UPDATE: Dr. Barnett responds in an unfortunately typical vitrioled post (“analytically-narrow”… “drunken [sic?] the Kool-Aid”… “Dark Lord”, etc., etc.). If anyone sees a real response in there, please share the substance in the comments.
ORIGINAL POST:
Dr. Thomas Barnett has built his career on describing the world as divided between a rich and developed “Core,” and an unconnected and undeveloped “Gap.” We’ve tried to “map” this gap several times here at CA to try and understand where the exact lines are. But when it comes down to it, the biggest indicator of the gap-core border is not homosexuality laws or war risk insurance policies, but simply looking at birth rates. All the developed societies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific quickly stopped producing babies once they became rich. The undeveloped world in Africa, South America, South Asia and the Middle East continues to grow at astounding rates. Compare a map of birth rates to a map of Barnett’s Gap and you get a crystal clear correlation: the higher the birth rate, the worse off the country.
It almost defies logic. The most miserable, ungoverned disasters of nations on this earth—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan—are the ones with the highest growth rates. Or as Robert D. Kaplan said in this interview on PBS more than a decade ago on April 5 1996:
All the new babies in the world are not being born in Japan or Scarsdale or Singapore. They’re being born in poor African countries, subcontinental India, and the poorest parts of our own societies. It’s like one part of the world is going in one direction, but a large swath of humanity is going in another. And overpopulation, disease pandemics, rising crime, cultural dysfunction, are going to make a critical mass of the Third World so far behind that they won’t be able to catch up.
Thomas P.M. Barnett is optimistic that the core counties can shrink the gap. Perhaps. But to paraphrase from Coming Anarchy, the world population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, it’s 6 billion today, and it will break 9 billion in 40 years. Although optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, a whopping 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world. Places like the Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan where governments do not function, the economy a wreck, and exports are non-existent. These places are already security black holes, and its only going to get worse as their populations explode.
This population growth will put an increasing strain on our environment and our energy resources. And while neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today’s environmental-social system, time may ultimately prove them right.
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Comments to this entry
Sam_S
June 12, 2007
9:55 am
Shenzhen Ren » You want doom and gloom?
June 12, 2007
10:06 am
Kit
June 12, 2007
3:04 pm
Chief Wiggum
June 12, 2007
3:55 pm
Richardson
June 12, 2007
4:11 pm
CTDeLude
June 12, 2007
4:55 pm
Add to this our unfortunate desire to flood these poor countries with donated goods and vast amounts of funds leaves these countries with no incentive to improve their own industries. Corrupt officials pocket the money and sell the donated goods at ultra cheap prices in which no domestic market can keep up with. It's all very distressing and unfortunately I don't see Bono stopping his crusade to provide as much money as possible to Africa any time soon.
Perhaps Isolationism is the Answer at DPRK Studies
June 12, 2007
4:58 pm
CTDeLude
June 12, 2007
6:35 pm
From now on I'm reading UP from where I last read.
Kurt9
June 12, 2007
8:25 pm
I think you guys are letting your paranoia get the best of you about a problem that will be 1) limited to the "gap" and 2) will be a generational thing at most and will burn itself out in the next few decades.
The FT article is correct that the obvious choice for the West and East Asia is to simply sit back and let this thing burn itself out in the next few decades. The stupidist thing for us to do is to actually involve ourselves in these societies and their troubles.
"More here.":http://www.reason.com/news/show/120360.html.
Sonagi
June 12, 2007
8:37 pm
Not in the least. The pattern is extremely logical. Poverty = lack of access to reliable birth control = large families. Development = higher cost of raising kids (education, trendy clothes, opportunity cost of spending on kids versus selves)= fewer kids. Even Darwinists understand that wealthy people do not need so many children because their resources ensure their offspring will grow up healthy with a bright future. Even in war-torn places like the Congo, people still have sex, mostly unprotected and sometimes without consent, hence, the high birthrates that outpace high infant mortality.
The population growth imbalance between rich and poor countries is mirrored in US population growth. Poor families, especially immigrants, have more children than middle class or wealthy families. I don't think this is a direct outcome of the existence of welfare benefits like food stamps and WIC. Most of the Hispanic families in my community are headed by parents with undocumented status. Their American-born children are eligible for public assistance, but even without such aid, they would still probably have large families, for illegal immigrants do not have convenient access to family planning services.
"...Luxembourg and Ghana have the same population growth rate..."
I wonder if Luxembourg's growth rate, like that of the US, stems mostly from immigration.
I adopted a paleolithic diet several months ago. One point made by paleolithic diet advocates is that the introduction of agriculture about 12,000 years ago enabled explosive population growth yet at the same time provided the human race with a less nutritious diet. Over a billion of the world's people get enough calories to survive and reproduce but not enough nutrition to thrive.
Mark
June 13, 2007
12:41 am
I for one welcome the coming anarchy.
Curzon
June 13, 2007
2:38 am
Richardson: Care to explain?
Kurt9: Leave places like Afghanistan to fester and they will ultimately export their misery to the first world. We should not try and solve the problems of Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sudan, and elsewhere, but we should be proactive in alleviating the problems that we can.
Michael
June 13, 2007
6:15 pm
The thing I like about Barnett's optimism? It allows him to actually LOOK for solutions to problems, to believe that problems can be solved. The only solutions I've seen in any of these articles is variants on isolationism. Also called Hope You can Die out Peacefully before the Marauding Hordes Kill You.
So, do you want to sit around moping about how hopeless things are, or do you want to figure out what can be done about them?
Chief Wiggum
June 13, 2007
6:55 pm
This is true in science as well. The old bulls sustain the prevailing orthodoxy and new ideas often don't have a chance to flourish until the old bulls are gone. Issac Newton was a brilliant scientist who was put into to a position where he could say yea or nay to the projects of other scientists, and became a retrograde influence on new science in the latter part of his life. Einstein never accepted quantum physics. So, nobody knows everything.
I have no quarrel with Dr. Barnett's optimism. With some exceptions, the prevailing wisdom on how to deal with egregious problems has not worked out too well. It's absolutely appropriate to try something new. I hope we will have a chance to find out if Dr. Barnett's ideas work or not. On his blog, he reported that he was contacted by a member of Barack Obama's team, met with him and had a long discussion about his ideas. Dr. Barnett said that some of his ideas are now appearing in Obama's speeches.
Sonagi
June 13, 2007
11:52 pm
How?
"If anyone sees a real response there (in Dr. Barnett's comments), please share the substance in the comments."
I'm afraid I can't help you there. I didn't understand a single sentence. His response is an excellent example of how someone can compose a collection of sentences that are semantically correct and obey syntax yet communicate nothing.
Sonagi
June 13, 2007
11:58 pm
alec
June 14, 2007
3:19 am
I'll stay out of the discussion, but as an econ + history major, I will jut my butt in about two things. First, the low GDP and high birth rate correlation. The majority of studies I've read have boiled down this to two factors: women's education and access to contraceptives. I won't go into more detail, but I'll leave it at that.
Also, I want to say one thing about the post-colonial legacy: it was really damaging in terms of population growth. Modern medicine placed in a society that cannot sustain high population growth will cause the society to implode. We gave and continue to give antidotes to the third world to solve curable diseases. While this may seem like the righteous action in the short term, in the long term it means you have hyper-popular growth without the correlated development in the other institutions -- education, agriculture, and infrastructure. I'm probably not conveying this idea properly, but dumping off antibiotics and immunizations in the rest of the world and giving yourself a big Bono pat on the back won't cut it.
alec
June 14, 2007
3:30 am
When you're addressing covariance for different variables, outliers don't make or break a formula. What does make or break a formula is that the Old Communist Bloc (sans Austria/Hungary/Slovenia) is poor AND facing serious negative growth rates -- worst than the Western World.
Curzon
June 14, 2007
8:22 am
I see your point, and that's a common criticism. And solutions is one thing that I simply won't advocate -- you'll notice I don't say, "OK, here's what we do/how we fix this problem." Because there are no "solutions" in the sense that policies or measures will change the demographic reality of our future. This post is simply drawing attention to an oft-ignored issue that is typically brushed off with a comment such as, "human ingenuity will sort it all out -- it always has in the past."
I think all of us should be more aware of the growing population in the chaotic, undeveloped world. I'm not painting a portrait of doom and gloom. I am not calling for isolationist "fortressing." I'm saying that this is our future, it may not be as bright as everyone is saying, and we should be prepared for the problems that face us.
...Or as Robert D. Kaplan likes to say, measured pessimistic realism is the best way to prepare for the future. Pure optimism blinds you to the problems to be faced.
Curzon
June 14, 2007
8:32 am
That sounds right on the money to me -- a classic example of good intentions leading to disastrous long-term consequences. However: Jared Diamond makes a powerful counterpoint that the only way for Africa to get itself out of the development hole it is in right now is to get rid of the high medical costs that plague its society.
Mind the Gap | Prose Before Hos
June 14, 2007
4:56 pm
Michael
June 14, 2007
9:15 pm
As for whether it's Curzon's, or my, or anyone-on-here's place to suggest solutions. . . we may be amateurs, but what could it hurt? At the very least, our fumbling around for a solution might help us better understand the problem.
Michael
June 14, 2007
9:25 pm
Sonagi
June 14, 2007
11:06 pm
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_1373664,00.html
Some details to observe:
-the amount of fresh produce
-the amount of junk food like frozen pizzas and bottles of soda pop (note: bottles in some households appear to be mineral water)
-the ratio of food quantity to the number of family members
-the cost
Joe
June 15, 2007
11:47 pm
Curzon
June 16, 2007
1:51 pm
gacetillero
July 24, 2007
10:02 pm
I used to like Barnett, but his response to this post was a little too cold even for a pretty cynical hack like me.
tdaxp
July 25, 2007
2:50 pm
Humanity, like all species, evolves through changes in the frequency of genetic variants over time. Where there is less diversity -- less possible genetic variants to have their frequency varied -- there is less evolution. The aboriginies of Austarli...