Nothing new under the sun

Yesterday I commented on the state of the earth's population as it is set to reach seven billion in about three days. In that post I voiced the opinion that the desire for a sustainable population is a good thing but that the methods that would be required to truly bring it about would be of a rather bloody nature.

 Today the BBC posted a decent article detailing the history of population control. Beginning with Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century and continuing on till the present day. One of the main thrusts of the article was to point out the fact that much if not all the major efforts at population control had been imposed on poor people and nations by richer people and nations. It's always been a top-down situation where those without say suffer the most. For much of the past two centuries the main focus of population control has been to protect the economic hegemony of the West.

Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US. 

"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says. 

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes. Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.

As I stated yesterday, the best way to help reduce the populations of poorer countries is to raise the economic realities of those countries. This isn't my idea, and its not new.

Critics of population control had their say at the first ever UN population conference in 1974. Karan Singh, India's health minister at the time, declared that "development is the best contraceptive".

This coming from the country that forcibly sterilized millions of its poor people in the mid 1970s.

In June 1975, the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency after accusations of corruption threatened her government. 

Her son Sanjay used the measure to introduce radical population control measures targeted at the poor. The Indian emergency lasted less than two years, but in 1975 alone, some eight million Indians - mainly poor men - were sterilised.

Another famous example of enforced population control is China's famous One Child Policy.

The One Child Policy is credited with preventing some 400 million births in China, and remains in place to this day. 

In 1983 alone, more than 16 million women and four million men were sterilised, and 14 million women received abortions.

Of course, it was not without its faulty consequences.

But modern technology allows parents to discover the sex of the foetus, and many choose to abort if they are carrying a girl. In some regions, there is now a serious imbalance between men and women.

Some point to these examples as a means of learning from the past in order to improve population control efforts going forward. Of course the term 'population control' was deemed to have negative authoritarian connotations and so they adopted such terms as 'women's rights and reproductive rights'. Some see women as being the magic silver bullet to end the world's population problem.

According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years. 

"I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society," she says.

I'm a bit skeptical of this.

So lets look at what would be an ideal situation; Canada. A place of vast economic prosperity where women's and reproductive rights are protected.

If a country wanted to simply maintain their population growth at zero (simple generational replacement - two parents have two children - population does not grow or decrease) then the birth rate for the country should be 2.33 per woman. Its been noted that economic prosperity helps to bring down fertility rates as does the protection of women's and reproductive rights.

So Canada, an economically and socially healthy country could be see maintaining the status quo as being sustainable. The Canadian birth rate is 1.58. Canadians are breeding themselves out of existence. How is that a benefit to society?

 At some point a tipping point will be reached when economically rich nations can't make up their lack of numbers by bringing in people from impoverished nations to meet the societal need for workers. As was seen during the immediate aftermath of the black death, as the population fell, there were less workers who were able to earn higher wages due to the decrease in the labour supply.

If economic prosperity reduces fertility rates and lower fertility rates reduce the labour supply pushing up wages, it would seem that rich nations could see a demographic downward spiral that could place their societies in peril.

Lets hope that the women in such societies recognize this pattern and alter their birth rates accordingly. So it would seem that the solution for the world's population problem is the leveling of the economic playing field that would help to decrease the fertility rates of those impoverished nations driving world population growth.

In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a stir with his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which suggested that it was already too late to save some countries from the dire effects of overpopulation, which would result in ecological disaster and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s. 

Instead, governments should concentrate on drastically reducing population growth. He said financial assistance should be given only to those nations with a realistic chance of bringing birth rates down. Compulsory measures were not to be ruled out. 

Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.

That was then. Now they are trying to get away from such heavy handed control mechanisms and its perhaps not surprising to see where they are looking for solutions.

Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue. 

If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC. 

"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."

Economic redistribution.

Its not the poor that are the problem. Its the rich.

 I think that Chairman Mao and Brother Stalin would be happy to see the West finally see the light.

 Of course they both already did their part for reducing the world population by murdering tens of millions.

That's a big number

So according to the UN the world's seven billionth resident is due to be born on October 31st. Statistics show that the world's population grows at a rate of 200,000 a day. There is talk that the earth's population could grow to be ten billion by the end of the century or even as high as 16 billion, with much of the growth taking place in poor countries.

 In 2011, the population of Ethiopia is approximately 80 million. In the next 50 years the country could see its population grow to 145 million.

 In contrast is Germany, with a 2011 population of approximately 80 million but rather than grow over the next 40 years, Germany could see its population decline to 75 million people over the next 40 years.

 There is a scenario from the UN in which the world's population in 2100, rather than being higher, is actually lower than it is today due to the decrease in fertility rates. Since 1950 the fertility rate has nearly halved, falling from 6.0 children per woman in 1950 to 2.5 children in 2011. If this trend was to take hold in places such as Ethiopia and other sub-Saharan African countries, which are said to drive the population growth, then the world's population would decrease by the end of the century.

"The world's population is going to continue to grow and we may as well be prepared for it, " says the editor, Richard Kollodge. "We may as well make sure that as many people as possible are healthy, that as many people as possible have access to education." "We have a chance right now in our world of seven billion to build a more stable, more socially just world by the time we reach 10 billion but that requires us to act now," he says.

So we need to act now or something is going to happen and I'm sure that according to them it will be disastrous. So what to do? One of the things that need tackling is fertility:

"Sex education has an impact in delaying the age at the first sexual intercourse, in increasing the use of contraception methods and condoms," says Gabriela Rivera from the Mexico City offices of the UN's population agency.

This is a fairly easy first step. It can be done for relatively low costs and can have an immediate impact. So women start having fewer children. Okay. Great. So, who looks after them when they are old?

Caring for the increasing number of elderly people will also present many challenges, says the report.

The rate in fertility in the West has declined as a result of economic prosperity. Modern Western countries have government programs that help to look after people when they are old and combine with a person's personal savings and pension to ensure that a large portion of the population is looked after by fewer and fewer children. This can't be said of the world's poor countries where people rely on their children to look after them when they are old. Children are their pension plan. So it would seem that in combination with sex education efforts and access to contraceptives the economic prosperity of these people needs to increase.

The UN has expressed concern that in many poor countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, the speed of population growth could hold back economic development and trap future generations in poverty and hunger.

But apparently this is a catch-22. They are too poor to be able to give up having children to look after them in their old age, but having more children keeps them poor. So in some way this cycle needs to be broken.

The challenges from the growth in population include the massive inequalities between different countries in access to food, water, housing and work.

The West and parts of Asia are far richer than vast portions of Africa, Asia, and South America. According to the CIA World Fact Book the world's GDP in 2010 was $74.54 trillion.

Here are the top ten in the world:
1 European Union $ 14,820,000,000,000
 2 United States $ 14,660,000,000,000
 3 China $ 10,090,000,000,000
 4 Japan $ 4,310,000,000,000
 5 India $ 4,060,000,000,000
 6 Germany $ 2,940,000,000,000
 7 Russia $ 2,223,000,000,000
 8 United Kingdom $ 2,173,000,000,000
 9 Brazil $ 2,172,000,000,000
 10 France $ 2,145,000,000,000

 This totals $59.593 trillion or 79.95% of the world's wealth. Of the 227 nations listed in the Fact Book, this translates into 4.4% of the countries controlling nearly 80% of the world's wealth.

 So if the economic realities of the poorer nations need to increase in order to combat population growth which will (insert something scary) allow them to ease up on having babies which will reduce the fertility rate of those nations driving the world's population growth which in turn will avoid (insert something scary). So what needs to happen is for the wealth of the richest nations to be diverted to the poorest nations.

 -insert thought bubble- I wonder what the UN would do with all the money that they gained from the carbon tax that has been proposed? -end of thought bubble-

 So you take a country like the US which had a GDP per capita of $47,200 in 2010. Then compare that to the GDP per capita for the world of $11,200. A big difference there. Heck, even China as the world's third largest economic entity had a GDP per capita of only $7,600 in 2010. India's was even worse at $3,500. 

As an aside, the US ranks 11th in terms of GDP per capita with Qatar being first at $179,000 and with the Congo and Burundi tied for last at $300. The number of countries equal to (St. Lucia) or above the $11,200 mark is 99, meaning that there are 128 countries below it.

 The point of the matter is that you will have a hard time convincing people living in countries like Qatar, the US, Canada, France, etc. to voluntarily give up their standard of living in terms of improving the standard of living of people in Burundi or Lesotho. It would either take a massive amount of robbery and collusion (hmmm, global warming is what again?) or violent and bloody conflict. You think that the world is a bloody place now, wait till you try and reduce the GDP per capita of the people in places like America or Germany or Kuwait to less than half of what they are used to and see what happens.

A quagmire

An amusing look at the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Having the Tea Party blaming only the government on one side and the OWS protesters only blaming corporations on the other side is futile. Both are the problem because they both work together. The corporations finance the politicians that subsequently use the government to finance the corporations. Blaming one member of the team while ignoring the other is not going to solve anything.