Do you really think that people in non-developed / developing countries *do not *understand that children consume resources? Really?
Historically, parents have decided to have many children because it provides them with labor for their farms. (Obviously, there are also cultural aspects to this, but those cultural tropes are rooted in the economic side and are common to all ethnicities.)
In an industrial society, children may not provide as much of an economic advantage as they do in an agrarian one. That, combined with the higher status of women, will cause the birth rate to drop.
But the major threat to the planet–and our survival as a species–is overconsumption. As has been pointed out several times in this thread, Westerners (and Americans in particular) consume far more than people in Third World countries. If the consumption rate of Westerners suddenly dropped to that of the Third World population, overpopulation would not be an issue. Conversely, if the per-capita consumption of the Third World population is raised to that of Americans, an additional 2 planets would be necessary to supply them with the necessary resources.
I do think that the problem of overpopulation needs to be fought through both environmental / business regulation and limiting the birth rate (which, as I’ve pointed out, has far more to do with the status of women than the availability of contraceptives). However, consumption / regulation side of it is far more important than the birth rate. Because the former is spiraling growing exponentially with no inherent control mechanism, while the latter does have a control mechanism, since human beings naturally adjust to the changes of their societies and environment.
There are two couples living in a street, each couple owns a car.
Two cars equal %100 of cars.
One couple has two children, so thats four people have the use of one car.
The second couple has eight children, so thats ten people have the use of one car.
The second couple then start lecturing the world on how unfair it is that only four people have the use of %50 of the cars while two and a half times more people have to make do with the other %50.
As the second couple have even more children the statistics make things appear even worse , with the greedy first couple still having one car and still only having two children.
It never occurs for one moment for the second couple or their apologists to blame themselves for their feckless behaviour.
That said I advocate population reduction for all countries including the Western ones.
The death throes for Humankind from over population will be slow and painful.
Unfortunately it will involve the extinction of many more species before we ourselves go down the toilet.
We don’t NEED large workforces anymore as a result of computerisation, mechanisation and production robots.
So children being born today won’t be necessarily funding the ageing populations retirement but will more likely be in competition with them as the unemployed for what resources there are.
In a poor society, children are not necessarily seen as a net drain on the family resources. They may be seen as a net benefit to support their parents by, for instance, working the family plot.
In a developed society, children are seen as a net drain on the family finances.
Total consumption is per-capita consumption times people.
The developed countries, having duped out how to get more better than the undeveloped countries, consume far more per-capita, and represent a much higher per-capita drain, on resources. In fact, without development, most societies have an upper limit to population maintained by nature. You can only support so many people by hunting and gathering if you don’t have the wherewithal to change the course of the natural world.
It’s perfectly true that overpopulation would not be the problem if the developed world hadn’t figured out how to control nature. But they did, and in addition to using that control to grab all the resources they wanted for themselves, they extended enough development to less-capable populations to allow those populations to expand as well; those under-developed populations are now trying to play catchup and get Stuff just like the developed world has.
I don’t argue for any particular morality here. Sure; the developed world rapes the earth for their personal convenience. Sure; the under-developed world consumes less per capita. But that’s not on account of the under-developed world’s superior morals; it’s on account of their sub-par competence (or bad luck, if you are a Jared Diamond fan, but either way, they reason they aren’t consuming more is because they can’t and not because they wouldn’t if the could).
It’s lovely talk to say the major threat is “over-consumption” but that’s meaningless. We are wired for selfishness and over-consumption, and frankly, no-one is going to under-consume to a degree sufficient to diminish the strain on the world’s resources. Instead, the current under-consumers are going to figure out as best they can how to join the over-consumers. THAT’s why we need to stop making babies, wherever they are made.
If someone manages to get us all to under-consume first, then we can perhaps give ourselves permission to make more babies. Unfortunately, the same technology that lets us support more people in the first place by changing nature (industrial farming, transportation, control of disease, city infrastructure, communication…) also gives rise to all the over-consumption.
It’s not by any moral authority the Developed countries somehow get to tell the Under-developed countries to stop making babies. The West has no moral authority whatsoever, since it is overconsuming. However the current plan is to extend that development to the under-developed, and since those populations are growing like made and hoping to consume like mad (actually, to consume the way the West consumes) this overpopulation is an enormous problem.
I suspect what will happen is that the developed countries will continue to consume, and under-developed countries will continue to pro-create while trying to consume, and we’ll eventually over-run the joint even more. That’s the nature of the Tragedy of the Commons; no one puts group interest ahead of self-interest.
That that is so does not render overpopulation a non-problem. But hey; I got mine, so I guess it’s silly to worry that the next few billion won’t get what I got, huh?
Computerisation and mechanisation if anything create jobs in the developed world and have little effect on the developing world.
They create jobs because they raise productivity and wealth in a country; which will indirectly create jobs elsewhere.
You might just as well say “Dammit, who invented the spade?! So many people used to be employed digging earth with their hands, those jobs are gone now”.
And in the developing world, a robot worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars isn’t really competing for the same jobs with a guy (or even a factory of guys) on a couple of dollars a day. Again, look at china: one of the main places where robots are made, yet so many employers there pick cheap manual labour instead.
If robots become super cheap and super smart…that’s a different story. I suspect that there will be much more good than bad in such a scenario, but that’s too much of a tangent for me to elaborate on.
Fine.
When you earlier said that in the developing world we’d “figured out” that babies require resources, the implication, I thought, was that in the developing world they only have babies because they hadn’t figured that out yet.
It’s not like that, and I’m pleased that what I’d inferred isn’t your opinion.
I can remember very well as a school leaver in the seventies seeing large offices full of people pushing paper around, from colleague to colleague and from their business to other businesses.
Those same offices process mor work, more efficiently and much more rapidly with a minute fraction of the workers previously employed.
Yes computerisation creates jobs but on nowhere the scale that it has downsized them.
Likewise a robot on an assembly line can work 24/7, its work is always consistent(no bad hair days, late nights, hangovers etc. to interfere with standards), doesn’t have breaks, holidays, sick days.
Doesn’t need pep talks, Health and Safety training or disciplinaries.
Also doesn’t get severance pay or a pension.
At the present level of development robots aren’t suitable for many jobs but as time goes on they will more and more be able to replace humans in the workplace.