2BR02B

 

Recently looked at the Vonnegut short story “2BR02B” with a student. First published in 1962, it is a record of our great concern with “overpopulation” back then, in the middle of the Baby Boom. The premise is that the population of the USA had been fixed at 40 million. Since medicine had progressed to virtually allowing immortality, it was necessary, in order to preserve the population at this level, to abort every new baby--unless someone chose suicide in the government “gas chambers.” That would allow a designated new child to be born.

Vonnegut obviously saw this as an undesirable future. He notes in passing that the women who ran the gas chambers mysteriously always grew moustaches. Like Hitler.

I remember well the overpopulation hysteria. It was not that long ago. In my last year of high school, circa 1970, our biology teacher made us all buy and read The Population Bomb, warning that there would be mass starvation and shortages of clean drinking water by the 1980s. My friend in first-year university was planning his future so that he could move to New Zealand. He calculated that, when the world descended into total war over food and water, that would be the safest place. In the 1980s, I became a vegetarian largely on the argument in the book Diet for a Small Planet, that not eating meat saved scarce resources for others.

Weirdly, although Vonnegut saw this all as draconian, measures we might resort to due to an emergency of overpopulation, he seems to be fairly accurately describing the Canada we live in today. We have not found a cure for aging, but we have unrestricted abortion, and “Medical Assistance in Dying” anyway. As well as feminism demanding that women give up having and raising children.

This leaves me with the thought that current government policies, and our current crisis of declining population, are caused by a mass hysteria. It was always wrong, and now surely everybody knows it was wrong, but we are still suffering from the consequences. We are still pursuing the worst possible policies for our current situation.

This should be a valuable moral lesson. “Climate change” is a more recent mass hysteria; some say it is in decline, and even Bill Gates has admitted it was largely a mirage. But governments have been pushing truly draconian measures in its name.

“Transgenderism” is another mass hysteria. So is “ecology” or “environmentalism.” So is the current mania for “indigenous people,” this being a nonsense concept. So is feminism.

I suspect the threat of depopulation and the supposed need to bring in masses of new immigrants is also mass hysteria. Some are predicting, almost in the same breath, that many jobs will soon be relaced by robotics, and a large population will be a liability.

As Nietzsche said, “Madness in individuals is rare. In groups, it is common.”

Countering Population Collapse

 

Almost without missing a beat, the world has gone from a supposed emergency of overpopulation to an emergency of population decline. Nobody seems to have stopped to point out that all the experts were wrong. Calamitous population decline projections are the justification for all the mass migration. But even if it is a good idea, it is not a long-term solution. Populations are due to collapse everywhere: we will run out of immigrants in the rich countries.

Governments like that of France and Hungary are trying to reverse the trend with cash payments and tax breaks for women who have children. This is expensive, and not likely to be enough.

The underlying problem, I believe, is feminism. The entire idea of feminism was that women were to abandon their traditional role as mothers and go out and make money instead. This was always a matter of robbing the future for the present. It was always going to hurt us a generation or two down the line, as child-bearing and child-raising was devalued.

But what non-draconian practical measures could be taken now?

First, the current immigration policies are insane. Most of those flooding in, legally or illegally, are young men. We do not need men if we are to keep our population up: men do not bear children. We need young women.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,

It's President Kennedy callin' me up.

He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"

I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,

Anita Ekberg,

Sophia Loren."

Country'll grow.

Second, instead of demanding equal pay for equal work, we need to encourage extra pay for sole breadwinners with children. This was the old system: it was why men were paid more than women. It made it possible for mothers to stay home and have babies. It was also more profitable for the employer: a sole breadwinner is more stable, less likely to leave for another job, and can devote more time and energy to his work.

We might also do something about the need for and high cost of post-secondary education. This is intuitively a big incentive not to have children: they are too expensive. Trump has proposed a national on-line free university with degrees certified by the federal government. This may help. We could do the same in Canada.

On the other hand, free post-secondary education has done nothing to prevent birth rates from plummeting in Germany or Scandinavia. 

We must do something about no-fault divorce and child support. The current system is a major disincentive for men to marry and have children. Do so, and they have put a financial noose around their necks. Any woman can pull out at any time, and take all the children, half his income and assets with no responsibilities on her part.

It is perhaps to prevent such situations that, in Islam, a wife cannot divorce a husband; only the husband can initiate a divorce.

We might cap child support, and give whoever makes the larger income in the marriage, sole discretion whether to pay it, or take custody of the children. Otherwise we have slavery.

Unless both parties consent, we should require proof of abuse, adultery, or abandonment in order to get a divorce. Without this, marriage is a uniquely unenforceable contract. Either party can leave the moment it is to their advantage to do so. This is not an atmosphere in which it is safe to raise children.

A no-brainer: abortion should be illegal.

We must also go back to respecting the family as a self-governing unit. We have also overburdened parents by not allowing them to discipline their children—for example, anti-spanking laws—while at the same time holding them legally responsible for the actions of their children. Parents have lost custody for not agreeing to having their child transition to a different sex. Schools ask kids to spy on their parents; and reserve the right not to advise parents of what their children do at school. A woman was recently arrested for allowing her ten-year-old to walk to the store alone. 

This is a tough one: I know only too well that families can be abusive.

But there is a solution to this, which does not discourage adults from having children. Bring back the orphanages. Bring back the residential schools. End child labour laws. End minimum wage laws. Open the monasteries and convents. All of these were paths for children to escape from abusive families; and for adults, too, who wanted to escape parenthood. They have been systematically closed off. We need to open them again. This would dramatically lower the risk of bearing children.

Are orphanages or residential schools cruel? Is child labour for low pay cruel? What if we compare them to the alternative: an abusive family, never being born, or resorting to crime or child prostitution? 

No doubt many children suffered in orphanages and residential schools: but when one trained economist did a comparative study, he actually found that life outcomes for kids raised in orphanages in the US were actually better on just about all measures than for the general population.

Of course, doing all this will require about a 180 degree pivot in our thinking. We are always too slow to change our course. But then, look how quickly we pivoted from alarm at overpopulation to alarm at underpopulation. Look how quickly we pivoted from mass immigration being beyond criticism to alarm at mass immigration. Or from alarm at global cooling to alarm at global warming. 

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

The People Shortage

I got a quick lesson in economics the other day. Someone was wondering why clay for crafting was so expensive, and why it was shipped in from Ontario. After all, there are rich clay deposits here in New Brunswick. And had it explained to them.

It’s all due to underpopulation. 

You can mine clay here, but it must be processed. By the time you get it to Ontario, it cannot compete there with the cost of Ontario-mined clay. But the local market is not large enough to support the cost of a processing plant.

And so, historically, industry after industry has pulled up stakes and moved to Central Canada.

The Canadian Atlantic Provinces are generally underdeveloped, because they are too far from markets. Granted, they are closer to Europe; but transportation by water is cheaper than by land. It still makes most sense to ship to and from the big markets of Central Canada through the St. Lawrence Seaway. 

I saw the same thing in the BC interior; vast stretches of what could be fertile land, unused or left in forest because too far from any large market.

I have heard the same problem has kept Latin America historically poor.

The obvious solution is to get more people living in Atlantic Canada: then the economies of scale would make it worthwhile to mine that clay, to grow those vegetables, to be used or consumed locally.

We have been fed the lie for many years that “overpopulation” leads to poverty. Since each individual human, on average, produces more than they consume, the reverse is true. Cities are generally more prosperous than the countryside, and young people do not pull up roots and head to a small town to make their fortune. Some of the most densely populated countries are also the richest: Singapore, Bahrain, Korea, Netherlands, Japan. Some of the least densely populated are the poorest: Mongolia, Western Sahara, Namibia.