What world we leave the next generation?
It is no surprise to anyone that our current world is in a broken state. Global warming, food shortages, water shortages, garbage and plastic fouling our planet, diminished wildlife habitat, civil unrest, aging populations in advanced societies and too many children in underdeveloped ones. If you look at all the things that are going on, it can be daunting!
If you look at many developed economies you will find that birth rates are on a steep decline as people (a) don't want to bring children up in a scary world and (b) want to enjoy a good life free from children. If you flip the tables, in many developing nations there are large numbers of children born as people see their children as a sign of security when they get older. Unfortunately with many children and few job prospects there is civil unrest, poor work conditions, and a lack of opportunity for many
It sort of underscores a dichotomy in our world. Recently in a #hivelearners post I lamented the fact that there was no-one to take my position as a pharmacist. Another member lamented the fact that the older generation isn't giving up positions to the younger one
Which leads to the question :
How many children should we have?
It really is quite a difficult question. How many children should we strive for?
One? Two? More? None?
If only the answer were that simple as every answer leads to a dead end. Don't believe me? If you have a society where there are very few children you don't have enough workers to look after the elderly. If you have a society where you have too many children you end up with an unemployed workforce and civil unrest. If you look at just replacing the people you have you still run into the problem of an overcrowded world where the status quo is destroying out planet.
Any solution is going to be nuanced, complicated, and likely meet with a lot of opposition!
However, lets look at three different area with three different problems.
Too Few Children
Did you know that Japan has a "death clock"? Because of a birth rate that doesn't replace the current population they have a death clock which shows how long until the country ceases to exist because there are no people left.
With a birthrate of just 1.3 children per woman it is far less than the replacement value which is just over 2 (one for the mother, one for the father and a small addition to take into account those who don't make it). South Korea has an even lower birthrate at only 0.9 child per woman.
As the population ages how do they replace workers who want to retire? When someone is old who is going to look after them?
Of course if you want to take this idea of too few children watch the movie "Children of Men". In that movie no more children are being born. There is no-one left to look after the aged. There is no one left to pass down shared knowledge and heirlooms to. There is no future for the countries or the world. Then again, with a shrinking population at least you can find a cheap house to buy in Japan as there are more houses than there are people to fill them. The fact still remains though :
Image source IMDB Children of men
Without children the future becomes meaningless
Too Many Children
Now if you want to flip the coin take a look at the country of Niger. There almost 50% of the popultion is under the age of 20 and the average birthrate is getting close to 7 children per woman!
What happens to all those youth? There aren't enough resources to teach them all. There aren't enough jobs for them to do in their current economy. There are too many mouths to feed and too little money to feed them.
If you imagine a large number of hungry, disillusioned youth with no prospects and no future then I am sure you can imagine the problems that can follow.
But what if I look a little closer to my home country? Do we have too many or too few?
How about a worker solution?
In Canada we have a very different problem. Yes, our birthrate is low at roughly 1.5 children per woman but not Korea low. Our population is certainly getting older and there certainly is a labour shortage for skilled trades. However, unlike Japan which severely restricts immigration Canada accepts a large number of people each and every year.
Who will staff our hospitals? Immigrants.
Who will drive our freight trucks? Immigrants.
Who will build our houses and highrises? Immigrants.
Sure it sound great in theory. Have an open door to the best the world has to offer. Solve our low birthrate problem by accepting other people's children to populate our land. However, that leads to a couple of problems.
First Problem
The first problem is housing. If you allow people into the country without sufficient housing then there is no-where for people to live. As the elderly age they aren't giving up their houses and they aren't making new houses either. As a result when new people come in to take their jobs and help keep the economy growing there is nowhere for these new people to live.
Homelessness is a huge problem in my country. Couple that with young families being unable to find a suitable place to live it makes the country much less attractive to live in. Indeed, without a home to raise children many young families don't have children simply for economic and space reasons
Second Problem
Have you ever seen the movie "Idiocracy"? It portrays a dystopian future where the intelligent and successful don't have children because of the stress of society. The uneducated and lazy have lots of children for the government subsidies that go along with a well meaning government trying to increase overall population. The problem is that poorly functioning parents lead to poorly functioning children. In the movie it led to society getting progressively stupider and lazier over time to the point where it ceased to function in a meaningful way.
Source IMDB Idiocracy
Now it hasn't reached "Idiocracy" proportions here in Canada ... yet. However, there is a real difference between children brought up in a loving and capable home than those brought up with poorly functioning parents (or parent, or orphanage for that matter). Sure any child can thrive regardless their upbringing but on the whole a stable foundation early in life means a better chance at success later in life.
A strong birthrate of poorly functioning children doesn't help society at all.
Should the government step in?
Now people look at the Chinese "one child per couple" solution to decrease population. Decrease population means less pollution, more jobs and so on. Except at one point the desire for male children meant that there were 70% Male : 30% Female .. there was a desire to keep the family name that travelled through the male line.
What a nightmare!
Now there is an aging population without enough workers. Many of the lone children have been doted on and suffer from "Little Prince" syndrome where they don't have a desire to work. Even worse in every 10 children there are 7 males and 3 females. Think of that: 3 women get 3 men and the other 4 men have no chance at a date.
If you were to assume that 20% of the Chinese population was children of that age: 200 million people. 60 million men get 60 million women and 80 million men have no prospects to have a family.
That type of imbalance can't be good in the long run
Think of that for a moment.
It's a scary prospect!
The world as a cruise ship
It may be odd to think of a cruise ship analogy when talking about children. However, bear with me for a little while.
When I am on a cruise ship there are two classes of people. There are the crew and there are the passengers. Those who work and those who get waited on. If you look at a cruise I was on recently to the Bahamas the passengers were typically from "wealthy" countries. European or North American primarily. If you look at the crew they are from "poorer" countries. Philippines, India, and many African countries. In short you have the rich being waited on by the poor.
Doesn't exactly seem like equality there.
However, if you look at the world as a cruise ship. With an aging population many of the wealthy countries will let in just enough workers from poor countries to keep them happy, fed and looked after. It works in rich nations favor to have a young, desperate, poor workforce to draw upon that stays far from their borders. I'm not saying its right but it is the way I see things working rich now. The cruise ship just made it exceedingly obvious.
Change won't happen without a change in mindset, legislation and determination
A long time ago there was a big problem in England. Too many poor with too many children. An author proposed "A modest proposal" as a tongue in cheek way to solve the problem. He proposed that the parents eat the babies. The overpopulation situation would be solved and the hungry would have a readily available food source.
Obviously that was a terrible idea
But at least it got the conversation started on how to fix the problem.
If I was to make a modern "Modest proposal" I would say that rich nations should allow unlimited immigration for all the workers they need to look after their aging population. Just make sure they know what is going to happen next. What happens next? After you have enough workers to look after the current elderly then cut off all baby production for the next 10-20 years.
Short term the elderly have someone to care for them while they die off. Those people with jobs now don't have to worry about losing them as there is no upcoming labor force to displace them. Every worker will be very valuable as there isn't a ready source of replacement. 10-20 years without needing schools or teachers means a huge cost savings. 10-20 years without sleepless nights, finding daycare or babysitters, or missing social events due to a child at home. Wonderful, right?
Everyone would still be able to have children; they would just have to wait a long time. Then, after 20 years with no new births, let the world see what becomes without legacy. What the world becomes without someone to pass the baton to. Let people see what really matters....
... Then maybe our best and brightest will be motivated to take family more seriously. To secure their legacy through their children and refocus on just how important it is to take care of the world we have been given as a legacy to give our children.
....Or perhaps we don't learn and the animals get their planet back.
Resource management
Of course no babies for 20 years just isn't going to happen. During COVID people couldn't even agree to wear a mask on their face. Think they are going to give up having babies? Not likely.
However, if you look at any animal management situation on a farm there is no rancher who just lets their animals breed without some sort of a plan. There are limited resources on the farm...limited amounts of space and food. The poor quality animals aren't allowed to breed while the best stock is bred to increase the strength of the herd. Careful management goes into how many animals are kept and which ones breed.
The earth is very similar to a large farm with limited resources. People aren't animals but they can't thrive if they outgrow the resources available. Imagine if we just had the number of people we needed to fill available job positions. Imagine if we had enough people to fill the earth without stripping its resources. Imagine if the best and brightest were bred to strengthen the species.
Unfortunately, imagine how unpopular it would be if the government was to tell you that you were unfit to have children. Imagine how draconian the laws would be to disallow a woman to have a child. Imagine you were told you could not have children or conversely imagine if you were told you were required to have sex with someone you didn't want because they were a good genetic match!
Looking at the problem its hard to figure a solution. Japan needs more people but is reluctant to allow immigration. Incentives haven't worked. However, you can't ethically force women to have children against their will.
Canada has allowed many immigrants to cover its work force. However that has led to serious overcrowding and housing issues along with social unrest. However, if we don't allow immigrants we run into a Japan style problem.
Niger doesn't have a program to look after the people it has and there are simply too many young and too few resources. If it was a farm some of the animals would be culled. Culling people is just wrong though so what do you do? Tell people they can't have babies? That's also wrong. Forced sterilization? Just as wrong. Let people die of starvation. Also not acceptable.
It will take a large scale societal change to help the world. I hope people in developed nations start to see the value in having a strong family. I hope people in developed nations see the value in developing systems to look after and feed those you have without adding more. I'm certainly not bright enough to solve those problems though.
Just my thoughts and I love comments.
Although I bet I'll get skewered for this one :)
Thanks for reading.
You got interesting points. But the worst problem of Canada isnt only the birthrate… on top of that many people that born here also decides to leave the country hehehe. Why we have a problem with doctors? The US pay better them since companies are responsible for their jobs, not the government. Im not being an advocate against universal public health but it is a problem. I met many young canadians leaving to Europe or even South American or Asian countries to never come back again. Yes a solution is immigration… but it comes with many other problems because you need housing and jobs. A problem that the government sell a false promise that there will be jobs for everyone. So a guy with a director position in a bank in Argentina comes but here he can only get a walmart job offer as assistant retail. Many people come back to their home countries with bad illusion about life in here.
All valid points.
However, I only have so many words in an article and I was already running long :)
Overall though I see many nurses coming to Canada from others countries. I see many doctors here in Abbotsford from other countries also. Sure people leave and medical care is certainly one reason why.
However for my son he is looking at moving to Japan. Why? Not medical care. Not because of the cuter women. Not because he will make more money. Because he can afford to buy a house and it is more orderly there.
As for people coming here and becoming disillusioned. Absolutely it happens. A friend came from Turkiye and was highly positioned in a prestigous school. He gets a masters degree here and ends up working at a private school teaching ESL. A huge step down.
He loves many things about Canada but the high cost of living, outrageous housing costs and difficulty getting a good job are certainly things that he isn't happy about.
Thanks for dropping by,
Appreciate the comment :)
Without children, the future of any country is at stake. Yet, with way too much children, the future of the country is still at stake. There's no clear answer to this. Because every country has a different way they can tackle this issue.
With immigrants and the use of strategic orientation to educate the public on the benefits of not having more kids than they can take care of, we can probably solve all this once and for all.
I think its a little more complicated than that.
Educating the population to not have more children helps in places where there is overpopulation but then again with few children what will the elderly do when they are aged if there isn't a government plan in pace for them?
In developed nations wealthy individuals already don't want to have too many children. Too much work. Too much expense. Too much time taken away from enjoying life. What do we do when there are too few children? For many wealthy in Canada (Japan Korea etc) children are seen as an imposition on their time and happiness so why have them?
Can you educate people into having children?
Then there is the other problem. If the educated know to limit their children and the uneducated and poor do not then what happens? The educated become fewer and the uneducated become more numerous. Your selectively breeding the less capable.
Then there is the sticky situation of "breeding them out".
Take many traditionally "white" european nations. France, Germany, take your pick. If the native people have 1-2 children but the immigrants continue to have 5-6 how many generations before the minority immigrants become the majority of the country? Especially sticky if you take religion into account. Take a predominantly "Christian" area like western europe and then allow a number of "Muslim" immigrants. If the immigrants shift the population then the religion of the area changes. However, then the older nationals feel like strangers in their own country.
Indeed I grew up in a suburb of Vancouver called "Surrey". 40 years ago it was predominantly white farmers. Now it is predominantly Indian and urban. Nothing wrong with that but many of the old timers feel like they are being pushed out of the city they once knew. Just like the area of Richmond has shifted to predominantly Chinese to the point where there are some places I am unable to shop or go because I'm an English speaking white person.
A very long way of saying...
..... It is a very delicate situation and there really is no easy solution. Any solution will have to balance ethics, religion, personal freedom, national identity, environmental issues and more.
Which will require someone much smarter than I am :)