[lbo-talk] Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

[Gar Lipow]

On 5/8/06, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>
> With a drop in infant and child mortality, and some other way to
> secure your old age than the support of your children, family size
> tends to drop independent of access to more advanced forms of birth
> control.  This is where the population controllers got it all wrong,
> based on a disrespect for the capacity of the poor to analyze their
> own situation.  It isn't just disrespect, though, it's also (what we
> hope is a justified) fear of growing numbers of peasants and workers
> who want to overthrow same population controllers and their rich
> sponsors.
>
> Jenny Brown
>
> -------------
>
> Lbo has been down this road before--it's somewhere in the
> archives. Years ago I post something quoting similar results, that
> when standards of living rise, family size drops off, particularly
> with increases in women's rights and general political awareness,
> employment, etc.
>
> The result is as you say and completely contradicts the population
> control alarmists.
>
> A similar drop in family size occurred in the US and Europe as rural
> people moved to cities, women struggled to integrate themselves into
> the larger urban society, etc, etc.
>
> CG

To Me three: increase standards of living, income equality, and
women's rights. Those three variable together pretty much predict
reproduction rates.  Which is why it is important not to deal lightly
with the myth that we don't have the resource for everyone on earth to
have a standard of living equal to the rich nations. What we don't
have is the resources for anybody on earth (including the rich
nations) to have wastefulness and inefficiency of the rich nations. 
And the politics of this are important; to ascribe it to technical
problems rather than wastefulness and hideous cruelty is to let
capitalism off the hook. Of course if it is true , it is true; if with
the use of renewable reesources and  greatly increased efficiency we
don't have enough to provide  everyone on earth with a standard of
living equal to (say) what someone with a median income in Italy has
then we don't.  But, to me, it looks like the evidence is that we 
know how to use our resources wisely enough to provide  a really
pleasant standard of living to everybody - not just bare survival but
plenty of luxury too.  We just have a type of society that chooses not
to, maybe that can't do other than choose not to.