No, that’s not clickbait. I’m going to discuss the idea that maybe demographers and commentators are missing a key element in this supposed population crisis. Maybe, just maybe, telling people for DECADES that the future is bleak and bringing kids into the world might be unkind has something to do with why people stopped having so many kids!
Is it the only factor? Of course not – there are no ‘only factors’ in the world of people stuff. People come WAY too complicated for that. World population managed to grow from the roughly 3,267,212,338 when I was born in 1964 – yes, the planet had cooled, danged whippersnapper! – to something around 8,264,364,509 today11.
Let’s stop a sec and understand the numbers. They look all spiffy and specific — they are neither. Best guesses by people trying their best to figure out conflicting, error-ridden, falsified, confusing, and usually self-serving data sets that were never intended to be compared in any meaningful way.
There should be 193, the number of countries in the world today, not counting the four or five that are countries but no one wants to admit it — Hi, Taiwan! — but there aren’t. Some are legit — population census data takes a backseat when your country is in the middle of a war fought on its land — others, not so much. Many are just polite fictions — Hi, China! — and some are really, really bad guesses — Hi, India!
Mostly, they are a mess. I’m impressed demographers even have a reasonable guess. I am not impressed by the data itself and you shouldn’t be, either. The population is NOT known exactly and never will be, not by us human types, anyway.
Overall, the data is as good as it’s gonna get and we use it with that understanding. We do not place absolute trust in this kind of data. That said, it’s easier to discuss this pretending that the numbers correspond to actual reality and, I promise, we’re not that interested in studying the numbers themselves. Well, I’m not anyway…
So, back to the topic, in my lifetime, we gained five billion people. Ish.
Now, we’re asked to believe that we aren’t having enough babies. When I was still a whippersnapper we were told to fear the rampant population growth. The Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich, terrified a generation. The world would run out of resources and we’d run out of food and anarchy and hair on fire and that kind of thing. And you young ‘uns thought you were the only ones to grown up with the media screeching about the end of the world.
Now, I don’t doubt either of the major premises, that the population grew and that it isn’t still growing as much, but whether or not this is a crisis, I’m unconvinced. Wait until you’re old and cranky and have lived through a few rounds of this ping pong game of Crisis Politics and see how cranky and snarky you get!
But nothing has to be a crisis to be a problem.
So, for the moment, let’s assume that the demographers and commentators and Chicken Littles are correct that slower population growth is going to cause significant economic and political problems. Um, we gained five billion with a B people in 60+ years – and that caused problems, lots of them. What makes this insurmountable?
I’m tail end of the Baby Boom. I was in first grade as most of the early Boomers were finally showing up in the job market – after a detour through college degrees of questionable value. There had been about 132 million people in the US at the start of World War II 2, if the chatbot is to be believed. The Baby Boom added a lot more, 31 million of whom showed up in the early 1970’s for jobs that had never existed.
Unemployment was already having a bad decade. The Baby Boom deciding it actually needed to make a living made matters considerably worse.
Now, I don’t mean to make this next part sound rosy. The news media was not exactly spreading unicorns and rainbows at the time – far from it – but it also wasn’t pounding people with dire gloom and doom about the future. That is different from my generation to yours, you whippersnappers.
See, up until the late 1980’s – early 1990’s, the idea that the future held promise was still very strong. Things could get better; we could do better. The future was still bright, even if the sky was a bit cloudy that day. Hard work, know how, gumption and a willingness to get up after Life knocked you down could get us to that better future if we would try.
It wasn’t a rosy ‘life will all be rainbows and sunshine’ wish and no one thought that if everyone tried hard no one would fail. But we did believe that the future could be what we made of it and that we were not doomed to failure, even if life wasn’t going to cooperate and nothing was perfect. The future held promise that could be reached even without a guarantee.
When you see hope in the future, you are far more inclined to bring new life into the world.
When you think a zombie apocalypse would be an improvement on what you expect the future to be and you’ve had hopelessness beaten into your entire generation, maybe having to tell a child you love that life will doom them and crush their hopes and dreams as it has yours is too heartbreaking to face.
The negative drumbeat started way before the 1980’s. Half to the abortion debate was over whether or not is was right to bring a child into the world with all its problems. That was in the 1970’s, Kiddies. Keep up.
And of course, we had Erhlich’s manifesto to lighten the mood – there were a lot of naysayers yelling at my generation. But they were not the dominate voice. Media still talked about doing what was right. Movies still showed real heroes, flaws and courage, both. Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rogers let us be kids while teaching us about kindness and being good people. John Wayne rode to the rescue. The Lone Ranger shot at guns, not people. CHiPs and Emergency! let us see regular heroes – maybe a little overly dramatic, but a darn site better than the nonstop antihero drivel that kids are force fed today.
In the name of realism, I might add. There’s nothing realistic about nonstop negative stuff! If life were that bad, the Golden Gate Bridge would be standing room only, and the city officials would have already – well, you know.
No one could survive a world half as negative as the one we let the media tell these kids they live in is. It’s NOT. Somewhere along the line we let ourselves think that lacking perfection was the same thing as being inherently bad. We became ashamed of the fact that America, being made up of imperfect people, was itself imperfect.
We let the media translate that to life is just bad. You’re all colonizers, racists, capitalists, parasites – the whole nasty list.
Not a word of it is true.
Being imperfect just gives you things to improve – and it means you happen to be human and not God. It does not mean you are worthless.
For a nation-state, imperfection is part of the workload. Always something to fix because people only come in Size Human and they will always make messes. It does not mean every stupid or even nasty thing you did in your entire history negates any attempt to do better in the future.
It does not mean the future is bleak, either.
It means every generation has its row to hoe (I am NOT explaining that one – look it up, whippersnappers!). Trouble is just part of life. No generation is born doomed. They are just born human.
Messy, imperfect, stupid and sometimes downright mean, human. Loved by the Creator of the Universe despite all that, human. Capable of greatness despite themselves, human. Capable of change when they don’t even want to and capable of making the better world they yearn for, human.
Telling them that the world is rosy and perfect is a lie. Telling them the world is evil and cruel is just as much of a lie. Reality lies in the middle. There are wonderful things in life and there are bad things inside each of us. Our superpower isn’t to just create a perfect world – we’d have done it by now. Our superpower is to choose.
Whether we choose wisely or not, that’s the hard part. But we do choose and those choices shape the future. It isn’t set in stone – it’s built one choice at a time.
Whether you choose to see only darkness or to walk in light governs all your choices.
Maybe this population crisis wasn’t brought on purely by moving from rural to urban economies. Maybe a good chunk of this problem comes from letting our fears get passed down as truth and convincing our children that their futures hold no promise.
My generation is too old to have its own kids again, but we ain’t dead yet, either. It’s not too late to start talking like we once did – about futures with promise and a God Who loves us. And all that other good stuff, too. The real world is both sweet and sour.
Maybe it’s past time we stopped letting anyone feed us on a diet of Warheads and started digging into those candy apples from the fair.
It’s danged sure past time we stopped letting the media teach anyone that there is no hope and the future is nothing but doom. Hopelessness breeds every type of problem – we should stop breeding it.
Will that solve the problem of people no longer having as many babies? By itself, probably not. Nothing has only one cause and nothing has only one solution. But giving people hope for a future they can help shape and be proud to leave to their children is certainly one big step in the right direction.
Who knows? Maybe some positivity will finally kill off reality TV!
A girl can dream, can’t she?
References:
1) https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/wld/world/population
2) Brave Search:
“people in the US at the start of World War Two”
At the start of World War II in 1939, the United States maintained an **officially neutral** stance, with **90% of Americans** opposing the deployment of military forces to Europe despite supporting material aid to allies. The U.S. population was approximately **132 million**, with only about **334,000** active military personnel and an unemployment rate of **25%** due to the Great Depression. Public opinion was heavily influenced by **isolationism**, driven by the memory of World War I and the desire to focus on domestic economic recovery.
Key demographic and social conditions included:
* **Military Strength**: The armed forces were small, consisting of **189,839** Army, **125,202** Navy, and **19,432** Marine personnel.
* **Economic Status**: High unemployment persisted, but the war effort soon mobilized the economy, generating **17 million new jobs** and dropping unemployment to **10%** by 1942.
* **Social Dynamics**: The labor force was predominantly male, though the war would eventually draw **6 million women** and **1.2 million African Americans** into new roles, sparking significant social shifts and migration.
**Political Context**: President **Franklin D. Roosevelt** navigated between isolationist sentiment and growing support for the Allies, signing the **Selective Service Training and Service Act** in 1940 to initiate the first peacetime draft.
Reference Link:
