In a politely ironic veil, the forecast of Europe’s population in 2100 is presented as if it were a grand revelation. The third-person narrator notes with a wry smile that, despite all the charts and models, humanity continues to surprise (and occasionally perplex) the statisticians who chained themselves to their calculators. The projection—ambiguous, nuanced, and almost politely unreadable—suggests that the continent will carry on, perhaps a little smaller, perhaps a little older, and certainly more dependent on the hope that birth rates will behave as the line on a graph behaves: stubbornly resistant to being forced into a neat, tidy trend.
