Posted on 02/07/2003 1:37:10 PM PST by Caleb1411
The president of Estonia goes on national TV to urge his countrymen to have more children. Russian President Vladimir Putin warns his parliament about "a serious crisis threatening Russia's survival": the nation's low birth rate. The government of Singapore is trying to reverse that country's birth dearth by sponsoring a massive taxpayer-funded matchmaking service.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, panicking the world with dire predictions of a population explosion. By the year 2000, he predicted, the world would be so crowded that hundreds of millions would die of starvation. Although Mr. Ehrlich's prophecies have turned out to be almost comically wrong, PBS has produced a documentary taking him seriously, and philanthropists like Ted Turner still donate millions to combat population growth.
But the problem today is not overpopulation; it's underpopulation. For a population to reproduce itself, the fertility rate must average 2.1 children per woman. (The .1 allows for child mortality.) The fertility rate today among major developed nations is only 1.6.
The United States is rare among its peers in keeping its fertility rate at around the replacement level of 2.1, according to the Population Reference Bureau, which provided the fertility data cited here. Europe, though, is shrinking. Germany's rate is 1.3. Despite the stereotype of large Catholic families, France has a fertility rate of 1.9 and Italy has one of the lowest in Europe, 1.3. At this rate, there will be only about half as many Italians in the next generation. There will also be fewer Russians, whose fertility rate is 1.3.
Even nations that were once notorious for booming populations have drastically slowed down in reproducing themselves. In the last 20 years, India's fertility rate has gone from over four children per woman to about three. Mexico has gone from over four to just under three. China has a fertility rate of 1.8.
African nations continue to have very high fertility rates, up to five or six children per woman, but those lands are ravaged by AIDS, which is decimating their population. Muslim nations, on the other hand, tend to have booming population growth—Yemen's fertility rate is 7.2 children per woman.
Demographers predict that the world's population will level off at 9 billion, reports The Wall Street Journal. Then it will start dropping. There may well be nearly 500 million fewer people by 2075.
Isn't this a good thing? Why are so many governments panicking at the drop in their populations?
Although radical environmentalists like Mr. Ehrlich see human beings only as "consumers of the earth's resources," human beings are in fact the most valuable resource of all. Citizens are not just consumers but producers. Having fewer people can wreak havoc on an economy, creating both a labor shortage and a shortage of buyers. A government with a shrinking population faces a smaller military and fewer taxpayers. Dwindling populations have always signaled cultural decline, with less creativity, energy, and vitality on every level of society.
Already Japan— fertility rate 1.3—is facing the problem of having fewer taxpaying young people to support the burgeoning number of retirees, something that will hit the generous welfare states of Europe especially hard.
Already Europe has had to import large numbers of immigrants to bolster the labor force, most of them from the Middle East. Fewer and fewer native Europeans—along with the dwindling influence of Christianity—and more and more Muslims raise the prospect of the Islamification of Western Europe. One reason "old Europe" is not supporting the United States in a war with Iraq is that politicians in France and Germany fear the reaction among their Muslim voters.
Why the population decline? The worldwide collapse of what are, literally, family values. Thanks to contraceptive technology, sex has become separated from childbearing. With women pursuing careers of their own and men getting sex without the responsibilities of marriage, why bother with children? For many women and men, pregnancy has become an unpleasant side effect, something to prevent with contraceptives or easily treat with a trip to the abortion clinic.
The dirty little secret of the population implosion, one seldom mentioned by demographers, is that the world is aborting its future generations. China has shrunk its fertility rate by its cruel policy of forced abortion. (The website of the International Planned Parenthood Federation has only good things to say about China and does not even mention how the government coerces women to have abortions. So much for "choice.")
In the United States, abortion ends between one-third and one-fifth of all pregnancies, and the U.S. abortion rate is relatively low. In Russia, the average woman may have as many as four abortions in her lifetime. There are two abortions for every live birth. That is to say, Russians kill two-thirds of their children before they are born. That, Mr. Putin, is the "serious crisis threatening Russia's survival."
You think this is a good thing? LOL.
Needing a computer is, like agriculture, another insult to human happiness forced upon us by overpopulation.
If not for overpopulation, why should anyone bother about increasing food production beyond what is needed?
You make the same mistake European explorers did when they judged certain peoples as imprudent for not stowing food for a rainy day.
Those Europeans had no understanding that before overpopulation, there was no need to store for a rainy day, because those people they encounterd had never known a time when nature failed to provide them.
All of their surrounding world was their natural larder.
Why bother about storing stuff which can spoil and sicken you--or which you must worry over to prevent raiding by animals and insects?
So long have you worn the albatross of civilization and overpopulation around your neck, that you make the unconcious assumption that things made a necessity by overpoplation, were things that always were.
But in order to have a healthy, growing population, the average woman must have 2-3 kids...not 1-2. The individualistic view of childbearing just doesn't cut it...it doesn't give any motivation to women to have enough kids.
Only religious conviction, compounded by a cultural expectation of having large families to continue the existence of a cultural/tribal group, can provide adequate incentive to women to have more babies.
To the extent that govt policy can influence this (which is debatable), I would suggest that we pass a law that any married couple who has more than 4 biological children is permanently exempted from paying income tax. This would provide an incentive to those who have significant incomes to have kids, without also stimulating increased fertility amongst those who can't afford to raise kids to begin with.
As we ought? Why is that?
albatross of civilization?
Needing a computer is, like agriculture, another insult to human happiness forced upon us by overpopulation
No. Not anything.
Look around: All life seems designed to pursue its means of sustenance. No animals are too lazy to feed themselves.
Neither is man lazy to provide for himself; man only seeks to avoid behavior that is contrary to his nature.
When people are accused of being lazy for evading work or school--is it becaues they are lying down sleeping, or are they found expending great amounts of energy doing things they enjoy?
People are by nature designed to love living a certain kind of life--a kind of life which we can no longer live because of overpopulation.
Now many sit at desks all day doing drudgery, only to be told that after work they must jog in circles (to simulate a days work hunting and gathering) lest they die of heart disease.
We now must do the work of civilized man to earn food and still do the work of hunter-gatherers to earn our health.
Modern man must work two shifts, and in ways most uncomfortable--jogging in circles is not the same as the endorphin eased exhilaration of real hunting.
You still don't get it.
I am not for dispensing with technology--I am against encouraging population growth, which increases the need for more technology.
Perhaps after another twenty or thirty-thousand years, our natures (and bodies) will--through generations lived in pain and struggle--finally adapt to the current level of civilization.
Or perhaps technology will speed up evolution, by first drugging us (already happening) and by later changing our genes (the first steps are being taken), to better suit us to living with technology.
So?
After a while, people inclined to abort their children will have selected their genes out in the course of evolution--such people, by aborting their pregnancies, will make their kind extinct.
Left alone to run its course, and your problem will solve itself.
Generous is not unlimited. The flood we are now experiencing is raising not just resentment in the legal residents and citizens, but alarm. The critical mass was reached and surpassed long ago.
Why do you type in English? It isn't forced upon you.
In the beginning, America obtained vast territories.
To prevent those territories from being settled, then claimed by foreign powers, America needed to seed those terriories with settlers as quickly as possible--so America imported people, rather than wait generations for our population to increase and migrate.
And somewhere in all this, big landowners profited (as they do today).
After the abolition of slavery (which also drove the price of paid labor down among poor whites), the industrial revolution in America needed cheap paid labor, so they flooded the country with immigrants to increase the supply of paid labor, thereby driving-down wages.
Immigration has always served certain interests, while hurting other interests.
Today, immigration is used to keep the cost of labor down while also dividing and conquering the American population through diversity ("they" don't want one, large, dominant culture with a belief system that gets in "their" way).
All this serves the powerful.
and there's plenty of country left.
Were there plenty of country left, why is the price of real estate rising?
If there is plenty of country left, why do we need pollution conttrol, recycling, and water-saving toilets and showers?
And as the number of voters approaches infinity, the power of your vote approaches zero.
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