13-01 The Issues

If you are a big picture person, that is someone concerned with what will drive our future in terms of standards of living, economic development, resource depletion, the environment and that kind of thing, then you will be concerned with population projections.
It’s easy to discover that the world population is around the 7 billion level, but not so easy to understand why some countries are facing under population and others over population.
Private briefings from our own immigration officials in Ottawa have explained some of this mystery. Women with more autonomy and more affluence have fewer children.
In 1983 in Singapore, I heard the Prime Minister declare how their small nation’s future growth would be curtailed if they did not encourage immigration because Singapore women were having less children and in many cases no children at all.
So, the issue for most developed nations is under population. Apparently not the US with large families of Hispanic population.
Then there is the debate about future shortages of fuel, water and food in nations like China, India and especially the continent of Africa. Why? Because that is where the population growth will come from.
And how about predictions that India’s population will outgrow that of China? That is the country to watch.
Love the photograph from the community of Daying, in the Sichuan Province of China, that clearly shows what population is all about with citizens trying to escape the heat.
At international conferences, the population debate brings a combination of good news and bad news.
In the sense that there is less infant mortality and children are reaching the age of maturity and capable of bringing children into the world, we have what could be called a good news story.
And of course, people are living longer. Is this another good news story?
Two of my lifelong friends died recently, and both had outlived their parents by about 15 years on average. They both claimed their longevity was a product of modern medicine and a healthier life style.
But this good news on a global scale is adding to our population problems and making the danger of resource scarcity and degradation of the environment more of a threat. This kind of debate around population issues is why it is so complex and difficult to deal with. Good news is also bad news.
No one wants the events of the past that have curtailed population like the Black Plague of the 1300s, the Spanish Flu of 1919 or two world wars.
I worked with a colleague from Lagos, Nigeria who was a university economist. He talked about how young the population of Nigeria was and how its population will one day surpass the population of the United States.
The trouble with their oil wealth, he explained, is that it is giving the economy what seems to be healthy growth but does not create street-level prosperity in terms of jobs. So, their population growth is not being accompanied by the right kind of economic development.
And as he further explained, population growth without economic growth is a formula for political instability. So any threats posed by future over population must be accompanied by economic development.
And in the developed societies that enjoy social programs like health care and pensions for the elderly, the challenge takes on a special dimension.
Here we have one group in society dependant on another group. The old and the young are serious partners. One group pays taxes and the other group spends it. And if there are not enough young to balance the books, we import them. It’s called immigration.