Spectator's Journal / Population Lost
Wattenberg, Ben J.
lucinatmg, the heroine of Reds proceeds on a smooth track under the blue skies of a peaceful Finland, well equipped with skis and provisions and a fetching wool hat--not to mention a male...
...2 in the world with 667 million people...
...That's called " t h e demographic transition" and it concerns individuals making very personal and logical decisions with little regard to the fellows with pocket calculators...
...I think so...
...today the rate is about 35...
...Even a lower growth rate still yield~ some growth until and unless it reaches zero...
...That means that in the past 20 years India got about a third of the way to rates that will produce zero population growth...
...Of course the great theme of the novel Doctor Zhivago is the destruction of freedom andprivate life, scarcely done justice in the film...
...Seven of the 20 biggest nations are categorized by the United Nations as "more developed...
...What we see, then, is a pattern that is observable elsewhere in our society: We trumpet and politicize bad trends that may not be bad and may not be trends...
...Lost forever...
...Second, what is seen as bad news drives out what is seen as good news...
...But they do suggest a certain priority for the love story...
...lucinatmg, the heroine of Reds proceeds on a smooth track under the blue skies of a peaceful Finland, well equipped with skis and provisions and a fetching wool hat--not to mention a male guide whose sole function is to give her a boost over the snowbanl~s...
...A nation only has to achieve rates in the mid-teens to get a population stability over time...
...These phrases are so familiar they don't even ring...
...This earth will indeed have more people--at Ben ff...
...Each had birthrates of around 50 in the 1950s and are only down to the mid-toupper 40s today...
...By the late 1970s, just a quarter of a century later, that rate had fallen to 22...
...Mothers no longer had to rear six kids in order for two or three to live to adulthood...
...The "moderates" at that time were predicting a peak of 12 billion to 15 billion people...
...As for me, a political man, I trumpet only the idea that the projections of doom will not survive...
...Third, what's seen as bad news often isn't...
...But the biggest demographic question marks in recent years have con~ cerned the major nations of the "less developed" world...
...The alleged "population explosion" dominated our consciousness for a quarter of a century...
...The remaining six big nations in the less-developed world break down this way: The birthrates of Thailand, Turkey, and Mexico have dropped about ten per thousand...
...I t ' s not just those missing 300 million...
...Brazil's was 44 in 1950...
...This article is adapted from Mr...
...The leverage of these sorts of declining rates is incredible...
...Most of those missing persons were from the poor countries of the world...
...Census Bur e a u ' s International Demographic Data Center, maestro Samuel Baum presiding...
...In short, many billions of people have statistically vanished...
...But that drop is more significant than it may seem...
...And for those-who are made uncomfortable by the contradictions, there is Jack Nicholson playing Eugene O'Neill, sending out caustic reminders of how absurd Reed and Bryant are...
...A famous demographer has noted that every baby comes equipped with not only a mouth but also with hands...
...It has been thought of as a demographic basket case...
...As recently as the early 1960s, Indonesia's birthrate was 46...
...A t first the returns were disappointing, but like Zinoviev, Beatty is not too concerned about the unguided masses...
...Moreover, what is never talked about is the thought that if some countries today have negative fertility rates, might not one day the world population as a whole decrease ? Are there some lessons to be gleaned from all this...
...Its recessional march now attracts little attention...
...Similar declines in birthrate are apparent in the two next-largest poor countries, Indonesia and Brazil...
...Thus, the often-bizarre "Global 2000 Report" commissioned by President Carter cites a harum-scarum projection dealing with a world population of almost 30 billion in the next 120 years...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 31...
...In Reds this priority is reversed...
...Some for a class war, some for a holy war...
...They are people who, back in 1968, UN demographers predicted would be born by the year 2000...
...now i t ' s about 36...
...These changing projections point up a fact of our modern circumstance that has received very little attention...
...It doesn't matter what they're cheering for, as long as they keep it up long enough to help Beatty seize power from George Lucas...
...No doubt they will heed the New York Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Holly-wood Foreign Press Association--all of whom have bestowed awards upon Reds...
...For good measure, South Korea, the world's 21st largest nation, has seen a stunning drop in its birthrate, which has declined by 3 0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 about half in only the past 20 years, from 45 to 22...
...What is happening is that around the world, the socalled "population explosion" is receding--and quite rapidly in most places...
...Yet it is a fact at the root of many modern distortions...
...A brief look at data from the 20 most-populous countries provides a flavor of what's going on...
...The UN projections show India's birthrate dropping to 26 within the next 20 y e a r s - - t h a t ' s yet another third of the way there...
...All you have to do is follow a handy little 17point program that happens to be already typeset and at the printers...
...They change--because, unlike pocket calculators, people have control of their destiny...
...If this is what the critics mean by an "adult" relationship, then it must be left to children like Lara and Zhivago to find passion in each other...
...Reds" is said to resemble Doctor Zhiz,ago in that it is "a great love story set against tumultuous historical events, fraught with conflict and full of passion," (Newsweek...
...they rattle...
...Six of these seven nations are already at fertility levels that would lead to actual declines in population in years to come...
...But by 1978, as birthrates kept falling, the same demographers predicted that those 300 million people wouM not be born by the turn of the century...
...The first is this: There are no immutable projections...
...least several billion more before we level off--and those new billions will cause some problems as they arrive...
...The lovers' main passions are political: his for Communism, hers for her own emancipation...
...Even a few years ago the professional demographic alarmists were saying the world would grow to 15 billion to 20 billion people before leveling off...
...A quick tour of these poor nations shows declines in birthrates everywhere, although at verydifferent speeds...
...But then the storming of the Winter Palace proves too stimulating for them, and the screen fills with their torsos, heaving like a bellows to the strains of the "Internationale...
...Today, when planners in most of these "rich countries" look into the future, they are less concerned about a population explosion than about labor-force shortages...
...Birthrates were very high in this world when many infants did not survive...
...They are the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and Italy...
...On the other hand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nigeria have all shown much smaller declines...
...These top 20 contain 75 percent of the world's population...
...Of course, he is madly in love with the absurd Bryant, which will keep most viewers from connecting his remarks with the rest of the film...
...some for rhetoric, some for free speech...
...But Carter's en~zironmental activists were way out of touch...
...Certainly not if present trends continue...
...In the early 1950s, the mainland Chinese had an annual birthrate of 40 children per thousand people...
...The Soviets are only a smidgen away...
...In Petrograd they sleep apart to demonstrate that she is his professional equal, which she clearly is not...
...By comparison, America's birthrate today is 16...
...When those infants began surviving, birthrates began to drop...
...But what is also apparent is that those nightmare scenarios of ever-more non-stop billions of starving people packed like sardines in a can will never come to pass...
...That makes the pie grow...
...India is No...
...That's an argument that may never be proved...
...I~1attenberg's ~l monthly United Feature Syndicate column...
...When some big out-of-town jasper with a pocket calculator comes up to you and says, " I f present trends c o n t i n u e . . . " - - h o l d onto your wallet...
...Present trends" involving people typically don't continue, particularly if the trends are unfavorable...
...These people were victims neither of a cruel famine nor of a tyrant's repression-but of plunging birthrates...
...Data for Vietnam does not exist...
...That's bad...
...People not only consume but also produce...
...Finalty, science and statistics become ideological handmaidens...
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...Yet the film Doctor Z/~ivago does manage to put human love before political ideology...
...Now, this does not mean that our planet won't ultimately house more people than it now has...
...They are gone...
...The differentials also involve many billions...
...some for self-assertion, some for selfless love...
...Wattenberg Three hundred million people have disappeared duringthe past decade...
...The missing 300 million Third Worlders are, of course, only a statistical artifact...
...We now have 4.5 billion and are expected to grow to 6 billion by 2000...
...today it's about 30...
...Begin at main land China with almost a billion people today...
...that is about what the United Nations predicts China's will be by the end of the century...
...Thus, the (distorted) perception of the population explosion quickly yields corollaries: We're running out of resources, it's an era of limits, the rich are unfair m the poor, we need a new world economic order...
...that's a bigger decline than India's but not as sharp as China's...
...it is surely the Big Daddy of nations when ranked by population...
...That's still high...
...Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Any skeptics left over will be drowned out by the cheers...
...But there is more to the comparison than a few ineptly cribbed details...
...The numbers were assembled by the United Nations and analyzed by the U.S...
...And isn't it odd that just about every nation in the world substantially raised its standard of living precisely while the "population explosion" was going on...
...Not surprisingly, the fellows with the hot calculators will also be happy to tell you how to fix things...
...India has had a much more moderate drop in birthrate than has China...
...Today, looking at the most recent birthrates, the low end of the moderate projections come in at about 10 billion while the low-ball demographers are talking about 8 billion...
...The "'population explosion" was regarded as "bad news" because the fellow with the calculator said that if you split a pie among more people, each person has less...
...The Philippines and Egypt have lost about five per thousand...
...In the late 1950s, India recorded 43 births per thousand...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
