I know that the logic here is flawed, cannot put my finger: Making Babies

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal


Making Babies
June 2, 2006; Page W13

In his 2004 book, "The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It," Phillip Longman exploded one of the planet's most enduring modern myths. He demonstrated that population growth is not the threat that it has been made out to be and that population decline is the real challenge ahead of us.

(snip)

What a change from only a few decades ago, when conventional wisdom had it that the only route to prosperity was smaller families. In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich famously predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and '80s thanks to overpopulation. Not only have Mr. Ehrlich's predictions not borne out but there is no evidence that overpopulation has ever been at the root of poverty. As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, there is no country that had a higher standard of living when its population was half of what it is today.

Oddly, economic opportunity turns out to be an astoundingly effective form of birth control. When people don't need to use children as worker bees in a desperate struggle to survive, and -- more important -- when they can imagine a secure future for their offspring, they tend to plan families with fewer children in the hope of showering each with more advantages. At some point the scale tips, however, and people enjoy their own creature comforts so much that they become disinclined to spend time and money on more children. That's one reason to doubt whether incentive plans for childbearing will work.

(snip)

Yet sometimes, it seems, the balance is just about right. Thanks in part to immigration, the U.S. is not facing a population deficit. Other factors are at work, too. This country has a high rate of religious belief, which usually corresponds to a higher birthrate, as well as a general sense of optimism. On the practical side, the U.S. has a tax regime that is not too crushing and, at present at least, a job market ready to absorb the next generation. All these things encourage parents to indulge a natural desire to raise children. With its cradle still full, the U.S. is in effect seconding Mr. Longman's theme. Our thriving economy is testimony to the fact that human beings, so long demonized as the ultimate threat to the planet, are its most indispensable resource.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114921183813769427.html (subscription)

[Fridays Child]

1. I can tell you why this junk theory fails, in four words...

Competition for scarce resources.

[Avalux]

2. Mind giving the author's name?

I can't access the article since I don't subscribe. It's clear to me whomever wrote this is living in la la land.

I suppose if no one in this country was religious ("this country has a high rate of religious belief), we wouldn't have any children and the US would wither and die. Thriving economy? This guy is whacked. He doesn't even consider global population (in fact, paints human beings as indespensible) - there's so much wrong with what he's saying it's making me dizzy.

[question everything]

4. Was looking for it, too

It is an editorial in the WSJ Weekend section and the editor of that page, strangely called "Taste" is Erich Eichman (not his fault, but an Eichman talking about making babies does send a shiver down my spine)

[Avalux]

7. Eichman's short bio:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/bios/bio_eichman.html

He has no business talking about population growth; not qualified to give a fact-based assessment.

[mike_c]

3. the earth cannot sustainably support unbounded exponential...

...human population growth. It just can't. Longman's arguments are largely socio-economic-- he only addresses the ecological inevitablity of a limited carrying capacity by shaking his finger at flawed estimates like Ehrlich's. The situation is similar to pre-Newtonian physics when one might have argued that flawed estimates of gravitational acceleration mean that gravity doesn't exist.

Economists have long been wedded to unlimited growth concepts. Ecologists know better.

[question everything]

5. That's right

many years ago, when I was taking Econ 101 I often wondered about the demand that a company continues to grow... if every person owns a car, and a TV and a computer, and a cell phone and you've saturated your market, now what?

And poverty does have something to do with this, look at Africa in Ethiopia and Somalia where the drought forces too many people to fight for a few drops of water. And many die, and, I suppose, this is fine with him that babies die when the mothers do not produce enough milk to nurse them, or when their immune system is too weak to fight simple infections.

Instead of promoting more babies in industrialized nations, how about promoting population transfer, where the poor and starving people of drought stricken nations can be transferred to industrialized nations to take care of aging population?

[Dogmudgeon]

6. In one respect, Longman is absolutely correct

A vibrant, dynamic civilization requires -- demands -- high birth rates. History, political and otherwise, is squarely on the side of breeding. Population collapse has never been a benefit to anyone, almost always involving considerable social self-destruction. Since the 1970s, the ideal post-apocalypse society has been imagined as a series of pacifist vegetarian communes following popularized Native American philosophies, but the reality is more likely to resemble feudalism with sporadic electricity, somewhat better sewage sysems, and a lot more guns.

The "natural" carrying capacity of the Earth is around 500 million humans. Through technology, we've been able to boost that to much higher levels, but I would have to guesstimate that ten billion is the absolute ceiling with the current technological level we have now. With an extensive regime of "back-to-the-land" and simultaneously high-tech agriculture, using innovative technology to "fix" nitrogen from the air, we might be able to boost that number to as high as 50 billion. It would be a world of techno-peasantry, though. We would each have an Internet connection, a licensed computer, a public transport passcard, a voucher for our basic needs, and little else.

At a population growth rate of 4% per year, in line with Longman's plans, we would be there in about 70 years.

The only way to achieve the "Longmaniac" ideal is to start an aggressive, well-funded program of developing habitations in space. This isn't really such a wacky idea, and space development would have a number of tremendous advantages, least among them the ability to take most of the industrial strain off of the planet itself. The development need not even be initially focused on moving population, not for several decades, until earth-to-space transport reached a level of safety even better than that of commercial aircraft. Self-replicating robots (nano-scale or otherwise) could build the enormous numbers of needed living spaces, take several decades to do it correctly, and the billions could move in at their leisure. Well-engineered Earth-to-high-orbit (or Earth-to-lunar-Legrange-point) transport need not be fuel hogs.

On the other hand, confining ourselves to this planet alone will lead to a radically changed civilization within a few decades. Petroleum will soon become too expensive for cheap transportation and agriculture, and there is no political will to change things (excepting maybe Al Gore and Hugo Chavez and a handful of other leaders). The transition is likely to be somewhere between painful and horrifying.

So, is this science-fiction? Sure. But so are most end-of-the-world scenarios of which I'm aware. Better a beneficial sci-fi utopia than an ugly, miserable sci-fi dystopia.

--p!

[question everything]

8. Interesting essay. Yes, a different civilization

existing mostly in cyberspace and outer space. As it is most of the activists these days do it by pointing and clicking. You really needed immigrants doing manual labor to fill the streets of our cities with real people.

As local municipalities and school boards carry their meetings live on cable, people no longer bother to attend such meetings, unless they want to personally address that government body. Yes, we collect tremendous amount of money via the Internet but we are not there in person and this still determines the actions that an elected person will do.

"We would each have an Internet connection, a licensed computer, a public transport passcard, a voucher for our basic needs, and little else." - shudder.

Perhaps the anti-mall trend in the direction of make believe city center in suburbs is a good indication that we have not yet lost our desire for human interaction.