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 growthYemen'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 1.3is 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 Europeansalong with the dwindling influence of Christianityand 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."
I wasn't tallking about civilization--I was talking about hunter-gathering peoples living before population growth forced people to farm and own land.
But since you bring up the subject, famine and disasters do seem to go along with farming and civilization.
Very well stated.
But --- consider the propraganda that is being preached to whites nearly everywhere in the world today: that whites are evil, that whites are racists, that whites are polluters, that whites are enslavers, that whites are imperialistic, that the white man's main accomplishment has been to exploit the earth's nonwhite peoples, at the same time depleting its resources and forever ruining its natural beauty.
In such an atmosphere, it is any wonder that young whites don't harbor the enthusiam to create large families through which "to continue the existence of [their] cultural/tribal group"? After all, don't they belong to the most oppressive, evil cultural group in human history? (laughs)
Conversely, I sense that children in most Islamic schools are being taught that -- regardless of the oppression foisted upon them by the West -- that they are a population "in acscendance", with a triumphant future before them. There's a good reason why the maps of Islam don't show Israel: it is because Islam believes it has a future; the Western world teeters on the verge of forfeiting such beliefs.
Make no mistake about the original article of this discussion. It bemoans the fact that [Japan and Singapore aside] those populations that are in decline are white, western, mostly Christian peoples, and that those populations that threaten to overwhelm them in numbers are not. Of course, this is not explicitly stated, for to openly mouth such ideas (as I am doing here) invites one to be branded as "racist". But that's what it infers.
Cheers!
- John
In my time, I have lived in all those places, including places with and without electricity and plumbing.
An understanding that population growth reduces freedom.
Once that is understood, then it's a matter of weighing the loss of freedom against the benefits of immigration--both near term and long term.
Another possiblity is that no one should be allowed to become an American citizen unless, in addition to the usual requirements, he is able to purchase the citizenship of a current American, who must then leave the country.
Now I get it. Much momentum to your effort?
Overpopulation is not about how much you have.
Overpopulation is about what you must do to obtain what you will have.
Are you hearing echoes of Through the Looking Glass here? 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
The derided "experts" rhema cited have responded to exactly the specter of "overpopulation" presented to the world by junk-science false prophets like Paul Ehrlich. But if one has gnostic insight into the arcana of "overpopulation," . . .
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.
In the materialist's world, yes, women would be genetically predisposed to abort their children.
In the real world, abortion bespeaks a soul sickness, as countless women who've aborted will testify.
In 1953 when Stalin died the world also marked a milestone. World Population exceeded 1 billion. Now the population stands at 6 Billion. I just did alittle bond table. 1 Billion grows to 6 billion over a 50 year period at a 3.6% per year growth rate.
Yes certain cultures have embraced policies to limit birth rates.
Implosion? I don't think so!
It has been an interesting read.
"How silly that prisons equate crowding with punishment and loss of freedom."
Punishment is the institutionalization of men and the loss of freedom in the world, i.e., removal from society at large. The crowding is for less cost and convenience of those who contain them from the world. The prison really belongs to the prisoners. Just ask the guards. It is a dangerous place to be. Individuals (inmates) often filled with anger, rage, violence, hate. Not all but many. Not a good thing for anyone to be exposed to on a daily basis.
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