Ape Man

Why is it that there is one and only one demographic effect that the majority of highly educated people in the world are willing to accept? And why is that one effect the idea that less children are good for the environment?

A lot of highly educated people are willing to argue that people in the developed world should have fewer babies because their children will consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. Even more educated people are willing to lay all the problems that Africa and other third world countries have at the door of overpopulation. And even those who are not willing to be quite so accusatory still feel that less people would be better for the environment.

Why can’t all of these people make the mental leap between the idea that having children will have an effect on the environment to the idea that not having children might have effects on other things? After all, fewer children are supposedly good for environment because less kids means less future economic activity. Yet somehow people can only see benefits from that fact. Any kind of talk of a down side to that particular fact is treated as wild talk from the doom and gloom crowd.

But the inconsistency of your average educated person goes further than that.

After all, if you take the underlying assumption of “less kids is good for the environment” seriously, you should be against all forms of economic growth. In fact, you should wish to see every economy in the world in recession.

The fact of the matter is that the absolute number of people in the world has very little to do with how much of the earth’s resources are consumed. The real key is the level of economic development that those people are operating under.

For example, let us say that X represents the maximum amount of consumption per year that the earth can sustain (grant me for a moment that such a limit exits if you don’t belong to that school of thought). Let us say that every human being consumes a certain amount. It therefore follows that a constant growth of the human population will lead humanity to bump up against the limits imposed by X. This much everyone can understand.

But let us say that GDP per person represents a rough guide to how much of the Earth’s resources a person consumes. It would therefore follow that a static human population could reach X simply through economic growth. Heck, even a falling human population could reach X if economic growth grew faster than the human population declined. It would therefore follow that man’s infinite wants are a bigger problem than absolute human numbers.

In other words, is it better for a place to be full of subsistence farmers or one big monoculture grown to provide the bio fuel for some dude’s private rocket ship?

Some hard core environmentalists are consistent on this point. They are against economic growth as much as they are against population growth. And for that consistency I respect them.

But most educated people fly all around the world for their vacations. They eat expensive food and drive expensive cars. They live in big houses/apartments compared to their less educated peers and they want even bigger houses or a second vacation home. And when they have their cocktail parties they discuss their stocks and how population growth is such a threat to the world.

That bothers me.

I think that willingness of the educated classes to lay so much blame for the environmental problems of the world at the feet of those crass enough to have babies says a lot about them. It also goes a long way towards explaining why they are so resistant to the idea that there might be negative effects to having too few children.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Demographics, Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.