Population crisis? What crisis?

Some people got an award for a special bedcover that ensures that male bits don’t get too hot. They invented it in response to declining male fertility.

Meanwhile a Presidential hopeful in Taiwan has proposed giving free pets to couples who have a baby. The Japanese government has promised to increase child welfare payments and a whole bunch of towns have had some ‘success’ by offering payments improving childcare. And so on around the world, newspaper headlines continually referring to the ‘population crisis’ and some sort of forthcoming economic crisis. Some economists support this idea others don’t, it’s a bit complicated! A recent study projects that on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly. This is more rapid than other studies have shown but seems scientifically sound, it was funded by the Club of Rome.

I’ve already written two articles (1 and 2 ) on this subject and I’m wondering what to say this time. So many subjects like this one get radically politicised and it becomes harder and harder to hear anyone talking any sense. Facts and figures from serious studies are ripped from their context to provided shouting points and banner headlines. People are encouraged to see the problem in through racial, nationalist and religious eyes. People start worrying that they are losing their ‘identity’ which, for them, generally means that they feel themselves slowly becoming a ‘minority’. Perhaps because ‘majorities’ have a pretty poor historical record of treating ‘minorities’ they are worried that they may get a taste of their own medicine?

Going back a few years a major concern was over-population, studies came out, people got worried, governments put into place policies to reduce population growth, now they are doing the opposite. One child per family has become ‘no seriously, go for it have three or more.’ It gets difficult to follow after a while.

One of the main worries seems to be economic growth, too few workers and it, apparently, becomes difficult to maintain growth as measured by GDP. Strange again as back when it was over-population that was the worry some economists were also explaining about the problems associated with unrestrained economic growth and we are living with the consequences of them having been ignored. Using GDP as a measure has been widely shown to be a pretty stupid thing to do.

Many policies in different countries, when seen through the optic of ‘a population crisis’, can be interpreted as measures to increase the number of children being born. Anti-abortion campaigns are more and more frequently achieving their goals, laws against homosexuality have been enacted in some countries, pressure is mounting to push, persuade, convince women and their partners that they have a ‘duty’ to have babies. We can but hope that we are not going to see fertility clinics becoming places where women are forcibly inseminated.

The idea that we could aim for a steady state global population and steady state economies are rejected or simply not considered. The El Dorado of economic growth dominates and precludes any serious discussion of well founded, seriously researched ideas around steady states. Better, it would seem to be, to lurch from over-population crises to under-population crises without ever wondering if there is another way. In the end who would be most affected it the global population gradually drops to a sustainable level? The global elite for the most part and their big game of seeing who can accumulate the most.

Politicians and other people who seem so often to be profoundly myopic and sometimes categorically daft dither around having a fiddle with this or that hoping that they can ‘sort the problem out’. In general they tend to make matters worse by polarising any debate and reducing them to the absurd. These people, newspapers and others get worried about AI taking people’s jobs and at the same time getting panicked about the ‘ageing’ population and how to pay people’s retirements. All of which seems a bit contradictory but humans have an enormous capacity to hold contradictory points of view all in the same brain, it’s a wonder sometimes that they don’t explode.

A lot of the debate around the so called population crisis seems to come from Cis males of a certain age, Silent generation, early Boomers etc. This seems strange as it is not they that do the heavy lifting when it comes to being pregnant, I’ve traveled far and wide and have yet to see a man breast feeding and a man being able to change a nappy, or mostly not being able to do it, is still a theme in comedy. In general it’s not the blokes career that takes a hit, In one large UK study, 26% of men versus 13% of women were promoted or upgraded their jobs within five years of having a child. The greatest impact is if a gap of two years or more is taken . In the UK maternity leave can be for up to 52 weeks, paternity leave is 1 to 2 weeks. Only relatively recently has it become possible to ‘share’ the maternity leave. A friend worked as a teacher and got sick and tired of young children being brought to school evidently unwell, they were dumped and left because the mother had to get to work. It’s really not very good for the kids and simply not fair on the staff.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if the discussion around population and fertility rates was being done principally by those members of society who carry the bump? Maybe that way we could start hearing a bit of sense. If those people who know about childcare and children’s needs were also included it would be even better. Children are not small adults, they have different needs, it would be well to take this into consideration and stop pushing people to pop out more economic agents in a futile attempt to maintain defunct, toxic and ecologically destructive economic systems. If women are deciding to have fewer children then, for each woman, there are probably very good reasons, pushing against this will only make things worse.