ABOUT 30 years ago, Marianas Variety published a letter to the editor from an educated, concerned citizen from the states who predicted that “25 years from now,” there would be “bumper-to-bumper ‘kids with no land’ and 250,000 aliens living here.” Twenty-five years later, there were about 12,000 guest workers in the CNMI. Today, what with all the business closures and/or downsizing that are occurring since last year, the number could be about 9,000, and is likely to decrease further if the economy continues to sink. As for public land for local residents — it is still available, but because the economy is down, the government is not collecting enough revenue so there is little to no funding for the required homestead infrastructure.
Hans Rosling
Dan Gardner, the author of “The Science of Fear” and “Future Babble,” said we have the unfortunate tendency to see tomorrow as being like today — only more so. Hence, Gardner said, the starting point of most attempts to predict is to take current trends and project them into the future.
In his instructive book “Factfulness,” the late Hans Rosling, MD., calls it the “straight line instinct.” He said this, in turn, has spawned the (deathless) “mega misconception” that the world population is just increasing. But “pay attention to the word just, which I’ve made italic…for a purpose. This word is the misconception.”
The world population is increasing, Rosling said. “Very fast. Roughly a billion people will be added over the next 13 years. That’s true. That’s not a misconception. But it’s not just increasing. The ‘just’ implies that, if nothing is done, the population will just keep on growing. It implies that some drastic action is needed in order to stop the growth. That is the misconception….”
All over the world, a lot of people — the highly educated and top government officials included — believe and expect that the world population will continue to grow, Rosling said. “The number of future children is the most essential number for making global population forecasts. So it is central to the whole sustainability debate. If we get this number wrong, we are going to get a lot else wrong. Yet almost none of the highly educated and influential people we have [asked about the subject] have the slightest knowledge of what the population experts are all agreeing about.”
Here’s how Rosling explained why the “straight line instinct” is a mega misconception:
“My youngest grandchild, Mino, was 19.5 inches long when he was born. In his first six months he grew to 26.5 inches. An impressive growth of seven inches. Impressive, but also scary…. If Mino just continues growing, he will be 60 inches tall on his third birthday — a five-foot toddler. By his tenth birthday he will be 160 inches tall — over 13 feet. And then what? This can’t just continue! Somebody must do something drastic! Mino’s parents will have to remodel their house or find some medication!”
However, because “we all have firsthand experience of a growing body,” we “know Mino’s growth curve won’t just continue. We’ve never met a person 160 inches [over 13 feet] tall.” But “when we’re less familiar with a topic, it’s surprisingly difficult to imagine how stupid such an assumption may be.”
In 2017, Rosling said the world population was 7.6 billion people and growing fast. “Still, the growth has already started to slow down, and the [United Nations] experts are pretty sure it will keep slowing down over the next few decades.” The U.N. experts are also not predicting that the number of children will stop increasing, Rosling added. “They are reporting that it is already happening.”
Rosling said the “radical change that is needed to stop rapid population growth is that the number of children stops growing. And that is already happening. How could that be? That, everybody should know.”
In Sweden where he was born in 1948, Rosling said “women on average gave birth to five children each. After 1965 the number started dropping like it never had done before. Over the last 50 years it dropped all the way to the amazingly low world average of just below 2.5.”
He said this “dramatic change happened in parallel with…other improvements…. As billions of people left extreme poverty, most of them decided to have fewer children. They no longer needed large families for child labor on the small family farm. And they no longer needed extra children as insurance against child mortality. Women and men got educated and started to want better-educated and better-fed children: and having fewer of them was the obvious solution.”
I recently checked the latest population news about my old country. (In Manila in the 1970s, a popular music group named itself the Family Birth Control Band.)
Here’s what I’ve learned:
• In Dec. 2020, CNN quoted a Philippine Commission on Population official as saying that although the P.I. “still has one of the highest population growth rates [among Association of Southeast Asian Nations],” Filipinos “are choosing to have smaller families and fewer children. Therefore, fertility is slowly declining….”
• The website Statista reported that in the Philippines, “all signs point to a decline in the number of inhabitants in the long run: Just like the population growth rate, the country’s fertility rate…has also been decreasing for years now….”
According to Rosling, “The dramatic drop in babies per woman is expected to continue, as long as more people keep escaping extreme poverty, and more women get educated, and as access to contraceptives and sexual education keeps increasing. Nothing drastic is needed. Just more of what we are already doing. The exact speed of the future drop is not possible to predict exactly. It depends on how fast these changes continue to happen. But in any case, the annual number of births in the world has already stopped increasing, which means that the period of fast population growth will soon be over.”
To be continued
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