Week 11 – Population and Health
Third World to First World and then back again.
Remarkable advances in science, especially biomedical sciences, have resulted in greater quality of healthcare and medicinal treatment. An individual’s lifespan has been progressively increasing over the years. People are now living longer and healthier. 90-plus year olds, and century year olds, though still uncommon, are less of a miracle now than it was a couple of decades ago. Soon, people may yet live to the biblical seven-score and ten years (150 years).
With these surges in biomedical advances, birth rates are perhaps going the other way, in the developed and first world states and cities anyway. Malthus’ Principle of Population suggests that natural checks on population growth keep the number of people on earth sustainable, like famine, war and natural disasters. Add longer life spans and contraception to the list. With people living longer and longer, they are choosing to have lesser and lesser kids. Perhaps also in-part due to the increasing hectic career commitments of both man and woman, the lessening stigmatization of childlessness, and the increasing survival rates of infants, people in the first world countries are definitely having lesser kids.
With more people having lesser kids, the result will be an ageing population in the first world cities. Meanwhile, in the third world countries, where advanced and expensive medical treatment is not available, or even basic medical care is difficult to find, the baby factories are still working hard day and night.
With the first world cities losing local population due to low birth rates, and the need to remain competitive, they turn to importing population from other places. Drawing an example from Singapore, when faced with dipping birth rates and an exodus in emigration, Lee Kuan Yew simply remarked that we would just have to replace them with skilled people from India, Mainland China and elsewhere (Bell, 1997). With much of Singapore’s local population becoming educated, menial jobs are being shunned. No one will take them up. ‘Guest workers’ from Bangladesh and similar countries have to be brought in to fill these jobs.
But now, even Mainland China is facing population issues. After so many years of one-child policy, current reports show that up to 6 adults are caring for one baby now: the infant’s parents and all four of his/her paternal as well as maternal grandparents. The ratio is staggering. Perhaps in time to come, as China progresses to a true first world country, her population will also dwindle just as so many other first world cities have. Will they then implement similar immigration policies, to attract people from ‘third world’ countries? Will then, their progress towards a First World country and cities, result in them being populated with people from the Third World instead?
Bell, Daniel A. (1997). “A Communitarian Critique of Authoritarianism: The Case of Singapore”. In Political Theory, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb., 1997), pp. 6-32. SAGE Publication, Inc.
