There has been much in the press recently about the drop in Chinese population and the fact that many countries in the world have negative population growth. Here in Israel, we congratulate ourselves on liking children and having lots of them.
In the meanwhile, the countries with falling populations like China and Russia feel threatened . They equate size of population with power.
For normal countries which do not have pretensions to be a superpower, there are two worries.
1.The first is the belief that a society which is overwhelmingly old does not function well. Undoubtedly there are rural villages in countries like Japan where the population is virtually all above the age of 60. Yet larger families will not solve this problem as young people want to be in urban areas nearer to employment opportunities .
2.The second worry is more financial . A large percentage of the population taking pensions will need a larger government budget to support them and a larger burden of tax on the young. This is the argument of many other leading economists and the Economist publication. To a degree this is true. However, I am uncomfortable with a government policy which gives monetary incentives for larger families. I think this is a poor reason to have children.
The obvious and best way to overcome this situation is to raise pensionable age and encourage many to stay in the workforce to a later age . Recently president Macron in France wanted to raise the pensionable age from 62 to 64 . Remember the average Frenchman lives to 82 years . Much of future government policy will be about stopping over generous support for indigent and often wealthy 60-80 year olds.
There are those who welcome this drop in population as they see a direct link between the population in the world and the amount of greenhouse gases produced. And undoubtedly if we had half our population in the world, we would most probably would have half the greenhouse gases. But the idea that we can solve climate change via discouraging birth is fantastical. If all women decided now to limit their family size to 2 children, the world population would still grow in the short term. We have 8 billion people now and will continue have many more than 8 billion for at least 50 years whatever government policy comes into play.
So let’s forget about the link between population and climate change. Let’s just enjoy our kids and find more plausible solutions.
David Waimann is VP Energy at OurCrowd Investments and executive director at five water and renewable energy tech companies. He is 64. drw@ourcrowd.com
This article is part of a series of more than 20 posts discussing climate policy and technology.
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