At 00:06 03/12/2012, you wrote:
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.
True, but only if the Latino immigration continues at the present
rate to make up for the shortfall of American births. Since the baby
boom, American births are following the European trends (for the same
economic reason) and the fertility rate has now dropped below the
requisite 2.1 children per family. Immigrant fertility will decline
similarly in due course.
(It's interesting that as far as world population is concerned it
doesn't really matter whether the surplus poor migrate to their own
super-metropolises or to the West. Within two generations all the
migrants, when parents, will want at least a minimum quantity of
consumer goods and won't be able to afford more than one child -- if
that. Just as all self-respecting Indian familiez, however poor, have
need to signify their level of status by means of jewels, so the new
poor will at least be buying television for their hovels quite
besides its entertainment.
Keith
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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