...its made from PEOPLE!

What a difference 50 years makes. In the late 1950's (prior to the sexual revolution) a book called Make Room, Make Room was published. It caught on enough that it was made into a movie, although the focus of the movie was very different. The movie was called Soylent Green and stared Charlton Heston. The primary point to the book and movie was that the population had continued to expand on a geometric scale, thanks to high birthrates and advanced medicine, and food production had increased arithmetically. For those of you who didn't see these graphs while you were back in grade school, the food supply increases due to greater workforce like this: 2+2+2+2+2+2... etc. But population increases like this 1+2+4+16+32... etc. During the 50's and up through the late 70's, this was seen a terrible crisis coming for us. That the world would eventually starve because there just wasn't enough food and that would create social wars, battling over arable land.

Now, several countries are openly worried about depopulation. In order to keep a population stable, a country needs to keep a birthrate of about 2.08 children per household. Anything over that, you get population increase. Under it, you get population decrease and that could have nasty implications. Japan is expected to hit its peak population in 2006 and then suffer a sharp decline in population. Germany also has a birthrate below 2 and could start declining in population within the next 10 years. They're decline has been only staved off due to the large influx of people from former East Germany. Birthrates in the US are holding around 2.3 (I think), but even that is a drop from where we were only twenty years ago.

Industrialized countries don't need large families and the populations of these countries are so consumed with wealth and enjoyment of that wealth, that any more that 2 children is seen as an unnecessary drain. Non-industrialized countries still rely heavily on agriculture so more children are needed. You also don't have as good as medical technology so the child mortality rate is higher.

The problem for industrialized countries is that the generation that grew up in the 50's and 60's is getting older and forming a larger portion of the population. They are not being replaced by younger workers. So, the cost to individual workers to care for older members of the population is going up. Here in the US, we're all in a scramble because when the baby boomers retire, the fraction of employed to retired will be 2:1. Not exactly the set up FDR envisioned when he set up the social security system, which had a ratio of nearly 19:1. Now, for the US, which is facing bankruptcy in 20 years because of this quandary, our population is still increasing. Imagine having this problem and knowing that your population is going to start declining where you might actually be facing a 1:1 ratio of employed to retired. Instead of food starvation, the world now faces economic starvation by caring for its elderly. Who knows, maybe some of the ideas in those science fiction novels may be tried out before too long anyway, and that may be a very scary idea for some of the older generation.