Many today still believe there are too many people on the globe. The Economist tackles this in a cover story, arguing that fertility is on the decline globally.
Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.
I don’t agree with their analysis or their conclusions, but it is still worth repeating: there is no population explosion.
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It just boggles my mind that this article pushes the idea that these drastic declines are not enough, that the world (ie Africa) needs to go further, ignoring completely that some of the countries experiencing low fertility, like Japan, are implementing policies to encourage population growth (and even China has relaxed its one-child policy) because of the negative impact on society.
I’m reminded of a quote from Adam Savage: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
Darlene: Try thinking of it in regional terms rather than global. Just because one region has too low a population growth rate does not mean other regions cannot be too high.
Exactly what the optimal population and growth are is subject to endless debates.
Environmentalists like 2.1 children per person, because it’s the highest rate that can be indefinatly sustained: A perfectly steady population. Any higher and inevitably, eventually, the limits of natural resources will be reached. This would be a Very Bad Thing. Expect water shortage, famine, and so on.
Economists like to keep it cranked up to 2.4 or so, because in their field growth isn’t just valued: It’s essential. If an economy doesn’t constantly grow, it dies. Growing an economy in the long term requires growing the population. They admit that eventually, yes, this is going to lead to disaster – but probably not for a long time, and to cease growth now would result in the collapse of pension schemes first, followed by intrest rates, savings accounts, and so on throughout all matters economic until we’re back at roughly the middle ages in economic state – surviving, but without the growth machine that creates wealth, and with the old condemned to starvation through lack of work unless they have someone to support them.
The most concerned environmentalists would take it below 2.1, for a time. Not indefinatly, but long enough to let the population fall to a truely sustainable, nondestructive level of around a billion or two. Once there, then it can be leveled off and kept in that state. After all, they argue, a population of one billion with high standards of living and a society that could last millenia is better than a population of seven billion with more than half living in poverty and the rest rapidly exausting finite resources to supply themselves.
All of which is largely academic, because noone has the ability to regulate global population, and only a few countries have even achieved an effective deliberate control of their own. So it doesn’t matter what the environmentalists, economists and politicians decide: Their decisions are almost powerless. Populations, globally and in most regions, will do whatever societal change results in.
All the believeable predictions I’ve seen suggest a leveling off eventually, but they don’t agree on at what level. Even if growth reaches and holds at precisely zero, if that’s twenty billion people at zero growth there still isn’t going to be enough to go around and still maintain high standards of living for all.
Suricou: I understand regional vs. global rates. What concerns me is that the article doesn’t seem to take into account the real world data from regions where fertility has dropped and the negative consequences seen there, and just blindly advocates expanding reduced fertility rates to every region.
I agree that poverty is an important issue, but I wonder that fertility rates can be fully blamed for the problem or manipulated to engineer a solution. As I understand it, hunger is largely caused by inefficient distribution of resources, not a lack of resources. And if developing countries are not able to grow their economies (due to a shrinking population), how will they grow wealthier so that the standard of living can be raised?
Simply put, I worry that encouraging the spread of rapidly declining fertility rates to every corner of the globe will actually make things worse, while there are other methods (eg developing less environmentally harmful technologies and improving food production and distribution) that can be implemented to address many of the problems.
Regarding hunger, you’re essentially correct. There is enough food to go round. I don’t know how much we do it now, but the EU used to destroy large quantities of food in order to maintain high prices, because if they didn’t the agricultural sector would undergo a most traumatic collapse.
Rather altuistically, as much as possible was given away in aid – but mostly we just wanted rid of it.
On fertility, I think we are forgetting something: Population growth will stop, both globally and in any region, given enough time. This is a mathematical inevitability – it is driven by laws rather more fundamental than supply and demand: No two people can occupy the same space. It doesn’t matter if someone invents a star-trek style food replicator and ends world hunger, all that does it buy time.
Given that inevitability, the question becomes ‘why delay?’ Yes, negative population growth causes serious economic issues, espicially regarding social services. And, yes, with sufficient effort it can be put off. But one day it will come – trying to fight it now only turns it into a problem for a future generation. If not through social factors, then through resource shortage.
Better to aim for stability now than to wait until the numbers are even more unmanageable.
I’m not sure how your economic growth via population growth solution to poverty in developing countries is supposed to work. Economic growth would certinly help, I have no doubt of that – higher per-capita income means they can afford more food, and even to import food if there simply are no local supplies. But how does population growth lead to higher per-capita income? It’d boost GDP, but that’s no help at all in combating poverty – all that means is you have a higher number of starving people.
The ideal way to help would be to increase individual productivity, not collective. Collective is useless – all you do is increase demand in perfect step with supply, as everyone needs to eat. Improve education, improve tools, improve infrastructure. Those are good ideas. Convert those subsistance farmers to a smaller number of more intensive farmers, and use the freed-up workforce to drive industry. But you can’t achieve any of that just by breeding more subsistance farmers.
You might also want to consider that regarding economic issues, fertility rate is less important than the rate at which people reach maturity and the productive portion of their lives. Not much of a difference in our modern western society – same number, just on an 18-year delay. Big difference in places with a high infant mortality rate. If you bring down the infant mortality, then the practical consequence of that is indistinguishable from increasing the fertility rate. So unless you want to see the human equivilent of the lemming run, you should hope that any decrease in infant mortality is quickly followed by a decrease in fertility rate to cancel it out :>