One of the most striking features about the human systems of the earth is the
extremes in poverty and wealth, of development and underdevelopment.
A few facts and figures, current as of 1995, on per capita Gross National
Product
Gross National Product is the market value of the economic production in
a country (if you take out profits coming in from and leaving for
other countries, you have Gross Domestic Product)
Per capita GNP is GNP divided by all the people in the country
This measure has a number of problems for comparing wealth among
countries:
It masks the degree of inequality in a country
It doesn't deal with non-monetized subsistence and domestic
production, so a subsistence economy looks even poorer than it
really is
With these caveats in mind, here are a few comparisons (data from the
World Population Data Sheet, 1997):
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First World examples:
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United States: $26,980 Switzerland: $40,630
United Kingdom: $18,700 Japan: $39,640
Norway: $31,250
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Second World examples:
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Russia: $ 2,240 Hungary: $ 4,120
Poland: $ 8,700
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Third World oil state examples:
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Kuwait: $17,390 Saudi Arabia: $ 7,040
UAE: $17,400 Nigeria: $ 260
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Third World Four Tigers examples:
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South Korea: $ 9,700 Singapore: $ 7,040
Hong Kong: not available Taiwan: not available
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Other Third World examples:
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Mexico: $ 3,320 Costa Rica: $ 2,610
Argentina: $ 8,030 Brazil: $ 3,640
Rwanda & Burundi:$ 180 Ethiopia: $ 100
Mozambique: $ 80 South Africa: $ 3,160
Haiti: $ 250 Bangladesh: $ 240
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Some notes on regional expressions:
First World:
The prosperous industrialized capitalist countries
US and Canada, most of western Europe, Japan
Also called the West (including Japan), the North (including
Australia and New Zealand), and the Developed Countries or
DCs
Second World:
Industrialized socialist countries with an explicitly Communist
ideological goal
Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe and
Yugoslavia
Has essentially disappeared and it is not a foregone conclusion
that these countries will become part of the First World
Third World:
Poorer, less industrialized countries of the world, many with
colonial histories, which experimented variously with
socialist and with capitalist development paths
Also called the South (including the Koreas), Underdeveloped
Countries (UDCs), and Less Developed Countries (LDCs)
This very broad category has experienced a lot of internal
differentiation over the last five decades:
Substantial industrialization and export oriented growth
strategies have gotten a few of these close to First
World conditions (e.g., South Korea, Singapore,
Taiwan, Hong Kong)
Some other countries have actually seen a decline in their
economic development and an increasingly impoverished
subsistence farming population (e.g., much of East
Africa, Bangladesh, some island nations)
Fourth World:
Sometimes used to characterize those poorer nations on a
socialist path to a Communist future: PRC and Cuba
Some other people use it to designate indigenous, non-state
societies caught up within First World, Second World, or
Third World nation-states:
In the Americas, this would be the Native Americans
Indians, such as the Cherokee, Navajo, or Mayans
Inuit (Eskimo)
In Africa, the San (Bushmen), Pygmies, Hottentots, Twi
In Europe, the Sami (Lapplanders)
In Asia, the hill tribes of India, the Ainu of Japan, the
Hmong of Laos and Vietnam, and the Siberian tribes of
Russia
Still another usage is for the very poorest of the poor
countries (e.g., Mozambique, Chad, Bangladesh, Haiti,
Nicaragua, Nepal, Cambodia)
In all, the term, "Fourth World," means so many different
things to so many different people that it is basically
useless
One of the most common explanations offered for the underdevelopment of the
Third World is overpopulation. Much of today's lecture reviews and
critiques this explanation.
A few facts and figures to illustrate the issue:
Population levels through time:
The earth's human population took until 1850 to reach its first
billion
The second billion took only until 1950
The population doubled in only 25 years! 1975 saw four billion of
us
We are expected to hit six billion by 2000
Current levels and trends:
As of 1997, we have over 5.8 billion worldwide
Globally, we're growing at 1.5 percent a year
This translates into a doubling time of 47 years
To calculate doubling time, divide 70 by the growth rate
Regionally,
The Developed Countries are growing at a bit over 0.1
percent/year, doubling every 564 years
The Underdeveloped Countries are growing at 1.8 percent/year,
for a doubling time of 38 years.
If we take the PRC out of the UDC category, then we see growth
rates of 2.1 percent/year, leading to a doubling time of
only 33 years
Some specific areas:
North America: 0.6% --> 117 years
Europe: -0.1% --> halving of the population in 700 years
Asia: 1.6% --> 44 years
Africa: 2.6% --> 26 years
Latin America: 1.8% --> 38 years
Oceania: 1.1% --> 63 years
Some countries are growing at really explosive rates:
Marshall Islands: 4.0% --> 17 years
Maldives: 3.6% --> 19 years
Yemen and Togo: 3.5% --> 20 years
Benin, Niger, Congo (Zaire), & Solomons: 3.4% --> 21 years
Jordan, Belize, and Madagascar: 3.3% --> 21 years
Honduras and Angola: 3.2% --> 22 years
Liberia and Saudi Arabia: 3.1% --> 22 years
Guatemala, Burkina Faso, Mali, & Tanzania: 3.0% --> 23 years
At the present:
95 percent of all children are born in UDCs
Only 25 percent of the world's population lives in DCs, which
account for 85 percent of the global economy
75 percent of the world's population has to make do on only 15
percent of the global economic activity
The USA, with about 5 percent of the world's population
Consumes a third of the world's raw materials
Consumes a quarter of the world's energy
Produces nearly three quarters of the world's hazardous
wastes
In a way, despite the grotesquely growing population of the
underdeveloped world, a child born in the USA is a bigger
global environmental problem than 27 kids in India
The world's population growth and trends become politically
explosive in a world with extremely sharp "North-South"
divides in wealth and economic power AND enormous
differences among religions and between religious and
secular views
An interesting site on the issue, including curricular ideas:
http://www.pbs.org/kqed/population_bomb/worldp.html
Various theories about the relationship between population growth and poverty
Overpopulation causes poverty
William Vogt (1948), Road to Survival: Simple-minded (and
often viciously racist-minded)
Third World peoples equated with rabbits in their propagation
"Untrammelled copulators"
Seeing past such ugly rhetoric, the argument states that there are
too many mouths to feed, too many hands to be employed
gainfully, so that the rate of reproduction exceeds the rate of
economic growth, thus negating all progress
The most sophisticated version of the argument is Rev. T. Malthus'
back in 1798:
Humans can increase agricultural production at an arithmetic
rate (1,2,3,4,5,6,...) because of the law of diminishing
returns
"The constancy of the passion between the sexes" means that
they can increase the human population in a geometric
series (1,2,4,8,16,32,...)
Sooner or later, these two maths collide and the population
crashes due to checks by disease, famine, war, pestilence)
Malthus' motive in this argument was to argue against the
betterment of humanity (his father endorsed the French
Revolution) by positing something that will eternally
undermine it (so why bother doing anything for the
improvement of society?)
He himself had a bunch of kids (as a parson, I guess he had
lots of time between sermons to explore the constancy of
the passion between the sexes)!
Arguing both sides against the middle, he actually opposed
birth control (as unnatural) because he actually sided
with industrial interests who wanted a larger and more
desperate (and cheaper) wage force
Malthus has seen quite a rise in popularity since the late
1960s
His modern fans are called neo-Malthusians
The "neo" reflects their commitment to the birth control
he abhorred
Modern explanations for this excess reproduction
All that untrammelled copulation and constancy of the passions
between the sexes: implying that poor people are like
animals and can't curb their reproductive urges (Vogt and
Malthus)
Nowadays, some people attribute Third World overpopulation to
the misguided generosity of Western nations, exporting
death control technology (e.g., public health and
sanitation measures and medicines) but not aggressively
and equally providing access to birth control technology
(The Population Bomb [1968], Paul Ehrlich)
Implications:
Couple economic aid with aggressive promotion of birth
control programs
More extremely, cut off all such health technology and
other forms of aid to the more hopeless nations and
leave them to their fates if they won't get with the
population control program (Garrett Hardin's "Living
in a Lifeboat," BioScience (1974) and "Tragedy
of the Commons," Science (1968).
Criticisms of this theory
Cornucopians (e.g., Julian Simon [1986], Theory of Population and
Economic Growth)
They deny there is even a problem
The human mind is virtually omnipotent and will always
come up with a solution to any specific problems
posed by population levels (e.g., if copper is
scarce, the market switches to other conductors)
Given that the human mind is unlimited, so the earth is,
therefore, virtually infinite
This sounds pretty dopey on the surface of things, but it IS
based on a sound argument drawn from marketing
In marketing, the first thing a business wants to know is
the level of potential demand for its products or
services
This is a function of incomes and spending habits
It is also overwhelmingly a function of local
population levels
In market area analysis, then, you prioritize markets
with high populations and, just as importantly,
populations that are growing
A market that is declining in size creates a cascade
of business failures as demand drops and
unemployment and even more business failure
So Simon and his fans hold that a drop in the WORLD level
population would result in a global economic crash
Well, the marketing analogy may be apt and, heck, maybe the
human mind is omnipotent, but:
What about the OTHER species on this planet? The
continued growth of the human component will
progressively crowd out the other species -- do we
really want to do that (or continue doing that)?
What about the disruption in local, regional, and global
ecosystems being set off by our economic activities,
which could and may be backfiring on us
Global warming and emergent diseases
Commercial logging and the massive fires in Indonesia
The rivet analogy -- the loss of this species and of
this one might not really do much damage, just
like removing one rivet from an airplane's
sheathing and another -- but what is the
critical point that sets off rapid,
catastrophic, and irreversible change?
What about another trend in our economy -- technological
increases in productivity creating structural
unemployment and creating a relatively superfluous
population?
What about the drastic drop in population growth rates
seen in the First World, which has not hurt its
prosperity, and the huge growth rates in the
Third World, where economic growth has not kept
up -- the demographic transition?
Demographic transition argument
Economic development affects population through something
called the demographic transition
Stage 1 -- undeveloped economy, featuring high birth rates
to keep up with high death rates, resulting in a very
slow growth rate and a low population level
Stage 2 -- early industrial development, featuring a drop
in death rates as public health measures are enacted,
which, however, is not matched by a drop in birth
rates due to cultural inertia -- population growth
rate explodes, as does the population level
Stage 3 -- later in the development process, we see birth
rates beginning to respond to the drop in death rates
(urbanization and child labor laws might help, too)
-- population is still growing at a high, but
dropping rate, and the population level continues to
rise but not as fast as in Stage 2
Stage 4 -- developed status, with birth rates down to the
low level of the death rates, producing a
stabilization in the population level (which,
however, now is huge) as population growth rates drop
to nearly zero
Some people think the demographic transition will eventually
take place globally, stabilizing the population, though at
a high level
Barry Commoner points out that poverty might prevent or slow
the demographic transition
We might not have the time to kick back and wait for the
demographic transition to take care of things -- the
planet's systems might not be able to withstand us
that long
Cross-culturally, poor people have more kids than rich
people, so perhaps we ought to concentrate on
eliminating poverty in order to hasten the transition
Frances Moore Lappé
Denies that overpopulation CAUSES poverty
Rather, both overpopulation and poverty are both symptoms of an
even deeper underlying problem
This problem is inequitable distribution of resources and the
benefits of modern technology
The First World has to get over its addiction to excessive
consumption, so that others might survive at a better
standard of living, which would produce changes in
reproduction
Mahmoud Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste,
and Class in an Indian Village
East African of Punjabi ancestry
Visited Punjab
Encountered family planning free clinics in Indian villages
Their American staffs, frustrated by the lack of progress in
slowing down local population growth, complained that
these people were too ignorant to understand the pill and
otherwise dissed them
Mamdani started just TALKING to the people themselves
Wonderful anecdotes: woman with jar of pills prominently
displayed explained that she WOULD indeed take them one
day when she had enough kids, enough being a large number
Mamdani noticed a pattern in the target family size: it fell
along caste (class) lines
Poorest peasants wanted the most kids:
Farm kids are economically productive at very early
ages: they are not a burden
Increase labor on land to increase productivity
Can farm out surplus kids to neighbors and the kids'
wages can help the family stay on their land and
maybe one day buy more
Better off peasants wanted somewhat fewer
Still needed a lot of kids
But their greater security meant that they began to
worry about the future, the division of the land
into absurdly small parcels on their deaths
Shopkeepers wanted fewer kids yet
Older kids can help out, but they are a burden longer
Many wanted to educate their kids, which is a big
burden on a family
Brahmins wanted the fewest kids of all
This intellectual caste feels an obligation to
educate all their kids (even their daughters,
fancy that), even to college levels
Kids are a very serious economic liability
In other words, these villagers are basically rational in their
reproductive wishes: they aim for about that number of
kids they objectively need, given their circumstances and
position in life -- they are NOT the "untrammelled
copulators" of Vogt's imagination, nor are they the
ignoramuses perceived by the family planning clinic staff
Implications for global population:
Overpopulation may indeed be a tremendous problem at the
global and country levels
Population growth may exceed growth in the gross
domestic product, outstripping economic growth
It can pose huge political problems: how do you
educated all these kids and how do you find work
for all of them?
Population growth may be contributing directly and
indirectly to the decimation of Earth's
ecosystems and the other species on the planet
But, people do not breed at the global and
country level: their reproductive choices are
negotiated between two people
They will aim for that number of kids they feel they
need
Differences in opinion between them will be
negotiated on the basis of their balance of
power (and, in most societies, the male has the
upper hand in this, so male preferences dominate
world population dynamics)
Trying to change population growth dynamics from the top
down is absolutely doomed to fail unless the
underlying rationality of people's breeding choices
are addressed
If they're not given an alternative means of
satisfying these needs, they will not comply
It is fundamentally unfair to ask the poorest and
most marginalized of the world's people to bear
the cost of giving up a reproductive behavior in
their objective self-interest to save the nation
or world (and the consumption habits of the few
better off of us)
Only tyranny can create a (temporary) compliance
People need help to secure their livelihoods and to
educate their kids and to survive in old age
Women need help to press their usual desire for fewer
kids against their husbands' usual preference
for more
Child labor laws need to be promulgated and enforced:
kids working are not in school (dooming them to
lifelong poverty) and, in industrial contexts,
their wages exert a downward drag on their
parents'
While religion makes a handy whipping boy for
overpopulation, it's interesting how people manage to
have the number of kids they need no matter their
religion:
Mamdani's people behaved consistently with their
caste and class, not their religion
Consider American Catholics -- Irish-American
families at the turn of the century commonly had
over a dozen kids -- now Irish-Americans have
your standard 2.1 kids -- American child labor
laws and urban life
Ernst Mandel
Thought experiment on overpopulation and employment
In capitalism, a certain number of people are required to be
unemployed to be keep wages down in the event of an
economic upturn (so employers don't have to bid new
workers' wages up)
If unemployment drops, profits drop, too, as employers are
forced to bid higher
So, let's imagine what would happen if, suddenly, half the
population were magically removed
Labor scarcity would erode profits and weaken businesses
Inventories would build up as the market was cut in half, thus
weakening businesses
These weakened businesses would downsize or go out of business,
throwing a lot of people out of work, thus restoring the
proportion of the population that is made surplus
(overpopulation, at half the population size!)
Some people criticize the racism and classism implicit (and
sometimes explicit) in the overpopulation debate
Mamdani tacitly criticizes the racism of the Americans working
on the project in India
Alan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus, passionately
exposes every racist sentiment uttered in this debate and
shows how overpopulation has consistently been exploited
in service of racist goals (e.g., forced sterilizations of
the poor, the 1920s US immigration laws, and attempts to
get rich white women out of the workforce and back to
having babies
David Harvey put it this way, mocking the assumption on the
part of the well-to-do, consumerist middle class that they
are obviously valuable and "they" are obviously not:
Somebody, somewhere, is redundant and there is not
enough to go around. Am I redundant? Of course not.
So who is redundant? Of course, it must be them and,
if there is not enough to go around, then it is only
right and proper that they, who contribute so little
to society, ought to bear the brunt of the burden.
Migration
Long-term or permanent displacement of one's residence
Immigration is movement Into an area
Emigration is movement Exiting an area
By shifting people from one location to another, migration affects
population levels in a manner as important as fertility and
mortality
Migration can be categorized by the degree of voluntariness involved
Voluntary migration
Migrant has control over
Whether to migrate
Where to migrate
When to migrate
How to migrate
Migrant responds to push and pull factors
Pull factors are the attractions of a destination or, more
accurately, the perceived attractions of a
destination
Push factors are the negative characteristics or
conditions of the origin
In a voluntary migration, the migrant is responding more
to the positive pull factors at destination than to
the negative push factors at origin
Examples:
Many of your migrations to Chico
Retirement migrations (e.g., Florida, Palm Springs)
Amenity migrations (e.g., California's climate)
Forced migration
Migrant has absolutely no control over anything (if, when,
where, and how to migrate)
Examples:
Slave trade
Nazis rounding up Jews for the death camps
Japanese-Americans "relocated" during WWII
Cherokee Trail of Tears to Oklahoma
Local roundup of Native Americans for a brutal and
murderous march to the Clear Lake area
Impelled migration
Migrant is responding to push factors at origin, which may be
very grim, even life-threatening
Ethnic Albanians under attack by the Serb-dominated
Yugoslavia in the Kosovo province ("ethnic
cleansing")
Tutsis fleeing certain slaughter by Hutus in Rwanda
Ethiopians fleeing virtually certain death to drought,
famine, and civil war
Central Americans fleeing civil war (often abetted by the
US -- every place we meddle rewards us with a return
migration flow)
"Downsized" GM workers fleeing permanent unemployment
Flint, MI, as shown in "Roger and Me"
Dust Bowl farmers fleeing the drought of the 1930s
Even under the grimmest circumstances at origin, however, a person
undertaking an impelled migration does retain a measure of
volition and control in picking just when to leave and where to
go
More on pull factors, which are relevant in voluntary and impelled
migrations
Out of the infinity of possible destinations, people have to commit
themselves to one
They may be looking for
Environmental amenities (climate, recreation possibilities)
Cultural amenities (colleges, lifestyle)
Jobs (well, more accurately, the possibility of being
overutilized -- having a job better than you would expect
from your training)
A safe environment
How do they learn about the characteristics of a potential
destination, enough to decide there is a sufficient pull there?
Media shape our mental maps of potential destinations (just
think, the Beverly Hillbillies is known all over the
world ...), sometimes biasing our perceptions in an
excessively positive manner (California?) and sometimes in
an excessively negative manner (New York City?)
Relatives and friends already in the destination area
This often sets off chain migrations as people follow one
another through space
Their information is very often biased in a positive
direction: no-one wants to admit they are not
successful after migrating
For better-off people, scouting out several places by actually
visiting them on vacation
Relevant only for pretty prosperous people with time on
their hands
Also possibly biased in the positive direction, as people
on vacation are interacting more with their own
positive fantasies than the actual environment as
experienced by locals (e.g., all my friends Back East
want to see Hollywood Blvd., which local Angelenos
avoid like the plague)
Barriers to the physical act of migration or to its ultimate success
Distance itself: it takes money and time to overcome distance
Political barriers:
International migration may be illegal (for people, not money)
You may have to deal with a policing authority at a border
If you get by that, you will live in fear of deportation, which
can frustrate your economic success
Cultural barriers
Language
Religious differences and prejudices
Racism and other forms of bigotry
Just the kind of discomfort of not quite fitting in (that can
hit you just moving within your own country)
A positive barrier: intervening opportunities
Sometimes, while en route to what you think is your final
destination, you find what you're looking for at some
intermediate location and decide to settle down right
there
Example:
Folks in the last century who decided not to continue on to the
Mother Lode in California's Gold Rush but stay in San
Francisco or Sacramento and start a business providing
goods and services to the miners
Someone trying to get into the US from Mexico finding a job in
Tijuana and deciding to stay and not hassle the crossing
last revised: 06/10/98