Skimming ‘The Nation’ article, ‘Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies’ by Kathryn Joyce, and reading the flaming op-ed letters her article provoked, I become confused. There are arguments, mostly from the political and religious right, that women in developed nations are failing society by not having more children. Women are getting too smart and planful. With increased access to education and birth control, birth rates are going down.
The developed nations are facing a demographic winter, where there won’t be enough young people to pay into the social security that us boomers will be collecting. We need to continually increase the population of young people in order to support the old people.
This is the point where I get confused.
If the only way for each nation to survive is to increase its population, won’t we eventually run out of room? Isn’t six billion people enough? Will ten billion be better? What happens when we reach the point of maximum survivability? What do we do then?
Maybe it’s simple-minded of me, but I think it’s a good thing that some prosperous nations are lowering their birthrate without resorting to the desperate and tyrannical measures taken by China and India. It gives me hope that women and men who have a choice usually choose to have fewer children and take better care of them. It seems like a positive trend for a world that is fighting over resources.
So just in mathematical terms, does it make sense to try to increase the population to take care of our old people, and then increase it again, to take care of the care takers, and …doesn’t that increase geometrically?
Just wondering. Maybe some of the smart people who post on our site can clear this up.
Recurring Nightmare 
Here we are, still worrying about Malthus (1798–population increases geometrically and food supplies increase arithmetically and a struggle for resources follows). In A.D. 1, world population was about 250 million, and reached 500 million by about 1650 (a doubling time of 1650 years). World population then reached 1 billion (1000 million) in 1850, a doubling time now of 200 years. Why this increase in doubling time: the industrial revolution, better farming practices, better health practices, longer life spans. The world reached 2 billion in 1930 (doubling time of 80 years); 4 billion by 1975 and 6 billion by 2000 (doubling time of less than 35 years). We are liley to reach 10 billion (10,000 million people!) by 2025). Our population in the U.S. is now at about 335 million (100 million in 1915; 200 million in 1967; 300 million by 2000), so we are not immune to this population increase and may reach 600 million by 2050.
What this means to competition for food, energy, other natural resources, and quality of life are all Malthusian issues. The developing world is and will compete for needed parts of the life equation. People need to eat, find water, clothe themselves, educate themselves, drive cars, and find jobs and land to grow food. The other difficult to quantify issue in all this is “quality of life.” China is a nation of 1.7 billion (170,000 million)–how important can the individual rights of any one person among 170,000 million others matter or be held important? One only has to look at the lack of individual freedom, or the massive impacts to the natural environment in Chine to find an answer.
The issues of increasing population, impacts to quality of life, stresses on social services and deteriorating infrastructure, are not issues in China, or India, but can be found right here in the U.S. How we address these issues will determine the kind of nation our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren inherit.
LikeLike