What If A Collapse Happened And Nobody Noticed?

[GliderGuider]

58. It probably has multiple causes in different places and times.

Fertility rates can drop because increased industrialization and rising life expectancy makes children less necessary, as in Western Europe from 1950 to the mid 1970s or in South-East Asia more recently.

They can fall because women become educated and empowered (as the agricultural yoke is lifted) as is happening in African nations;

They can fall because mothers see few opportunities in the future for their children due to worsening economic circumstances, as in the ex-Soviet Union and many Eastern bloc countries;

And they can fall because of government edict as in China.

In most places fertility rates probably fall because of specific local combinations of these factors.

Regarding education, I think I mentioned to you about a month ago something I heard at a conference in Berkeley. An education activist from India and an American woman film-maker looked at education in rural Ladakh (in Kashmir) and found something disturbing. Young women were being educated and the fertility rates were falling as expected, but human trafficking rates were rising at the same time, as were land grabs in the region. What the speakers ascribed it to was the type of education the young people were being given.

The young people are often being given a modern Western-style education that is separating them from their culture and making them want to become Western consumers. In order to do that they want (need) to move to cities and get jobs using their new skills. In the cities the girls find few opportunities and become prey for the traffickers. As the young people (boys as well as girls) move to the cities to become part of the global consumer culture, they abandon the rural life in droves. This leaves the land unprotected (a whole generation of potential farmers vanishes) and it becomes vulnerable to land grabs by countries like China.

The lesson is that we must be very careful how we educate the young people in these vulnerable agricultural communities. The right sort of education (especially for girls) can protect them to some degree against the risks of trafficking, but the wrong style of education can have unexpectedly negative consequences.

To me all this says that things are rarely as simple as we would in our hearts like them to be. That applies as much to education as it does to any other activity in our civilization. We always need to look below the surface at the deeper interconnections, to find the unintended consequences of our actions and avoid making well-intentioned but potentially harmful decisions. I think that's called exercising wisdom, and it's something we need to do a lot more of.