In his 2002 book, The Death of the West, author Patrick Buchanan listed accurately the cause of this – declining birthrates below replacement levels throughout Western nations, making this a self-fulfilling prophesy. He points to a statistic that in 1950 people of European descent (mostly Christian) made up 50% of the population of the world and that by 2050 the same would be only 10% of the global population, and the oldest 10%. The cause of this demographic shift is a voluntary reduction in population by people who traditionally welcomed children and had large families.