Recently, in this forum here this headline caught my attention:
The report said that Bill Gates initiated a meeting between billionaires like David Rockefeller Jr, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel Laureate (Bio Chemist) and Michael Bloomberg to discuss strategies to slow down population growth.
Numbers do matter. Affects every aspect of life, distribution to welfare to governance to nurture to sustenance.
The key to it all probably is education and awareness and empowerment of women.
If this news be true and these guys are really interested in doing something about SLOWING down the population growth, I wish they would:
CHANGE NATURE OF FUNDING. FUND EMPOWERMENT. STOP CHARITY.
It pushes a country deeper into hell of shit: never ending debt and corruption.
- Stop rural funding in countries like India. It has led to severe corruption and scams. Where it benefitted, it has benefitted only a very few in superficial ways.
- Fund and nurture private enterprise.
- Start funding education in countries like India, China, Africa systematically.
- Fund private curriculum development projects that would empower its citizens to get actively involved in developmental work.
- AggressivelyMonitor Progress, audit fund management at the receiver’s end. Get involved. The Bill Gates Foundation had funded computer literacy in a school in Kolkata 7 years back. Did anyone go check what happened and why?
- Fund projects that initiate Women’s empowerment, her social rights to Health, to Reproductive choices, to Financial independence, to Wage equality and Resistance to abuse. Often a woman in India is forced to continue until she produces a male child
- Fund support groups to engage women in developmental work.
- Help build/ sustain Women Empowerment bodies that would help protect women that choose to stay single in countries like India Indian situation was just not designed to sustain single women or even single men.
The real drivers of social developement are WOMEN. Let’s face this : these creatures create and then rear children that run the country one day. No matter how good a school is, if the child has been mothered badly, there usually is little hope of getting a high quality man with high quality brains and a heart to run things well.
In countries like India it is the mother that does most of the critical parenting – she is the one that instills and builds the value system that would run the individual’s learning, development from then on. What the mum did would have become the primary operating system. Scripting.
Men rarely participate in child rearing in ordinary middle class homes. They merely are content to play the supervisory and the role of principal bread earner.
Educating and empowering one half- educated, resistant urban Indian housewife would help 2o women through her and 5 men and 2 future citizens. Roughly 27 people.
Fund one Teacher and – you help 200 future decision makers through him/her.
- Support Gay Marriage. Gay marriage would lead to lifestyle changes that might curb rate of reproduction, cause more adoptions, bring down divorce rates.
- Support single parenthood. Support adoption.
- Fund initiative to curb teenage pregnancy in developed countries.
- Fund literacy programs, language teaching enterprise (that is the key to inseminating information about rights, know hows to stoke population control behavior) R&D in this field, content creation.
More than money, in countries like India, what is more essential is skill-building efforts: Management skills, project development skills, entrepreneurship skills, campaigning skills, outreach program manning skills, administrating skills.
Here in India, half the brainy middle class able population is left out of quality skill building education systems because every selection here is marks/score based. Most failing in academic examinations have no other way but to drop out of every training, education program forever.
One could continue to make money: NOT through drug or weapon sale or scams and engineering economic disasters.
If the quality of population improves and the numbers stabilize, one could make money through sale of SAFER stuff – that are safer for the rich and the poor alike.
See, everyone knows and has seen that if the rich sell a gun, the poor might use it to destroy them.
Instead, if they had enough and were less angry, they might want to buy more cars or iPods or software or services perhaps and land in the moon too.
But of course this is far more complex and till the time the idea of “resource” is equated to power and control, development would always be about money. Never about people or real social development perhaps.
Rolling 
This is an excellent post! I loved it. I like your ideas.
thank you Nita, but I wish I could have constructed it better and made it sharper as you wd have 🙂
I like your recommendations a lot, you seem to have thought about this in detail! Alas, ‘throwing money at a problem’ is still a popular way to feel good in developed countries.
not just me, the entire teacher team at school…. ultimately every act needs be moral for the world to become progressively safer and nicer, cleaner place we can look back at with pride.
Great to hear this discussed. Politicians here wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Too many “pro lifers” I guess.
I don’t understand how it is that many people appear to believe that we can expand our population endlessly on a finite planet. Either we curb our own population growth or mother nature will do it for us in some really unpleasant ways…
O Paul, happy to see you here. Nature is already doing it I think. Thru reason and enterprise and inclination, did you see such serious clamoring for same sex relationships at any other point in History? It always existed!
Somehow first set of ideas you have put forward, seems to take more time to get it implemented.
Second set of Ideas are good. Appealed to me.
For me if it has to happen in India, education system has to revitalize itself. Institution runners still think education is a business, when it will changes things will fall in place.
Hmm, finally a good topic to blog about. At least those idiot politicians in developed countries might get it into their heads that this “pro life” attitude is making things worse…
thank you for reading this Marrik…you might have a point
No offense, but your solutions to population reduction seem like a combination of logic and silly wishes. While increasing education is definitely an essential step to the creation of any good government, most educational efforts in the third world are hampered by lack of funds: too much money goes to militaries, is needed to fund urban infrastructure, combat epidemics, or is used to simply feed the rising millions of urban poor.
Make everybody gay. While I applaud the idea of equality for all people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, you cant make people gay, and since the majority of the world’s population is heterosexual, allowing gays to adopt is not going to seriously lower birth rates. Neither is the nihilistic hatred for big families in the developed world. Populations are growing almost entirely in the third world’s rural sectors, where tradition is key, and the only govt programs that may help would be large scale funding for family planning, funding that is increasingly not enough, primarily because of the religious right’s hatred for anything that would even remotely challenge the ‘sanctity’ of an unborn fetus. Great blog, sorry to criticize it so, I just wanted to have my say. Hope the world responds well to the challenge of poverty and population pressures in the often ignored third world. Only by forcefully getting the money there, auditing how its spent, educating people there, and encouraging economic growth, can the poorest nations in the world grow and prosper.
thank you David for honoring this with the first ‘serious’ comment. This post was written while IPC 377 was still in vogue in the country, and secondly bef the IIT Delhi took up the onerous job of beginning the task of reforming the edu system in this country.
of course!!!! I dont think I said make everyone gay. I said, stop pushing gay men into forced arranged marriages. Accept ‘gays’ as natural and ‘not sick’ so they do not have to hide within a veneer of dysfunctional marriage with a straight woman. Lots of gay men in India don’t even admit to themselves they ARE gay, bec they were brought up in families that are ignorant about such things. So they find another ignorant woman and get married – then trouble starts when cant emotionally bond with this woman, starts beating her up, neglecting her, infecting her with disease etc.
ABSOLUTELY right!!!
So you see, if instead of direct ‘money giving’, suppose govt in the first world, of every great university or school opened up their system to educate at least two Indians – without charging them the exorbitant fees that they do charge overseas students, (wh is usu triple the amount that citizens pay) or do it for FREE, that would be a huge HELP. Thousands of women could get trained, get back to the country and begin work in earnest. We cannot continue to depend on the govt in India. Things have to now be focused on empowering individual efforts at designing for change.
If one woman is trained, she could train twenty women! Training intelligent deserving willing women is cheaper and faster road to achieving ‘sustainable development’
India is unable to use most of the billions of dollars that are already coming in – bec there is lack of infra structure, trained managers, trained professionals, ignorance etc. Money unutilized, is money lost. And debts rise.
Would like to hear your views – am not proud of this article – it was written in haste and in a bit of heat 🙂 but looks like we are on the same page actually. Thx.
I found your page by searching on ‘rising world population, gay marriage’. I wasn’t surprised to find a like mind. It has seemed to me for some time that the rise will eventually be capped by one means or another, either by social engineering or by catastrophe. Humans are not going to stop wanting to have sex before the sun freezes over. The present consequence of that activity is a rise in world population. The decline in world resources does seem to be high in world consciousness so any/all means of avoiding catastrophe seems to warrant attention if not action.
If the world population growth could, even for 10% of the population drop from 2.2 per couple to, say, -0.5 per gay couple (by adoption) this would seem to be a move in the right direction. It certainly would not be enough of a counter trend, but it makes one think that early writers of the scriptures (prophets no less) condemning gay relationships could not have foreseen a world which would be overpopulated.
My search was really targeted at finding any increasing awareness in the possibility of managing the need for sex without consequences for population growth.
My search first turned up the NATSAL I and II statistics for Britain, showing a slow but steady rise in acceptance of gay relationships, so that too, makes one question, whether it is merely an indicator that indeed preparedness to accept gay relationships, is akin to the 8/9ths of an iceberg unseen.
That is, one is forced to question whether the human race (and many other mammalian species) is inherently bisexual, and that over a long period the notions of survival one’s genes and social acceptance (dictated by religion) has conditioned us to be predominantly heterosexual. In other words, to “Make everybody gay” seems to propose an enforcement which may be unnecessary if the trend in the statistics is anything to go on.
This raises the whole issue of questioning the validity of the science suggesting genetic predisposition to homosexuality. Supposing if the whole human race were inherently bisexual (at least as indicated by the location of erogenous zones around the body), we can perhaps better understand how it is possible 1) that once a young person’s orientation switch is flicked over, they can be *so sure* that their desires were in-born, and 2) that science could find evidence in support of a genetic predisposition, but misinterpret the data to fulfill the hypothesis that data were valid only for a select subgroup.
It seems to me there are two classes of human being…. those without a prostate organ and those with a prostate. Of those ‘with’, there seem to be two classes, those who have only discovered one use for their prostate, and (the long-supposed minority class) who have discovered two uses. I am searching here for an adequate explanation of how it is possible that acceptance of homosexuality can be exhibiting an exponential (?) trend. Secondly, how it is possible that the least opposition to homosexuality actually originates with women, it comes predominantly from homophobia in men. If, with the rise in acceptance of gayness in men, how can women rationalise the loss of their opportunities for reproductive success which goes with it? One explanation is the ease with which any woman can be fertilized if she really wants. Another is that women inherently understand the thrills of penetration (and one doesn’t need to be a woman or an actively gay male to know that).
To conclude, contrary to initial impressions generated, I am not suggesting that “the end justifies the means”. Before advocating widespread acceptance of gay marriage as a means of reducing population growth, there should be serious thought and study given to potentially adverse consequences of legalising gay marriage. e.g.1. If what drives gay activity is the novelty of multiple partners, undiminished by a marriage, imagine how gay divorce courts could be swamped? e.g.2 Is it really true that gay marriage would promote better social harmony? I’m not sure that this really is the case, based upon the cat-fights amongst gay lovers one can see on television. The acrimony which can follow failed gay relationships seems to be no less than failed straight ones. e.g.3. We could still be in early days in managing HIV.
The attendant issues will certainly not be solved in my lifetime.
*
well maybe not, but it would certainly prevent some women from being pushed into arranged marriage with closetted Gay men in India and forcing govts to legitimise Gay marriage would reduce the number of men that remain closetted due to fear of persecution and/or marry a straight woman for a cover up for their gay relationship with another man (‘my best friend’)
*
isn’t this true of straight men and women as well, Rick?
*
frankly, Rick, I was not aware of this, thank you for educating me. Since I have not had a chance to think about this, I don’t have an answer.
But I do believe, right now, perhaps the priority should be to contain population explosion and let Gays live safely without fear or repression and then if does create societal imbalances, we can then legislate again and curb that. Legalising their right to live safely and with dignity now, does not necessarily mean ushering in hideous social maladies that cannot be cured if they become a menace later.
*
–
😉 really depends on how old you are. Thank you for visiting my blog Rick and taking time to share your thoughts. A discussion would be nice and links to current studies, academic journals, opinion pieces