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.