| >>Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem" The overwhelming majority of that progress comes from replacing an evil, murderous, and incompetent dictatorship in the world's largest nation with a decent dictatorship. One faction, led at enormous personal danger by Deng Hsiaoping, replaced the preferred successors of Mao with ordinary dictators that wanted to rule a prosperous middle income country instead of a disaster area. All the other progress in the world is small in comparison and we aren't going to see China rescued from sociopathic communism again. There has been progress in SE Asia and India and Latin America and even some post-post-colonial recovery in Africa. There isn't that much grinding poverty in Latin America to alleviate anymore and SE Asia is getting there. But that leave the most intractable problems to deal with. India and Africa have enormous birth rates, populations that have proven resistant to education, and local politics unfriendly to economic growth. Latin America and China brought down birth rates and raised educational achievement quickly as soon as their governments allowed it, but India and Africa have tried and the people aren't taking to either. There are some encouraging places like Tamil Nadu and Botswana, but there are diminishing returns in development as in any industry. It gets harder and harder to grow economies once you've done the easy cases like China and Korea. And because of birthrates, the hard cases just become a larger and larger problem. Two thirds of mankind will be Sub-Saharan African and Indian/Pakistani by 2100 according to the most optimistic projections. Will they still be grindingly poor? I hope not. Still there's no clear road from today to a decent future for most of mankind. |
I don't get it. India's birth rate was 2.4 children per woman in 2012 and 2.3 children per woman in 2013, barely above replacement. We should expect it to get down below replacement rate in the next five years.
It looks like your post contains interesting thoughts, but it's hard to take the rest of it seriously when there's such extremely obvious inaccuracy.