are (roughly) constant. It's everyone else whose birthrate declined.
But that's not the unit (average children per woman) that they use in the article, and there isn't an obvious conversion between the two (is there?). So this isn't enough information to compare how the birth rate among Americans of European descent compares to the birth rate in Europe itself... which I agree would be interesting.
Edit: I also agree about it being tiring to even skim that article. I do love it, though, when apocalpytic crises directly contradict each other. Weren't we all going to die because of exponential population growth?
While the Times article certainly has an alarmist tone, American fertility rates are an anomaly in the industrialized world.
Not to be offtopic: I also don't consider it a crisis. Population aging, yes, that's a problem, but between current birth rate and imigration that's not a problem. As for all the issues imigration brings: talk about them directly, and the solutions will be much more apparent then blaming everything on birthrate.
1. There is no crisis. Certain conditions produce certain effects. When smallpox is introduced into a population, the population declines, but subsequent generations resist it. The modern world has a perfectly consistent effect on population size, roughly the same as smallpox. The fittest, as always, will survive, and subsequent generations will not have the same problem.
2. The United States is not a "sparkling exception", if you correct your samples. If you reduce Americans to their European subset, you see that Birth rate was 11.6 for Non-Hispanic Whites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... ... the lowest of all major groups.
3. The subject of immigration should not come up. Europe will not "save itself" by replacing itself with North Africans. This point warrants no discussion. If you hate Europe as much as the editors of the nytimes, that's another matter, and it's a valid viewpoint to the degree that it is open. It's not open, of course.
4. Europe and Japan are both far too crowded. As long as the situation isn't treated like a crisis, with hopeless policies (mass immigration, mass boondoggles) the long-term effect will be positive.
5. Three big groups who've reversed the trend: Mormons, Albanian muslims, and Ultra-orthodox Jews. A portend of things to come, and it's no surprise that the nytimes is troubled by the situation resolving itself.