Population growth is a problem--just not the problem you think it is. Yes, it's hard to forget a book like The Population Bomb (Paul Erlich, 1968). It remains memorable for its stark, frightening prognostications of overpopulation. And the troubling Malthusian hypothesis is still recycling generation after generation, reflecting as much nationalistic and racial paranoia as concern with overpopulation--always pointing at other groups as the problem, most often the poorer, less educated countries or ethnic groups. But for some decades now, a different type of problem has been evolving: declining birthrates and aging populations in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, and continued high population growth rates in large areas of the third world and the developing world.
The implications and reasons have been speculated about for some time, but this article in the British Independent World covers this global issue rather well, reflecting what is known and what remains speculative.
The implications of all this are enormous. Low-birth Europe is faced with an ageing population, a pensions crisis, later retirement, changes in work patterns, shrinking cities and a massive looming healthcare cost. Nations of children with no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles – only parents, grandparents, and perhaps great-grandparents – will face the burden of paying for the care of a massive older generation. The same prospect of an older, more conservative, less vigorous or inventive culture looms in China, Japan and much of the Far East.
Meanwhile high-birth Africa will remain stuck in a vicious circle unless it gets economic growth, agricultural reform, improved world trade terms, infrastructure investment, better health and education systems, more girls into school and a wider availability of family planning. A tall order, though the example of Bangladesh shows change can come...
[Still] the United Nations has had to revise downwards its prediction that the world population would reach 11.5 billion by 2050. The human race is now expected to peak, according to one of the world's top experts, Dr David Coleman, Professor of Demography at Oxford University, at 9.5 billion people. Then, around 2070, it will begin to decline. We have reached a demographic crossroads which will have dramatic consequences for large sections of the world – including us.
Interestingly, the article introduces the topic by referencing a piece in a leading British medical journal that calls for the British to reduce the number of children per family further in order to curb global warming and the depleting of environmental resources.
His argument was straightforward. The mushrooming population of the world is putting extreme pressure on the planet's resources and increasing the output of greenhouse gases. Every single month there are nearly seven million extra mouths to feed. And because a child born today in the UK will be responsible for 150 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a child born in Ethiopia the obvious place to start cutting back is here rather than there.
Talk about failing to see the forest for the trees! Talk about blinkered, draconian solutions that ignore the wider array of global problems--and the need for integrated, interdisciplinary answers! He apparently believes government policy, technology, and individual behavior cannot change--and that more of Africa and less of the UK would consitute a better world.
Regardless, the thrust and remainder of the article stresses the new reality of contracting populations in many Western and Eastern areas. It addresses the paradoxes, the counterintuitve facts and factors, the likely reasons for differences in population growth in different parts of the world.
The span of fertility across countries has never been wider," says Dr John Cleland, Professor of Medical Demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "Both extremes cause their own problems. If Europe continues at 1.5 [children per family] the population will halve every 65 years. If Africa continues with half its population under [age] 15 it will continue to consume more than it produces making it harder to escape from poverty and illiteracy...
A country's population is determined by three things: how many people are born, how soon they die and how many leave or enter the country. Fertility, as we have seen, is rising in Africa and parts of the developing world but falling in Europe and the Far East. Mortality, by contrast, thanks to medical advance, is falling almost everywhere: global life expectancy has risen from 46 in 1950 to 65 in 2008 and is expected to reach 75 by 2050; in Europe it will be 82 by mid-century. Migration, despite the heat it generates as a political issue, is a marginal factor in population issues. It would take massive numbers of immigrants – some 700 million throughout Europe – with unthinkable cultural and identity tensions, to counter the low-birthrates. Fertility is the key engine to population rise and fall.
But the most interesting elements of the article are the explorations of the changing economic and cultural realities in different regions and countries--and among different groups within those regions and countries--and the resulting changes in population growth. Those elements also address the likely reasons for the unlikely results: the qualified role of poverty, the role of education and outside work for women, the countering role of more conservative or fundamentalist religion, and perhaps most important, the level of emacipation and status of women, and the changing, accomodating roles of men and government programs.
In the US, like Japan, 20 per cent of women born between 1956 and 1972 are childless and likely to remain so. The figure could rise to 25 per cent. Revealingly, the incidence rises with education and income. A third of women graduates in their late thirties have no children. And only 20 per cent of women with MBAs have kids, compared with 70 per cent of MBA men. [That is, 80% of women with MBAs have no children.]
By contrast 40 per cent of college-educated American women are not in the workforce, but they are still not having many kids; the number of women with only one child has doubled since 1976. And in that same year 36 per cent of women had four or more children but less than 10 per cent do today. Childlessness is now a fashionable lifestyle choice, as it is in Germany where 27.8 per cent of women born in 1960 are childless, far more than any other European country. (In France the figure is just 10.7 per cent.)
The article provides many more interesting examples and more explanatory analysis. It is well worth reading. But we should also bear in mind a point of caution and qualification tucked into the middle of the article:
How seriously should we take all this? "All population projections are wrong," concedes Professor Coleman. "The question is by how much?"
Too true. But we know the changes that have already occurred, and that we are continuing in that same direction. And we know the resulting problems about to be visited upon us.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/population-paradox-europes-time-bomb-888030.html
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