I had seen the January issue of National Geographic for sale a few times around town, but there is a little second hand book store that I go to every month where I can buy the previous month’s issue for a deeply discounted price. However, this time they did not have it available and so I finally relented and bought a copy online to be delivered.
I especially wanted this issue because I knew that they were running a story on the world’s population, something that I am very interested in. To my happiness I found out that this article was just part of a series that the magazine will do this year as the world approaches the birth of the 7 billionth person sometime late this year.
The story itself was interesting, but mainly just confirmed a lot of things that I had already learned from other sources. What it really did was open up a discussion between Aya and I about children. We have talked about having children and we plan to soon, but the issue is really how many and whose? Of course, they will be our children, but there is a question of if we want that to be biologically so or not.
As the world’s population swells it brings a number of environmental questions forward which is really why I am interested in population issues. Obviously more people equals more consumption of goods and more consumption of goods mean more of the planet’s resources must be used to make those goods and more waste is produced as a result.
Food and the resources used to produce it will sky rocket in use. Not only this, but as people become more wealthy their diet often turns to more meat consumption and that means much more water and grains used to produce that meat. Every pound of meat requires many pounds of grain and 600 gallons of water must be used (an average, beef is more, goat is less). Common sense will tell you that grain takes much less. Think of how many more people could be fed off of the grain and water than could be fed with the pound of meat. Now multiply that by a few hundred million.
Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would vastly outpace food production and at the root he was right, but thanks to the efforts of the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug the impending train wreck between population and food was averted for a time. However, we are facing it again. Norman’s goal was to produce crops that yielded more food per acre/plant in order to eliminate starvation. It pretty much worked, but could not continue to work. The simple reason is that the world’s population did not stand still. People did not think to reduce growth rates to coincide with food production. When less people starved more people had babies. Somehow the connection gets lost. This means that while crop yields grew so did numbers of people. All this wouldn’t matter too much except for the one factor we can’t improve on greatly. That is our planet, its arable land, its clean water, its natural resources and ecosystems.
As medicine and nutrition have improved life spans have increased dramatically, basically doubling in developed countries within the past few hundred years so that the traditional population pyramid became more top heavy. In developed countries, the number of centenarians is increasing at approximately 7% per year, which means doubling the centenarian population every decade, pushing it from some 455,000 in 2009 to 4.1 million in 2050. Japan is a great example of this.
The neat thing is that once countries became developed their growth rates declined. Most of the countries you can think of as developed nations have a negative growth rate. However, most of the countries you think of as developing nations are not necessarily the environmental plagues of the world. Although human numbers do add strains to environments it is also the habits of those people. Those in the developed world consume far more per capita in terms of goods than those in a developing country. So that begs the question, who is more environmentally irresponsible? Is it the person in the developed nation with 2 kids or the person in the developing country with 5?
These things all lead me to the question of, should I have children? How many? Whose should they be? Now before I pose the next batch of questions lets assume that I desire to have children, which I do, and that I want to be as good to the planet and everyone on it now and in the future, which I do.
The questions tumble out; if I wanted to be environmentally friendly I would have no children? The world will go on after I am gone, why should I add to its problems by having another mouth to feed, cloth, educate, and comfort? Would not my energies be better spent helping the people who are alive now? Would not I be better off helping a child who has already been born, but is not wanted? Should I adopt a child? If I adopt a child thinking environmentally I should adopt one from an area of the world with a similar consumption habit to the one I live in right? Otherwise I will be raising a child who would have consumed less in a lifetime I a developing society to a society in which they would consume more, correct?
However, they would not be my biological child and I have to assume that part of my desire to have children is to have one of my own. Yes, there is a degree of selfishness in all of this. Despite all my concerns for the future of our species as a whole I also have a bit of concern for myself. The fountain of youth is not in the Florida everglades, it is in the genes you pass on to your kids. I should have just as much right as anyone else to do so, but I can’t get past the idea that on an intellectual level I am betraying my principles to quench my emotional desires.
However, I have my other half and it takes two to tango so I am pretty sure that we will have at least one biological child of our own. Not to mention that Japan, a country with a rapidly shrinking population, offers a hefty monetary incentive to have a child. I can’t be certain, but it looks to be in the neighborhood of 8,000 dollars in payments and benefits. Many other countries are doing the same thing in an effort to create a boon of young workers to support their aging society.
As most people in the developing world I think we will stop with one child to ensure that we can devote as much time and money to the upbringing of that child as we can. However, the question of adoption then is still on the table. If we were to adopt a child from a similarly well off country would we be tipping the scales any more than had already occurred? I think the answer is no. I can assume a certain degree of consumption and actually the child might consume less in a household with environmentally conservative parents.
Once the world population creeps past the 7.25 billion mark my child should be entering the population pool. I guess the only real question is, will they be using the buddy system.
12 comments:
Bunch of stuff here I have an opinion about--I'll be adding to this comment later.
Most of your concerns about having children have to do with the "externality" on other people. Your argument is essentially that another person is another drain on already scarce resources, so every person added to the world makes the others a little worse off. I have the opposite opinion. I think there is a positive externality associated with having a child. Every person added to the world is another person that might have an idea which will improve others lives. Every person added to the world is another person that might be a great friend or a great partner for someone who already exists. People are resources themselves! New people create opportunities for existing people.
An extremely common environmental fallacy is that growth is driven mainly by increased resource extraction. In fact, most growth comes from ideas which serve to improve use of existing resources (for example, see the Simon-Erlich wager). We don't live in a Malthusian world. The most important resource today is ideas, and more people means more ideas.
I am, however, ambivalent about the ethics of having (biological) children. While I believe that having a child has a positive externality on others, I it may have a negative effect on the child himself. Basically, life can be very painful. Is existence really preferable to non-existence? Very few people think about this before having children.
Ok Dave, but the negative externalities of consuming more resources is guaranteed and the positive externalities of having a good idea or being a good partner is not. They could just as easily be a terrible stupid person who contributes nothing to society.
Your second point I get, which is why I included Borlaug and the reference to the green revolution, it was in fact his work/ideas that spurred that extra growth. The same resources, land, was being used to actually produce more. The important thing to remember is that Borlaugs only come along so often while people come along pretty regularly.
Third point, I would agree. We like to think of life as a nice thing, but for some first worlders and many third worlders maybe it isn't.
We care about the "expected" externality associated with having a child, right? I guess the point I am trying to make is that I think the expected positive externality of having a child is much larger than the expected negative externality.
I just don't think there is a good reason to believe that resources will become "too scarce" in the near future. For over 200 years, technological advances have in effect made resources more plentiful even as populations have exploded (new energy sources have been discovered, older sources are used more efficiently, more efficient production of almost everything--think of the energy that went into making a pencil in the 18th century vs today). Why should we expect this trend to suddenly stop, even as technological change seems to be speeding up while the world population growth rate is slowing down?
Its not so much the boom in population, though I don't like that, I enjoy open spaces, not crowded one (it makes me depressed, perhaps another negative externality of population growth. Then again most people like a crowd). The extra people will mostly be coming from the have nots. The growth rate of developed places like the U.S., Japan, most of Europe, etc. is decling, but that of the more developing nations is not.
The extra people won't be consuming the same amount of energy, they will consume more as their standard of living increases even if technology makes production of goods more efficient. Even if they consume goods more efficiently, which they will, the net gain of consumption and pressures added to our planet is large.
PS, how are you putting links into your comments? I can't seem to figure out how to do that. I wanted to include this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Population_growth_rate_world_2005-2010_UN.PNG
and this http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html
I saw you wanted to make a link to a talk by Hans Rosling. I love his gapminder website. There isn't a better way to visualize the improvement of the human situation over the last 200 years. I just don't understand why the trend is on the verge of stopping.
I am using html tags to include links. This website has the code I use.
I like Rosling too, have watched all of his speeches on TED. I would say not that we have reached the end of innovation, that will go on and on and on. I think there are two things that make me think its not going to save us. First, in the past if a human destroyed his environment he could move on. New ideas didn't work out? No problem, lets go somewhere else. That option isn't open anymore (unless we improve our options for space). The other thing is that the human population growth has been speeding up, sure, it will start to level off after 2050, I hope, but until then we are still expanding into unchartered waters and lightning speed. I'm not confident that the pace of innovation can keep up with the pace of births.
The world was pretty much settled by 1900. There were about 1.7 billion people around, and the per capital income (in 1990 dollars) was about 1600 dollars a year. In 2000 there were about 6 billion people, and the world per capita income was about 7000 (1990) dollars a year. How do you explain that?
Also, world population growth is slowing down, not speeding up!
I'm not saying its speeding up, that came out wrong. What I meant is that it has sped up quite fast and though it appears to be slowing down, the total will be drastically more. Although we have 7 billion people alive today I don't think innovation has adequately provided for them. Even if we do come up with more innovative ways to discover and use our planet’s resources the fact remains that we are using them.
I am saying that it seems the total amount of people by 2050 will put enormous pressures on the earth, even with innovation, and it is my understanding/feeling that there is enough strain on the earth already. Technically the earth could support much morethan 9 billion, but who wants to live in that world? Sure they can eat, have shelter, etc. but what life is that? Is adding more people to the planet in that way a good thing? Like you said, life can be painful, especially for those with little access to the niceties of life.
Also, those pretty much settled areas by 1900 did not have the same types of problems we have now. They were settled first because they offered some sort of advantage over somewhere else, most likely fertile land and easy access to water. That is no longer true and though we have more land that we can tap it is much less able to support people, but here again I guess you would say “innovation!” That land is also part of ecosystems that we depend on and if we continue to expand arable land those ecosystems shrink.
We are getting pretty big now which means nature is having a harder time rebounding. We either have to innovate our way out or get smaller/even out. Maybe both, but to me getting smaller/evening out seems like, at least, a much more desirable outcome. We know what the earth is like at 5,6,7 billion people. We don’t know what its like at 9 billion. We can hope for innovation to fix problems we know will occur. However, I am also concerned about the things that we don’t know we don’t know. What new problems will arise and is it worth the risk?
sorry dave, I didn't answer your question. I will get to it soon, its been a busy day.
"In 2000 there were about 6 billion people, and the world per capita income was about 7000 (1990) dollars a year. How do you explain that?"
Economies of scale? :)
Dave, these are a bit old, but I know you dig Krugman, and he is on my side, sort of. He has two articles I came across this weekend while looking for articles directly talking about technological advancement and growth of gdp. It is such a simple concept, yet I did not find an article that was terribly interesting. Any ideas?
Running Out of Planet to Exploit and Limits to Growth and Related Stuff.
This was a very interesting topic. It is true that the more people that exist the less resources we may have. Unfortunately, we cannot say for a fact that resources will become scarce if the population happens to increase. There is a possibility that someone will find a way to fix the resource problem.
But let's say that there won't be a person to fix this problem in the future. Then we can say that having a child biologically may be unethical.
I wrote a paper on the ethics of having children. I believe the reasoning of having a child can determine if having a child is ethical or not. I believe that if a reason does not benefit the child then having a child is unethical. So let's say I wanted to have a child because I wanted to experience parenthood. That would be a selfish reason for me to have a child. Then therefore, unethical.
Anyway, I thought about population while writing this paper. Even if the reason of having a child was to give the child happiness, it would somehow be unethical. The more people that exist, the less that each person can receive. So as more and more people come into our world, it makes each individual lead less satisfying lives.
I think people should be more aware of this because there are plenty of children in the world who don't even have parents. I believe adoption should be promoted and it seems like a better choice for the people already existing in today's world.
Post a Comment