The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey Read Free Book Online Page B

high-fertility basket cases for the next several decades while the rest of the world modernizes, with concomitant improvements in the life prospects of women? Surely it is reasonable to expect that new medicines, vastly more productive crops and farming techniques, high quality education delivered via low-cost computerized tablets, cheap decentralized energy, and 3-D printing of tools and goods will spill over from the labs and factories of rich countries. These modern tools will go a long way toward ameliorating the chaos and poverty currently afflicting the least developed nations. In addition, the continuing global abatement of violent conflict is already taking hold in Africa and in other poor countries. For example, in October 2014, U.S. Naval War College researcher David Burbach and Tulane University political scientist Christopher Fettweis pointed out that “after the year 2000, conflict in Africa declined, probably to the lowest levels ever.” While they noted an uptick in battle deaths on the continent between 2010 and 2013, those casualties were still almost 90 percent lower than the average in the last decade of the twentieth century. “Changes in external support and intervention, and the spread of global norms regarding armed conflict, have been most decisive in reducing the levels of warfare in the continent,” they concluded. “Consequently, there is no Africa exception to the systemic shift toward lower levels of armed conflict.”
    Among the regions of the world, according to UNESCO, adult and youth illiteracy are highest in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, among Africans aged fifteen through twenty-four, the male literacy rate stands at 76 percent versus the female rate of 64 percent. Obviously, the more that donors from rich countries can do to promote the education of women in the world’s poorest countries, the better. In addition, Africa is rapidly urbanizing, which will also push fertility rates lower. For example, a 2000 study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Tulane University reported that African urbanites had nearly two fewer children than did their rural counterparts. Demographers working for the International Food Policy Research Institute found in 2012 an even greater urban-rural differential; Ethiopian women in the countryside had a total fertility rate of 6 offspring, whereas their city sisters averaged only 2.4 children.
    This process of modernization will bring dramatic improvements in health and longer lives, resulting in a steep decline in fertility rates. Consider that the life expectancy of Bangladeshi women rose from forty-four in 1970 to seventy-two today. In addition, literacy among Bangladeshi women aged fifteen to twenty-four climbed steeply from 38 percent in 1991 to 80 percent today, actually surpassing the male rate of 77 percent. Consequently, the country’s total fertility rate fell in just the twenty years between 1980 and 2000 from 6.6 to 2.9 children. It is now 2.2 children. If the current high fertility countries can realize the bare elements of political stability and economic freedom attained by Bangladesh, with its $750 per capita income, women will live longer and have fewer children. If this analysis is right—and most of the evidence points to that conclusion—the latest UN population projections will turn out to be too high and the musty Malthusian specter will finally fade away.
    In his 2013 book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, technologist Ramez Naam asks an intriguing question: “Would your life be better off if only half as many people had lived before you?” In this thought experiment, you don’t get to pick which people are never born. Perhaps there would have been no Newton, Edison, or Pasteur, no Socrates, Shakespeare, or Jefferson. “Each additional idea is a gift to the future,” Naam writes. “Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for