Belated holiday greetings to all. I’ve neglected this blog for a while, but I’m back. New Years Resolutions, and all that.
The cultural shift from over population being the doom to under-population being the problem is slowly but surely gaining traction.
In the 70’s and 80’s the fashionable doom was overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich was one of the loudest voices, with his best-selling book “The Population Bomb”. That tune has been played on multiple fiddle strings over the half century since, including resource depletion and climate change. A lot of people have been convinced by decades of media that having a large family is bad, and not having children at all is a good choice.
The numbers reflect this. China’s One Child Per Family policy succeeded, and it now appears to have succeeded a little too well. The Communist government is belatedly realising that just because you give people permission to have children, it doesn’t mean they will. If there aren’t enough people to do the work, the work won’t get done. If the work doesn’t get done, you don’t have a nation. The Chinese tendency to brutal exploitation of its labour force is hitting that wall, too.
Japan’s falling birth rate is now recognized as a national problem to the point where the Japanese Government is moving to create a government agency to encourage its citizens to get married and have children. The cause is entirely different from China’s, and has nothing to do with government policy. Japan’s work culture, where twelve hour days bookended with a two hour commute are not uncommon, leaves little time or energy for family life.
Japan’s government is looking at the real prospect of a nation which simply doesn’t have enough people who are able and willing to do the work to keep their society going.
In my own experience, I’ve seen organisations go into a downward spiral. Not enough people to do the work, but the workload doesn’t get any lighter. The stress level increases, and people start leaving. It takes a concerted effort, resources and leadership to pull an organisation out of such a tailspin. Companies whose management does not rise to the challenge wind up in bankruptcy. Government agencies or military units simply become ineffective. Some functions can be taken on by private individuals or charities. Some can’t.
A favourite setting for a dystopia is a crumbling abandoned city. A city is a dynamic system, built and, crucially, maintained by the people who live there. Work needs to be done all the time to unclog sewers, restore power, fill potholes and all the other tasks we don’t notice until they aren’t done. When the work doesn’t get done, dystopia moves in pretty fast. Certain areas of Chicago, among other large cities, have been abandoned ad are crumbling away, looking as bad as any post-apocalyptic ruin.
Now, if people started having large families tomorrow morning, it would still take quite a while to show results. Newborn babies don’t go to university or go out job hunting. There are some things that can be done. Automation is one of them. Japan, not coincidentally, is getting into that in a big way. If you have a machine which can, for example, look after an elderly person without needing a caregiver, that frees up the caregiver to do something else.
Not to mention the benefit of removing the stress on an elderly spouse or sibling from being such a caregiver without any pay and not a lot of support. There’s a member of my extended family who is going through that right now. It’s not good for her physical or emotional health.
Contrary to the happy assumption of a lot of people, robots and other complex machines don’t just spring into existence and maintain themselves. They have to be designed, built and maintained by human beings. If the society loses the organisation and resources to do that, the downhill road gets pretty steep.
One of the effects that aggravates such a downward spiral for a nation, or pushes them toward it, is warfare. All through history there have been people who will take what they want, and go to war to do it. Where they see real or perceived weakness, they will.
It hasn’t always been that way. There was a time a family with twelve children was not uncommon in North America. Of course, not all of those children survived to maturity. Many didn’t. Death in childbirth was hardly unknown, either. But, there was land, room for a nation to grow. In the early 1800’s the birth rate in the US was in a range of over 4% a year, which took no account of immigration. That has steadily declined right down to the present day.
Now, factoring in near term settlement of the Solar System, whose beginnings we are seeing now with the development of reliable reusable spacecraft and there are many predictions of rapid emigration to this new high frontier. Elon Musk proposes building cities on Mars, the idea of space colonies has been around since the 90s, and surveys of the available energy and materials grow every year with our increased knowledge of the Solar System. That cheap energy, those abundant resources there for the taking, will, on the historical record, spark a population boom off Earth.
As it happens, I believe as well as hope that bright future will come to pass. I may not live to see it, but my grandchildren will, and they will have the opportunity to go out to the High Frontier. People brave the frontier for many reasons but notable among them is poverty and want at home. The Irish fled famine, daring ships that were rightly called coffin ships, because what they left was worse and there was hope there.
One of the effects of the frontier is to draw off the young and ambitious, those in their childbearing and productive years. Someone who chooses to leave is just as much a loss to the birth rate as someone who chooses not to have children. An already bad situation is made worse, with crumbling cities and failing services, which in turn prompts more to leave. One can see nations collapsing, others contracting down to what they can sustain, far less than it was in their heyday, with their ever fewer people picking through the ruins for the wherewithal of survival.
A family struggling across this bleak landscape toward a spaceport where they might, or might not, find a path out to the lands of opportunity beyond the sky, would be a pretty good scenario for a post-collapse novel. No nuclear war or alien invasion need apply.
I’m not going to write that novel, and I wouldn’t read it if someone else did. I’m a techno-optimist. I just hope we don’t see it in real life.
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