I wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t, but lots of people do, for very simple, straightforward reasons. BTW, how long is “that long”? However long it is, most of us would probably want to live that long.
I first heard this from Carl Sagan who pointed out that people in impoverished places have lots of kids to serve as their retirement insurance. He said that we don’t have an overpopulation problem per se, as much as a poverty problem (meaning, the former is caused by the latter.)
Sure, it’s definitely multifaceted, self-reinforcing, and so on. It’s good that the countries that drive a lot and eat lots of meat (and so on) have low fertility rates and/or are pursuing clean energy. If we can’t be sure to lower consumption, we can at least lower the number of consumers.
But as for the relationship to poverty, here’s what I think so many people miss, to the point that it seems like people are forever talking past one another: Poor adults have poor children. If they were to have fewer poor children, then, all things being equal, poverty will decrease. Opponents of the Philippine Reproductive Health Law said that the poor are not the cause of poverty, to which I would respond that they are its victims. Now we come full circle, because all of this is easier to accomplish when the reality or perception of children as insurance is diminished.
So, not most Africans, then.
Those are also the regions that had lower rates before AIDS, so that doesn’t really signify anything.
I’m just saying - in times of crisis, people breed.
What, me worry?
It sort of depends on what worries you. If your fundamental good is simply how many people the earth can support without them croaking from starvation, you might be right. We may figure out a way to keep 11 billion people alive by feeding them dung beetles that re-process feces and waste.
I don’t think so, but you might be.
If your fundamental good is earth close enough to its native condition, you are dead wrong. Disaster has long since struck, and the pace is accelerating.
How much native North American prairie is left as a percent of the original amount? How many lions? How many whales? How much rainforest will be left when we finish razing it to grow food? How many fish stocks are over-pressured already? What do you think a developed african continent looks like when they have human infrastructure per person on par with the Western world?
If you accept AGW predictions, how good are the chances we will ever slow down total CO2 production–much less reduce it–when 5 billion people are already way behind the Getting Stuff curve, and 4 billion more are about to join them, and getting that stuff requires some huge multiple of current energy output? That means, essentially, that every additional watt of energy we can produce will be snapped up and will never actually replace fossil fuels. With so many people, the energy trends will simply continue to look like this.
Well, nobody asks us if we want to be born. Somewhere out there some rich sheik is wondering why we have children when we are just condemning them to decades of spending 40 hours a week performing labor just to survive. What were our selfish parents thinking? The lives of the very poor are not different than our own, except they are poorer. They want he poverty to go away, not the living.
The very poor having kids isn’t some kind of calculated cold blooded decision. But people are very aware that ending up with no living children means they will be destitute when they get sick, injured or just too old to do backbreaking farm work-- nobody gives poor farmers a 401k or disability insurance. There aren’t other options. You need a kid to live.
It’s not seen as selfish imposing by either the parent or the kid, because that’s just what people do-- just like its normal for us to support 15 year olds, even though they are perfectly capable of getting a job and paying their own way. Nobody thinks twice because it’s just how we do things.
I don’t think that’s at all true, as a general rule. The economic collapse in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union following the end of communism, for example, was coupled with a major decline in fertility, wars and economic recessions in developed countries usually (IIRC) also see drops in fertility, and so on. I’d like to see some evidence to the contrary, if you have it.
Here’s a study from Ethiopia, for example (since we are talking about Africa) addressing the way that crises temporarily depress fertility.
The dynamics of fertility in industrial countries is massively different than that of agrarian economies. Basically in agrarian economies children require few resources to raise-- you have to grow a little extra grain and set some cash aside for clothing and some basic health care. The children don’t provide immediate returns, but they only take a few years to start defraying some of the costs by providing valuable household help, field work and labor for home-based commercial activities. The return of a kid who makes it “big” by getting a paid job or going overseas can be enormous-- they can send back enough to support everyone else.
In industrial economies, the cost of raising a child is huge, mostly because of the cost of education. But there is also the fact that you aren’t producing a lot of food and basic materials at home, so everything comes out of your pocket. They don’t really contribute to the household until their teens at the earliest. ANd having a kid that “makes it” doesn’t provide as much of a return-- in part because the contrast between “poor” and “middle class” isn’t as mind bogglingly vast, and in part because the family dynamics are different.
Some extrapolations and predictions that use empirical evidence and advanced modeling techniques are accurate and useful. Others are totally useless. There is no a priori reason to assume that the UN’s predictions, or the predictions in Science that sparked this thread, or any other set of predictions are accurate. Indeed, past predictions of population by the UN have often been inaccurate even when projecting just 5, 10, or 20 years into the future. Common sense dictates that predictions from 86 years out are likely to be much less accurate. So for those who are inclined to skeptical of all predictions including those made with “advanced modeling techniques”, there’s little reason to get worked up about such distant forecasts.
The point being: no one knows what the population of Earth will be in 2100. Did anyone in 1928 make a successful prediction of the earth’s population in 2014? Did anyone come even remotely close to predicting the political, social, technological, religious, and various other trends that would occur between 1928 and 2014. I doubt it.
Yeah, that’s why it’s so helpful when people are able to form mutual aid societies and other ways to pool risk, so blood relations aren’t the be-all end-all. Apparently medieval peasants were able in some cases to form the kinds of collectives memorably mentioned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (those “very modern political ideas” Terry Jones mentions on the commentary track aren’t that modern), but the political powers of the day were not too keen on such things.
I have enough resentment towards my parents already; I’ve often wondered how much worse it would be if they had me solely as part of their own financial planning. I certainly could never ask anyone else to take care of me, or worse, inflict it upon them without asking! If I can’t take care of myself, I want to die, ideally with dignity.
And with that said, or perhaps by the same token, what role do all of the non-economic factors in child rearing play? In other words, although I’m in no financial shape to be breeding now, economics are not very high on my list of reasons for remaining childfree. Personally, I would sooner bite off my own leg than have a child, and being faced with that possibility is one (more) thing that would easily render me suicidal. I would view reproducing as an act of monstrous irresponsibility and/or cruelty. Not only would I have ruined my own life, I would have victimized a completely innocent and helpless child who never had any say in being brought into this situation.
To bring it full circle, one of the reasons I don’t want any kids (though this particular reason would not prevent me from adopting, but I have others that do) is that I don’t want to bring a child into this poisoned, ruined world, amongst our fratricidal, cruel species. I would be too worried about what might happen to them, along with what they might inflict upon others. So, as things keep getting worse, will this fear not become more common, if not among the poorest?
As I’ve already said, I don’t see any trace of “gambling” involved here.
But as far as predictions are concerned, it’s perfectly reasonable to predict that the planet earth is capable of feeding 11 billion people comfortably. Agriculture is constantly improving thanks to new technologies. It has been for a long time. Here in the USA, yields of major crops such as corn and wheat have increased steadily for generations, at a rate of around 1% per year. The technologies involved are many: increased mechanization, better fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides, better strains of genetically modified foods, better storage and transportation. Most recently, computers are being used to carefully map the most minute differences in soil quality and climate, almost down to the square foot. This data allows farmers to make smarter decisions about where and when to plant and what fertilizers to use. There is every reason to believe that all of these areas of technology will continue to advance and that yields will continue to increase.
Further, there’s any easy way that the world can and will increase food production. In agriculture, as in so many areas, Americans invent almost everything, and then the rest of the world gets the benefit of it. A lot of agricultural technologies used in the USA are not currently used in other places, especially in third world countries. When American technology reaches those places, yields will increase dynamically. This doesn’t require the invention of anything new, only the spread of the technology we already have.
In addition to creating more food, we could simply waste less. Right now about a third of the food we grow goes uneaten.
Lastly, humanity could reap tremendous benefits by simply removing idiotic government policies. In the USA, we require that gasoline be 10% corn ethanol. This is an enormously wasteful policy that drives up food prices in this country and worldwide. If our politicians cared about preventing people from starving, they would cancel this policy immediately. Other policy changes could help as well, ranging from knocking down trade barriers to removing limits on genetically modified foods.
The poorest often don’t have the education to reason as academically as this. Also, they often don’t have access to family planning, and so the kids come pretty much as an act of nature.
Also, the poorest often are under heavy religious pressure to eschew family planning, even if it is available. They often live in societies where being childless is seen as a punishment, or even a sin.
And, the poorest often live in circumstances where children, by providing low-wage labor, are a valuable economic asset. They work the farm, gather fuel for the fire, herd the animals, etc. Without them, the elderly fear they would die – and the elderly might well be right.
Education alone goes a long way to remedying these ills, but education and economic growth do better together than separately.
You keep arguing two different things in this thread. Many people have agreed that it is impossible to predict what the population will be in 2100 including me but that isn’t the main point of this thread.
You also said that the world will cope just fine with with 11 billion people or possibly more. That is where the real disagreement comes in. Other people have already pointed out the blatantly obvious ways that the world is already collapsing under the collective burden of 7 billion people and yet you stated that 50% more than that will still work out just fine indeed. That is where the point of contention is and you haven’t addressed the reasons why you believe that at all.
As Chief Pendant pointed out, technology can be a great thing for addressing problems like global energy usage but only as long as you are getting a net decrease globally. The only way to do that is to have mostly stable or decreasing population numbers and use the efficiency gains to have a true arrest of demand and eventually decrease it. Population growth is outstripping those gains so it is still rising for all forms of energy including fossil fuels. All of those solar cells, wind farms and electric cars aren’t doing a damned thing for the environment as a whole simply because they just increase the overall energy supply and make it cheaper which billions of people already want and many billions beyond that eventually will. All they are doing is shifting consumption from one area to another while increasing overall demand.
That is only one problem however and it may be mere child’s play compared to water issues. The American west including Los Angeles has destroyed most of its water supply within less than 100 years of major settlement. You can work around energy issues and see them coming but severe water issues only take a few years of drought and will result in the death of agriculture, livestock and eventually people if it gets bad enough. Still, that is just a cat fight compared to what will happen in Africa if they really do add another billion people or so in less than 100 years. Do you honestly think they are capable of managing that rate of growth? Even if they could pull it off, it will have all kinds of nasty effects not the least of which is the loss of a significant percentage of the biodiversity in the world but who really cares about that when you have massive genocides and large scale wars going on like they tend to do.
At least the Amazon rainforest is well protected from human encroachment don’t you think? It produces a significant amount of oxygen for the people on planet Earth and it would be a shame if human population started getting so big that it was cut down for farmland, wood for furniture and hunting. I am not sure but I think that you might notice some effects like large scale extinctions, pollution and threats to non-renewable resources if the human population ever got too large to ensure long-term sustainability in the way that that we are using resources today.
We know it isn’t 11 billion because you provided yourself as your own cite. What number would start to be alarming in your educated view?
You seem to take it for granted that all the assertions you’re making here are self-evident. “Things keep getting worse”? Says who? “Poisoned, ruined world”? Not an assessment shared by everyone on earth, or even by a terribly large share of the species. I wouldn’t base any long-term projects on the assumption that everyone has or soon will have these viewpoints.
The key word there is “temporarily” - and then comes the boom.
How well do these studies take into account that conditions can change fast in the real world?
Just as a small examples look at the explosion of cell phones in Africa:
The point I have seen made is that new technologies can allow a sort of leapfrog effect, instead of developing on a linear scale like more wealthy countries the latest and best can instead be used.
The point I am trying to make is why would anyone assume that conditions right now will still be there in 2100, a decade or two of change and development could change everything and with it people’s desire for kids.
The way to drop the birth rate in Africa is simple - empower the women. Nothing else is going to work as long as the women are less educated, less economically advantaged, less liberated, and just plain old oppressed.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
It produces a significant amount of oxygen for the people on planet Earth
[/quote]
Cite?
I know it produces oxygen, but can you detail exactly how ‘significant’ this oxygen production is? Note- this is not a straightforward question; lots of people make this mistake.
