This reviewer agreed with almost everything she read in this 2011 book; Fred Pearce, a British science/environment writer, has managed to very closely replicate her views on population, fertility, causes, the role of policy and immigration. That's remarkable (hence the remark). It also told her plenty she didn't yet know.
Such as this: worldwide fertility (average number of children per female) actually peaked more than half a century ago. Not that world population is shrinking yet (that may be 25+ years off, and more than 70 million people are still being net added to this planet annually), though there have been days when it has shrunk, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The rate at which population grows by a billion has started slowing down already from its quickest interval of 12 years. Which may not seem like much. But falling total population in due course looks like a near mathematical certainty. Without immigration and on current reproductive trends Germany's native population will fall below Berlin's by 2100 (and apart from the capital, the east is emptying much faster already and most towns there are shrinking) Italy will lose 86% of its population. 26 countries were already shrinking in 2008. Rising life expectancy has delayed this but it can not reverse it. In Russia, falling longevity is chasing declining fertility down. Once the number of potential mothers starts to fall--itself an outcome of low fecundity--then combined with the same lower fertility, this train will apparently be very hard indeed to stop. Or is that re-start?
There are some exceptions where populations are more than replacing themselves; both poor (Afghanistan, Mali) and rich (Israel's Haleda). But almost everywhere there are fewer children per woman than there used to be--fertility is falling. And almost nowhere can policy stop this happening. Iran's clerical revolution probably speeded up its women's preference to bear far fewer kids, even as it was imploring them to have more and more. Myanmar's generals, opposed as they are to any family planning, have not been able to make 40% of university-educated women reproduce. Singaporeans have been too busy getting rich for too many decades to create the next generation, despite state-funded match-making and generous baby bonuses courtesy of Lee Kwan Yew's regime and its successor for decades now. Anti-contraception Catholicism presides over crashing fertility in large parts of Europe. Even in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries with fewest educated women, the birth rate is falling at breakneck speed, if from high levels. Sweatshop workers in Dhaka increasingly see themselves better off without a child. This, collectively, is a massive transformation.
From where does concern about overpopulation arise then? Ever since English vicar Thomas Malthus noticed he was registering more births than deaths two and a quarter centuries ago there has been persistent fear that population would outgrow world carrying capacity. And in several dimensions (topsoil, climate change, water access) this fear looks both true and more real today than then. But long, yet not all that variable lags have hidden the defusing of the population bomb spectacularly well also.
And according to Mr Pearce, a perennial source of Malthusian affliction is not so much adherence to a natural law borne of environmental degradation, but is avowedly eugenic. Survival of the fittest, according to Darwin's half cousin Francis Galton, was assisted if the unfit were helped off the field, or at least discouraged from reproducing. And the distasteful notion that the social reforms to reduce inequalities of fitness were actually an all-round bad thing, got into a lot of places: The British government mostly sitting on its hands as Ireland's potato blight wiped out a million; compulsory (but unashamedly selective) sterilisation programs in the United States less than a century ago, also in Japan (just for the "mentally ill"), and Europe; tying state benefits to vascectomies in Indhira Gandhi's India (which in one state were once proceeding at such a pace as to make its entire male population impotent in a decade). Under Robert McNamara in the 1960s, the Washington based World Bank hitched health care aid for poor countries to conditions of fairly coercive population control. And medical advances had long been seen as a bad thing--if only for inferior races--by the eugenicists. In 1948 ornothologist-turned-population doomsayer William Vogt wrote "the greatest tragedy China could suffer would be a fall in her death rate". One hardly need mention Nazism, of course.
Such views gained particular popularity among the privileged because they simultaneously fed their vanity and absolved them from responsibility for people who supposedly had brought their plight on themselves. But the more liberal minded glommed on to population control too, under the alternative guise of a supposed large scale tragedy of the commons--a planet trashed by too many births--which required their (wise, naturally) corrective action. Nasty stuff across the class/politics spectrum really. Lurking behind all of it was a suspicion that the poor and uneducated would--left to their own devices--breed themselves to oblivion. And it would be too long a wait for them to be enriched and schooled, which they might anyway not do as well as we did.
Worrying about carrying capacity is surely correct, even as policy at times went haywire over eugenics. The green revolution in agriculture probably would not have happened without population bomb fears. Climate change is a necessity that already mothers invention and will galvanise more. But while the spectre of environmental degradation almost certainly does require intervention, innovation and reform, it is far from clear that fertility rates ever did, or that child policy has made a blind bit of difference to its fall. Anywhere.
What has driven this, the author refers to as the reproductive revolution, and it seems to be an inexorable outworking of higher infant survival, less need for manual labour (IE children), and the attendant relative empowerment of females (and these two developments do that by themselves already, regardless of patriarchal social arrangements). This leaves women freer to choose fewer pregnancies, and to be slower in selecting them, and that is what they do. Because they can, rich or poor. In an echo of Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men", male rule of social space and households could not help but collapse as well on an almost worldwide basis (some places obviously ahead of others). There are more young women than men in almost every city on earth. They outnumber males on most university campuses. Social space has been widely feminised. Mr Pearce argues that unless governments, employers, churches, and men reform to accommodate this, fertility will simply keep falling. Today's educated women, whether in London or Lahore, will just choose motherhood (and marriage) less, because there's not so much in it for them. Deng Xiaoping's one child policy was arguably largely an irrelevant bystander in China's fertility fall. Growth wasn't.
Completion of this reproductive revolution--so as to arrest the eventual downward spiral of populations--supposedly includes Scandinavian-style desiderata of highly generous childcare, flexible working, and male partners who do more than most. But the most important thing is the most widely resisted--immigration. The wealthy world needs people, and it isn't producing them any more. The poor world has them, and needs wealth. But what's good enough for goods and capital markets (free movement) is almost nowhere wanted in the same measure for people. This is a huge mistake, the author argues, borne of the same mentality that governed lifeboats on the RMS Titanic, yet which is applied to a situation which is that scenario's polar opposite. Opposition to large scale legal migration is inhumane, highly inefficient (given this book's portrayal of interntional demographics), and deeply counterproductive. Illegal migrants are far less likely than legal ones to contribute as much to a host country, and far less likely to leave it again either. They are also less able to make remittances home. Win-win is turned into lose-lose in comparison. Yet most rich country voters remain hostile to relaxation of borders; and recessions, and refugees harden opposition. If only they did the opposite, importing and exporting people is a clear remedy for both sides of the planet's economic and demographic peoplequake. And stable population wrought by low fertility and low mortality, rather than both being high, mass migration, and a permanent fading of patriarchy, really seems like more of a way forward than a brick wall.
Such as this: worldwide fertility (average number of children per female) actually peaked more than half a century ago. Not that world population is shrinking yet (that may be 25+ years off, and more than 70 million people are still being net added to this planet annually), though there have been days when it has shrunk, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The rate at which population grows by a billion has started slowing down already from its quickest interval of 12 years. Which may not seem like much. But falling total population in due course looks like a near mathematical certainty. Without immigration and on current reproductive trends Germany's native population will fall below Berlin's by 2100 (and apart from the capital, the east is emptying much faster already and most towns there are shrinking) Italy will lose 86% of its population. 26 countries were already shrinking in 2008. Rising life expectancy has delayed this but it can not reverse it. In Russia, falling longevity is chasing declining fertility down. Once the number of potential mothers starts to fall--itself an outcome of low fecundity--then combined with the same lower fertility, this train will apparently be very hard indeed to stop. Or is that re-start?
There are some exceptions where populations are more than replacing themselves; both poor (Afghanistan, Mali) and rich (Israel's Haleda). But almost everywhere there are fewer children per woman than there used to be--fertility is falling. And almost nowhere can policy stop this happening. Iran's clerical revolution probably speeded up its women's preference to bear far fewer kids, even as it was imploring them to have more and more. Myanmar's generals, opposed as they are to any family planning, have not been able to make 40% of university-educated women reproduce. Singaporeans have been too busy getting rich for too many decades to create the next generation, despite state-funded match-making and generous baby bonuses courtesy of Lee Kwan Yew's regime and its successor for decades now. Anti-contraception Catholicism presides over crashing fertility in large parts of Europe. Even in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries with fewest educated women, the birth rate is falling at breakneck speed, if from high levels. Sweatshop workers in Dhaka increasingly see themselves better off without a child. This, collectively, is a massive transformation.
From where does concern about overpopulation arise then? Ever since English vicar Thomas Malthus noticed he was registering more births than deaths two and a quarter centuries ago there has been persistent fear that population would outgrow world carrying capacity. And in several dimensions (topsoil, climate change, water access) this fear looks both true and more real today than then. But long, yet not all that variable lags have hidden the defusing of the population bomb spectacularly well also.
And according to Mr Pearce, a perennial source of Malthusian affliction is not so much adherence to a natural law borne of environmental degradation, but is avowedly eugenic. Survival of the fittest, according to Darwin's half cousin Francis Galton, was assisted if the unfit were helped off the field, or at least discouraged from reproducing. And the distasteful notion that the social reforms to reduce inequalities of fitness were actually an all-round bad thing, got into a lot of places: The British government mostly sitting on its hands as Ireland's potato blight wiped out a million; compulsory (but unashamedly selective) sterilisation programs in the United States less than a century ago, also in Japan (just for the "mentally ill"), and Europe; tying state benefits to vascectomies in Indhira Gandhi's India (which in one state were once proceeding at such a pace as to make its entire male population impotent in a decade). Under Robert McNamara in the 1960s, the Washington based World Bank hitched health care aid for poor countries to conditions of fairly coercive population control. And medical advances had long been seen as a bad thing--if only for inferior races--by the eugenicists. In 1948 ornothologist-turned-population doomsayer William Vogt wrote "the greatest tragedy China could suffer would be a fall in her death rate". One hardly need mention Nazism, of course.
Such views gained particular popularity among the privileged because they simultaneously fed their vanity and absolved them from responsibility for people who supposedly had brought their plight on themselves. But the more liberal minded glommed on to population control too, under the alternative guise of a supposed large scale tragedy of the commons--a planet trashed by too many births--which required their (wise, naturally) corrective action. Nasty stuff across the class/politics spectrum really. Lurking behind all of it was a suspicion that the poor and uneducated would--left to their own devices--breed themselves to oblivion. And it would be too long a wait for them to be enriched and schooled, which they might anyway not do as well as we did.
Worrying about carrying capacity is surely correct, even as policy at times went haywire over eugenics. The green revolution in agriculture probably would not have happened without population bomb fears. Climate change is a necessity that already mothers invention and will galvanise more. But while the spectre of environmental degradation almost certainly does require intervention, innovation and reform, it is far from clear that fertility rates ever did, or that child policy has made a blind bit of difference to its fall. Anywhere.
What has driven this, the author refers to as the reproductive revolution, and it seems to be an inexorable outworking of higher infant survival, less need for manual labour (IE children), and the attendant relative empowerment of females (and these two developments do that by themselves already, regardless of patriarchal social arrangements). This leaves women freer to choose fewer pregnancies, and to be slower in selecting them, and that is what they do. Because they can, rich or poor. In an echo of Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men", male rule of social space and households could not help but collapse as well on an almost worldwide basis (some places obviously ahead of others). There are more young women than men in almost every city on earth. They outnumber males on most university campuses. Social space has been widely feminised. Mr Pearce argues that unless governments, employers, churches, and men reform to accommodate this, fertility will simply keep falling. Today's educated women, whether in London or Lahore, will just choose motherhood (and marriage) less, because there's not so much in it for them. Deng Xiaoping's one child policy was arguably largely an irrelevant bystander in China's fertility fall. Growth wasn't.
Completion of this reproductive revolution--so as to arrest the eventual downward spiral of populations--supposedly includes Scandinavian-style desiderata of highly generous childcare, flexible working, and male partners who do more than most. But the most important thing is the most widely resisted--immigration. The wealthy world needs people, and it isn't producing them any more. The poor world has them, and needs wealth. But what's good enough for goods and capital markets (free movement) is almost nowhere wanted in the same measure for people. This is a huge mistake, the author argues, borne of the same mentality that governed lifeboats on the RMS Titanic, yet which is applied to a situation which is that scenario's polar opposite. Opposition to large scale legal migration is inhumane, highly inefficient (given this book's portrayal of interntional demographics), and deeply counterproductive. Illegal migrants are far less likely than legal ones to contribute as much to a host country, and far less likely to leave it again either. They are also less able to make remittances home. Win-win is turned into lose-lose in comparison. Yet most rich country voters remain hostile to relaxation of borders; and recessions, and refugees harden opposition. If only they did the opposite, importing and exporting people is a clear remedy for both sides of the planet's economic and demographic peoplequake. And stable population wrought by low fertility and low mortality, rather than both being high, mass migration, and a permanent fading of patriarchy, really seems like more of a way forward than a brick wall.
