For years now, major cities in India have trucks that go around collecting bodies off the pavement of people who have died during the night. They come in from rural areas seeking any kind of work they can get and die of starvation and disease. Over 50 cities have a population of over 1,000,000. This doesn't even include countries like Brazil and Pakistan.
There are so many that the authorities don't make much effort to identify them since most have no identification papers.
What is amazing is that Thomas Malthus thought disease, war, famine, etc. would keep a lid on explosive population growth. Its hasn't. I read recently that despite wars, AIDS, genocide, famine, drought, etc., Africa's population has continued to grow as a continent.
I don't know everything. Neither does anyone else
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rmax304823
9 years ago
You're probably right.
The chief reason for many children and large families is economic. Couples from large families move to urban areas where children change from an asset to an liability and the number of children drops.
The main problem areas are where the primary institutions, the extended kinship network, are still in the traditional agricultural mode and the children provide labor and support for the elderly and disabled. It was a workable system when a couple might have a dozen children and half of them died before reproducing.
What's going on now is a gradual shift in which children cost money and the move out of the house. If you should be lucky enough to have four children and all were accepted at Yale, it woul cost you $10.5M. Sixty years ago, my grandfather had dozens of grandchildren, none with more than a grade school education and all of them lived nearby. I trimmed the old fellow's toenails. Now my mother is his age and the state sends over a podiatrist. The care of old and disabled people is increasingly the responsibility of secondary institutions, like state agencies. Well, like Social Security and Medicare.
There always seems to be a lag period between the introduction of state assistance and the desire of families to have large numbers of children. The Chinese government got on its abacus and figured out that Malthus was pretty much right. The population was expanding at a rate much higher than new land could be made arable. They also figured out that there was a two generation time lag between the imposition of the one-child policy and the time it began to have an impact on the economy. If you cut all families down to one child, you wouldn't see a stable population for forty years. Thus, the one-child policy imposed at a time when the ordinary Chinese still see no reason for it.
Probably the biggest hinderance to a sensible population policy is not just economic but emotional. What father doesn't want to prove his masculinity by having many children? And who is going to put up an argument agains motherhood?
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chicago85
9 years ago
In countries like India and China there are cheap places telling you the sex of your unborn baby. Girl babies are aborted. Many female babies are exported out of the country for adoption but boy babies never are. In China especially this has lead to a huge imbalance between the sexes. They are now trying to get away from the one child per family edict. It takes awhile to get rural areas to come around.
The result is young poorly paid working males with no hope of being married. This is the most violent unstable group in a country which could lead to urban violence. Girls in the country want to move to cities and marry up and have better jobs than being a peasant's wife. Those men resort to marrying desperate North Korean women who have fled starvation in North Korea. Many have been kidnapped and sold into forced marriage or prostitution.
Land ownership is a problem in India. Each generation as land is inherited, it is split into smaller and smaller units. A farmer might have as many as three scattered patches not big enough to support his family. They also have to resort to money lenders for emergencies and lose their land. They then have no choice but to move to an overcrowded city.
I don't know everything. Neither does anyone else
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rmax304823
9 years ago
Interesting.
"Each generation as land is inherited, it is split into smaller and smaller units."
That's exactly what happened in traditional China, leading to a circulation of elites of the kind Vilfredo Pareto described. As wealthy families outgrew their resources, the less affluent were selling the girls into concubinage and aquiring land of their own.
And the same thing happened in Mexico after the revolutions. Parcels of land were distributed to farmers, enough to support a family, but the families had so many children that the parcels became too small and the excess kids all moved to big cities looking for work. They formed squatter settlements around the cities' edges.
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chicago85
9 years ago
In Mexico, poor people organized in groups to "parachute" onto land as squatters. They would pick out large areas of unused land near cities and rush in on a given day throwing up shacks. Politicians and the army hesitated over having confrontations. Before long these groups would pick leaders and agitate for water and electricity in exchange for their votes.
There is a great Brazilian movie called "Central Station". Its about a retired teacher who takes it upon herself to get a boy who has been orphaned to his half brothers in a remote rural area in Brazil. They take buses, hitchhike and even walk to get to the place. Most of the movie is shot without professional actors including the boy who was found shining shoes in a train station.
Brazil had been undergoing a drought of several years and there is dust everywhere. When they get to their destination there are settlements of identical houses in the middle of nowhere. People get land from a lottery in an attempt to get them out of the cities but there is no infrastructure or jobs. Despite all this the movie is upbeat about people trying to survive.
I don't know everything. Neither does anyone else
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rmax304823
9 years ago
I didn't know about Brazil. I've heard about migration from farther south into the Amazon basin being prompted by offers of free land, farm land that was promptly turned into grazing land for cattle.
The Mexican situation reminds me somewhat of "Los Olvidados." I'll have to see if I can dig up "CEntral Station" somewhere.
It's been an informative exchange.
Thanks.
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