e$: The Demographic "Transaction" (was Re: Schelling Points...)

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 5:00 AM -0400 7/29/96, Timothy C. May wrote:
> Which it has, as you note. The availability of microwave dinners,
> transportation to new jobs, new employment patterns, and other factors too
> numerable to mention are correlated fairly strongly with a reduction in the
> size of the average family.

On a wild tangent to the topic at hand, this reminds me of a talk at MIT I
went to last year (?) given by an editor emeritus of SciAm, can't remember
his name at the moment, but he was introduced by Phillip Morrison, which
was memorable for its own sake.

This guy talked about something he called the "demographic transition",
where a country's per capita life expectancy went past, say, 50 or so. When
that happens, people start to breed less. (Well, maybe the keep *breeding*,
but not procreatively ;-)).

As a result, family sizes and populations decline. He said that this has
started to happen in India, and China's getting there, draconian population
controls or not. I got the impression that he thought China couldn't have
enforced their population controls without an increase in life expectancy,
reality not being optional, and that law and government is an inevatably
reactive and not proactive business.

He said there are many hypotheses about what causes this decline in
fertility, including the commonly held one that people make babies as a
form old age pension income :-), but that all he was talking about was this
very strong inverse correlation between population growth and life
expectancy. He talked about this happening in Athens, and on the Italian
peninsula during the Roman empire, and gave other historical examples,
including, of course, Europe and America, Sweeden at the turn of the
century being a good example. He said America was the exception which
proves the rule, because most of our population growth now comes from
immigration, and that one way to kill the vitality of America was to kill
immagration, which should give erst-superpatriot Buchananite/Perotistas
some pause for reflection. He even manges to describe the post-war
baby-boom in these terms, but I forget how he did it.

He also said that the obvious things like public health and education were
good ways to increase life expectancy, but that the very best way to cause
this "demographic transition" was a dramatic increase in personal income.
:-).

Given the recent Forbes "Billionaire" issue, calling the 21st century the
"Asian Century", full of stories of the unleashed economic power of the
former command economies of India, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc., not to
mention China and VietNam or even Korea and Japan (yes, Virginia, they were
and are quasi-command economies, especially in their domestic accounts)
and, to a lesser extent, Singapore, I think he may be on to something
here...

The crypto-economic relavence here is that once we have the ability to have
peer-to-peer transactions for everything transmittable (financial assets,
expertise, even teleoperated skillsets), economic "commands" won't be
audible for all the din of internet digital commerce.

Watch what happens to life expectancy then...


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender."
                -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard,
                       for Bart Simpson
The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/