Approaching Seven Billion: The New International Population Order, a lecture by Joe Chamie, Director of Research, Center for Migration Studies. The human population of Earth quadrupled during this last century. It never happened before and it is very unlikely to happen again. That huge new population has been moving into cities and the cities have grown even faster than the overall population and as of this year more people live in cities than on the farm and villages. The most shocking growth in the last five years has been in India which accounts for 22% of the numerical increase. But even in India there is a rapid demographic transition to lower reproductive rates as the population grows more educated and richer, which recapitulates what happened in the developed countries but much more rapidly. The research shows that women are particularly sensitive to the population reducing effect of the increase in education and monetary income. Another shocker is that Africa which was only one third the population of Europe in 1950 and about the same size now, by 2050 will be three times as populous as Europe. Russia and Pakistan are having a similar population flip. He mentioned considerable worry in the UN community about Pakistan becoming what they call a failed state because they now possess A-bombs and who knows what will happen if the state loses control of those nukes. Another evolving population issue is, who is going to care for the elderly.
Demographic comparison age 65 to age 5 1950-2050
The problem becomes serious when there is a very large percentage of people who are older and need to be cared for by younger people. Above is a worldwide comparison of people at different ages projected into the future. All options for paying for elder care are seemingly very poor ones: raise taxes to pay for the care, lower the benefits to the old people or require the old people, especially women, to keep working for more years before they retire, because they live longer. He didn’t mention the technological fix, which is what Andy Grove is promoting, which is to transfer as much as possible of the care of infirm people to machines which can monitor them and contact doctors and nurses only when they are needed.
Fertility of US women from 1800 to 2000
Over all the fertility of American women has dropped from 8 per woman to only 2 per woman and the population of this country is growing only because of a large foreign immigration. He asked the audience how many people had children and how many children. Only one person had four and of an audience of about 35 well over half had no children at all. I have said in the past that the University of California is a genocide machine but this is the first time I saw people raise their hands to affirm that lonely prediction.
After the lecture I had a chance to talk to Dr. Chamie for several minutes and after a few general comments about past population crashes based on resource depletion such as has happened repeatedly in various places like Iraq I got to what was most pressing—the coming population collapse after the Doomsday events. He acknowledged the possibility of such an event but said that in their field it is such an imponderable that they simply ignore it and make various assumptions about things continuing the way they seem to be going within the parameters which they address. When I brought up the four Earth Ark proposals, which I sketched out in a sentence or two, he seemed to be interested, or at least he wasn’t so offended that he wouldn’t listen, as has happened elsewhere sometimes. Because he had worked with the United Nations for 30 years as a population person he would have known if anything approaching any of these ideas had been suggested. But the only things which he acknowledged were the various seed and animal sperm banks. Therefore, it appears that if anything is to be done along the lines of saving humanity from Doomsday the field is open and if it isn’t filled humanity will suffer more grievously than it needs to.
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Filed under: Health, policy, survival | Tagged: human population, Population growth, Population policy, Six billion and growing
[...] to copy its success. It is curious to see this so blatantly when just a few days ago I was in a Cal-Berkeley audience which was asked how many children they had and more than half of the fifty year old people had no [...]