Posted on 09/26/2007 5:26:29 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Industrialized nations fret about their declining population, but the more pressing problem is that developing nations can't control their growth.
Anew divide is opening between shortsighted industrialized societies and the world's poorest countries. It's all about babies.
In Japan, in Russia, in Germany and elsewhere in what development gurus like to call "the global North," panic has set in about fertility declines, and couples are exhorted to have and are rewarded for producing more children. Economic growth demands it. Bigger retirement bills come due every year as populations age. A shrinking labor force spells disaster. So fascinated are we in the developed world with this phenomenon -- the scarcity of babies -- that a pervasive misinterpretation of world population trends has taken hold.
Here's the reality: In a majority of nations, in the world's most deprived societies, there is no shortage of babies. Women there are often crying out for help in controlling their fertility, sometimes to save themselves from early death as well as to give their children a better chance at life.
But when foreign aid priorities are set, family planning is no longer high on the list. It hasn't been for decades, even before the focus and much of the money turned almost exclusively to the prevention and control of admittedly decimating diseases.
President Bush thinks otherwise. He has just barred for the fifth year U.S. government contributions to the U.N. Population Fund, which does more work in more countries than any other family-planning organization. His action is based on unsubstantiated claims, denied by the United Nations, that the fund aids abortion in China. The U.S. is now $196 million in arrears.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
1) Malthus was wrong. Over population is not really a problem. We can handle the growth.
2) Singling out the developing world and trying to convince them (not us) to have fewer children, is racist and the sort of eugenic claptrap that Liberals have been peddling for decades and decades.
“Barbara Crossette was a New York Times correspondent in Asia and chief of the paper’s U.N. bureau.”
This explains the rectal-cranial insertion viewpoint of the article.
Oh sure, Africa’s handling its growth just fine. South America too. < /s>
It’s not racist to suggest that people who can’t even feed themselves shouldn’t be having large numbers of babies (many of which will die in infancy, after a short, hungry life). People whose lives are perpetually focused on how to get enough for food for the next few days don’t have time for niceties like education, resulting in truly appalling political decisions (Mugabe, Chavez, just to name a couple of current examples).
In this book - “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It” - http://www.amazon.com/America-Alone-End-World-Know/dp/0895260786
Mark Steyn makes a powerful case for America to wake up and make babies - and teach our children what America is and how it was founded and what makes it great.
It’s written in the same way as the author talks, is a very good book. I’m giving it to my 23 year old son.
Maybe it’s as simple as not killing the next generation in the womb... or encouraging couplings that can procreate...
Nahhh... too easy.
Good point. Although, it’s not fair to compare Zimbabwe to Venezuela. Zimbabwe has always been a hell hole, whereas Venezuela was at least semi-tolerable at one point with some semblance of a middle class.
“1) Malthus was wrong. Over population is not really a problem. We can handle the growth.”
Malthus’ theory is sound. and has largely been proven in areas of famine and in animal populations. If a population grows and its food supply does not, there is starvation. His prediction about human population was wrong only because human food production has kept up with increases in population. If this stops being the case, we will find out how true this is.
“2) Singling out the developing world and trying to convince them (not us) to have fewer children, is racist and the sort of eugenic claptrap that Liberals have been peddling for decades and decades.”
You may not agree with it, but that doesn’t make the proponents racist or eugenic.
As usual, the worthies at the New York Times think we should sub-contract all of our policy making to the unelected bureaucrats at the United Nations. Sorry, that just is not going to happen.
How would Jesse Jackson characterize that policy?
The problem in many places in Africa is that the governments there are corrupt kleptocracies. Property rights are insecure, there is no meaningful rule of law, and this results in unstable societies where there’s no real incentive for anyone to improve their lot because someone else will just take it away.
Zimbabwe has not always been a hellhole - it only got that way when the Socialists took over, expropriated land from its owners, and put a bunch of ideologue idiots in charge of what used to be the bread-basket of Africa.
Barbara Crossette: A racist who is bad at math.
Not to worry, many in the developing world are moving HERE to have their many children so we can subsidize their healthcare, social security and education.
Which author?
Steyn's book has precisely the opposite thesis from the author of this article.
Steyn argues that the West should have larger families, not that developing nations should have smaller ones.
Crossette is arguing that developing nations should have smaller families and not that the West should have larger ones.
“...what would happen if I suggested that we ought to have a policy limiting the number of children that American poor people can have?”
To my knowledge no one has ever seriously proposed a Chinese-type manditory child limit on the third world. The objective is to teach them that it is in there own best interest to do it themselves. Even so, manditory child limits are not necessarily racist. No one believes that China’s policy is race based.
Both Mugabe and Chavez are dictators. When they were elected they were elected as officeholders in constitutional governments on the strength of reformist platforms.
Both men have since seized greater power in defiance of the popular will, abolished the constitutional safeguards of their nations and are pursuing radical agendas they never offered to the electorates of Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
Characterizing the people of Zimbabwe and Venezuela as too hungry to think clearly when they voted is (a) simply not historically true and (b) patronizing in the extreme.
I feel like you're not seeing the point. There's a journalist named Barbara Crossette at the LA Times who wishes that some folks would have fewer children. She's not pointing her finger at Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland. She's saying the folks in Africa, Asia and South America should have fewer children.
This is an ivory tower Liberal pontificating -- in effect, though not overtly -- that the world would be a better place if there were fewer non-white people in it.
She doesn't think she's being racist. I guess you don't think she's being racist. But, you know what? She's being racist.
And we [the USA] will have plenty of growth. Since 1970 we have added 100 million and in a little over 50 years, another 167 million. Since 2000, we have added almost 22 million and in the next 23 years another 62 million or the equivalent of the current population of the UK.
Projecting the Impact of Immigration On the U.S. Population, 2007 to 2060
It isn't racist, but it ignores the traditional response to that particular problem, which the Left likes to pretend is "racist" (or "culturally imperialist" or some such nonsense). While the logic seems shaky, for thousands of years, the typical response to not having enough is to have more children, because then, in a few short years, you have more hands to work the fields for the long-term. There are more potential sources of incomes (or dowries) for the family as a unit.
Human capital is an investment, the one most likely to pay off, and the easiest to create (only one investing partner required!) China is finally figuring out how to put this, their most significant national asset, to good use, and it is paying off handsomely.
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