Posted on 06/18/2008 2:27:29 PM PDT by The_Republican
Many years ago, I read a study about demographics that was full of all sorts of interesting observations about populations, their growth and decline.
1) Raw numbers of offspring are less important than quality of offspring. But defining quality is hard, as it incorporates elements we would think of, like intelligence and health, and others that we wouldn’t, such as negative personality traits that aid in reproduction and survival.
2) The things that reduce population, such as war, famine, and plague, each behave very differently in how they effect a population.
War usually does not kill many people, but it does lower the standard of living so has secondary effects that kill. After wars end there is often a population boom.
Famine wipes out a lot of people, but they take a long time to die and ravage the land in the process. For example, it took Ireland almost 100 years to recover from the potato famine, and its birthrate never recovered.
Plagues are unique, as they strike “the bottom of the social pyramid”, afflicting the poor, ignorant, and sickly much more than the wealthy and educated. Populations usually recover quickly from a plague, and wealth is concentrated, which provides for economic growth. The Black Death of the 14th Century was followed by the Renaissance, and the 17th Century by the Industrial Revolution. This pattern was seen many times in historical China, as they kept records of plagues and their aftermath.
3) Quality population booms like the baby boomers after WWII had some key elements not found in typical developed world populations.
Large numbers of newly married couples were clustered together in new housing areas based in the Levittown model of suburbia. They were away from singles who didn’t want to be married or have children, and older people. Only the men were usually employed, often at less demanding office jobs. Taxes were low enough to make this possible.
A critical element was boredom, and the energy to have and raise children. These new suburbia had little entertainment available, and were generally child oriented. This made it much easier to have larger families.
However, within two decades, this situation had normalized. Especially with both parents working and much higher taxes, there were strong incentive to have few children, if any. There were recreational and career alternatives to having children, and being much more tired and having less relative net income helped make the choice as well.
There’s plenty of room for more people, and plenty of resources too, since people create resources.
The problem is the kind of people that there will be. In 50 or 100 years, everyone in America will be Catholic, Mormon, or moslem. How scary is that? :-D
It's also worth noting that Saskatchewan now has some of the fastest-growing cities in North America . . . mainly because of the effects of the energy boom (Saskatchewan is a major source of oil, natural gas and even uranium).
Here ya go.
I don't know where you live, but every time I turn on the radio or Taa Vaa I'm being told to stop using so much gas, water, electricity etc etc and the prices of everything continue to sky rocket.
So what are you learning here? Do we need more people to consume more stuff?
This time post your answer and stop playing games.
“No you didn’t answer the question. Ya want me to post it to you again?
Here ya go.
I don’t know where you live, but every time I turn on the radio or Taa Vaa I’m being told to stop using so much gas, water, electricity etc etc and the prices of everything continue to sky rocket.
So what are you learning here? Do we need more people to consume more stuff?
This time post your answer and stop playing games.”
Now you’re becoming annoying.
Have a good night!
“I didn’t think you’d answer.
Have a good night!”
The median age in Japan is 43.8 years compared to 36.7 years in the US and 42.9 years in Italy.
Take a long hard look at Africa. Africa has always had a very high birth rate and low standard of living. The result is that the vast majority of adults are focused entirely on day to day survival, casually accept the deaths of many of their children at an early age, and lack the capacity to see any point to formal education since it won’t produce more food immediately. So they have lots of babies who are malnourished in utero and onwards, stunting their intelligence and health, and those who survive to adulthood don’t have the ability or inclination to do anything but repeat the process. They are ripe for exploitation by tyrannical dictators, because they are desperate to believe the promises those thugs make to get into power, and too ignorant to see that the promises are fraudulent.
China was on a similar trajectory in its pre-communism era, and brutal as the means has been, the fact that their early communist leaders latched onto population control as absolutely essential to progress, has been critical to the vastly improved standard of living of the Chinese people, and ironically, to the ability of those people to start fighting back against communist repression. They aren’t so busy trying to feed crowds of hungry little mouths, so they have time to think about other things. The Chinese government also banned marriage, and hence baby-making before, for anyone below their mid-20s, thus promoting education.
It’s really disturbing that “conservatives” continue to promote unrestrained reproduction, when it inevitably leads to abysmal standards of living and political tyranny. It pretty much guarantees that the only way Africa will ever climb out of its hellhole is if it goes through a long period of brutal repression by a fundamentally well-intentioned government, as China did. Not sure where the well-intentioned African leaders are going to come from, though, as their culture doesn’t seem generate or respect people who focus on long term benefits for society as a whole. And it would be ever so much nicer if Africans could be persuaded to voluntarily delay and limit child-bearing, and thus skip the brutal repression phase.
As for the concept that “a better life leads to fewer children”, not necessarily. Look at the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. A rotten life led to fewer children. They imploded largely because the miserable people simply refused to bring children into their horrible world. The Romanian government under their brutal dictator Ceaucescu, made a desperate attempt to reverse this, employing a coerced reproduction program that was every bit as awful as the Chinese coerced birth prevention program.
American conservatives tend to imagine that the glory days of the westward expansion in our own country, with its huge families living off the land, can somehow be a model for the third world countries of today. Unfortunately, the vast tracts of sparsely populated and agriculturally ideal land simply don’t exist anymore, especially in the third world. The multiply-and-sprawl model of development was lovely while it lasted, but it’s over.
While the enforced population control in China may have played some role in their improved economy, it is fairly obvious that the major role was played by the state getting (partially) out of the way and allowing the economic genius of the Chinese people free reign. I have read that the city people in the new middle class in China have little or no interest in large families, repeating the common pattern of improved lives resulting in smaller families.
I never claimed that the process was not also true in reverse, that rotten lives didn’t sometimes mean smaller populations. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the later Roman Empire, where the population dropped constantly, as people refused to bring children into the appalling life they faced.
The traditional Chinese approach to population control was the Four Horsemen. Each change of dynasty on average resulted in the loss of 50% or more of the population, a pretty effective culling process.
For the most part, Africa is not really over-populated, as the density is not particularly high in most areas. Africa is very poor, and there is great crowding in the capital city of each country, but that isn’t the same thing. Their poverty is caused not by crowding, but by cultural and political reasons.
IOW, history has proven many times that wealth causes reduction in population growth. This is in progress right now in Mexico and Iran (and many though not all other Muslim countries), for instance.
With the possible and highly debatable exception of China, there is no counter-example of a reduction in population growth causing a dramatic increase in wealth.
Sorta puts the brutality level of their more recent population control measures in perspective.
As for Africa, any place where the population exceeds the economic capacity for a decent standard of living is overpopulated. It's not a humans-per-acre calculation. And any place where the birth rate exceeds the economic growth rate (even if the child death rate keeps population growth even with or slightly below the economic growth rate) has an excessively high birth rate.
China is a rare example of intentional slashing of the birth rate, and it worked as far as economic development and standard of living is concerned. Sure there's a dearth of other clear examples of cutting the birth rate resulting in an improved standard of living, but there's also a dearth of examples of cutting the birth rate NOT resulting in an improved standard of living. On a micro level, at least, it's just plain common sense. If you're barely scraping together enough food to keep your two toddlers alive and growing, and then you proceed to have three more over the next three years, the standard of living of everyone in the family most certainly will go down, and the likelihood of one or more of the children dying will go up.
A similar phenomenon is common in our own welfare-dependent underclass. If a young woman has her first child before achieving the ability to fully support herself, the chance that she'll ever be fully self-supporting takes a dive. And takes another dive with each additional child. And it really makes little difference whether or not there's a father in the picture. If a married couple is barely getting by with the help of food stamps, and go ahead and start having babies anyway, it's extremely unlikely that the family will ever be self-sufficient for more than brief periods. Instead of getting further education, working extra jobs to save up money for a down payment on a house, etc, their time and money will be tied up in just trying to maintain their rock bottom standard of living for themselves and the new additions to their family.
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