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Cover art by Jean-Pierre Normand
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: UPS AND DOWNS by Stanley Schmidt
Novella: TEST SIGNALS by David Bartell
Science Fact: STRANGE CROAKS AND GHASTLY ASPIRATIONS by Henry Honken
Novelette: NO TRAVELLER RETURNS by Dave Creek
Short Story: THE ASHES OF HIS FATHERS by Eric James Stone
Short Story: STILL-HUNTING by Sarah K. Castle
Probability Zero: THE DINOSAURS OF EDEN by Darrell Schweitzer
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE FALLING DOMINOES: THE SOURCE OF ULTRA-HIGH-ENERGY COSMIC RAYS by John G. Cramer
Short Story: PETITE PILFERER PUZZLES PIEDMONT POLICE by Walter L. Kleine
Short Story: WHAT DRIVES CARS by Carl Frederick
Novelette: CONSEQUENCES OF THE MUTINY by Ronald R. Lambert
Short Story: THE NIGHT OF THE RFIDS by Edward M. Lerner
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: UPS AND DOWNS by Stanley Schmidt
A while back ("Double Standard Required,” December 2007) I wrote here that global overpopulation is the central problem we must deal with if we are to find long-term solutions to subsidiary problems like global warming and resource depletion. A few readers, including some who on the whole agreed with me, pointed out that some countries are facing the opposite problem: rapidly and “dangerously” declining populations.
Are such declines really dangerous? Or are they another example of an opportunity being mistaken for a problem?
Before we do anything else, let's stipulate that the alleged declines are real and significant, and emphasize that that fact does not contradict the reality that global population is growing dangerously. I was reminded of this during my recent trip to Japan, during which I read a small article in Japan Air Lines’ in-flight magazine asserting that the birth rate in Japan is down to 1.26 per woman, which is well below the “replacement rate” of about 2[1]. The article attributed the low birth rate in Japan to sociological factors such as more women refusing traditional roles, e.g., they're working longer, marrying later, and having fewer children. Other highly developed countries also have lower-than-replacement birth rates, though not always for the same reasons. In Russia, it's due to deteriorating health care and consequently deteriorating overall health. The U.S. demonstrates that the trends can be more complicated than they sound: our population is still growing, but that's mainly because of immigration, not births. The birth rate here is slightly below the replacement level.
[FOOTNOTE 1: We're commonly told that the “replacement fertility rate” is 2.1: that is, on average, women must have that many children to maintain a steady population. The actual figure to give that effect depends on a complex interaction of such variables as infant mortality, whether the sex ratio is being tinkered with by such means as selective abortion, and the extent to which life expectancies are rising or falling because of advances or declines in medicine. 2.1 is currently pretty close to a worldwide average, but it has been much higher through most of history, and still varies widely among countries. In both Japan and the U.S., it's currently quite close to 2.1.]
From a purely local point of view, considering only short-term effects within a single country and assuming that the inhabitants go on doing everything else in the same ways they're used to, a low birth rate and declining population can indeed look alarming. Japan, for example, is concerned about labor shortages, and therefore is looking for ways to reverse the trend by encouraging big families. In at least one prefecture (an approximate Japanese counterpart of a state in the U.S.), companies are giving employees hefty bonuses for each additional child they have—and the more children (up to five), the bigger the bonus.
Understandable, up to a point, yet disturbingly at odds with two larger facts: (1) Worldwide population growth is still the biggest threat we all face (most of the others are just side effects), and (2) Japan itself is already so crowded that its culture is full of adaptations to enable large numbers of people to coexist in a small area. So, in the long run, is encouraging increased birth rates, even locally, really a good idea, either globally or locally?
Probably not. But what are the alternatives?
What's happening in the U.S. demonstrates one possibility, at least as a stopgap: many labor niches are currently being filled (as has often been true in our relatively short history) by immigrants from other countries. Americans have often proudly thought of their country as a “melting pot” in which people of many backgrounds are welcomed and merge into a new culture called “American.” That attitude has, of course, undergone some evolution. Not everyone is quite so welcoming these days (though the issue has been muddied by fuzzy thinking about “immigration” and “legality"); and not all immigrants are so willing to be “melted,” preferring to maintain their old cultural identities even in their new homes. Neither the “melting pot” nor the “mosaic” version of assimilation sits well with the Japanese culture. Whereas American culture was forged from the beginning by a melding of elements from many sources, Japan was essentially isolated for many centuries and evolved a finely honed culture of its own. It now places a high value on preserving the essence of that culture even as it adopts modern technologies, and makes little provision for trying to assimilate immigrants from elsewhere. So most Japanese do not see large-scale importation of foreign workers as a viable solution to their perceived problems.
It doesn't address the larger problem in America, either. A wave of immigration may provide an immediate solution to labor shortages here, but it takes those people away from their home countries, where they may be needed even more. They come here only because of the possibility of making more money here than they could at home, and sending it back to their families. This suggests larger social problems back home. Many immigrants are skilled professionals in their own countries, but here must accept relatively menial employment because of the language barrier, licensing requirements, etc. They wouldn't need to do that if their homelands could provide them with pay commensurate with their skills.
And, of course, importing workers to countries that aren't producing enough of their own does nothing for the worldwide population problem; it just redistributes it. Discouraging immigration and encouraging a greatly increased domestic birth rate—anywhere—goes even further. Not only does it not help head off worldwide overpopulation, it actively exacerbates the problem.
So the fact that some countries—usually highly developed ones—are experiencing local population declines in no way negates the dangers of global overpopulation. That remains an overarching problem to which we all need a solution. Local declines simply create a different set of local problems that need to be dealt with at the same time as the larger one.
But the “big” and “little” problems seem to make opposite demands. How can we meet both of them at once?
It seems pretty
clear that any real solution will have to involve changing attitudes toward at least one of them, and the ways cultures deal with them. Such changes are seldom made lightly or easily; cultures are massive objects, not easily deflected from their present courses. So when they grudgingly recognize that some change is necessary, they try relatively easy ones first—but those are seldom enough. Urging the birthrate upward in an already crowded country exacerbates the existing crowding as well as the global problem. Inviting large-scale immigration merely redistributes the problem, at best; and that's if a country is already used to assimilating immigrants. In one that isn't, and that places a high priority on maintaining an established and relatively monolithic culture, such a course requires a major and difficult shift in mindset.
Such a major shift may well be needed, but that may not be the most productive one. In the U.S., at least, most of us have been bombarded since birth with the dogmas that “Bigger is better” and “If you don't grow, you die.” It may well be time to revise those assumptions, because we seem at least close to a point at which too much growth may cause us to die. We may need to shift our thinking to recognize that everything doesn't always have to get bigger to get better—and getting smaller may sometimes be the better way to go.
Even if the world's population could be stabilized immediately, resource use, global warming, and related variables would continue to climb. Many of the world's people have a much lower material standard of living than places like the U.S., western Europe, Australia, and Japan—not because they prefer to, but because they haven't yet managed to get it that high. But most of them would like to, and as they approach that goal, their per capita resource consumption and generation of waste byproducts will rise, too. Ironically, history suggests that such a rise in standard of living is likely to be accompanied by a slowing of population growth—but for the reason just mentioned, even more will be needed.
Maybe, instead of reflexively regarding local drops in population as threats, we need to reorient our thinking to see how an actual decrease in population could lead to better lives—not just locally, but globally. Maybe we should aspire to not only slowing the growth of our planet's total population, but allowing and even encouraging it to shrink—and turning that to everybody's advantage.
I probably need to emphasize at this point that I'm not advocating any sort of forcible reduction in population—no “ethnic cleansing,” intentional plagues, wars, or killing of any sort. I'm suggesting nothing more than attrition—that if we let birth rates drop below replacement levels everywhere, for a while[2] , we might wind up with a world in which more people were healthier and happier than ever before.
[FOOTNOTE 2: Obviously a permanent drop to such levels would ultimately be self-destructive.]
But is that possible? Aren't the problems of countries now experiencing below-replacement birth rates proof by example that such a course would amount to cultural suicide?
No, they are not. Our long-term survival and prosperity may depend on our ridding ourselves of the deeply ingrained assumption that they are. Low birth rates now seem like a threat for the same reason that low employment is assumed to be automatically and intrinsically bad. Our society has evolved a system of operation based on jobs, and a system for evaluation of its success based in large part on “full employment.” People who are unemployed don't have a way to support themselves, so if there are too many of them, we scramble to “create jobs": things for people to do and be paid for, whether or not there's any real need for those things to be done. It seldom occurs to us that we could instead decide that there's not enough necessary work to go around, so we should redistribute what there is so that everybody has a job but nobody has to work as much.
Similarly, if we've created a lot of make-work jobs to match their number to the available workers, and the number of available workers declines, we complain that there aren't enough workers to do them; so we either bring in more from outside, or encourage people to breed faster. Why not instead see if we can reduce the amount of work so the available workers can handle it?
There are at least two main ways we might do this. First, we could recognize that many of the jobs we “need” done aren't really needs at all. Browse any of those “in-flight mall” catalogs and see how many essentially useless gimmicks are being manufactured solely to help the rich flaunt their wealth and to provide employment for those who make them. How many people do we really need to hold doors or do nails for other people? Admittedly many of the things that make civilized life enjoyable are not necessities—a case could be made that the world doesn't really need expensive restaurants, baseball players, opera singers, or science fiction editors, for example—and most of us would rather not get rid of all of those. But surely there's some room for cutting back, and learning to be more self-reliant and less dependent on expensive services provided by other people.
Especially when you consider the other way we might reduce the need for workers: by the use of technology. In a culture geared to full employment as an end in itself, replacement of people by machines is a sore topic. But if we can learn to look beyond that mindset, maybe we can learn to see such replacement, handled thoughtfully and carefully, as a way of improving human life rather than just “throwing people out of work.” There are plenty of tedious jobs that I would be glad to let a machine do for me, and I'll bet you have a comparable list of your own, which may or may not be the same as mine. A well-handled transition to turning over more such jobs to machines could enable us to maintain or even improve the standard of living for everybody, while allowing everybody more time to do things they want to do rather than things they have to do—even with substantially fewer people. Conceivably, particularly if nanotechnology research achieves as much as seems possible, this process could go very far indeed, with fewer total people on the planet, but more of them enjoying better lives than ever before.
Doing that will, undeniably, require a major shift in thinking at both individual and cultural levels. But it's time to start seriously considering how we might achieve that shift. Our past history has all been geared toward growing population, and we've been conditioned to take it for granted that population can and must go only up. It's time to recognize that it can have both ups and downs, and to learn how to make the best of both.
Copyright (c) 2008 Stanley Schmidt
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[Back to Table of Contents]
Novella: TEST SIGNALS by David Bartell
New technologies create new moral dilemmas—but not simple ones.
I clicked the Promote Target icon on my desk and claimed another minor victory. “Just one more to go,” I said out loud, “and it's vacation time!"
"What is it?” came the voice of Kaitlin from over the short cubical wall.
"Some kind of squirrel monkey,” I said, noting the genetic ancestry.
"I thought that was already a real animal."
"This hybrid is different. Kinda cute. Wanna see?"
"Nah. Too busy."
Me too. My job was to discover something by accident, and I had a quota to meet.
A lot of scientific discoveries are made by accident, like say, penicillin, or matches. The polite term is serendipity, but when you're in the business, you understand that it's half desperation and half luck. Sometimes you learn more from the botched experiments.
Our training video had an old black-and-white skit where Don Knotts was dressed up like a nutty professor. He kept stumbling around, knocking over test tubes racks and spilling chemicals all over the place. An interviewer asked what he was doing.
Analog SFF, May 2008 Page 1
