"Population" is a dirty word
"Population" has become a dirty word in policy discussions.
I just finished reading the fascinating article by George Packer in the 11/10 New Yorker about the city of Lagos, Nigeria. The article give a feeling of hopelessness -- the situation is horrid there and steadily getting worse. Yet Lagos is comparatively a bright spot in Africa -- people continue to move there, want to live there, see it as their hope for the future.
I was born in Philadelphia. When I was born Lagos had a population of 200,000. That was about 10% of the population of Philadelphia, a manageable small-city size. At my projected death Lagos will have a projected population of 30,000,000 people. That will be 20 times the population of Philadelphia.
Surely this astonishing population growth has something to do with the problems of Lagos. Lagos is extreme, but population growth far above world standards characterize Nigeria and indeed Africa as a whole.
But Packer does not mention population growth as the cause of the misery. His focus is on corruption, pollution, slums, lack of municipal services, privatization, etc. He sees the new larger populations as a multiplier of the misery, rather than as a cause of the misery. I have gotten used to seeing "population" ignored -- not even mentioned -- in discussions of world problems. This is such an egregious example, I had to write this blog entry!
The one change that could offer real hope for the future of Africa would be the dramatic drop in birth rates. Resources channel into improving the lives of the people, rather than into making more people. This has been tried only once in the world, on a large scale. It worked. When I was little, in Philadelphia, my mother told me to eat up and think of all the starving people in China. Today, US farmers worry about food imports from China.
I do agree that something needs to be done with regards to population growth in Africa. However, I would have to disagree with the idea that the Chinese "One Child" policy was a success.
One of the biggest indicators of failure is the rapid aging of the Chinese population. It's close to reaching the levels of Europe.
Second is the cultural disposition of preference to male children to female. For every 100 female children born, there are 120 male children. Now that the first wave of "One Child" policy children have reached adulthood, there are instances of female bride trafficking, kidnapping, and murder of men for their brides.
Third are the general human rights abuses these types of policies entail. Forced sterilization, forced abortion, abuse, coercion, and other methods have been documented as being used by the state.
To address the issue of agricultural growth... the biggest boon for China are the very good subsidies given to regional farmers. China does not allow agriculture to be affected by market forces (much like in the US), and so there is no incentive to NOT over-produce.
In addition, this over-production has been shown to cause all sorts of environmental problems, much like US factory farming.
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December 4, 2006 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've been a fan of cultural anthropoligist Marvin Harris ever since I read his "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches : The Riddles of Culture" as a freshman several centuries ago.
A couple of the points he and others make is that from the standpoint of reproduction and population growth 1) males are redundant, and 2) cultures contain their own built-in checks limiting growth. The fun thing about reading Harris is how he shows what might first appear as really wierd, even evil, cultural practices play directly into issues like excessive population growth.
With regard to both points 1) and 2), for example, cultural preference for male over female children, even to the point of a cultural nod and wink to female infanticide (as in China - one of his examples, by the way), is in itself a powerful mechanism that serves as a brake to runaway population growth. Men don't birth no babies. The fewer females, the fewer births.
These kinds of built-in cultural "quirks" play havoc with predictions of future population size based purely on statistical models. Real world isn't that deterministic, at least not in the obvious way suggested by the number crunchers.
http://samthornton.blogspot.com/
December 4, 2006 2:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I used to think overpopulation was the key problem facing the world (supporting ZPG and NPG), but I am more ambivalent now. It seems that once nations reach a certain level of development, population growth naturally slows: Europe is below a sustainable birth rate, and the US is as well (I think) discounting immigration.
Population seems to be self-limiting, and in a fairly painless way: once societies have reached a certain level of economic prosperity and women's rights, they naturally stop growing.
December 4, 2006 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Overpopulation is a major problem not in and of itself, but in that it relates directly to so many other problems, especially in the developing world. Mister Foo, you are right that population plateaus at a certain level of development; however, high population growth hinders development. Population is closely intertwined with many quality of life issues; for example, a decrease in fertility rate in a developing country has almost invariably increased the total grain imports to that country.
Since population growth is so closely intertwined with so many other problems, taking steps to solve those problems will help lower population growth and hasten development. Improved health and education resources would go a long way toward shifting cultures in Africa away from subsistence and encourage lower population growth, which would hasten development.
Now for the shameless plug: I work for the Institute for Population Studies and I am working on a project that touches in great detail on the issues I talked about in this response. Check out our web site at www.ifpops.org, or our blog (which I keep up) at www.howmany.org. My latest entry is on the same article as MarcF wrote about. Come and visit our site if population issues interest you.
December 5, 2006 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Population growth HAS dropped all over the world -- we got lucky, in the sense that nobody predicted that. My sense is that the drop is ending now, at a new plateau. Where women have many opportunities they choose to have few children. Where women have few opportunities other than child-bearing, they choose to have many children. Their opportunities may be limited by sheer poverty (Africa) or cultural restrictions (Islamic world).
If I'm correct about this new population growth equilibrium, it means that all predictions of future world population are obscene underestimates.
December 7, 2006 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
So what CAUSED the drop in population growth? Nobody really knows. World population growth rate peaked in the early 1960's and has been falling ever since. There is probably a very general and widespread reason for this, because the population growth rate decreased in essentially every country in the world. The availability of contraceptives certainly played a role, but I think there is a different major reason.
I think it is TELEVISION. This was exactly the period when television spread across the world. Before television most women learned of their options, their possibilities for the future, their world view, from their friends, their families, their churches. In most places their options were very limited. With television, there is at least a view of a much wider world, a sense of greater possibilities, no matter how unrealistic these may be.
So I think the global drop in population growth rate was caused by the advent of widespread television. Now we have reached a new population growth equilibrium, much lower than previously (thank goodness) but much too high to achieve sustainability and to avoid catastrophe.
December 8, 2006 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink