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A review by pocketbard
The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet's Surprising Future by Fred Pearce
3.0
This book is all about demographics. What happens as people have fewer children, live longer, move more? David Foot, author of Boom, Bust, and Echo argued that two-thirds of everything can be explained by demographics, and that's what Pearce sets out to prove in The Coming Population Crash.
Pearce starts with a review of demographic thinking, starting with the 18th-century scholar Malthus and working his way forward. Pearce is at his strongest, I think, when he describes how generations of political scientists, economists, and demographers took Malthus to heart and unwittingly engineered Malthusian crises which they described as "inevitable." One poignant example was the Irish famine, wherein rich (British) landowners exported food from the island while their Irish tenants starved, all while arguing that the problem was Irish fertility. A similar rhetoric is happening even now in Kenya. Malthus influenced -- directly or indirectly -- eugenics movements and xenophobic thinking that continue today.
I was also impressed with Pearce's analysis of today's world. Travelling from Italy to Bangladesh to San Paolo, Pearce paints a picture of the world as it is and describes how we got here. All over the globe, with few exceptions, women are having fewer children. Peace points out some of the political ramifications, from the "little emperors" in China to the abandonment of cities in East Germany to the bulging slums in megalopolises around the world.
Where I thought Pearce was weakest was in his final chapters, the ones where he gets to the crux of his subtitle, Our Planet's Surprising Future. Pearce envisions an aging world, but one in which the elderly are more active in political and social affairs, more important in taking care of their families, and more present in the workplace. I think, given the amount of times Pearce described previous demographic trends (the rapid decrease in fertility, for example) as "completely unexpected," he should be the first to admit that a similar "unexpected" trend could creep up on us. There's just no way to predict what the planet's going to be like in 2050, let alone 2100.
That said, I thought this was a well-researched, well-argued book. Certainly, it provides food for thought.
Pearce starts with a review of demographic thinking, starting with the 18th-century scholar Malthus and working his way forward. Pearce is at his strongest, I think, when he describes how generations of political scientists, economists, and demographers took Malthus to heart and unwittingly engineered Malthusian crises which they described as "inevitable." One poignant example was the Irish famine, wherein rich (British) landowners exported food from the island while their Irish tenants starved, all while arguing that the problem was Irish fertility. A similar rhetoric is happening even now in Kenya. Malthus influenced -- directly or indirectly -- eugenics movements and xenophobic thinking that continue today.
I was also impressed with Pearce's analysis of today's world. Travelling from Italy to Bangladesh to San Paolo, Pearce paints a picture of the world as it is and describes how we got here. All over the globe, with few exceptions, women are having fewer children. Peace points out some of the political ramifications, from the "little emperors" in China to the abandonment of cities in East Germany to the bulging slums in megalopolises around the world.
Where I thought Pearce was weakest was in his final chapters, the ones where he gets to the crux of his subtitle, Our Planet's Surprising Future. Pearce envisions an aging world, but one in which the elderly are more active in political and social affairs, more important in taking care of their families, and more present in the workplace. I think, given the amount of times Pearce described previous demographic trends (the rapid decrease in fertility, for example) as "completely unexpected," he should be the first to admit that a similar "unexpected" trend could creep up on us. There's just no way to predict what the planet's going to be like in 2050, let alone 2100.
That said, I thought this was a well-researched, well-argued book. Certainly, it provides food for thought.