Bruce W. Jones
The connections between death, technology and the population
explosion may not be obvious at first, but think about it for a
moment. Our technology, especially our medical advances, have
helped us to prolong life. The old diseases and plagues that
helped to limit the size of the human race have been either
overcome, or their severity has been reduced significantly.
Infant mortality has dropped drastically. Many other countries
have done a better job at this than the United States, but our
infant mortality statistics are improving, too. What that means
is that more and more of the people who are born live long enough
to produce children of their own.
Population is an issue of technology for at least three reasons.
1. Technology has allowed us to live longer, so that our numbers
have increased.
2. Our technological lifestyles mean that each one of us has more
impact on the environment than our ancestors did. We consume
more resources, both renewable and non-renewable. We eat more
and wear out our clothes faster, and we use up more of the
world's supply of oil and iron. We also have greater impact on
the environment in the sense that we leave behind more plastic
bags, glass bottles and nonbiodegradable waste.
3. Population is a technological issue in the way we think about
it. We have come to expect technology to solve the problems for
us.
The subject of population growth is firmly linked to death and
technology.
And US population is increasing dramatically. All of us are
aware of these changes, but we have not really begun, yet, to
think about all the implications.
For most of the history of the world, having more children was a
good thing. You needed more hands to help you do the work on the
farm. You needed children who would take care of you in your old
age. Today, that is no longer true, at least in the more
developed parts of the world. Today, we have nearly 6 billion
people in the world, and the number grows by almost 100 million
each year.
Population growth is perhaps the most pervasive and least
recognized problem in the world. No one writes editorials about
it. Political parties do not put it in their platforms. And
yet, it affects every other problem we must deal with. Almost
every problem I can think of is either worsened or made
insolubable if our world population continues to grow at its
present rate. And we are doing virtually nothing to reduce that
rate.
In my opinion, urban violence is partly a result of overcrowding
in our cities. If that is true, then longer jail terms will not
help. Building more prisons will not help. Continuing our
futile war on drugs will not help. It is what I call the "baby
chick" phenomenon. If you put too many baby chickens in an
enclosed space, they will start pecking each other. Human beings
react the same way. It is not that complicated to understand,
but no one is talking about it.
There are only three variables that affect population size:
For most of the history of the world, mortality kept the
other two factors under control. All of that changed when we
began to find new ways to extend the human lifespan.
Actually,
the most important factor was the reduction in infant mortality.
Eighty-year-old women do not have babies, but any child who
survives long enough to bear children of her own can add to the
world population.
During the baby boom era, from 1947 to 1964, American women
averaged between 3 and 4 live births. World War II also brought
a host of new wonder drugs and improvement in medical care, so
that most of those children grew up to become adults to produce
children of their own.
It is hard to talk about the population problem, because almost
everything that can be said is politically incorrect. People use
code-words to disguise their prejudices, so that we do not even
have a common vocabulary any more with which to discuss our
differences. Words mean different things to different persons.
Any discussion about birth rate is clouded by conflicts over
abortion.
People will suspect you of having a hidden agenda. One one
side, many pro-life activists equate family planning with
abortion, or at least they are opposed to both. Pro-life people
may fear that family planning is just a cover for pushing
abortion on demand. On the other side, some feminists say that a
woman's choice to bear children is absolute, and no one should
meddle with it.
Discussion of immigration is made difficult because of the
pervasive racism in America. Almost any statement in favor of
limiting immigration can be interpreted as racist, and some of
those statements may have been intended as racist. I am sure
that some of the people who want to limit immigration into the
United States have racist motives, but is that true for all of
them? I don't think so.
Those who talk about reducing birthrates within the US may also
have racist motives, because the highest birthrates, currently,
are among African-Americans and Hispanics. Do they really want
to reduce all birthrates, or just reduce the non-white
birthrates? And, at the same time, it would be a great tragedy
to ignore the population problem because of those fears.
Actually, birthrates are more a function of education than race.
Among American women who are not high school graduates, there is
a big gap between whites and non-whites. The gap narrows among
high-school graduates, and by the time you get to those with one
year of college, there is only a slight difference between whites
and blacks and Hispanics.
Third-world countries show a similar dynamic. Poor and
uneducated women want very large families. As they have more
education, they marry later, and they have fewer children
throughout their lifetimes. Often the change is more dramatic in
developing countries than in the US.
I keep mentioning countries outside the US, because I don't
think we can solve this problem by isolating ourselves from the
rest of the world. We could not seal off our borders, even if we
wanted to. The AIDS virus did not need a passport to enter the
US.
We depend so much on world trade to provide jobs for Americans
that it would be impossible for us to isolate ourselves. If we
reduce population growth here, while the rest of the world keeps
growing, we are asking for trouble. If there is an explosion
from starving people in Mexico or Asia, all of us will suffer.
Demographers talk about the concept of CARRYING CAPACITY. By
carrying capacity they mean the ability of a region to support a
given population. How many persons can the land carry? What is
the number of people that can live in a given region before the
quality of life begins to decline? At the most basic level, can the region produce enough food to
feed the people who live there?
Carrying capacity also includes the impact on the environment.
Can we dispose of the garbage from all our population? Can we
build enough houses without destroying the farmland we need to
grow crops?
Egypt provides an example of problems with carrying capacity.
Throughout its history, Egypt has been very fertile, but almost
all the food is grown just a few miles from the Nile River. The
country is doing a very good job of increasing the amount of
agricultural land, mainly by bringing irrigation water to land
that was formerly barren. However, they are finding that people
are building houses on the existing farmland just as fast as new
acreage is being irrigated. The net result is that the amount of
land under cultivation is not changing.
We have seen something like that in California. We have long
been one of the major agricultural producers in the country,
especially here in the San Joaquin Valley. Then, as people have
migrated from the cities and built houses on farmland, farmers
have felt squeezed. For us, competition for water has been one
of the first signs of conflict. Water that is diverted to cities
cannot be used to grow crops.
The US is one of the foremost agricultural countries in the
world. The food that we export to other countries is a major
contributor to our national economy, and our standard of living
would be much lower without it. Export of food currently brings
in $155 per capita to the U.S. David Pimentel of Cornell
predicts that we will no longer be exporting food after 2025.
The amount of available water is declining, and each year more
farmland is lost to urbanization and erosion.
If our population continues to increase, we will need all of our
available agricultural resources to feed our own people. That is
fine; we won't starve. But notice: We will have lost a major
source of national income, so that our trade deficit will be much
worse than it is now. And what will those people eat who are
buying food from us now?
Again, the problem is international in scope.
A report released in February 1995 to the American Association
for the Advancement of Science predicted that the same process
would have a strong impact on the American diet. We would not
have as much meat or dairy products as we do now, because it
takes more land and water to produce them. Instead, we will be
eating beans and grains, more pasta, more potatoes, with fewer
choices in the vegetables we eat. That may be a healthier diet,
but we are not accustomed to having fewer choices available to
us.
The American Farmland Trust (AFT) projects that at present rates
of growth, Central Valley population will grow from 4 million
today to 12 million by 2040. Kern County's share would go from
550,000 to almost 2 million. Our local population would more
than triple in less than 50 years. AFT is concerned that these
new people will live in houses built on farmland, and that our
major industry would lose $1 billion a year ($5.3 for whole
valley).
The three US counties with the largest agricultural production
are Fresno, Kern and Tulare. The value of Kern County produce
would drop from $2.5 billion (in 1994) to $1.5 within 45 years.
We currently average three houses to an acre in new
developments, and people are reluctant to reduce that, because a
big house with a large yard is part of the American dream.
Farmers, apparently, are not as worried about the loss of land as
much as the loss of water.
Government officials are worried about the impact on taxes and
government expenses. Farmland produces a lot of tax revenue
with relatively little demand for services. When the farmland is
converted to residences, there would be some increase in property
values, but even more increase in demand for schools, fire
protection and police. The American Farmland Trust report
estimates that taxpayers would need to come up with an additional
$83 million per year to provide services to the new residents.
Carrying capacity can also include more intangible issues. As
the population grows, there will be more cars on the road.
Freeways must be expanded. Traffic slows down as more and more
cars use the freeways. Will people be able to visit the beaches
and national parks whenever they want to?
Some of our resources are finite, like the amount of oil under
the ground. What will we do when it is gone?
In 1994, for the first time in US history, we imported more than
half of the oil we use. Our dependence on the Middle East may
force us to continue fighting expensive wars there to guarantee
our fuel supply.
The US has petroleum underground equal to 16 times our annual
rate of consumption. If we currently depend on imports for 50%
of our petroleum, we should not run out for another 32 years.
Also, there is probably more oil under the ground that we have
not found yet, and we can reduce our consumption by improving our
conservation practices, so it will probably take much more than
32 years for us to run out of oil. However, at some point we
will. When we do, we will be totally dependent on other
countries for a major part of our energy resources. All of
those questions are relevant for the concept of carrying
capacity.
We have lived so long with the firm belief that a growing
population was an advantage that it is almost a heresy to
question that. Generals needed soldiers for their armies. A
growing economy is a healty economy, and we continually need new
workers and new consumers in order for the economy to keep
expanding. I don't know of any major economist who wants the
economy to shrink. The idea is unthinkable. Yet, we need to
question it.
It is possible for the earth to support its nearly 6 billion
inhabitants right now, because most of them have a very low
standard of living, compared to the US. All of them would like
to have the wealth of food, automobiles, health care that we
enjoy. But, of course, that would mean an even greater demand on
the finite resources of the earth. And that is happening.
The US has 5% of the world's population, and it uses 25% of the
world's energy. By contrast, India has 16% of the population
and uses 3% of the energy.
Every country in the world wants to raise the standard of living
of its citizens, and they should. However, if they are even
moderately successful, they will vastly increase the pollution in
the world and will hasten the depletion of non-renewable
resources. The economies of much of Asia and Latin America are
growing faster than our economies. They have not caught up with
us yet, but they are gaining.
During most of the history of the world, the pace of change was
much slower than it is currently, the rate of change of all
kinds. In this century, our worldwide use of energy, chemicals,
fertilizer has increased sharply, much faster, even, than the
increase in population. Prior to this century, the increases
were pretty gradual. Even for the first half of this century,
all the increases are relatively slow. The curves go up more
sharply in the second half.
Population itself did not increase as much as our use of energy
and chemicals and fertilizers. Each one of us drives more cars
and burns more energy than our grandparents did. We have 150%
more cars on the road than we did in 1960. And that increases
the rates of contamination much faster than the rate of
population growth. However, the number of automobiles is
increasing even more dramatically in developing countries. In
just a few years, they have moved from a situation in which
hardly anyone had a car. Now, a larger proportion of the
population has that option. Smog and transportation bottlenecks
are no longer a monopoly of the west.
The disappearances of forests is not just a problem for spotted
owls; it is a problem for loggers and carpenters and homeowners.
We try to replant our forests, but we use up lumber and paper
faster than we can grow new trees.
Let me cite some figures, quickly, for the US: The harvest of
oysters from Chesapeake Bay has been reduced by 99%. Salmon
fishermen in the Northwest are going out of business, because
salmon are becoming more scarce. Some of the fish from the Great
Lakes contain cancers when they are caught. Others are inedible
because of mercury poisoning. We draw 25% more water from the
ground each year than nature can replace; wells must go deeper
and deeper.
We lose 3 billion tons of topsoil to erosion every year. Our
cities generate twice as much solid waste as they did in 1960; it
is more difficult to find landfill space to dispose of our
garbage.
Japan has a more serious disposal problem than we do, because
they are so much more crowded. They have adopted a vigorous
recycling program, but they can only recycle 50% of their waste.
In the US, when you add in industrial waste, we average 50 tons
per person, per year. I find that very hard to imagine, much
less believe. Two percent of that is considered hazardous
waste.
The US is one of the richest agricultural lands in the world.
For over 40 years, we have been able to increase our grain
production by more than 2.5% per year. That should make us
optimistic, but the increase in production has been possible
because of an increased use of water, chemical fertilizers and
pesticides, and machinery and fossil fuels, which add to the
pollution problem. Insects
develop resistance to our chemicals, and our ground water is
becoming more poisoned.
On a worldwide basis, the rate of increase in food production is
dropping. It is still increasing, but not as fast as it was a
few years ago.
World grain production is increasing about 1 per cent each year,
but population is increasing by 2 per cent. Those figures,
alone, would lead to eventual catastrophe, even if there were no
other changes.
The 2000 census counted 281.5 million Americans. Our first
census was taken in 1790, when there were about 4 million
Americans. Now, the Census Bureau estimates that we will be half
a billion by the middle of the 21st century.
Remember, population depends both on birth rates, death rates and
rates of immigration. We could reduce our total population
growth if we restricted immigration OR if we reduced the birth
rate. [No one is suggesting that we increase the death rate.]
The current birthrate for American women is approximately 2.0,
that is, an average of two children per woman. At that rate, the
population would be pretty stable, provided we had zero
immigration, but no one is suggesting zero immigration, so far as
I know.
Could we reduce the birthrate to less than 2.0? Some women
choose to have no children or they are unable to have children,
so a birthrate of 2.0 means that many women are having more than
two children. If we could encourage all women to stop at two
children, the average would be even lower. However, it is hard
to do that in a free society. There are few choices more
private, more personal, than the number of children to have.
However, we could make some small changes.
Both our past welfare policies and our current income tax
policies have the unintended effect of subsidizing more babies.
No one ever talks about the deduction for dependents in the
income tax code. We were willing to talk about smaller families
for the poor, by reforming welfare laws, but no one wants to
suggest smaller families for the middle class or the rich. Under
our present system, the more children you have, the less income
tax you pay. The 2003 tax cuts increased that incentive with a
$1,000 tax credit, per child.
There is a certain prima facie fairness to such policies; it
costs money to raise children. However, if we were serious
about reducing family size, we would give tax breaks only for the
first child or maybe the first two. No politician would dare
suggest that, but we may need to do something like that if we are
serious about slowing growth. I have three children, so I have
to admit that I am part of the problem.
The other part of the equation is immigration. There is
tremendous pressure for the US to admit more immigrants. We take
pride in the fact that we are a nation of immigrants and that we
have been a haven for refugees. Two of my grandparents were
immigrants, and the other two were children of immigrants.
Is it fair for us to pull up the drawbridge behind ourselves?
And how do we balance fairness with the mathematical realities?
I have been suspicious of some of the current political attacks
on immigrants, but the other side of the coin is that we do not
have room for everyone who wants to come. In my opinion, any
solution will have to consider population at the world level.
I think it is short-sighted to focus on the problem of US
immigration and ignore the rest of the world. We are not
isolated or separate. Even if we wanted to build a wall around
us to seal us off from the rest of the world, that would be
impossible. There is too much travel going on, too much world
trade, to make that realistic. As long as there have been human
beings in the world, we have been a mobile species, going back to
the Old Stone Age. If we sealed ourselves off, but the rest of
the world continued to grow and expand, it would only be a matter
of time before the pressures would implode in on us, and we would
be overrun.
In 1994, there was a population conference in Cairo, sponsored by
the United Nations, the UN International Conference on Population
and Development (Sept. 5-13). The Cairo conference produced a
strange alliance between the pope and several Muslim countries,
in conflict with other developing countries and feminists.
According to Roman Catholic doctrine, birth control is a serious
sin, and many Muslims oppose it, as well.
The discussion almost derailed into a fight about abortion and
women's rights, so that other issues received less attention.
The feminist position was that women all over the world would
have fewer children if women had more power. If women could have
education and jobs, they would choose to have fewer children.
There is truth to that, because we know that fertility drops as
standards of living rise and as educational levels rise.
However, the older non-governmental organizations that have been
working on population control for a long time argued that there
are many, many women -- rich and poor -- who do not have access
to birth control. They want it, in many instances, but cannot
afford it.
There was a strange kind of irony at the conference. It was
supposed to be a conference on population and development, but
virtually nothing was said about population growth. It is well
and good, the critics said, to raise the status of women, but in
the meantime, they will continue having babies.
To mention Egypt again, I was struck when I was there at how
much the country had done to raise people's welfare. The Aswan
Dam is an amazing project that produced both water for irrigation
and electric power. The value of the electricity alone repaid
the cost of the dam in just a few years. That made it possible
not only for people to have electricity in their homes, but it
allowed the construction of new factories and the creation of
jobs. The irrigation water made it possible to transform desert
into farmland.
What was the result? The standard of living for the poorest
people, perhaps for the majority, continued to decline. Why?
Because population growth was in a race with the growth in the
economy, and the population was winning.
United Nations demographers have made a series of projections,
based on different assumptions. One scenario asks what will
happen if nothing changes, if we keep on growing at the present
rates?
They say that by the year 2150, at present rates, there will be
694 billion people in the world. Of course, that is absurd.
That is more than 100 times present population. If we divide up
all the ice-free land in the world, including deserts, mountains,
cities, freeways, each person would have about 2,000 square feet,
roughly an area 45 by 45 feet. We would have to grow all our
food on that, and build houses and roads.
We would never reach that point, because we would have
starvation and famines and probably wars. But the question is,
can we find a way to keep that from happening without starvation
and war?
Most of us would reject dictatorship and totalitarian solutions,
and the right to have children seems one of the most basic, most
fundamental human rights. However, in the third world, in
developing countries, most parents want large families. Girls
marry at an early age, and may have 3 to 6 children.
It will take a tremendous amount of effort and education to
encourage parents to stop at two children. Any number larger
than that will keep the growth curve moving upward.
Another part of the technological issue raises a further difficulty,
namely,
unemployment. If fewer people can produce the goods and services
that we need to live, what happens to the other people?
At the beginning of the 20th century, something like 85% of
families either lived on farms or worked in some business related
to agriculture. That is another way of saying that it took 85%
of us to produce the food & fiber we needed to live.
By the time I was in high school in the 1950's, the figure had
reversed. Only 15% of the people were farmers, producing food
for the other 85%. Now, the percentage is much less than that.
When I lived in India in the 1960's, India was still in a stage
in which 85% of the people were farmers or lived in rural areas,
supported in some way by agriculture. However, already, the
country was moving into manufacturing and heavy industry.
People were moving from the villages into the cities at a rapid
rate. I don't have the figures, but the proportion of people
living in villages is smaller today.
Population affects employment. We have chronic unemployment in
this country, and we experience it in a variety of forms.
In 2003, with our current economic decline, unemployment went
above 6%. Previously, it was considered "normal" to have 5%
unemployment, but the people who are employed are often
underemployed. That is, they are working part-time, or they are
working at low-paying service jobs that do not match their
education. Worse, our unemployment statistics never include the
so-called "discouraged workers," i.e., those who have given up
and are no longer looking for work. If you are not collecting
unemployment or showing up regularly at the unemployment office,
you are not counted.
Unemployment affects all social classes. We have the educated
unemployed, people with BA's, even Ph.D's, who cannot get jobs.
And we have the uneducated, who don't have any skills that anyone
wants to pay for.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 18 million college
graduates will join the labor force between 1992 and 2005, but
only 14 million of those (78%) will find jobs that require
college training.
The first machines reduced the need for manual labor. Tractors
could do the hardest work for us. Then, there was a decline in
manufacturing jobs, as assembly lines and robots became more
sophisticated. Now, we are at the point where white-collar
workers are threatened by technology. When we can buy computer
software that does our taxes, we don't need so many accountants.
Future software can reduce the need for lawyers and engineers.
Instructional television makes it possible to teach ever-larger
classes, so that we will need fewer teachers. And so on.
Unemployment, also, is an international issue. It cannot be
understood by looking exclusively at the United States. The
working-age population is increasing worldwide, leading to
unemployment almost everywere. The International Labor
Organization estimates that 30% of the world labor force earns
less than subsistence wages. Within the Third World, there is
constant migration from rural areas to the cities, but the cities
cannot support the new arrivals. Those who can afford it,
migrate to other countries, where they add to unemployment
figures.
Haiti has between 70 and 80% unemployment or underemployment.
Even if the first freely elected president in Haiti's history
[Jean-Bertrand Aristide] had not been overthrown by a military
coup, and even if the country had not been ruled as a police
state for decades before that, some of those unemployed persons
would risk their lives on the chance that they could get a job
that would allow them to feed their children. We could not
build walls high enough to keep all of them out. They are
desperate.
It is not only the US that faces immigration problems. Asians
and Africans flock to Europe. Asians find jobs in the Near East.
Proportionately, Europe is taking in more immigrants than we are.
However, labor is not nearly as mobile as capital and
technology. Multinational corporations can move their
operations to whatever location can offer the cheapest labor.
Technology has been displacing labor ever since the invention of
the wheel. In the past, that has been good for us. We have not
had to work so hard, and technology has made it possible for us
to enjoy a higher standard of living. The problem is that we are
currently seeing the acceleration of two separate trends, both of
which contribute to growing unemployment:
One is the computer revolution that puts people out of work
faster than steam engines or cotton gins did. The other is the
rapid increase in population growth. People are being created
faster than jobs.
The new "Silicon" Valley in South India is an example of the way
high-tech jobs can be exported abroad from the U.S. Silicon
Valley is that part of the Bay Area between SF and San Jose,
which benefited so much from computer companies and software
development. I grew up there, in a pre-computer age, when the
area was in a transition from agriculture to suburbs. With the
introduction of the computer industry, wages and real estate
prices sky-rocketed, and then crashed when the over-extended
technology sector hit a wall.
Meanwhile, India has joined the information industry. It has
large numbers of Ph.D's involved in computer technology and
development of software. Again, I feel personally involved in
the story, because the center of the new, Indian Silicon Valley
is the city of Bangalore, where I lived for two years. It costs
less to live in India than in California, and now computer
programmers can do their work by modem. Each one of them means
one less job for someone in California.
Immigration into the US pushes down wages among people who are
already here, by the law of supply and demand. There is some
increase in the demand for workers, but the supply of workers is
going up faster. That helps to explain why your standard of
living is lower than that of your parents. It often takes two
incomes for a family to enjoy the status their parents or
grandparents had with a single wage-earner; without the dual-
income families, our wage drop would be more obvious.
The people who suffer the most are those who are already poor.
The groups which have been hurt the most by immigration are poor
Blacks and Hispanics, especially those with only a HS education
or less. There is disagreement among the experts, but I think
the single group that has been hurt the most have been African-
American males.
It is easy for politicians to blame our problems on immigrants,
but it seems to me that immigrant-bashing diverts our attention
from the real problems:
First, there are not enough jobs to go around. And that, in
turn, is caused by population growth and technology.
Population, technology, immigration and wages all affect each
other. When technology reduces the need for labor, wages go
down. If we raise US wages too much, jobs will go overseas;
companies will move their factories to wherever wages are low.
If we try to keep foreign products out by raising import taxes
on them, many Americans would not be able to afford to buy not
just television sets and cameras, but also the shoes and
clothing that are manufactured abroad. I think most people agree
that free trade is good for American business, but it is not yet
clear that it is good for workers -- either in US or abroad.
Overall, there was a drop in real American wages during the
decade of the 1970's of more than 8 percent, for all workers.
The impact was greater on unskilled workers, and the hardest hit
were African-American males.
It is also the case that young people suffer more from
unemployment. The people who have jobs are not dying or retiring
fast enough to make room for the people leaving school. In the
past decade, 50% of the young African-Americans, out of school,
in their early twenties, did not have full-time jobs. The
percentage for non-Hispanic white youth was much better, but
still a frightening 30%.
However, unemployment has become a chronic problem in the US for
all races and all age groups. When white males start blaming
their unemployment on affirmative action, that only distracts us
from the real problem.
It seems to me that the proposals for welfare reform from both
parties are also tragically unrealistic. We cannot rely on job
training when there are no jobs. Putting time limits on welfare
can only work when people have some kind of work opportunity at
the end of the time limit.
We have not yet come to terms with the possibility that both
unemployment and welfare will be chronic, permanent problems that
are not going away until we can find some way to create jobs that
does not require a perpetually growing population.
Good luck!
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(References omitted)
mortality (death rate) and
fertility (birth rate).
There is a chicken and egg problem with fertility and the
standard of living. Which is the cause and which is the effect?
Probably some of both, but the reality is that it is much, much
harder to raise the standard of living so long as population
growth is out of control.