Unintended Consequences
Well, maybe one more thing before I go back to drinking tea and zoning out. This item from Will Saletan was too good to pass up:
Chinese women are taking fertility drugs to evade the country’s one-child policy. Pharmacists are selling the drugs indiscriminately to women who want to increase their chances of getting two or more kids from their one allowed pregnancy. Twin births are up nationwide; a hospital that used to deliver 20 sets of twins or triplets a year now delivers 90. Chinese government’s warning: These drugs are dangerous for women and kids because multiple-fetus pregnancies can lead to abnormalities and premature births. Critics’ rejoinder: Women will stop taking the drugs if you let them have two babies the normal way.
Where there’s a will…
A few years ago, while working on my bachelors, I was a “conversation partner” with a professor from Beijing University who followed her husband to the States so he could get his Masters. During one the conversations she told me that she wished that they could just pay the fine in order to have another child.
I’m not a very emotional person, but I felt bad for this woman who desired more children, but lived in a state where they could dictate how many she was allowed to have.
Remember what was said by the character Dr. Ian Malcom in ‘Jurassic Park’:
“life finds a way”.
You cant beat biology. The life force is right in there at the DNA doing everything it can, everything that 6 million years of evolution has taught it to stay alive.
Centralized Communist party planning is nothing in against the full force of nature best represented by any young woman who hears the tick tock of her biological clock.
Where there’s a will…
I beg your pardon?
You’ve got some ‘splaining to do, Will.
China would do damn well to heed the tick tock of the bio… demographic clock.
If I remember correctly (sorry no link, I read it on a piece of newspaper someone left on a bus in Warsaw) that China has over 60% of men in society. A natural balance is 52-54% WOMEN, all of which means that they are also precariously on the bring of a demographic collapse (for very different reasons than the West). Perhaps they should encourage this sort of thing.
–Where there’s a will…
I beg your pardon?–
Get busy.
Indians are also starting to take vows not to kill baby girls.
The world is choosing life, the death cults, as usual, are on the wrong side.
Britain is thinking about bringing down abortion from 24 weeks to 20-22 weeks.
–Sandy P.
The world is choosing life, the death cults, as usual, are on the wrong side.–
Funny though, how birth rates are highest in places where the death cults are predominant. Whether the babies survive to adulthood, that’s a whole other breastful of milk.
Actually – demographics as a whole are going down.
Isn’t the world supposed to peak in 2050?
Can we at least agree that there are too many people in china? Seriously, it is a huge overpopulation problem in the world; at least China is trying to do something about it. I say more states should have limits on birth rate. If we keep exponentially growing in population, we will reach the Earth’s carrying capacity and natural limits (read: lack of food, water, shelter, even oxygen eventually) will ensue.
No, we cannot agree that there are too many people in China. There is no “overpopulation problem,” either huge or minor. Such a belief is pseudoscientific rubbish. Sorry, but it is. Just like Marxism itself is pseudoscientific rubbish.
Check the CIA World Factbook: China has 9,326,410 square kilometers of land, and holds 1.3 billion people. Do simple math–population divided by square miles–and you’ll find that China has a crushing population density of less than 140 people per square kilometer.
Hong Kong, the richest and most prosperous city in that nation, and also one of the most populous, holds 7 million people in 6,294 square kilometers, for a population density of 1,112 people per square kilometer.
By comparison, the State of New York in the United States has a population density of 155 people per square kilometer, i.e. denser than China’s. And New York City, has a population density of 10,292 people per square kilometer.
You could fit 8 billion people–more than the entire world population–in one Canadian province and be less crowded than that.
Overpopulation is a myth. Not one single democratic nation (democratic as defined by Freedom House, which is a source recognized and used by political scientists) has ever experienced a famine. We currently produce more than enough food to feed the entire world population easily. The only reason anyone starves is oppressive governments, not overpopulation or anything else.
Oh and by the way, once people grow wealthy enough, they rarely choose to have more than 2-3 children. And since an increasing amount of the world population is living in democratic nations with rising standards of living, the birth rate is plunging around the world.
There is absolutely no need for any draconian, inhuman laws like those in China. They’re evil and should be abolished.
robrrb, yes, China had (and perhaps has) a real problem with overpopulation. But does their policy fix it? What *do* you think those young men are going to do when they want wives?
We *know* what leads to reduced birth rates. Prosperity and everything that goes with it. The “West” is looking at negative fertility rates without ever having a law.
Anyhow, I dare say we’re discovering what happened to Atlantis… they just stopped having kids.
And disappeared.
Okay, I take my initial statment back.
Well, all I can say is, thank Marx China is exempt from Kyoto, so they can afford to support all them bootleg babies…
See Dean, the problem with your argument is that it assumes a) all land is inhabitable (if we put 8 billion people in one Canadian province our fossil fuels would run out in about a month due to various energy concerns) and b) that the under 300 years of democracy is representative of what is possible in the future. Regardless of these, one of the many real issues arises from what goes into feeding, housing and providing electricity and health care to everyone. We have to face that the reason we sustain populations as large as current ones is because of energy. Throwing stats from the extremely abnormal U.S. at the problem doesn’t solve that. This is a major concern- we are going to run out of fossil fuels (as stated with the Canada reference above), and it takes more energy to make a solar panel than it’s worth. Nuclear energy could be the answer, but there are certainly risks with it as well. Wind energy? We have to prove something.
Other than energy, as we grow in population we need more food. We need fewer forests so we can have our lovely country homes. This, combined with energy, means we will have less and less oxygen and more and more respiratory problems. Livestock is a major source of methane, and though I can’t say I am convinced that global warming will screw us over in the end, whatever is causing the earth to heat up is undoubtedly making the sea level rise. This means New York won’t be able to sustain a population larger than New Orleans did while the dyke was broken.
Sure, they’ll just move to Westchester, but there are a hundred more issues where these came from. I have a midterm to study for so I’ll save the rest of the debate for another day,
-robrrb
Where there’s a will…
There’s a relative!
As my Trusts and Estates Prof would say, quoting his father, an old country solicitor
Oh, balderdash Rob. Complete rubbish.
As has already been stated we already, currently, produce more than enough food to feed the entire world population. Furthermore, just as a point of reference, we are consistently doing it on less and less land all the time. Also, in most of the developed world, the forests are growing, not shrinking.
The ONLY thing you have in your favor, the ONLY thing, is not that overcrowding is a problem (it isn’t), or that we’re running out of land, forests, or other major resources (we aren’t), is that we have a significant challenge in producing enough energy to continue economic growth around the world. But that, my friend Rob, is a completely separate question from population. You claimed that there’s a crushing overpopulation problem–which there isn’t–and now you claim there’s a problem with providing sufficient energy, which is a different kettle of fish.
But we have substantial reasons to think we’ll be able to produce enough energy. We could produce all the electricity we want worldwide if we just switched to breeder reactors, which is a proven, working technology. We don’t want to because that makes more materials that can also make bombs, but it’s one option. There are several others on the horizon, including bio-fuels, orbiting solar collectors, nanotech-based solar cells which are cheaper and more efficient, and more.
If we can’t produce enough energy then the world is in trouble. If we can, then we have no reason whatsoever to believe there will ever be any major overpopulation problem. As has already been stated, all serious population projections show the world population peaking some time during this century and beginning to decline. The trend is already a major problem in most of the developed world, where populations are declining. Indeed, if it were not for immigration, the U.S. population today would be much smaller than it was in 1950.
And by the way, it’s not just the US that fits the pattern–it’s every developed nation everywhere on Earth. Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, all of Western and most of Eastern Europe, most of South America, most of North America, etc.
Indeed, you will find one universal constant: wherever you find free markets and democratic government, you will find that (A) population growth declines precipitously, and (B) inevitably the highest incomes and best standards of living are found wherever population densities are highest. And wherever the lowest population densities are, you’ll find the lowest standards of living, lowest levels of education, and most limited opportunities.
The fundamental error is in assuming that people are a drain on resources. No, in a free society, human beings ARE resources.
On a more serious note: my family had a chat with one of the Chinese girls working in the shop at EPCOT in Disneyworld a few years ago. She was very curious about our kids’ relationships and even teased them a good bit. When I asked if she had any brothers or sisters (I didn’t think the ban went back that far), her smile went away.
She said, “No, we are not allowed to have more than one child in a family…And that makes it very difficult to have a choice of what kind of life we want because it is Chinese custom to take care of your elders. We cannot go away because we have to stay with our parents, because we are the only one.”
Well, that’s one way to keep people from leaving…
The Malthusian Fallacy
Vodkapundit notes just one of the many sad results of China’s draconian, evil, utterly pointless ‘one child’ policy. In the comments over there, I wound up engaging one “Ro…
Thanks American Mother for adding another dimension to this discussion–one I hadn’t considered.
Personally, the only reason I can think of why a member of a free society would support the one-child policy is that it limits China’s ability to dominate international relations through sheer numbers. Other then that…keep Will away from China!
I live in China, and I was watching twin girls cross the road with their mom today, and it dawned on me that I’ve seen far more twins in China than I did back in the US, and wondered if this was just because the One Child Policy’s effects make twins more visible, or whether there really was a statistically significant increase in the number of twins here. I’m gonna go with the latter assumption based on this story.
I’m not a big fan of government stepping in but when you live in a country with a population of over 1 billion and a plethora of health and environmental issues, if the government doesn’t say no, who will?
China doesn’t have health care.
Isn’t everything cash?
robrrb, sounds like Michael Crichton wrote this just for you:
In November, Michael addressed The Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy in collaboration with The Smithsonian Institution. The speech, entitled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century, was given November 6, 2005 at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C.
Read the speech here or visit The Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy.
Of course you’ll find opposing sides.
–
In short, we always find a way.
Almonte: It’s not conjecture. We *know* that people voluntarily reduce their family size under certain conditions. No one has to “say no.”
In fact, what we’re seeing is that when the government makes rules such as this (and many others) there are inevitably unintended consequences. Does it actually *solve* a problem to produce a situation where girl babies are aborted and there gets to be so many more men than women… what is that going to do to the culture?
And thanks to American Mother for pointing out the affect a “one child” policy has on population mobility. While this move-move-move thing is a pet peeve of mine (having done it way too often) the ability of people to rearrange themselves to meet labor market needs *must* make a significant difference in a modern economy.
What I’ve never quite been able to figure out, is why China didn’t allow people to have *two* children. (Or two *pregnancies* brought to term, as the case may be.)
Julie asks:
“What *do* you think those young men are going to do when they want wives?”
Find a prostitute, of course (this should be one of the more lucrative businesses in China, and it would be interesting to know how much of that trade is controlled by Party members).
And if Africa is any guide, you can expect a certain number of them to catch AIDS thereby. If enough of them do end up with the HIV virus, the imbalance problem solves itself.
The problem not thereby solved, of course, is the parents who were depending on their sons as their main source of financial support in their old age.
“Life finds a way” – as in Jurassic Park, that’s an adage that can have dark overtones, too.
Joe. Not so long ago I heard that keeping mistresses was a real problem in China among those with power. It’s not that they were controlling bordellos (though they may also) but that the scarcity of women meant that having *two* women, a wife and a kept mistress, was the highest status symbol possible.
Seriously… most people don’t want to share. Get whatever they can whenever they can? Sure. Share? No.
I am listening to people talk about population mobility when the freakin’ country has over a billion (a fairly large quantity even by McDonald’s standards)people! Mobility where? How? Have you seen your cities (on days when you actually can see their cities?). And mobility isn’t what you want when you have pandemics knocking at your door & nothing like health care to mitigate the situation. In the words of Mahatma, “Oh Cripes!”