AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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17 Dec 2019, 2:28 pm
page 364:
"Some years ago, a British politician welcomed the fact that, in the previous year, there had been fewer teenage pregnancies. A middle-aged man wrote in anger to The Times. He had been born when his mother was only 14. He admitted that, because his mother was so young, his early years had been hard for both of them. But his life was now well worth living. Was the politician suggesting that it would have been better if he had never been born?"
And slowly over time, this got me thinking that it may be better to live even if things are far from perfect.
Plus, I thought Hans Rosling, the optimistic Swede who had talked about economic development. Although he called himself a realist or a possibilist, and not necessarily an optimist.
17 Dec 2019, 4:30 pm
17 Dec 2019, 7:45 pm
18 Dec 2019, 1:16 am
AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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18 Dec 2019, 9:38 am
In 1960, there were 1 billion persons in the industrial “west.”
And there were 2 billion persons desperately poor who looked for food for the day. And whose aspiration was maybe to save enough money to buy a pair of shoes.
But . . .
By 2010, the world’s population was 7 billion. There were people in the middle. But only 2/7’s into of 2/3’s of the world desperately poor. Still a real issue, especially for the lives of each one of these people. But I will take improvement where I can find it.
And even better were Hans’ predictions for 2050 . . .
Last edited by AardvarkGoodSwimmer on 18 Dec 2019, 10:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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18 Dec 2019, 9:51 am
By 2050, Hans predicts the formerly desperately poor will have moved up such that daily food is no longer such a pressing concern, and people’s new aspiration is to save enough for a bicycle.
At the end of the video, Hans even predicts three boxes at each place by 2050. And I’ll take what positive predictions I can find.
Here is Hans’ 10 minute TED talk:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg
AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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18 Dec 2019, 10:24 am
(1) First, child survival improves.
(2) And then each family has fewer children on average.
And more educational opportunities for girls and women is the single biggest factor in encouraging women to delay starting a family and having smaller families. Again on average, but that’s what kicks through demographics.
So, population growth will slow, if we keep doing all the same positive things we’re doing right now.
Dear_one
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18 Dec 2019, 7:11 pm
It is quite common for children to resent a new sibling for dividing the available resources. The new mouth to feed may be smiling, adding to the total of human happiness, but there are limits. The recent genocide in Rwanda was mostly Hutus against Tutsis, but where there were no Tutsis, there were still many killings, especially of people with enough land for several heirs. The survivors remark on the general relief of having enough land for both hut and garden, after too many generations of divisions had made the plots too small to live on.
Hans is certainly a breath of fresh air, but he ignores that the whole explosion in human population is built on using fossil fuel. It could now be sustained by renewables, but we are currently destroying carrying capacity long-term to push the maximum consumption now. There are so many extinctions that we are now in another geological epoch, writing a new chapter in the fossils. Humans and domestic animals are the vast majority of mammalian and avian life, reducing many species to marginal numbers.
I have seen the population triple in my lifetime, but I have not seen people's expectations shrink to one third of what their grandfathers wanted, let alone had. It is like having nine people in a 2 br apartment, and still pretending it is only three, with room for more.
I vowed to not have children until I could support us without cutting into their natural inheritance, and the economy never allowed that. At least I can still get around with no more horsepower than my dad's early cars. Some people laugh, but John Wayne hauled all his manhood on 1HP. 
AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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19 Dec 2019, 9:15 pm
