where is New Zealand?
DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population:
https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E
1
Children deserve to live a long and lengthy life. This causes a problem for some children.
The increasing live birth and survival rates around the world portend catastrophe.
The planet cannot currently support 7.7 billion people, a few billion of whom exist in substantial or abject poverty.
When I trained as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s one of the academic lecturers pointed out that the American doctors and nurses we were sending to Africa would inevitably help increase live births and reduce infant and child mortality, leading to impossible demands on the country’s food and water supplies.
In 1965 Africa’s population was about 320 million; in 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, the population of Africa had quadrupled to about 1.3 billion. Similar increases have occurred in virtually every developing nation.
Unbridled population growth is a disaster; we need to be promote birth control even as we help other nations improve their child health conditions.
4
Another challenge facing a new administration in 2021 will be to revitalize development aid & promote free & fair trade & investment with the Developing World.
Two observations:
1. One of the greatest success stories in reducing child mortality during the period covered by this article has occurred in Afghanistan, and it coincides exactly with the period that the current government has been in power after the overthrow of the Taliban regime.
2. Fertility rates almost always decline drastically with investments in women's health and education which are directly related to infant mortality. For example the fertility rate in Honduras, the poorest country in Central America, has seen a steady decline from an average of 7.347 births in 1969 to an average of 2.454 births per woman in 2019. Mexico, a much richer country, has also experienced a similar steep decline during the same period - from 6.664 in 1969 to 2.117 in 2019 - and a projected decline in the fertility rate in Mexico to under 2.0 by 2025 will mean that Mexico will face a possible population decline by 2070 unless Mexico is able to attract a significant number of immigrants.
1
Reading the comments it is surprising how many people think improving infant mortality is a bad thing.
3
Cannot be right.
Surely things can't be improving somewhere?
How come the US isn’t listed? What other country separates families? Locks children up in DOG cages? Or that is perfectly alright!
We need to deploy parenthood planning on the front side of the wave of medicine that reduces child mortality.
9
@Tom No. We need to educate and empower women. Giving them opportunity and relieving them of the misery of lost children will, time and again, lower birth rates.
"Adequate nutrition, water, sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics can save many lives. And it’s not always a matter of money; often there are cultural or political roadblocks."
part of the life saving, life creating and dying story also involves birth control, from relatively cheap progestin pills and latex condoms to more expensive IUDs and implants, thereby affecting the numbers of children, as well as money spent per child. birth control methods obviously have their own cultural and political issues, which vary by country.
in nearly all countries, birth rates have been declining, some more than others (thailand, cuba, india: more; nigeria, zambia: less). causes of these declines are variable, but modern and more widely available methods of birth control are surely a significant factor.
a final note: i recall that the gates foundation has done some research and surveys on the use of latex condoms, for disease (ex., HIV) reduction and birth reduction purposes.
Cheers for the pace of improvement in the South Indian state of Tamil Nad, which has acquired the reputation of being the Medical Tourism Centre of India. Apart from the locals, it also serves the medical needs of middle, upper middle and affluent class patients from East Africa and the Middle East, many of whom come here for routine medical procedures and also pioneering ones, costing a fraction of what they cost in the West, as It has hospitals and nursing homes which cater to most purses.
@A. R. Reddy
I guess it’s more important for India and Pakistan to have A-bombs than to worry about feeding their children. Or having in door plumbing and other means of sanitation.
2
Let's be honest. Sure it sounds great to save humans, but at what cost? We ADD over 233,000 people to the planet everyday. That's about 7 more mouths to feed every 3 seconds. Bringing down the death rate without a complimentary reduction in births is missing the forest for the trees, or what remains of the forest. Amazon and Indonesian fires are direct results of sweltering human populations of the poor who traditionally have large families. While this may seem like a good news, feel good, story, the long game for civilization's existence diminishes. And please don't buy demographers lies about the population growth rate dropping sometime in the future, when there is scant evidence that will happen.
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@Buzz Avery Historical trends show that when child mortality drops, so does the # of children per household. This is all co-mingled with the trends of increasing wealth, so hard to tease out what drives the lower births per household; is it richer people have fewer kids or if you know your 1st child will survive to adulthood, you have less incentive to have backup children. Outside of the 1st world, children are the retirement strategy for parents. The kids will take over the farm and take care of elderly parents.
Good news is the world is getting richer and lives are improving, so birth rates will drop.
10
@Buzz Avery
You are absolutely wrong, both morally and factually. Reducing child mortality may be the biggest factor in reducing population growth.
Given that Earth is already tragically overpopulated, this is the worst possible kind of news. Most of those children who did not die will live short, miserable and meaningless lives, and in so doing contribute to the mortality of all non-human animals, who are the innocent victims of human self-centeredness.
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@Ajax
Can I see your data re: “short, miserable, meaningless lives”? How do you qualify/quantify meaning? Misery? Seems we have plenty of miserable people in our prosperous American cities.
7
@Hmm.
"Seems we have plenty of miserable people in our prosperous American cities"
I include those too, for your peace of mind.
4
@Ajax Are you actually stating that we shouldn’t be attempting to reduce child mortality because that will lead to overpopulation? Leaving aside the immorality of that viewpoint, many wealthy countries (eg Japan) are already experiencing the impact of birth rates lower than the replacement rate. It’s not a good thing. I would also refer you to analysis by Dr. Steven Pinker who shows that on every measurable metric, things are getting better for almost all people globally.
5
Improvements in child mortality rates is great news but it also now must be accompanied with a global push for family planning and birth control.
Religious objections must be overcome or ignored.
People tend to have smaller families in first world countries. However, by the time that trend reaches all countries, the planet will be so overcrowded, governments will have to impose child limits like they did in China- which is not the best approach.
It’s better to have people know their children will reach adulthood, have access to easy and cheap birth control and to educate both girls and boys. This should be a UN priority along with UNICEF.
If there is no effort to keep families small, this planet will be uninhabitable in a hundred years- regardless of global warming.
8
@marian
You are wrong and ill-informed, in claiming that the trend for smaller families has not reached developing countries. The measures you correctly advocate: educating women and access to birth control are indeed important, and in fact have been very successful, worldwide, other than certain pockets of extreme poverty. Cultural and religious pressures on women to have children fall, in the face of individual women and individual families making day-to-day decisions in their lives. This happened in the “developed” world as it was developing, and it is happening a a furious rate in the developing world, now.
In Northern Nigeria, it's not only about climate and violence Education levels in many of the northern states are terrible - one third of women of reproductive age have no education in Nigeria. Vaccination levels are incredibly low, hovering in the low 20s for many northern states (with some below 10%). Nigeria has Africa's largest economy and still doesn't have a reliable national power grid. Nigeria's state and national government could, as a major step, invest more in its people.
3
And all the lives saved are in countries with the highest birth rates and most impacted by climate change.
Africa will have more than 3 billion people by 2050 while the continent’s carrying capacity, less than 1 billion now, will continue to decrease. Where will the excess 2 billion people go?
South Asia will have more than 2.5 billion by 2050, nearly double the current population while climate change is expected to reduce the size of safe dry land during Indian Ocean cyclones and habitable areas during Summer. Where will the refugees go?
The world needs to adapt a comprehensive population control policy like China did 40 years ago. The current “save as many babies as possible and let climate change” sort it out policy is going to wrack the environment.
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@AmateurHistorian
Luckily, you are wrong. Saving babies is not only the right thing to do, it is possibly the greatest driver of not only reduced rate of population increase, but of actual population decline.
From 1968 to 1970 I served in the Peace Corps in northern Malawi in a remote mountainous area. I set up and ran child welfare clinics where we taught village women how to improve infant nutrition and prevent such things as diarrhea. We also vaccinated the children against small pox and measles. It was the best two years of my life. In 1968 the mortality rate in the area for infants was 1 in 5 before the age of five. From the chart I see that it is now it is 1 in 20. I have always had reservations about the work I was part of because of the problem of its contributing to over population. But I must say, looking at the chart, I feel rather proud to have been a part of that accomplishment.
7
@JamesEric
Your work did not contribute to overpopulation. Precisely the opposite. I’m sorry to see such a good and experienced person still prey to that myth.
This is great news, and a challenge. Furthermore, the evidence that both economic growth and policy are needed, not one or the other, shows the best way forward. In a world as wealthy as ours, no child should be dying due to poverty.
"Thanks to a combination of economic growth and state policy, as few as 1 in 50 children under age 5 die. States in northern India have comparatively high rates of child death, closer to one in 10. "
1
Why is the U.S. ignored in this article? Infant mortality is rising in the U.S.
4
This analysis avoids discussing the over 50 million babies annually aborted worldwide.
Many reader comments are surprisingly eugenics tainted, arguing that saving lives is bad. Is this really who we are?
They still have 5+ children per family in places where they can barely scrape together a living. Then they become economic migrants, basically exporting their poverty and social instability to other countries.
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@Gabe In 1870 there was, on average, 5 babies per woman in the United States. We then had 39.2 child (0-5) deaths per 100 babies (double the minimum for 15%+ red zones in these maps). These countries are seeing improvements we enjoyed a century ago and that is terrific news.
1
Exactly why it's past time to discuss OVERPOPULATION and planned birth control for the world at large (where is the UN in this?) Another two billion projected to be occupying the planet in about 25 years plus or minus. Will people be content to stay put or immigrate (legally or illegally)? Malthus first presented the problem around1800, and two hundred years later we may finally be facing the ultimate crisis -- even with a plant based diet for everyone on the planet. I looked up birth rates per country and in several African nations they were 44 per 1000 Ultimately it's not just food shortage, it's education or lack of, water shortage (apparently more pressing), job shortage, gangs. The poor nations of the world have provided a great cheap labor market for the giants of industry and their stockholders -- but when will they go on strike?? or can they? Living hand to mouth makes you unlikely to upset your precarious situation.
It's obviously better to have a world with as little fatal illness as possible, but the consequences of that must also be discussed... and solutions to the possible problems proposed.
14
@Auntie Mame Malthus has been consistently wrong for two centuries. Why he is still invoked is a mystery. Steven Pinker has shown that on every measurable metric, the quality of life for the vast majority of humans has been improving. The statistics presented in this article corroborate Pinker’s findings. Food production is increasing because agricultural yields are higher, and agriculture is increasingly becoming more sustainable as well through improved technology such as hydroponic farming in greenhouses. And a decline in infant mortality will actually translate into lower population growth as parents have fewer children (because more survive to adulthood). That pattern has shown up repeatedly around the world. Beating the population control drum is unnecessary.
5
As the planet suffocates under a thick blanket of sweating meat, the glorious human race does absolutely nothing to stop it. Are we smarter than yeast? The answer is obvious.
6
Why is no information about fertility rates and total population from 2000-2017 included? We're told that when fewer of their children die in early childhood, those families tend to have fewer children total.
How about some data on that?
In each country or region mentioned, how has the average family size changed over the same 2000-2017 time period? Not counting migration, please (artificially makes regional population growth appear lower than it is).
9
A lot of the comments are talking about the negative impact of babies not dying in these countries anymore, on global warming in the future. Besides being extremely callous from a human point of view, these comments do not take into account that most of the developing countries in question have been spending more on creating renewable energy resources than the developed world since the past 3 years now, and they are either on their way to meet their Paris Agreement pacts or far exceeding them as it helps their economies in the long run. Some of these countries never got a chance to to contribute to global warming as they were too poor earlier and by the time they can, they will mostly only be using renewable energy because those are the resources they building today.
7
I wish you had given attention to Cuba which for decades has had a child mortality rate on par with the best in the world and far better than the US. Cuba is Exhibit A for the efficacy of real socialized medicine, bringing great health outcomes at very low cost.
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It seems a lot to learn from Thailand and India. The scale of child mortality in India alone is staggering. A child doesn’t get to choose where they are born.
1
Do we know for a fact that lower child mortality leads to smaller families? The map shows that in the Northern Triangle Central American countries, child mortality is low and has even decreased further, yet almost everyone has kids by 25 in the migrant population.
6
Why this map is not showing numbers from Canada, US, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, China, Lybia Japan and Russia among others? Were them irrelevant or not available? Or are they going to be part of second story? I think those numbers are worth knowing too.
4
The U.S. should be included on these maps. According to the CIA Factbook, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota had an infant mortality rate of 18 out every 1,000 live births in 2012. Why such poverty among indigenous people in the U.S.? Recall that Oglala Sioux originally had essentially the western half of South Dakota according to treaty, but when gold was found in the Black Hills guess who said it was the Indian's no more? A more honest appraisal of the progress of global child poverty should include all countries. The U.S. government essentially is still murdering Native Americans. When will we right this wrong?
5
I don't want to see kids die any more than anyone else here. But this is not a one-way street -- the privilege of saving children (historically unheard of) REQUIRES an equal commitment to ZERO POPULATION GROWTH.
Or you end up like Syria or Nigeria with populations that have increased in size by 4-5 fold or more -- ensuring desperate poverty and no future for those children.
21
Great, great news!!
2
Just what the "humanitarians" want so that we can accelerate the destruction of rain forests, arable land, and the melting of arctic ice, speed up the spread of communicable diseases, and create more civic unrest, extinguish a few more species to provide more Lebensraum. A global " lake Wobegon" where everyone stays glued to their cell phone following the tweets of their leaders. A "Brave New World" where the technology that has brought us to the brink will rescue us from disaster..No wonder Bezos and others are looking toward Mars... To my benighted eyes it looks like Orwell was right, just a century early in giving birth to "Big Brother".
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@diderot - are you commenting on the same article we're all reading?
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This is really good news. Hats off to all the private and public assistance programs that contributed to this success. I'm surprised at comments pointing to a dark side of this equation. No one should assume that babies that survive are destined to an overcrowded, polluted, and unjust World with limited opportunities. There is a virtuous spiral to this in that more babies survive, fertility rates go down, smaller families lead to more productive adults, etc.
7
Populations of all animals have built in controls, which includes new born mortality. Most animals in the wild do not survive their first year. When we set ourselves apart from the natural world, there are consequences.
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@The Weasel By that logic, modern medicine should not have been invented.
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@The Weasel so we should go back to living on the savanah, hunting and gathering? I prefer to do what this article shows we do so well. Learn, adjust, and move forward.
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@The Weasel Yes, we separated ourselves from the natural world about 3000 years ago. Dense human settlements (cities) require sanitation (sewage treatment and refuse disposal) and vaccination.
The potential for humans was unlocked when our brains became more important than our strength or speed. The future is limitless because of our ingenuity.
4
This visualization clearly shows the survival rate for children creeping in from the coasts toward inland areas over time. It's interesting as proximity to ports, specifically deepwater ports with containerized shipping, are one of the clearest indicators of income growth in the past few decades. It's also clear that child mortality appears to have a similar trend. Fascinating data!
7
As someone who works on malaria in Subsaharan Africa, the improvements have been incredible. The mortality rate from the disease has been a strong point.
That said, gains are tenuous and there's a constant risk of resurgence. Last year's World Malaria Report highlighted that the incidence rate has plateaued in Africa and globally cases are increasing. 200 million cases and 403 thousand deaths still occur each year in Africa because of malaria. Globally, 61% of them are children younger than 5.
As cases and deaths decline, so to does the urgency of sustaining funding and political will. Without these, progress will revert.
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@Stephen
Bill and Melinda Gates, it’s ok be thankful. Trump never gave a penny to take on this problem.
1
@Stephen I worked in a country in Asia that went from having 250,000 cases per year to ~150 within a decade. The potential is incredible, but it needs to be backed up with sustained investment.
Interestingly and not incidentally, that country invested strongly in its health system and gave the manpower (health workers, technicians) and local facilities that complemented international aid and medical support. As we see more countries investing in their own health we're starting to see greater results. I fear the next wave of non-communicable disease among adults (from tobacco, etc.), but these won't increase child mortality.
During the course of their lifetime, a child born in Southern California will use approximately 80 times the resources of a child born in southern India. By rights then, parents in India should be allowed to have 80 kids before their California counterparts get one. “Overpopulation,” in the context of resource use, is not just a third world problem.
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@Douglas Thanks for this comment! Every child born in wealthier countries is a massive carbon bomb. In wealthier countries going vegan (0.82 tonnes of carbon equivalent per year) and replace a typical car with a hybrid (0.52 tonnes per year) don't make the dent that not having on child does (58 tonnes of carbon equivalent per year every year for the life of that child). Stop wealthy breeding!
2
"Mothers who lose fewer young children tend to have fewer children, reducing their own risk of death in childbirth and increasing their ability to improve the economic prospects of their households, …”
Is this wishful thinking or are there statistics that support this statement?
To what extent does a country’s culture/religion influence the number of children a woman has? Do some cultures continue to encourage women to continue having as many children as they can even as child mortality drops?
17
@ann I think the statistics are found in just about every developed country in the world. Our great grandparents and grandparents, generally, had more children and were less educated. As education levels rose, our own historical families shrunk from 9 and 10 kids to five to four to two. It happens just about everywhere. I've travelled to many developing countries and the same phenomenon occurs.
4
@ann Religion and culture are the practices which give a human society (clan, tribe, nation) the tools to propagate and succeed. With modern medicine, sanitation, hygiene and food supply, the infant mortality drops to near zero and the life expectancy doubles. Because religion and culture change relatively slowly, the birth rate does not drop as rapidly as infant mortality, and added to a rapid increase of life expectancy, there is a huge increase of population and cultural turmoil. However, it is a temporary transition, complicated by the fact that more slowly developing societies suddenly have huge populations compared with the earlier developed ones. This difference is a crucial problem of our times.
2
Yes but black African American infant and child mortality is comparable to that of 3rd World nations. And so is maternal mortality.
Because no black African American life matters as much as any white European Judeo- Christian American life.
3
@Blackmamba Your statement is factually incorrect. No group in America has infant and child mortality rates comparable to third world nations, a fact that is clearly demonstrated in the maps/charts accompanying this article.
1
Fabulously good news, in a world that seems darkly colored all of the time. Somehow, with horrific politicians that sever international treaties and relations, roll back environmental regulations, and threaten conflict both at home and abroad, mankind makes progress on important matters. This gives hope that just maybe we will meet our tremendous challenges in climate change, population growth, and resource scarcity while avoiding catastrophe.
8
That is really great. But what kind of productive future do they have? Sitting in a closed room as a telemarketer or worse? Are we creating a class of peoples that have so few options they are ripe for exploitation? Why not let the lineage elders decide how to do their own population management? Sure clean water is fair, like putting in sewers, but how much further shall we go? Their micro biomes evolved in the context of their land and indigenous foods. Golden rice isn't well digested, let alone tetraploid wheat.
Remember those that die from complications of ordinary diseases usually have weak immune systems or other significant underlying conditions. We are not allowing nature to have her way which will lead to much greater sorrow later when the droughts, floods, and other natural disasters hit and resources are scarce already from increased demand and decreases in individual strengths and productivity.
I know we worry that a future savior or president will die because of these diseases and yet, consciousness has a way of simultaneously evolving in many when the time is ripe! Ask any physicist or mathematician.
Blessed be those little souls.
3
Low child mortality is a double edge and always has been. Great that kids aren't dying in large numbers, but they usually become adults and far less appealing to us as a species. Kind of the same with puppies and kittens. They grow up and become dogs and cats.
In no way am I suggesting to let kids just perish. But the bottom line is every human being, regardless of age needs to be feed and clothed and to top it off, we seem to want to keep elderly people alive much longer than they're even remotely capable of productivity.. There is and always has been a price to be paid for good health.
12
@Martino: I agree totally, and BTW, I am Sucker #1. I have my heart strings tugged by cute little kids and puppies and kittens.
Nobody cares about homely middled aged people -- or fleabitten old dogs and adult cats, who are euthanized in huge numbers.
If large numbers of children survive....there is an EQUAL responsibility for all adults to practice ZERO POPULATION GROWTH, which means "2 children each family" and no more, with no excuses.
BTW: I hope when you are old, you have good excuses as why you are "not more productive!" and shouldn't be turned into Soylent Green.
5
The Times credits aid groups and governments, but the positive changes in health and life expectancy have been going on for hundreds of years, starting in the West and now spanning across the globe. The key to success is not international aid groups but the macroeconomic changes in the economy that have come from globalization.
Adopting a free market economy, rule of law based institutions with democratic features, and scientific method replacing local superstition should be credited with these improvements in people's lives. I've noticed Times readers so quickly forget this.
Science and effective use of data are also playing a major role. The large n, double-blind study experimental methods used in Western medicine are propelling these advances, and if governments and groups have a role in this, it is in distributing the benefits of such studies abroad.
9
@d
... excellent several NGOs have been implementing specific programs to target child mortality... and the rate of improvement may be quite different since these initiatives started
wow...that assumes that "the West" spread enlightenment rather than colonialism, exploitation, pollution, violence and dislocation.
3
@Rebecca
Even the people at NGOs who do this type of work would admit that sustainable progress depends on larger changes such as the ones I mentioned. I'm not trying to argue against such efforts, but we need to acknowledge that there are things that we often take for granted that have contributed greatly to this success.
And I'd add, as others have noted, our efforts should now be more focused on environmental impacts of more people living with higher standards.
2
Overpopulation is what fuels global warming. Too many children are being conceived. It is interesting how infrequently the fact of increasing overpopulation is mentioned in discussions about the climate crisis.
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@Radical Inquiry
A decline in mortality rates can lead to smaller families.
2
@Radical Inquiry
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/climate/countries-responsible-global-warming.html
3
@Radical Inquiry We are the greatest contributors to the climate crisis and we are not overpopulated we are over automobiled. You are misinformed and probably biased against both the poor and the darker folk of this planet who haven't the means to leave a carbon footprint. What brand SUV do you drive?
4
Educate girls. It is the most effective form of birth control and economic growth.
Educate girls. Educate girls. Educate girls.
68
@CT Educating girls is half the equation. Educate boys there are consequences to their actions. Sex is a biological urge that can be satisfied without causing pregnancy. It is important that sexually mature boys be prepared to use condoms if they are not ready to exercise parental responsibility. It is especially important to raise boys to respect the wishes of girls who say no!
Teaching total restraint works for some of us but most of us need sex education about how to avoid pregnancy.
6
@KWW The increasing live birth and survival rates around the world portend catastrophe.
The planet cannot currently support 7.7 billion people, a few billion of whom exist in substantial or abject poverty.
When I trained as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s one of the academic lecturers pointed out that the American doctors and nurses we were sending to Africa would inevitably help increase live births and reduce infant and child mortality, leading to impossible demands on the country’s food and water supplies.
In 1965 Africa’s population was about 320 million; in 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, the population of Africa had quadrupled to about 1.3 billion. Similar increases have occurred in virtually every developing nation.
Unbridled population growth is a disaster; we need to be promote birth control even as we help other nations improve their child health conditions.
2
Surely the current climate disaster is causing widespread famine, drought, reallocation of refugees, war and poverty and would lead to high mortality among children, right? What is this nonsense about children dying less?
2
@Kev you do understand that the effects of climate change are only just being felt, right? You don’t stand on the tracks with a freight train rushing at you arguing the train can’t be real because your not dead yet.
3
@Kev: Wait a few years. It'll catch up.
3
The world will be a safer place, as well as a more moral place, if we get the child mortality rate closer to zero.
It will take all of us to gets this done.
7
It is wonderful to read this positive news article in today's NYT with all of the horrendous things we see every day in the world news. But what will be the future for all these children who are not dying before the age of 5 given the intent of so many of the world's leaders, including Donald Trump, our very own POTUS, to pollute the planet simply to protect their wealth for the immediate present with no concern about the future of the world's children, even their own???
2
Telling that investment in women's health and education significantly improves survival rates for children.
26
@Kristine
The increasing live birth and survival rates around the world portend catastrophe.
The planet cannot currently support 7.7 billion people, a few billion of whom exist in substantial or abject poverty.
When I trained as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s one of the academic lecturers pointed out that the American doctors and nurses we were sending to Africa would inevitably help increase live births and reduce infant and child mortality, leading to impossible demands on the continent’s food and water supplies.
In 1965 Africa’s population was about 320 million; in 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, the population of Africa had quadrupled to about 1.3 billion. Similar increases have occurred in virtually every developing nation.
Unbridled population growth is a disaster; we need to be promote birth control even as we help other nations improve their child health conditions.
2
@Mon Ray The nations with higher childhood mortality are, overall, the nations with higher population growth. When childhood mortality is low and women have good levels of autonomy, family sizes are small, even to the point of causing populations to shrink.
1
Two things jump out at me: (a) bad country policies (e.g., Laos compared with Thailand; Zimbabwe compared with Botswana) and (b) drought/climate change in the Sahel, which is also fueling conflict and violence. Of course, carbon emissions caused by all of us in wealthy countries are contributing to the climate change, drought, and poor nutrition in the Sahel.
5
The invention of modern medicine and hygiene has in the last 200 years led to a reduction of child mortality rate from about 40% in a natural state to a about 0.1% in advanced economies, with a parallel reduction in maternal death rates. It means that whereas a typical woman in the past had to have at least four or five children for the population to not decrease, now two or so is sufficient. It means women can spend far less of their lives in child birth and rearing. The impact of almost zero child mortality on social and economic evolution seems to me to have been neglected. It may well be a major driver of the social changes we are seeing today, delayed by the persistance of beliefs, expectations and customs formed when human survival demanded a very different roles for men and women than needed today.
18
Great news. More people to apply stress to the environment.
Global population is is like an economic bubble: the larger is becomes the greater the damage when the conditions supporting it disappear.
Saving children's lives is a good and noble goal but the context in which we are doing this needs to be examined. Is a greater global population a positive?
27
@Clotario
I would argue there's better ways to combat overpopulation than letting young children die of diseases or conflict. Besides, as this article mentions, lower child mortality is also an indicator of improving economic, social and medical positions of families, which is always paired by a reduction in childbirths in the long term. In short: the less children die young, the less children will be born. See child mortality and the number of childbirths in developed countries as an example (both low).
40
@Bart Immerzeel
Theoretically possible. But in the nearly 200 years since the industrial revolution there has been only one industrialized nation where the population has even stabilized; waiting for the "long term" to arrive is not a realistic plan to combat overpopulation. As Keynes put so succinctly, in the long term we're all dead. In the long term the sun explodes and the planet disappears. Depending on the "long term" is too often a call for non-action to avoid hard decisions. We either acknowledge we have a global problem being exacerbated by humanity and all of its members, or we pretend the problem will go away someday.
I would note that this article is exceptionally short of actual numbers. Did it mention that the population of Nigeria is up to 190 million, with no projection of slowing down? Indeed, it is expected to surpass the US population within another generation or so? Or that Africa's population is projected to increase by another billion people or so by the end of this century?
Blithely stating that one day the problem might just resolve itself because at some point people decide to stop having babies is not addressing the central problem in the slightest.
22
An almost universal phenomenon in developing economies is that as economic conditions improve and child mortality drops, urbanization and women's education and other factors drive down the birth rate. That is how to lower global population ultimately, not hoping more kids die.
27
"Climate change may make access to good nutrition harder in some parts of the world, and could prompt violence."
these are not hypotheticals, but probabilities; and the probabilities increase each year that the human population increases and our climate denialism continues.
substitute "likely will" for "may" and "could" and you have a more accurate picture of the future that you will pass on to your children.
14
@drollere, These babies will be foot soldiers in those violent conflicts probably before they reach 14 years old. The more foot soldiers, the more brutal, violent, and enduring the conflicts. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not against saving babies. I'm all for it. I'm also for birth control (before babies are conceived).
1
Yes, very nice. But can we also point out that infant mortality and maternal mortality rates in the United States are near the absolute bottom compared with every other country in the developed world?
Could we understand that our system is poor, and the trend not positive?
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@Sean Sean, do you understand that the statistics are reported by each country's standards, not a single standard applied across the world.
Outside of the US, some births are catagorized as still borns and don't count in the mortality stats, while in the US we take heroic measures to save a life, and if the baby dies it will count as a live birth that subsequently died.
We can deliver babies at an earlier gestational age, so our statistics end up looking worse.
When we compare apples to apples (population samples similar to Finland and Austria), the gap disappears.
From the article
As the authors note, "infants born to white, college-educated, married women in the U.S. have mortality rates that are essentially indistinguishable from a similar advantaged demographic in Austria and Finland."
The takeaway isn't that America is racist or treats certain genders worse, it is that we have more people in the lower socio economic groups because we are a more open society (US migration rates are 3.9/10,000 people vs Finland at 2.9/10,000 people).
Statistics require some further analysis before reaching a conclusion. The prime example is comparing heart surgeon mortality rates. Some surgeons with good rates maintain those rates by refusing to take risky patients.
We are an open country that will take more immigrants than Europe (on a per capita rate) and take heroic measures to save "stillborns" in other countries.
https://www.nber.org/aginghealth/2015no1/w20525.html
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@James The datapoint that you relate is damning: Children born to white college-educated married women have the same infant mortality rates as the entire nation of Austria or Finland. Let's keep in mind that not all of the women in those countries are college-educated, or married. So again, we have a problem.
And why shouldn't we be able to offer the same health standards to all people, not just wealthy, White, college-educated families?
The answer is that we can, and we would if we implemented universal healthcare.
Not difficult.
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@Sean Unclear if the driver is the system is the type of healthcare system or the characteristics of the population.
Statistically speaking, as you move away from college educated population you have a greater proportion of women who smoke (even during pregnancy), which lowers the birth rate of the children born. SIDS is also strongly correlated with smoking, obesity, breast feeding decisions, and income levels, as well as co-sleeping practices.
Medicaid for All is being marketed like CBD, the cure for everything. Reality is it is much harder to make these claims.
America has a more diverse population than many other countries, which is great but it makes the "one size fits all" solutions available in Europe less feasible here.
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