How To Achieve Zero Population Growth
Sun August 10th, 2003 19:19 MSTIn his excellent article on the Left Wing origins of Eugenics, Jon Ray quotes an author who says: “Rising living standards and rising populations go hand-in-hand.”
This temporal correlation is more coincidental than causal (with the caveat that rising living standards in the west have resulted in improvements in medical science, causing reduced infant death rates in poor countries).
Rather, the important trend is that rising living standards leads to reduced population growth. Thus the ZPG’ers should be advocating free market capitalism for the world… as people get more prosperous, they have fewer kids.
Also, as infant mortality rates decline, so does the rate of population increase, but there is a lag which results in a temporary population growth bulge.
Bucky Fuller was successfully outspoken about this exact population vs. development from the 50’s through the 80s. I quote from an essay of 1966:
“In the USA, though there was an increase in the post-war birth rate between 1947 and 1954, since then it has declined. This trend is also evident in all the industrialized countries, including Russia. During the last twelve years then the birth rate has been declining in the industrialized countries, yet the main problem is thought to be population increase. The cause of the bulge in census population of these countries is, of course, that more people are living longer. But the underlying reality of the population problem, if there is a problem it is that as we industrialize, the rate of births decrease. We may see this most clearly in, for example, the US, where the early settlers had an average of thirteen children per family and survival rate was very poor. We may then plot the decrease in number of children per family against improvement in technological services, public health, indoor water supply, bathrooms, refrigeration, general improvement in life expectancy, and so on. Clearly, as man industrializes and improves the probability of human survival, whatever the drives or controls of nature are, she does not have to have anywhere as many birth ’starts’. This is one of the fundamental points about industrialization.”
From here.
If anyone thinks the US birth rate has declined, he is has been in a coma in the past 20 years.
For twenty years, I have been studying birth rate just by watching my colleagues, my friends, and people in the news. Have you noticed that every time they mention some in news, the description is always “mother (or father) of 4 (or more)?”. How often do you hear something like “mother (or father of one (or two)”, or “a childless person”? I notice most of my colleagues have 3 or more children (and they have pretty good income.) On every gathering in my company, I would secretly take an average of children per person. My conclusion is 2.6 - and this is largely due to people who are still single (I can’t exclude them just because they are 24 or 44 and still show no prospect of marriage), and some people of my generation who have one or zero children. If not because of us, the children per person probably will be at least 3. And anything number over 2 will cause a huge population growth within 30 years.
By the way, do you know there is a small window in the 80’s when Carl Sagan would go on TV to speak for ZPG and many people chose to have no kids to save the environment? Many of my friends are from that generation. We have either one or zero child. I’m immensely proud of my generation.
I really resent any effort to change the subject of ‘population control’ to ‘economic fairness’ or ‘how to eliminate world poverty’. It is a very long detour to fix the population problem. To me, to eliminate poverty, the first thing is to have fewer kids. The reason is so simple. The more children you have, the poorer you are, even in the US, even you make $100k a year. There is no reason for me to help anyone if he wants to have more than 2 kids. My sister is poor, and she only has one child. That’s very commendable. If you can’t afford them, don’t have them.
The Americans are having too many children. We have much higher birth rate than Asians and Europeans. I have seen so many self-proclaimed American environmentalists who have more than 3 children (e.g., Al Gore, who has 5). Having children is no more a personal right than polluting the environment. If a person can have 5 children just because he can afford them, then I can live in an eight thousand square feet mansion and drive a hummer or cut down all the trees I want just because I feel like it.
For any American, having one child will cause more environmental damage than all the bad environmentally unsound things I can do. Imagine, a person has minimum usage of energy. He lives in a house, not a cave. He uses heater, A/C and refrigirator. He drives a car to work, rather than riding a bicycle. He will drink coke - which is transported by a big truck and cooled in the refrigirator, and its can is made of aluminum, which is hard to recycle. And when he grows up, he will be married and have more children who live this American life style. The envoronmental impact this person causes is infinite.
If you really support ZPG, please visit http://www.vhemt.org/. What we need is a voluntary human extinction movement. Any other idea is futile and worthless.
Elaine,
Your arguments are what are called “anecdotal” - which is to say, of no value whatsoever in making generalizations. There may indeed be a local maximum in birth rate around you, but the US birth rate is approximately the rate required to maintain the current population (2.1 children per woman per lifetime).
If you compare this to the birthrates in 2nd, 3rd and 4th world countries, it is quite low.
Your solution (”have more kids”) doesn’t work unless you choose to revoke a basic human right (which, in fact, you do). In order for your situation to work, we would need a population police with worldwide enforcement powers forcing women to have abortions, and even killing their unauthorized children. This is a practice followed in China. If you support such a practice, I suggest you move there and enjoy the other repressions which occur with such a policy.
People choose to have many children in poor countries for two reasons: (1) with a higher infant mortality rate, they need to have more children in order to assure that some will grow up; (2) because they have a lack of economic conditions to allow for retirement plans, they need children who can earn enough (or produce enough food) for themselves and their parents when the parents get too old.
As far as Americans go, we are having just enough children to maintain our population. That you consider this too many is your opinion. I consider it too few. Those who choose to not have the replacement number of children are voluntarily removing their genes from the gene pool. If you think you are above average intelligence, then you are decreasing the average intelligence of the human race. In any case, to the extent that silly utopian reasoning is genetic (and there is evidence that some of it is, surprisingly), people who believe like you do will eventually cease to exist. The rest of us will inherit the earth (except that I only have one child, wish I could have had more).
Finally, anyone who wants a voluntary human extinction movement is either insane or part of a crazy cult. Why should we drive ourselves extinct?
I have read the silly writings of many deep environmentalists, and yours is certainly out there. For you to say that people have no right to decide the number of children they have is simply wrong.
If you want the human race extinct, my question would be why? Why protect the environment if there is nobody to enjoy it?
good for students
John has the perfect solution, everyone should have 10 children and overpopulate the earth. This is the perfect way to voluntarily eliminate the human population. May the cockroaches inherit the earth.
It was mentioned above that “Those who choose to not have the replacement number of children are voluntarily removing their genes from the gene pool. If you think you are above average intelligence, then you are decreasing the average intelligence of the human race.” My speculation is that the majority of people who voluntarily remove their genes from the pool in this manner are indeed far more intelligent than those who propagate like a colony of bacteria. (By design, the default biological imperative is, to quote Lard, “MATE, SPAWN and DIE”, and it takes more thought and conviction to resist this impulse than it does to indulge in it.) Furthermore, “average intelligence” doesn’t mean a whole lot when consideration is given to just how short-sighted and maliciously ignorant the “average (American) person” is. If smart people are indeed removing themselves from the gene pool en mass, perhaps it is because they feel society no longer values them. The days of the philosopher king are long dead, and modern times are proving to be the heyday of wanton stupidity. If by the smart ones not breeding, the stupids become collectively stupider, so be it. I for one don’t have enough faith in humanity to waste my time, effort and energy embarked in the futile pursuit of attempting to change the tides. My misanthropic contempt for our species as a whole aside, based on the experience I have had growing up between 1980-now in Silicon Valley, one of the hotbeds of western civilization, I shutter just thinking of actively bringing an even moderately intelligent life into the world such as it is. If by refusing to bring more life into existence I can prevent another from suffering such as I have suffered, that alone is more than enough to justify my rebellion against our outmoded instincts. If I somehow speed humanity’s demise by depriving it of the person who “cures cancer” or accomplished whatever other clichéd scientific/medical advancement, all the better. All I know is that in keeping true to the idea of existential authenticity, I must be the change I wish to see in the world, and that change is no more people.
Below replacement birth levels are a result of a complex of factors, none of which involve the reasoning you give.
In fact, I would say your reasoning is sick, so to the extent that sickness is genetic, you are removing it from the race.
And, of course, Silicon Valley is hardly typical of ther human race or America. It is a significant departure, in fact.
Get a grip on life, two wrongs don’t make a right!! Just because a person has multiple children does not mean that a person should be able to go cut down all the trees they want. Although that is being done as well, maybe that is a good place to focus some attention
Chopping down trees is great exercise. If you own the trees, chop as many as you want.
I don’t know of any wrong attached to chopping down trees.
Do you worship trees or something?