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What do I love about: Empty Planet?
What I love about this book is the suspense. Initially I was of the notion that the writer was against population decline, thought the UN was overly optimistic with its prediction numbers and was seriously trying to make his case by providing so much details from history and individual interesting countries.
It was a shocker when I got to the last chapter and the writer was promoting population decline as the solution to climate change and improved standards of living. I really was not expecting the book to end on that note. The writer did a great job concealing his ultimate point to the very end. That is what I call an impressive writing style.
What do I not love about: Empty Planet?
I felt that the book had a bit too much details with the statistics but again it revealed how thorough the writers team got to produce a piece like this.
Who should read: Empty Planet?
If you are curious on the economics of population across the world then this is a must read.
Who should not read: Empty Planet?
If you have no patience to comb through statistical details, have no interest in population economics and have no interest in how population has evolved from country to country you may want to stay away.
Notes from Empty Planet
- John Snow is known as the father of epidemiology due to his contribution to eradicating Cholera
- Urbanization causes fertility to decline due to rising affluence, improved education, women emancipation, weakening influence of kin and organized religion
- Why are small families hard on the economy? They reduce the number of consumers available to purchase goods, they reduce the number of tax payers available to fund social programs. They reduce the number of young innovative minds
- Immigration is a win win for both immigrants and the native-born. It is the opposite of a zero sum game. Immigration enlarges the economy while leaving the native population slightly better off. The immigrants avail themselves opportunities not available to them in their home countries while providing bodies needed to drive consumption and pay taxes for services consumed
Impact of historic plagues
- Plague of Justinian was the first pandemic with death of 25-50 million
- Black death (Bubonic plague) was the second pandemic killing one third of European human population
- Cholera brought by trade to Europe through Russia. The first cholera pandemic occurred in the Bengal region of India, near Calcutta starting in 1817 through 1824. The disease dispersed from India to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Eastern Africa.The movement of British Army and Navy ships and personnel is believed to have contributed to the range of the pandemic, since the ships carried people with the disease to the shores of the Indian Ocean, from Africa to Indonesia, and north to China and Japan. Since it became widespread in the 19th century, cholera has killed tens of millions of people
- Spanish flu at the end of the first world war that killed between 20 and 40 million people
5 stages of demographic transition
Stage 1: High birth rate and death rate, population growth is slow and fluctuating. This was the case from the dawn of human species till 18th century. Hunger and disease were major cause of the problem
Stage 2: High birth rate but gradually declining death rate due to the industrial revolution itself
Stage 3: Fall in birth and death rate
Stage 4: Birth rate at the sustenance level and death rate continues to fall. Life expectancy becomes high. The rate required to sustain the population is 2.1 babies
Stage 5: Life expectancy slowly increases, fertility rate declines below 2.1 replacement rate eventually leading to a declining population
Demographic facts across the globe
The pressure of career in Korea, the cost of bride price in Africa, the one child policy in China, the impact of urbanization and the popularity of soap operas in Brazil influence how and why women decide to have children.
China: Interesting facts that have influenced population
Demographer Feng Wang sums China’s population dilemma up neatly in one number:160
- The country has 160 million internal migrants who in the process of seeking better lives have supplied abundant labor for the nations booming economy.
- More than 160 million Chinese are 60 years old or older.
- More than 160 million Chinese families have only one child, a product of the country’s 3 decade old policy limiting couples to one child.
Wang’s sobering conclusion is that population decline and an aging society could bring on a crisis of political legitimacy
USA: Interesting facts that have influenced population
- The United States welcomes new arrivals, and people from all over the world want to move there. China does not permit immigration and Russia has trouble convincing anyone to come. America’s willingness to supplement the gap between babies produced domestically and the babies needed to sustain the population through immigration is the crucial advantage that will secure American hegemony.
- If America is to remain great, it must remain a nation that welcomes immigrants. For that to happen, Americans must once again overcome the worst angels of their nature
- In the worst single act of government sponsored race hatred in American history, the federal government interned one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and Japanese residents in camps during the 2nd world war, fearing they were disloyal. The American government placed its own citizens in concentration camps (and the Canadian government shamelessly aped their cruelty) out of sheer, racist fear of the other. Figures as progressive as Franklin Roosevalt and Earl Warren, then the governor of California, allowed themselves to be blinded by animus and prejudice. Today, the Japanese internment stands as a shocking legacy of American inhumanity towards its own people. 40 years later a federal commission called the incarceration a grave injustice and President Ronald Regan issued a formal apology and the federal government provided each survivors twenty thousand dollars in compensation.
Canada: Interesting facts that have influenced population
- To equal Canada’s intake on a per capita basis, the US would need to accept about 3 million legal immigrants a year, 3 time the current level. Immigrants to Canada are on average better educated than native-born Canadians. They contribute to and flourish in, a peaceful, prosperous society.
- 10 percent of the people granted permanent resident status are refugees, the rest are either immigrants brought in because they will contribute to the Canadian economy or family members of economic class.
- The less nationalist the state, the easier the job of absorbing immigrants. The weaker the culture, the easier the task of promoting multiculturalism. The less the sense of self, the less the sense that another is the other.
Indigenous population: Interesting facts that have influenced population
- Indigenous populations will soon start to age, along with the general population and they will face the same resulting challenges. And because they are so few in numbers, relative to the general population, they will find it even harder to preserve their language, culture and autonomy within the larger society. The challenge for indigenous populations in Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand is that there are not too many babies being born, but too few.
- Australians are working hard to preserve aboriginal culture-for posterity. An estimated 130 people are currently at work digitizing languages and other aspects of aboriginal culture.
Conclusion: What lies ahead
- If you want to contribute to the fight against global warming, live in a city in a high-rise apartment where radiant heat seeps through walls into other people’s unit, lowering heating costs- and commute by subway.
- Urbanization, innovation and depopulation might be the best solution to halting the march of climate change. With any luck, a baby born today- or at worst one born a decade or two from now will reach middle age in a cleaner, healthier world.
- Some analyst predict that smaller families will make society richer by allowing parents to work longer hours, thus increasing their skill at the work they do and making it possible to lavish more attention and money on their only child when they get home. We are not sure. But we do not want to become reverse Malthusians predicting a world of increasing poverty and social stress through population decline. Things have a way of working themselves out