Why Is Population Growth Seldom Discussed?

[Igel]

17. Because it's a pointless subject.

On the one hand, projections give a good chance of the population flatlining in the next couple of generations, and possibly dropping after that (or possibly increasing, there's always a range when you read projections and look at inferential statistics).

The projections look worse than they are. Even if you hit replacement levels for all current population--2.1 kids per every male-female pair--you'd still get a lot of that growth because so much of the population is single single and hasn't reproduced yet.

The projections also make a few assumptions that might well be wrong. More education means lower fertility. Greater numbers of surviving offspring means lower fertility. More women working outside the home, finding fulfillment in what men have traditionally found fulfillment in, means lower fertility. The assumptions generally hold in the West and seem to be on track in some other parts of the world. But stay tuned, because there's no preset "arc of history" and not only have not all cultures have checked in, but some subcultures are flouting the "arc of history" and being really intransigent about following the trends of the dominant populations.



On the other, there's sod-all anybody can do about it that they're not doing already, at least to some extent. China's going to face some massive problems because of it and took a lot of repression to implement it. To get the countries that currently have high fertility rates would require having those with low fertility rates--mostly white, Western, Xian or post-Xian countries--to impose restrictions or seek self-imposed restrictions on mostly non-white, non-Western, non-Xian countries. I can just see the US, Britain, France imposing such restrictions on Africa, S. America, S. Asia.

The actions being taken view population control as secondary, derivative. First you fix health conditions, uplift women in their status and education and empowerment, you get them working outside the home, you change men's minds about the role of women in society and get governments to do what they should, which is help. In short, you remake 3rd-world families in precisely the kind of ways that liberal Western society finds most valuable: Women should be educated, jobs should be mostly white-collar, there should be good health care, and immediately everybody will see that what's really important is wealth and money and living standards, or personal self-fulfillment, so they'll limit procreation because that takes time away from work and pleasure and because large families predispose families to poverty.