You can get $14,000 to have a baby in Italy.
Their population is in such decline: 1/3 decrease by 2050. Not a bad deal...
Meanwhile, in the entire rest of the world, populations are exploding.
Current world pop: 6.5 billion
2050 world pop: 9.1 billion (increase of 40%)
Current US pop: 298 million
2050 US pop: 394 million (mostly from immegration)
Interestingy enough, in places like Africa and India where people are dying at alarming rates from AIDS and other ailments, the birth rates are enormous.
"The world's 50 poorest countries will see their numbers more than double. At the same time, life expectancy in southern Africa has declined from 62 years in 1995 to 48 years in 2000-2005, and is projected to hit a low of 43 before a slow recovery. That means Africans are being born and lost to AIDS at a rate almost incomprehensible to comfortable Westerners."
My friend Stu says this is always the case: anytime populations are seriously threatened, they start reproducing like crazy. It's just biologically hard wired. A last attempt at life. I think this is interesting because anytime you see a plane go down in the movies, everyone decides to have sex. And ask people what they would do if the world would end tomorrow, and they say they would have sex.
Even my cacti get in on the action. They best way to get them to flower (i.e. display their sex organs for other sexy plants to get it on with) is to stop watering them. One last harrah.
Posted by bluprnt at February 28, 2005 03:32 PMI would be extremely interested to see a statistic of the birth rate of the U.S. in comparison to both developed and developing countries. My guess is that the U.S. birth rate is closer to developing countries. I would also be interested in testing this little quasi-hypothesis in comparing developing countries with a high rate of HIV deaths to developing countries with a markedly lower rate. True, the developing world has a higher birth rate, but in some, the population is not being wiped out at such an alarming rate. Lets not try to dumb down complex systems into a one-liner explanation. Especially not some quasi-gaia hypothesis with a seriously compressed timeline. It seems that there could be numerous explanations for data such as these. I do however like the fact that you have steered away from certain cartesian models wyou have mentioned before, which separate physiology from behaviour.
Posted by: at February 28, 2005 09:59 PMWhen I am not so sick, I will try to find those stats, they shouldn't be too hard to find. I agree it would be interesting.
What do you mean that I use cartesian models and seperate physiology from behaviour? I can't even find a good deffinition of "cartesian" online except that it relates to older methods of thinking in which technology is prized and the world is human centered. Is this what you meant? Please explain.
Best,
~ rebecca
True, the group selection way that the hypothesis is presented really doesn't make much sense. It can't be explained on the level of some concious will to preserve your particular human population, but rather on the proximate level. A high percentage of the people that AIDS kills are young adults of an ideal child-bearing age. AIDS destroys families and causes children to loose their parents. And I don't think it is that big of a stretch to postulate a correlation between a child coming from a broken home and them getting pregnant at a younger age. Basically my point is that AIDS doesn't work to reduce birth rates, it works to kill parents and destroy the social cohesion of a culture. Which has a tendancy to increase pregnancy rates.
There are other ecological examples that could support this, a good one is with wolves. If you just start shooting wolves to reduce the wolf population, it can actually increase the number of wolves. By killing the dominant wolves in the pack, the group hierarchy is shattered and all the subordinates go off and start having pups on their own. Without the group support, life expectancy and quality of life for these wolves undoubtedly goes down, but the population numbers increase.
Posted by: stu at March 1, 2005 07:12 PMgreat post.
Posted by: jk at March 5, 2005 03:40 PM