You know what pretty much never goes out of fashion?

[james_davis_nicoll]

First Worlders pondering how to limit brown and black people's birth rate

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Well, banning DDT was promising at first, but it hasn't killed them as fast as it might have; and suppressing information about AIDS for over a decade let it spread through the West and created a motive for research.

Maybe somebody could make a sci-fi horror flick to get people to think that industrialization and reduced infant mortality will destroy the world?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Why do you keep lying about DDT, Matthew?

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

His weltanschauung needs constant reinforcement: constantly repeating stories like that one help keep the structure from collapsing into a heap of soggy tabloids, moldy celery and old socks.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Tribal marker.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

The hell?!

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I disagree with you, but I regret having made an ad hominem response. I apologize, and in future comments, I shall address only the subject at hand, not the person discussing the subject.

http://resonant.livejournal.com/393784.html

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Claiming that the Taiping Rebellion was caused by "widespread female infanticide" seems like simplifying things just a BIT...

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, but that's the problem with studying history-- pretty soon, someone asks you "What caused X?" and you can't give a short, easily-digestible answer anymore. It's much more convenient to give one-sentence answers and be done with it.

[ellemir.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder( tongue firmly in cheek) what would happen if someone suggested that as western countries appear to be doing so much better at population control than elsewhere,, that they should put more rigorous controls in place thus easing the burden on countries that can't control theirs.

I predict the idea wouldn't go down so well, and that it is probably very unwise to be the person putting this idea forward to the wider public.


These issues do worry me. My sister is from China, one of the abandoned girl children, she was luckily found by a police officer, just a few hours old, having been left outside in freezing winter conditions.

[(Anonymous)]

There is of course no ethnic stereotyping whatsoever in assuming that these were First Worlders.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

And once again the valiant Anonymous Man tells it like it is.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Yes, what an odd thing to assume about a research organization headquartered in New York, run by a professor on leave from UC Berkeley who is originally from Indiana.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Which brings to mind another question: How many of the children in countries where women have about 5 on average are born because the older children were girls and the family goal was to have some boys in the mix? I'd be willing to bet that smaller families in those countries were ones in which boys were born first. A preference for sons is still a cultural staple in a number of places, China being a prime example. Letting go of that, to an extent, is probably something that has contributed to smaller families in countries with declining birth rates.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I'd be willing to bet that smaller families in those countries were ones in which boys were born first.

I'd doubt it personally, the point of getting male children is cultural AND economic - male children can earn more money for the parents in the long run and so can provide money and care in their old age, while female children will eventually be married off into other families.

Thus what happens when a third world family has a male child as their first is that they then have another child, and they hope that the NEXT child is a boy as well because again, female children have a limited economic utility to parents and male children have A LOT of economic utility to parents. The goal in the end is to have enough male children that their collective income from both child labour when they're young AND their income when their parents are too infirm to work and provide for themselves is maximised, and also as a way to replace losses from the high infant mortality.

Only coincidentally is the issue of gynoicide currently an issue in largely patrilineal cultures - I'd be very surprised if there's not more than a few matrilineal cultures that is exhibiting the exact same phenomena, because there's economic issues underlying it as there usually is with infanticide of any stripe.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

This penny has already dropped, but not universally. Some families have figured out that all these surplus males are going to want to marry someone, and a girl who's not actually rabid is going to be able to take her pick. This is already the case in a few areas, where the demand for wives outstrips the supply; a woman can pick out a pretty good husband and have an excellent chance of getting him. The young ladies are happy about this; the young men who are not handsome, smart, and wealthy are rather less pleased.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Do people in these conversations ever mention free/easily accessible birth control (and education to use it) or various ways of empowering women are probably your best bet?

And if there's something to the boys for greater economic stability in old age, a social safety net might also be a nice idea. Or legislation forcing wage parity... hahhahhahhaha!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I've wondered if pensions are a major reducer of birth rates. Actually create something of an externality problem: on purely economic grounds, having kids is a public good: parents bear the cost, but their whole generation will get the benefit of being supported by the kids' taxes. Public goods are underproduced...

[resonant.livejournal.com]

From a resource viewpoint, only the birthrates of developed and rapidly developing countries are a problem. Subsistence farmers are nearly carbon-neutral, and have a relatively tiny environmental footprint. They may burn a few litres of petroleum distillates each month in a kerosene lamp. They may cut down a hectare of forest over their lifetime, which takes decades to grow back. But a rich suburban dweller burns that much fuel just driving to the mall, and a forest can't regenerate after it's been paved over to make a parking lot.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I think deforestation takes out far more forests than parking lots. There's not that much paving, while it's easy to chop down every tree in a country for farmland or firewood. Vanished forests means vanished species, plus more CO2 in the air... also often more soil erosion and even drier climate, inhibiting regrowth of the forest.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Yeah...no.

Subsistence farming runs into the limitation that growing populations requires (by definition) more farmland: since it's subsistence farming, there's no significant surplus to carry people, so more people means more farming. More farming means more land. More land means more trees cut and, this is important, *never growing them back* because farming takes up more of the land, and the trees that aren't cut for farming are cut for burning wood, or construction material, or tools, or whatever, and more people with more farms means more of them are cut...

Subsistence farming is a dirty, back-breaking, environmentally unfriendly method of raising food. As much as people bitch about industrial farming, the greater efficiencies has vastly reduced the need for subsistence farming which has allowed areas to be reforested because people don't need them any more, like much of New England, Ontario, and Quebec.

To bring it back

[(Anonymous)]

The UN amends these every couple of years. The figure of 10.9 billion in 2100 is a bit higher than the last estimate, but not by a lot.

Something that everyone seems to be ignoring: that 11 billion is only about 50% higher than the world's current population. And if you click through and look at the numbers, they have the growth /rate/ steadily falling -- we hit 10 billion around 2060, and in another 40 years we only add another 0.9 billion to that.

So it's actually a pretty optimistic report (if less so than the last one).


Doug M.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

But we know the answer to that is "female education"...

[(Anonymous)]

Who is suggesting limiting birth rates in that article? Or are you referring to the comments?

Stephen Shevlin

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

I would imagine he was referring to the comments.

The article was perfectly bland. On the other hand, the comment about dropping asteroids into the middle of Africa and India made me facepalm quite hard.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The comments. Although I see more brutal methods are favoured by some:

The solution is to find appropriately sized nickle/iron asteroids and hurl them at population centers in India/China/Indonesia/Brazil/and some central African countries.

Whereas others just hope nature will deal out the megadeaths for us:

Hopefully there will be a big heard culling before that. In fact, I would wager in 87 years there is bound to at least be a pandemic that wipes out a couple hundred million people, at least.