Except for the US. Recently I saw on MSNBC an article that said the population of the US was much more stable than the rest of the world.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 3:06 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Nosediving world population Parents, more specifically mothers, will always try to adjust the number of their children according to economic circumstances. In hunter-gatherer groups living in exiguous food circumstances, children born with physical handicaps are immediately culled, as are one of any rare pair of twins. In seriously deprived situations, even previously vigorous children are neglected to the point of allowing them to die even while the mother instinctively eats sufficiently to survive (she can have another child when times are better). In agricultural regions, however, where large numbers of children are useful for planting and harvesting. large families are not only desirable but peer pressure against any form of birth control can be intense. Concern by intellectuals in the advanced countries about massive world over-population began about 40 years ago. The concern was, of course, valid for all sorts of reasons, but what was totally overlooked at the time is that parents in the West were beginning to think a lot more seriously about family size. Children were beginning to be extremely expensive. Parents were finding it increasingly difficult to buy a house that is priced according to their felt social status as well as filling it with the standard stock of status goods expected of them and a car (or two) of similar status in the drive, as well as having the two or three or four children they used to not long ago. Moreover, by 30 years ago, average wages in the advanced countries were failing to keep up with the cost of living. One child per family is more than enough expense for most parents. The birth rate in all European countries is already well below replacement rate and, within a generation, populations will be falling steeply. The same dramatic fall in birth rate has also occurred in several East Asian countries as rural populations enter cities. Relative to Europeans, parents have a far greater need to reduce family size because, without a welfare state, they are saving hard because they have to think of their own old age as well as the cost of raising children. Like us, this second phase of family limitation will mean that these countries will have steeply falling populations within a generation or two. Yet another powerful third phase has begun to happen. In the last few years only, big investment funds of the West and the very rich, increasingly despairing of low or risky returns from bonds and equities, have now begun to buy prime agricultural land on a huge scale. This is not so much for feeding the two billion starving people of the world but to grow feedstuffs for meat and fish production, as required by the growing middle-class of China and other countries that are managing to develop. The result is that people are being pushed off the land as never before. Migration into cities is accelerating, not so much because there's a need for more industrial workers in many countries, but because, living in dense shanty districts of metropolises, the poor at least have a roof over their heads. These potential parents are so poor that they can't afford contraceptives as those in the first two phases, but amateur abortionists are always available when there's a need. The first phase of population reduction has only recently been discernible (and even then only to those who care to look) but the next two phases will follow for exactly the same reason -- economic necessity. One child per family is already, or soon will be, more than enough in order to survive. As an increasingly highly educated rump remains in a century or so and a more beautiful and fascinating natural world revives, then it's likely, in my view, that the birth rate will become normal again. But when that happens it's likely that they'll make quite sure that they don't get caught in the population-growth trap as happened in the agricultural era. Keith
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