I see that my brother has an article in this month’s Foreign Policy magazine. I read this article many months ago, maybe in a draft form. It will make you think differently about issues like sustainability and population growth. I wish he had more of a conclusion, but I think his work is important because there are so many people who think that the world population is going to keep growing beyond what is sustainable and therefore are not eager to have children or large families. The truth is a lot more complicated.
We actually need more children if we want to avoid some rather serious problems. Almost all population growth right now is due to people living longer, not people having more babies. To illustrate my point, I’ll quote one part of Phillip’s article:
Russia’s population is already 7 million below what it was in 1991. As for Japan, one expert has calculated that the very last Japanese baby will be born in the year 2959, assuming the country’s low fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman continues unchanged. Young Austrian women now tell pollsters their ideal family size is less than two children, enough to replace themselves but not their partners. Worldwide, there is a 50 percent chance that the population will be falling by 2070, according to a recent study published in Nature. By 2150, according to one U.N. projection, the global population could be half what it is today.
For a variety of reasons, people all across the globe are having fewer children. This might seem ecologically sound, but the truth is that it will cause real problems as populations age. There isn’t necessarily any ideological component to this observation. We are not compelled to respond to it in any particular way. But, what we shouldn’t do is to go on thinking that we’re doing humanity a favor by not having children. A healthy population is not tilted in age towards the young or the old, but has a good mix of both. Since our country, like almost all others, is aging rapidly, we have an incentive to have larger families to provide a more balanced population. But how this relates to things like abortion, contraception, and women in the work force is something we can tackle on terms that are consistent with our values.
Phillip’s suggestion that we craft policies to make children an economic asset (as they used to be) instead of an economic burden (as they are now) is probably the right one. The alternative is the Taliban’s model, and we know we don’t want to go down that road.
I’m sure it’s been said a lot, but there were large families back in the day due to infant death, needed labor as on a farm and lack of available birth control, to name a few.
In the US, with the unemployment and the Republicans calling the unemployed lazy, I doubt people are thinking about children. The cost is a worry.
Enjoyed bro’s article, even though its conclusions lead to pessimism about the future. At least in the US, this kind of prescience does not seem to inform political judgment.
I can’t quote the sources right now, but pretty much the expansion of world population in the past 50 years has occurred in the poorest of countries, many in Africa and the far east. And I mention this with utter disgust, but it is in those poorest of countries that most of the 6 million children below the age of five who die every year are found. The main causes are not obesity, but starvation, malnutrition, and disease.
Six million is perhaps a trifle compared to the six plus billion inhabitants of the planet, but still, according to the thesis of the article, it suggests that we do all we can to save them. It is not happening. Humanism does not appear to be a strong suit among liberal democratic governments including the US. While we can appreciate those private citizens who contribute regularly toward eradicating poverty and saving those children, it just doesn’t seem to make a dent in the problem.
Interesting article. I’ve actually been wondering about this a bit recently. Although many of the important problems we will face over the next 50 years – global climate change, peak oil, etc. – are direct result of overpopulation, it is almost inevitable that world population will start to decline in this century. And yet almost nobody talks about the consequences of what is almost certain to be a profound change.
In particular, I wonder whether our capitalist economy – which is based on “growth” – can operate with the global declining population. Will people, for example, open new businesses when they know that they will have fewer customers in the future, or buy land when they know that its value will inevitably decline? It’s kind of like the world of the future will live under permanent deflation.
Or perhaps not… I’m not an economist, so I don’t know, but I’d like to see some discussion of this. Perhaps population decrease would actually be a good thing: as labor becomes dearer, the relative strength of labor will decline, leading to a more equal society. I believe something like this happened in Europe after the Black Death. The fact that labor became more dear meant that the economic situation actually improved for most people.
Well, ironically, the developing world experienced a population boom largely due to the actions of the United Nations and other humanitarian groups who helped bring down infant mortality dramatically over the second half of the 20th Century.
Interesting to see these statistics again. While the overall population of the world continues to boom, in the first world it is falling (ignoring immigration) as it also does in affluent parts of the third world. For example, in Shanghai, a large number of adults are choosing to have no children at all.
On a personal level these facts influenced our decision to have 4 children here in the U.S. No, we didn’t think we were especially genetically better than our peers, but we do like raising children. I am concerned about overpopulation but as I looked at every peer group that I am a member of — my college peers, my work peers, the people in my own generation in my extended family, etc. — i found that in all cases even after accounting for our 4 children that peer group was reproducing at well under the replacement rate.
Consider my extended, and ironically Catholic, family. My grandparents had 6 kids. They in turn had 10 kids (the 6 were compromised somewhat in that the eldest two became a priest and a nun, respectively). The next generation, mine, has had only 13, although admittedly the 10th is still of reproductive age.
While 6-10-13 may sound like an increase it is not, since each one in theory pairs with another from outside the family. In fact the reproductive rate has gone from 3 to 1.8 to 1.2.
I’ve found this is typical of white America. In any group I’ve been in with co-workers I’ve found that our groups overall reproductive rate is always well under 2 despite my having had 4 kids (almost always I am the outlier).
Good or bad? I do think the world population needs to be smaller. But I also think that we benefit when the kids who are born are born to parents who really, really want them — as ours have been.
Reading this comment, for some reason, made me happy. Thanks for your wonderful attitude on raising children. We only had two kids but we sure loved them.
1 US child = 283 Indian children in terms of Carbon output.
Until we solve that, all else is meaningless.
Many often wonder why the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola are so disparate. Haiti is shit poor, the DR is pretty nice.
There is a simple difference. Haiti is one of the most populated nations on the earth, coming in about 20th out of 200-some. The DR and Haiti have the same rough populations of 10 million, but the DR has 2x land, and the land is more arable.
When you see stories about Haiti, you never see discussions about attempts to control their out-of-control population. Few discuss this, as it is assumed to be a matter of personal choice. But that is wrong. Haiti will continue to be a cesspool of misery until they cut their population by 50%, and you can imagine how hard that will be.
I come to a totally different conclusion: cull the elderly!
Boo:
I don’t know about your financial situation, but I am around the age of you and Brendan and I can’t afford children. And given the employment situation today, it’s only going to get worse. Also, can working women have 5 or 6 kids? Who wants to have that many these days(except for that idiot Octomom)? Companies aren’t going to give women that much maternity time off. And even if they did, the women is going to fall so far behind(meaning in her chance to move up the corporate ladder). There is also another thing at work. Did you see that article I sent you via Twitter yesterday? About Harley Davidson(among other Midwest manufacturers) cutting pay and having a two-tier wage system now? I guess what I am saying is that wage growth isn’t helping the case for having more kids. Seriously, if you want people to have more kids(here in the USA anyway), you are going to have to increase the top tax rates back to Eisenhower era levels. To pay down the debt, and to subsidize child-rearing for people our age and younger.
Again, there is NO mention of the context of rapidly diminishing wilderness (and the long term, Earth sustaining capacities they contain), regardless of population growth. He’s talking economic bubbles made literally manifest in a rather myopic, man-centric fashion, don’t you think? Have more babies and The Market will sustain us. Incentivize babies and somehow the rainforest is replenished, everyone has jobs, etc. Seems to me the real problem is efficiency, not demographics. Old people are inefficient, apparently.
I don’t get why he thinks incentives for having more children is a good idea, but doesn’t mention incentives for early demise. The incredible waste of resources on our final months/days is the story here, that and the fact that old people failed to accumulate enough resources to pay for the system THEY came up with that let’s them live so damn long. It’s their fault that the 4-2-1 family doesn’t work. Lazy, selfish bums (note: tongue is in cheek – sort of).
I love grandma more than anyone in the world, but go to the future and ask my grandchildren if it would have been better for ‘us’ to spend $200k on her last months or to have put it in a tax free account for the education of the coming generation(s), or to have started a business with it, or basically have done anything but pour it into machines and drugs, providing only some small percentage of it as profit to the greater economy in hopes it trickles back down on us once again. Inefficient, no? The article’s last paragraph really comes close to saying this, so kudos for that.
In all likelihood, if a shrinking youth population causes problems, then we’ll deal with them as they come instead of by some grand population scheme. I mean, anyone seen Logan’s run? That is the logical capitalist response to an aging populace.
“Hope I die before I get old.”
Yet another discussion of how the largest population cohort in history is going to doom us, eh? Maybe we of the Boommer generation who started out with civil rights and antiwar (and Goldwaterism and YAFers after all) will bear the negative consequences of the decisions of the majority of us. Maybe we should go out now to the ice floes while there are still ice floes some left. </snark>
A good mythbusting piece. Well done.
The big worry about workers in 2075 being able to support a ratio of elderly to Boomers was overdrawn. It rarely recognized that by 2075, Boomers will be mostly dead and succeeding cohorts more closely match the workforce. It was a non-problem sold as a way to destroy Social Security.
As for developing countries, most still have an ethos of supporting extended family–China especially has not lost that. In the US both elders and their children have been given independence to live apart, which creates a different ethos; folks are less likely to take care of elder uncles and aunts and cousins as well as taking care of their parents.
As for economic growth, demographics of declining growth rates will cause wages to generally rise even as the traditional manufacturing engines of economic development (textiles, apparel, shoes) move to the poorest nations. Guangdong province in China, which was responsible for the loss of US jobs in these industries, now is losing those jobs in turn to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Mexico is losing the same jobs to Guatemala and Honduras. And there have been attempts to get the apparel industry going in Haiti.
Even as folks who would normally take their college degrees and start work in offices are moving into high-intensity “locavore” farming.
An aging culture will not necessarily be a peaceful culture as long as there are young people available to press into military service. No more than an increase in the number of women in government or the military necessarily leads to more peaceful approaches. One need point only to Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great, and Joan of Arc to be disabused of that notion even without considering the sudden burst of momma grizzly warmongers.