Welcome back to Filling in the Development Blanks. I apologize for my absence. I have been busy moving to Paris and dealing with bureaucrats, lawyers, accountants and tax collectors on at least three continents. Don’t worry, I am not threatened with indictment on any continent that I know of, though I am a little worried about a letter I received today with an Atlantis postmark. Except for that, it has been more like an extreme case of untangling the cord of your headphones - a pain in the rear, not to mention your fingers, but something you have to deal with if you want to hear the music.
But wait. Before the music starts, I should be thanking YOU for welcoming ME back. Without readers, there is nothing.
That last sentence, not coincidentally, provides a nice segue to the introduction of the star of today’s blankety blank feature. So without further ado, in all seriousness, here it is: in 2009 literacy advocate Hank Schwarz, PhD (a.k.a. author/illustrator Uncle Henry) introduced the internet-based Kids’ Book Network (KBN) at www.read4free.net to bring free books, along with the first live bookcasting™ experience, to every child in the world.
Hank also sent us what he dubbed a twitter bio. It is way to cool to leave out: “Missouri. California. Point Dume. Latin. Greek. Harvard. Art. Photography. Boston. New York. L.A. Writer. Illustrator. Message reception. Visual History. Children. Dogs. CEO. Communication. Silicon technology. Hércules Florence. Rural mountaintop living. UCLA. Spanish. Portuguese. Brazil. PhD. Beach. Light. And KBN.”
The bold text below shows how Uncle Henry (a.k.a Hank Schwarz, PhD) filled in the development blanks. We invite readers to fill in the blanks themselves by using the comment function below. Or ask him a question. Here goes:
In an era of limits, the new definition of development is to reduce the total human population on the planet to a healthy 1 billion people.
If I were casting a sequel of Nightmare on Development Street, my choice to play Freddie Krueger would be any pope, oracle, ayatollah or prophet mandating unconstrained human reproduction as the absolute law of god.
As part of the development agenda, water is the foundation.
As part of the development agenda, tourism is the arterial system of global cultural and social integration.
Continued or increased dependence on the automobile will lead to a reinvention of the concept.
The population explosion will lead to a complete planetary biological collapse.
The most likely millennium development goal to be achieved is global economic integration.
The most difficult millennium development goal to achieve is human global population reduction.
The most glaring thing missing from the development agenda is population reduction.
My favorite development success story is as yet unwritten.
The sentence I would like to see others complete is: The future of global peace, with social, economic and political integration, depends on _________.
* Press officers: If you would like to have someone from your organization or company Fill in the Development Blanks, please leave a comment in the space below or contact Bill Hinchberger directly.
It is of course easy to write quick statements following your questions and simply jot down ‘reduce the human population to a healthy 1 billion’ but this is nonsense of course… Without any further elaboration on how this can be accomplished, or what the true meaning is of such statement, it is meaningless.
If I would answer this question with: ‘export 6 billion people to the moon’, would you publish this?
What is the value of an answer ‘reduce the human population to a healthy 1 billion’?
Take Lara’s last post, or Helena’s… great stories.
Hello Bill,
If uncle Henry says that the most difficult millennium development goal to achieve is ‘human global population reduction’, than I wonder if uncle Henry knows what the MDGs are.
Maybe he should read: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/post/millennium_development_goals_for_dummies
Thank you for your comments, Bart and Johan. The point of this exercise, as I see it, is to get people thinking. Indeed, the title of this exercise is Think3.
Maybe population reduction _should_ be an MDG. It would certainly be easier to meet the needs of fewer people with the finite resources we have available to us. But population control is very controversial, and neither the UN nor the politicians want to touch it.
Hi Bill,
And where do you suggest we start with reducing the population?
Hi Bill,
You’ve been silent. Welcome back. Yep, I really wonder how we can wipe away a billion people…but I hear the arguments well…
Thanks, Iris.
In poor countries, Johan, I would start by empowering women, starting probably with a focus on education. In rich countries and for rich people in poor countries, I would start by eliminating tax write-offs for dependent children. (Show me a politician who will tackle that one!)
I must first thank Bart and Johan for their comments on my observation that “In an era of limits, the new definition of development is to reduce the total human population on the planet to a healthy 1 billion people.”
Their response illustrates what is one of the central obstacles in solving the many problems of global development, which is to recognize and acknowledge the nature of the core problem in the first place. Were it left to Bart and Johan, doctors would only be allowed to treat symptoms and never the underlying disease.
Certainly there is a long list of pragmatic human needs we might consider as global development goals – water, sanitation, clean energy, education to cite just a few – for the next millennium. But none of them are ever likely to be achieved without a sharp reduction, at the same time, in human population on the planet.
Consider this. It is estimated that China, with a population of 1.3 billion people, has only recently surpassed the United States in total energy consumption. When China and India together, with a combined population of almost 2.5 billion people, advance to the same level of development and parallel per capita energy consumption as the United States the world’s annual energy consumption, at current efficiencies, will simultaneously increase to about 2.3 times the current level of consumption. Or, the consumption of the entire population on the planet might reach four times the current consumption which is already sufficient to send us in the direction of catastrophic global warming.
So while it’s nice to discuss strategies to improve the efficiency of our use of energy, along with parallel forms of social, economic, and educational development, it’s very difficult to conceive our ability – even employing all the technological discoveries and advances possible – to actually trim current energy consumption levels in half worldwide in the face of development pressures which are leading us at high speed in the opposite direction.
The only effective way to survive this conflict is to reduce energy demand in the future by reducing the planetary population levels that demand it.
We can talk about how that reduction can be achieved without war or pestilence, as I believe it can. But like it or not, population reduction must be the new core definition of development on a planet of limits.
Hank - I don’t know where you got the idea from that Johan and myself go after symptoms rather than the underlying disease. Perhaps I may invite you to read our blogs on TH!NK3 and you will arrive at a rather different conclusion.
I quite agree with your observations and the alarm bells that you ring. But I maintain my view that such propositions are entirely unrealistic.
Perhaps you can also read Stefan May’s blog: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/post/arithmetic_population_and_energy/
in which a presentation is shown that claims that the ‘The world’s worst population growth problem is in the United States’. Food for thought indeed…
The Bartletts Lecture, which Stefan linked to in the post to which you refer, Bart, is excellent. More than that. Fundamental. As we can see now, it was way ahead of its time. It reached many important conclusions, including the one you mention (with which I agree, by the way).
I believe that we should all be responsible for our consumption/carbon footprints. Indeed, I would suggest that a person’s carbon footprint should include one-half of each of their children`s footprint, one-fourth of each of their grandchildren’s, one-eighth of each of their great grandchildren’s, etc…
@ Bill, welcome back!
@ Uncle Henry, to me your statement about reducing the global population struck quite a scary chord. It is little based on reality, too (therefore as Bart and Johan suggested - little constructive).
I believe our endeavours should be based on reality not wishful thinking or fears (see my post where I mention a summit called to help a then urging problem of hourse manure flooding the New York City: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/post/mad_developing_world)
Why don’t we instead resort to more intensive research on alternative clean energies (have you seen a movie ‘Moon’?
) or water?
I believe we are able.
@ Bart: thanks a million for mentioning my posts!
@Hank,
Correct me if I am wrong in my assumptions please.
Up till today we have not heard from you how you would actually try to reduce the amount of people on our tiny planet. So I guess:
1. You would not help victims like those of the Haiti quake,
2. You would like to stop any research that prolongs our lives,
3. You would like to introduce the 1-child policy of China worldwide (and all the problems, like kidnappings, that come with it),
4. Maybe sterilize a percentage of all human males?
5. Tell the developing world to stop developing,
6. Or maybe our governments should just tell us to stop eating?
I am challenging you to share your ideas with the world about how you think you can achieve the reduction to a ‘healthy billion’.
Johan, you were the one who brought up the Bartletts lecture, albeit indirectly. If you watched it, which is what Stefan seemed to be encouraging people to do in the blog entry, you know that he came to several conclusions in addition to the one you mentioned in your comment above. One of them was that population growth WILL be slowed one way or another. As humans we can act to make that process less painful or we can just wait for Four Horsemen (pestilence, war, famine, and death) to do the trick for us. And that, I would suggest, Helena, is way more scarier than doing something.
Hi Bill,
It was my brother that mentioned the ‘arithmetic’ article. But your last comment had me look it up and to my astonishment I have to say I missed it when it came out. So I had a look at the full version today.
Bartlett makes sense, a lot of sense. But nothing he said came as a surprise to me. The good thing it did was making it easier to understand (at least a lot easier than a report I once read from the ‘Club of Rome’).
Yet, also Bartlett doesn’t come up with solutions. The problem we are facing is clear, but what are we going to do about it? As we could see in the lecture videos from Bartlett, there is no politician or economist who is going to bring up the topic because we would plunge into anarchy. Why? because there would actually be no hope left.
So my question remains the same: where are the ideas about how to bring the population back to 1 billion?
Sorry for confusing you with your brother, Johan… I doubt we would plunge into anarchy if politicians began to debate the issue. Politicians won’t deal with it because voters want to have kids; not only that, they want tax write-offs for their kids.
I realize that the path to the human population objective I propose is not easy to achieve, but the objective can be achieved. In fact it must be.
I will return to this conversation in a few days to point out some of the principal obstacles to global population management and identify intermediate steps that must be taken to move past those obstacles. They are not insignificant.
Meanwhile I would encourage Helen to relax and stop watching so many horror movies.
And I would encourage Johan not derail his own analysis with speculation based on false dichotomies. His guesses are vivid, certainly, but should be confined entirely to one of Helen’s horror movies.
Thank you for your patience.
@ Hank,
Stop playing the ‘know-it-all”. You could have given some of your solutions already. If you got them….?
I will be very patient and I am waiting in anticipation what you will produce next.
Hi Henry, thanks for you advice. The movie ‘Moon’ is not really a horror movie(a S-F one), but it teaches thinking outside the box and that you shouldn’t be blindly fixated on any idea - it is set in a reality where already helium-3 is extracted from lunar regolith, for much-needed clean energy!
I believe in development, so I believe a human being is able to search for alternative sources of energy - at the end of the day we are not know-it-alls and we don’t know really what’s ahead - just like the guys from NY didn’t know that a car would be invented and we wouldn’t need to swim in the horses manure.
Before we let ourselves become convinced of the impossibility of human population reduction, let’s consider the consequences of simply looking away from the problem. In an article by Carl Haub on Global and U.S. National Population Trends, published in Consequences Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 1995, and updated in 2004, Haub paints a chilling picture of what the planet could become in just another forty or hundred and forty years. “Today,” writes Haub, “women in developing countries bear an average of about 3.6 children, or 4.2 when numbers for the much-lower fertility of giant China (with over a billion people and more than 21% of the world’s population) are removed. Either figure is well down from the 6.1 of the early 1950s. Does this change remove concerns about a population explosion? The answer is found in simple mathematics. If the TFR [total fertility rate] remained constant in all countries at its present level, world population would rise from 5.7 billion today to 22 billion by 2050 and to 694 billion by 2150.”
Since the point of this conversation is to take a millenial perspective, it’s clear that we need to understand both the obstacles to achieving a global control over population, and the mechanisms short of war and pestilence that might nevertheless help us make it happen.
The key obstacle, it would appear, lies in two factors. One is the current variation around the world in human economic development, industrialization and prosperity. The correlation between development and the lowering of any national TFR is already well-documented and understood. When children are no longer required to harvest the food their family requires to survive, the production of children can be permitted to decline, even to a rate lower than replacement.
On the other hand, getting to that level of development on a global basis requires, at the same time, a planet on which at least 90 to 95 percent of the population operates within a very similar social schema.
From that perspective the other factor we face as an obstacle to population control, as we have been witnessing most vividly in the nations of the Middle East recently but we can see in the large rural parts of nations like India as well, is that right along side of the most economically advanced and socially tolerant societies in the world we have societies that operate with the same primitive absolutism that five centuries ago was the universal world standard.
Trying to solve large economic problems and realize mutual international development opportunities across such a cultural chasm, it must be said, is very difficult.
The good news, on the other hand, is that with our emerging global communications network we can pull jihad-category societies forward much more quickly than in any previous era. And if, further, we can come to understand and learn to employ the function and critical organizational processes of social cognition in human behavior with some additional political skills, we can also drive the transformation of culturally medieval societies toward modernity in their social schema very actively and very quickly, and move the planet toward a new level of global social unity.
But first we must understand the character and evolutionary origins of human social cognition and recognize more clearly its universal and active function in every society today, a subject which, with your permission, we will consider in our next note.
@Hank,
The TFR is inadequate to use if you watched Prof. Bartlett’s videos in this post: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/index.php/think3/post/arithmetic_population_and_energy/
Especially oil-peak will take care of the simple mathematics.
And what I expected you to do is happening. You are targeting specific groups like ‘jihad-category-societies’ and ‘culturally medieval societies’ (whatever these words mean). It is these categories that destroy little and have the least impact on the planet. It is us, with our never ending appetite for capital and goods that do the damage.
But for argument sake, let’s have a look at your new level of global social unity. If we would be able to accomplish this in the next forty years, we would still be with 22 billion people on this planet. So what’s your point?
Independent journalist, communications expert and translator, principal of Babel Comunicação (microbusiness) based in Brasilia, Brazil
Sorry, I thought I was just registering…Anyway, reducing population is not what is needed to ensure development; better distribution could help, though. There are still vast areas of the globe with very low human population density…I believe education and health are the keys to real development.
@Regina,
Regina, I am under the impression that the discussion is not so much ‘development’ but rather what we can do to slow population growth dramatically in order to achieve sustainable development. A better human distribution will not solve the problems we are facing at the moment, it would only lead to an increase in the total world population.
I have to agree with Hank that we are (and will be even more so) with too many on this planet. The problem is: how can we find humane solutions for our over population? Like many other people, I also don’t have the answer to that question.
See how Regina Vasquez filled in the blanks: http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/post/filling_in_the_development_blanks_regina_vasquez/
Both individuals and societies of every scale – nations, familes, tribes, gangs, religions and country clubs – operate on the basis of schema.
Schema is the term used to explain how the individual mind sees the reality of the world, and his or her place in it, to facilitate relatively smooth and reliable behaviors and function within a particular society.
Rules are only a part of it. Unquestioning belief and consequent action are a much larger factor in many societies today, established in the individual’s mind through processes developed thousands of years ago to enable the rise of ordered tribes larger than the maximum size of a chimpanzee colony, or about 130 to 150 individual animals operating together.
It should be understood, as well, that an individual today may live within multiple societies, for example tribes within nations, and the conflicting schemas between those two societies may lead to enormous social conflict and violence. We can readily see the consequences of such conflicting schema in Taliban behaviors in Afghanistan, rural caste behaviors in India and drug gang behaviors in Mexico.
An 18-year-old Afghan woman, Miss Aisha, has her nose and ears cut off with Taliban approval. A young couple in India is killed, by Indian rural tribal authorities, because a strict social code does not permit their marriage. And thousands of Mexicans are killed each year in major cities by very tightly wired drug cartel operatives.
Lest the reader think that cognitive wheels that control social cognition are being condemned here, let us note, first, that human social cognition first arose as an evolutionary advance many thousands of years ago, not long after the development of extractive language. It evolved to enable a reliable standard of social cohesion in the earliest, entirely oral societies. And as an early survival device its very strict, and apparently irrational character as we might view it today, was essential for its success in enabling human civilizations on a larger scale.
Lest the reader think that this brief survey of the function of social cognition around the planet marks a specific assault on the religious tradition of Islam, let me point out that not so very long ago that Inquisitions were held and witches were burned alive in the Christian tradition as well. Religions, which by their nature are designed to hold truth as something completely fixed and reliable, are reluctant to change. In 1992, while the author was in Bangkok, it was finally announced by the Pope that maybe Galileo and his blasphemous ideas were okay after all.
Social cognition, however, is a process more fundamental than any specific religious expression. For a slightly expanded survey of its features the reader may wish to review an article on Transactional Cognition, pp. 21-22, found at: http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/trans.COG.121506.pdf
The problem that all of this illustrates, however, is that reducing global population at a time when the world is still so separated and fragmented by the conflicting social schema that still obtain, along with the very evident disparity we observe in economic and educational development, represents a very difficult challenge.
On the other hand, we can’t wait until every human on the planet is walking around with complete sanitation and a perfect water supply, national healthcare, a high school education, good wine, and a new iPad before we begin to work on the issue of human reproduction, either.
But by recognizing the fundamental nature of the obstacle – a process of social cognition that is highly dysfunctional on a global level, with very inconsistent local schema directing human behavior among perhaps 70 percent of the world’s current population – we can perhaps accelerate adjustments and some shifting in how social cognition functions and how schema are formed for the next 3 to 5 generations of humans on the planet, allowing perhaps 12 to 15 years for each social generation.
How we might actively harness human social cognition to help reach some population limit across the planet is a subject which, with your permission, we will consider in our next note.
Hank,
“How we might actively harness human social cognition to help reach some population limit across the planet is a subject which, with your permission, we will consider in our next note.”
If I am not wrong you wanted to bring back the population to a ‘healthy 1 billion’. In my opinion that is a bit more than ‘some population limit’. But I wait for your next comment. But bring it on fast otherwise I might loose interest!