The population dud.

population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. . .

So why is this happening? Demographers used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, where girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. They have just three children now, less than half the number their mothers had. India is even lower, at 2.8. Tell that also to the women of Brazil. In this hotbed of Catholicism, women have two children on average—and this is falling. Nothing the priests say can stop it.

Women are doing this because, for the first time in history, they can. . .

Some green activists need to take a long hard look at themselves. We all like to think of ourselves as progressives. But Robert Malthus, the man who first warned 200 years ago that population growth would produce demographic armageddon, was in his time a favourite of capitalist mill owners. He opposed Victorian charities because he said they were only making matters worse for the poor, encouraging them to breed. He said the workhouses were too lenient. Progressives of the day hated him. Charles Dickens attacked him in several books: when Oliver Twist asked for more gruel in the workhouse, for instance, that was a satire on a newly introduced get-tough law on workhouses, known popularly as Malthus’s Law. In Hard Times, the headmaster obsessed with facts, Thomas Gradgrind, had a son called Malthus. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was also widely seen at the time as a caricature of Malthus.

Malthus, it should be remembered, spent many years teaching British colonial administrators before they went out to run the empire. They adopted his ideas that famine and disease were the result of overbreeding, so the victims should be allowed to die. It was Malthusian thinking that led to the huge and unnecessary death toll in the Irish potato famine.

As noted in the previous post, green attitudes are a license to behave badly, a get out of jail free card for being an obnoxious bully. These types have always been with us. The only thing that changes is what they are obnoxious about, as the author of the above article promptly demonstrates.

We must not follow the lure of Malthus, and blame the world’s poor for the environmental damaged caused overwhelmingly by us: the rich. The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.

The "consumption bomb" is a dud too, and for the same types of reasons that the population bomb is a dud: people adapt to circumstances when they have information and options. However, as with population growth there is a lag due to momentum. Population will still rise for some time due to the number of women alive now who haven't had their 2.3 children yet, and consumption will still rise as those new people as well as the ones still scraping along in poverty develop.

Rather than screeching obnoxiously about this reality greens and "progressives" could be some help. Currently they are a hindrance as well as being obnoxious: they are the fart in the elevator, apparently they just like a stink so long as they can have the pleasure of harming others at the same time.

There are worrisome implications too.

The older you get, the more difficult it is to get pregnant and the higher the chance of miscarriage, pregnancy problems such as gestational diabetes and hypertension, and chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. … The risk of autism increases with a mother’s age.

There are social as well as physical implications.

We estimate the relationship between maternal age and child … learning outcomes and social outcomes. … Children of older mothers have better outcomes. … When we control for other socioeconomic characteristics, such as family income, parental education and single parenthood, the coefficients on maternal age become small and statistically insignificant.

We get better kids from younger women, but they only develop well if they have good opportunities. Duh! Via Robin who speculates:

Today high status women stay long in school, start careers, and take long to match up with a man before having kids. They are often too late, their kids have more defects, and the interruption hurts their career. Low status women more often have an accidental early kid out of wedlock.

Imagine a different equilibrium, where females pick a male at 15, then school more slowly to have kids till some standard age (20? 25? 30?), when females return to full-time school and uninterrupted careers.

While it is not entirely clear if this new equilibrium would be better or worse, it certainly has some positive features. Kids and moms would be healthier, kids more numerous and less accidental, moms more energetic, older folk would enjoy more grand kids etc., and career interruptions wouldn’t make female employees suspect.

As with population and consumption there is momentum which will make any change to current practices unlikely to be quick. Perhaps some of the girls who are growing up now will notice the defects in current practice and try to live differently, but it will be decades before we see much change.

I wonder what those who are morally contaminated by the feeling of being pure will screech about then?