Spur of the Moment Guide to FACTFULNESS: WEEK 15

p. 89-92

There’s some more interesting stuff on population growth in the next few pages from where the Week 14 post left off, but I’ll mention the most important takeaway because it’s worth it even if you hadn’t given it much thought.

The takeaway:

“The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives, including education and contraceptives.” (page 91)

One thought that came to mind when the author debunked the misconception that religion plays a role in how many children one chooses to have was about a documentary I’d seen about a couple living in the UK.

First, this is part of what the author talks about. Because the media choose to tell stories about exceptions like the couple in this documentary, most people will end up thinking that a certain mentality attributes to the issue of having lots of children. That is easy to understand. I remember the guy telling the reporter that he was not going to stop having children. He already had eight, if I remember correctly.

At the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking about the issue of overpopulation. I assume it was partly because of the point the documentary was trying to make, but the issue was that this guy was claiming benefits. So although he was not able to support all those children he was going to keep at it.

The author mentions child labor and potential child death as the primary causes of people having more children, causes which are a direct effect of extreme poverty.

So maybe this guy is simply an exception because clearly, his motivation has nothing to do with survival rates or child labor. Or maybe, it is this government-made policy that creates the issue. In that case, although you have a policy that has nothing to do with manipulating the population’s growth, you end up with influencing it anyway.

The question here is could this create an issue? I am not referring to overpopulation, but a social issue. These children, although they will benefit from a level 4 income situation in terms of education and health they will still not benefit as much as the children of couples who choose to have fewer children in order to offer their kids better education and healthcare.

The benefits policy is very important for the reasons it was created. But if misused by people, no matter how small a number of people abusing the policy, it could potentially create an issue.

This has nothing to do with what the book is saying, but it does highlight the importance of government-backed policies and the impact they can have whether they are positive, negative or both.

And since this might sound a bit vague one can look at the one-child policy in China at this Wikipedia page. There’s a section titled “Potential social problems”.

I suppose one point of these first thoughts could be that eradicating extreme poverty and increasing education and access to contraception may save the planet from overpopulation, but other factors, such as government policies, could have an effect as well.

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Week 14

The Spur of the Moment Guide to FACTFULNESS is a series of posts of first thoughts while reading the book FACTFULNESS by Hans Rosling (this is an affiliate link).