How I Really Feel About
Population Growth and Related Issues
Last updated 2/6/2001
Bigger! Better?
One aspect of economic thinking that has consistently troubled me
is the way in which economic health is constantly tied to growth,
not just in business productivity or revenue, but in population as
well. Here's an example from the New York Times, in a February 6,
2001 article on Japan's economic problems:
There is one statistic that seems to have caught people's attention,
and it may be the most damaging and difficult to deal with: the
shrinking population. Japan has one of the highest percentages of
older people in the world, with almost one in five--26 million
people--over 65. And their numbers are growing about 1 million a
year.
At the same time Japan's fertility rate, the average number of
births per woman of child-bearing age, dropped to 1.34 last year,
the lowest since 1947 and far lower than the 2.08 needed to maintain
a stable population. The number of Japanese is now expected to
fall from 127 million now to 100 million by 2050, and only 67
million by the end of the century.
As it stands now, if current trends continue, today's teenagers
could face two and a half times the current rates of taxation and
expect 30 percent less in pension benefits just to keep the system
afloat.
warty bliggens the toad
i met a toad
the other day by the name
of warty bliggens
he was sitting under
a toadstool
feeling contented
he explained that when the cosmos
was created
that toadstool was especially
planned for his personal
shelter from sun and rain
thought out and prepared
for him
do not tell me
said warty bliggens
that there is not a purpose
in the universe
the thought is blasphemy
a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the center of the said
universe
the earth exists
to grow toadstools for him
to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon
and wheeling constellations
to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens
to what act of yours
do you impute
this interest on the part
of the creator
of the universe
i asked him
why is it that you
are so greatly favored
ask rather
said warty bliggens
what the universe
has done to deserve me
if i were a
human being i would
not laugh
too complacently
at poor warty bliggens
for similar
absurdities
have only too often
lodged in the crinkles
of the human cerebrum
archy
From archy and mehitabel by don marquis
Reproduced without permission.
Biodiversity (there's that word again...)
People spend a lot of time arguing about the fate of a particular
species or ecosystem, the morality of hunting or the suspect
patriotism of those who oppose guns, and so forth. A lot of the
philosophy succumbs to a little systems engineering.
For the purposes of this rant, a system is a collection of
things (operators) which interact with each other according to
certain parameters. These interactions lead to changes in the
system's properties, which are any observable attribute of the
system at a particular time, and behaviors which are trends in
the system's properties over time.
An (oversimplified) system might be an isolated field which contained
rabbits and foxes.
- The operators are the rabbits and the foxes.
- The way the operators interact is that the foxes eat the
rabbits, and the rabbits and the foxes both reproduce.
- Parameters of the system include the respective birth rates
and natural life spans of the rabbits and the foxes, and the rate at
which foxes eat rabbits.
- Properties of the system include the number of rabbits and the
number of foxes.
- Behaviors of the system depend on the parameters, but examples
would be:
- All the rabbits get eaten (so all the foxes starve).
- All the foxes die for some reason (so the rabbits
reproduce without limit)
- The relative proportions of rabbits and foxes continue to
shift back and forth, but remain within some finite limits (dynamic
equilibrium)
The entire world can be viewed as a system which includes every
organism and all their interactions.
- The operators include every living thing, as well as
environmental factors such as the concentration of different gases in
the atmosphere, the temperature, pressure, and humidity at every point
in the atmosphere, and so forth.
- Parameters include the birth and natural lifespans of every
species, their predation rates on each other (including hunting,
fishing, logging, etc.), their respiration rates and waste products
(including industrial waste).
- Properties include the number of different species in
existence and their respective populations, as well as the
relative proportions of different types of climates and ecosystems.
- Behaviors include long-term trends in the number of species of
various types of organisms, the prevalence of different climates or
ecosystems, and incidentally the survival of any particular species,
including man.
The system above, if it were sufficiently complex to model the real
world, would be incomprehensible to any person. However, humans as
operators in the system have a decisive effect on its parameters and
properties. In particular, we can consciously change our birth rate,
our predation rates on other species, and our effect on terrain and
atmospheric composition.
In general, we can fairly easily kill off other species, especially
larger ones such as land mammals. Conversely, it is incredibly
difficult for us to introduce viable new species, particularly the
larger ones. Therefore, we can easily drive the number of species in
the system in one direction--lower--and cannot easily drive it
higher.
So even though we don't understand the system, we can and do change
some of its fundamental properties, in a way which we are unable to
reverse. These changes could drastically affect the behavior of the
system, including the survival of our own species. This is one
of the reasons I am fiercely in favor of conservation and preservation
efforts, especially habitat preservation efforts, which I feel are the
most likely to reduce the loss of species.
Mason Wright observes:
I think that ... environmental impacts ... may be caused by the
indoctrination of China and Russia into the capitalistic
philosophy.
This may sound terrible, but frankly I am worried what would happen if
China became a democratic society. It has a lot of old technology
that would be employed rampantly, and such a transition would cause
enormous ecological damage. The problem is that everyone wants to
live with the luxuries of a consumer society, one which has been
primarily heralded by we, the American capitalists. Such a venture
would inevitably result in a simliar situation [to that which] occured
when we first wiped out the frontier that was the American wilderness.
If everyone is going to convert to a consumer society they are going
to need a tremendous amount of guidance and assistance. Either that,
or we're not going to live too much longer.
Reproduction
The Bad News
I believe:
- There is a limit to the number of people the world can support.
- The human population is still growing rapidly.
- The limit is increasing, but not nearly as fast as the
population is growing.
- The population will approach the limit asymptotically (the
closer it gets, the slower it approaches the limit).
- This will not be pretty if it isn't through family planning.
So naturally I'm strongly in favor of birth control.
First off, this is hardly original thinking. Thomas Malthus thought
of it long before me. It just seems like it gets left out of debates
on birth control vs. theology, the role of the United States in
supporting UN programs which promote family planning, etc.
Now, what would be so ugly about the population leveling off? If our
birth rate remains unchanged but the population doesn't increase, that
means our death rate has to increase to equal the birth rate. Most
likely that would be through:
- Starvation among poor, rapidly growing populations.
- Disease due to overcrowding and poor sanitation.
- Fighting over limited resources.
Also, since resources would be scarce, people who sustained injuries
or contracted diseases which were not ordinarily life threatening
might succumb anyway if they could not afford proper care.
Even if we found a way to increase our resource production to match
our population growth for a while, eventually (not as long as you
might think) we would encounter an immutable limit: the size of the
planet Earth. The planet is finite in size, and can support only a
finite number of people no matter how clever we get. Should we reach
that limit, we would probably already have sealed the doom of all
complex life on Earth, for we would have crowded out so many other
species that we would face a global ecological collapse.
The Good News
I believe that if every woman who survived to child bearing age had
exactly two children, world population might continue to grow for a
short time, but would then start to decline slightly. Why?
- About half the people in the world are women.
- Everybody dies sooner or later.
- If half the people in the world have exactly two children, and
everybody dies sooner or later, then the number of people being born
equals the number of people dying over a long period, and the
population remains stable.
- In fact, it will decrease slightly, because not every woman
born makes it to child bearing age.
By the way, this only works when the average lifespan stops
increasing. As long as it increases, the population will increase,
even under the conditions listed above.
NOTE: This does not mean that I think overpopulation is
somehow the fault of the world's women. It's just that since only
women can get pregnant, they're the only ones that figure in the
population arithmetic. Huh? OK, imagine a population with 40 males
and one female. You can have at most one pregnancy at any one time.
Now imagine a population with one male and 40 females. Now you can
have as many as 40 pregnancies. The rate of growth of a population is
coupled far more tightly to the number of females than to the number
of males.
The Bottom Line
So what's my point? How do we humanely limit the number of children a
couple can have? How do we avoid trampling on people's human rights?
Good questions. I don't know. The problem is, if we don't devise our
own answers, nature will find them for us (see above).
Related matter:
What Do Names Have To Do With Population Control?
Our society tends to view a family's identity as being passed down
through direct male descendants; when a woman marries she
traditionally adopts her husband's last name. With a few exceptions,
if a couple has only daughters, those children will not continue the
family name. Thus, a couple having only daughters might be inclined
to have more children in hopes of having a son to continue the family
name.
There is no biological reason why a family's name should be that of
the father rather than that of the mother. Why should your identity
be more closely associated to your father's father's father than to
your mother? I think we need a way to preserve family names through
female as well as male generations. Unfortunately I haven't come up
with any totally satisfactory ways to do so. A woman and man could
add each other's surname to their own at marriage, but this would lead
to hopelessly long processions of names. Perhaps a child could choose
which of its parents' family names it wished to assume upon reaching
adulthood, but this might be taken as a slight to the unchosen parent.
As a society, we could encourage genealogy as an alternative way to
preserve a family's identity, without a direct line of male
descendants.
Other possibilities:
Since it is possible to separate Y-chromosome bearing sperm from
X-chromosome bearing sperm (because of the difference in mass between
the two chromosomes) we could theoretically guarantee to a couple that
they would have a son... but all the lab tests and artificial
insemination would take a lot of the joy out of procreation.
Some women opt to have children without ever getting married, and
technically this permits them to pass their own family name to their
children, but I have a hard time believing any woman has ever done it
for that reason.
Charity
I primarily support organizations which benefit other species (i.e.,
The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, etc.). The way I
see it, humans as a species already have an edge in preserving
themselves, so why pump money into charities for them?
There's another reason I'm careful to which charities for humans I
contribute. If a charity does nothing but supply food to a region
whose people are starving, it could simply be making the problem
worse. By supporting a growing population that already cannot support
itself, the charity creates a pyramid scheme based on the population's
natural growth. Sooner or later, the population will grow past the
ability of any charity to support it, and more people will starve than
were starving originally.
Put another way, overpopulation is the problem; starvation is just a
symptom. If you treat the symptom without solving the problem, the
problem will just get worse until you are no longer even capable of
treating the symptom.
The bottom line? You must solve an overpopulation problem not just
with emergency food donations, but also by encouraging family planning
and birth control.
[Segment on Religion and Birth Control removed. To my surprise, the
demographics didn't back it up. --DM]
Instead, here's a little number from William Blake:
The Human Abstract
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more would be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpiller and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain
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--William Blake, "The Human Abstract" (c. 11791)
from Songs of Experience
Blake is sometimes referred to as a poet of the early 18th and late
19th centuries. Personally, this one reminds me more than a little of
Ambrose Bierce.
My Own Criticism of This Page
The main flaw in what I have written here is that I do not offer any
verifiable facts or research to support my claims. I put this page
together in a bit of a rush, without taking the time to find
supporting references, so at the moment it's more philosophy than
science. I encourage anyone who knows of a reference which either
supports or refutes any of the statements made on this page to email me. I will include
acknowledgements with any contributions I post on this page.
Feedback
OK, do I have some good ideas here? Am I a raving idiot?
You tell me!
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