Dedev Answers
Remember the number 1.85. It is the lodestar of a new demography. It should change the way we think
about the environment, economics, geopolitics, culture, our current Middle East dilemma-and about
ourselves.
Demographers have typically worked on the assumption that human population would level off by
achieving a "Total Fertility Rate" of 2.1 children per woman. Why 2.1? Two parents have two children.
Sooner or later the parents die and are "replaced" by their two children. (The .1 accounts for children who
die before their own age of reproduction.) Were the projection substantially higher, the result would be
wall-to-wall people. If substantially lower, before too long there would be no people at all. Either trend
moves in a relatively rapid geometric progression. So 2.1 it was. Very nice, the base line of a symmetrical,
perpetual, and ordered universe.
But no longer useful. For the last five years UN expert meetings have examined a trend that has been ever-
more apparent for several decades: Never have birth rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, so surprisingly, for
so long, in so many places. Now the United Nations has made it official, breaking demographic crockery
everywhere. Its 2002 World Population Prospects uses 1.85 children per woman as the point to which
human population is tending in this century.
6. NO ESCALATION--
None of their terminal impacts have occurred during periods of strong economic growth.
Major power wars have only occurred after depressions--growth wars have never
escalated.
7. NO MINDSET SHIFT--
It's empirically denied by every economic decline ever. And it just doesn't make sense.
People suffering economic deprivation want to get jobs and get back on track. They don't
want to die off or join a commune.
To sustain and improve its economic strength, the United States must maintain its technological lead in
the economic realm. Its success will depend on the choices it makes. In the past, developments such as the
agricultural and industrial revolutions produced fundamental changes positively affecting the relative
position of those who were able to take advantage of them and negatively affecting those who did not.
Some argue that the world may be at the beginning of another such transformation, which will shift the
sources of wealth and the relative position of classes and nations. If the United States fails to recognize the
change and adapt its institutions, its relative position will necessarily worsen.
To remain the preponderant world power, U.S. economic strength must be enhanced by further
improvements in productivity, thus increasing real per capita income; by strengthening education and
training; and by generating and using superior science and technology. In the long run the economic future
of the United States will also be affected by two other factors. One is the imbalance between government
revenues and government expenditure. As a society the United States has to decide what part of the GNP it
wishes the government to control and adjust expenditures and taxation accordingly. The second, which is
even more important to U.S. economic wall-being over the long run, may be the overall rate of
investment. Although their government cannot endow Americans with a Japanese-style propensity to save,
it can use tax policy to raise the savings rate.
Only a spacefaring culture with the skills to travel among and settle planets can be assured of escaping a
collision between Earth and a large asteroid or devastation from the eruption of a super volcano, they
told the World Space Congress.
"Space exploration is the key to the future of the human race," said Young, who strolled on the moon more
than 30 years ago and now serves as the associate director of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "We should
be running scared to go out into the solar system. We should be running fast." Scientists believe that an
asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago, and are gathering evidence of previously
large collisions.
"The civilization of Earth does not have quite as much protection as we would like to believe," said Leonid
Gorshkov, an exploration strategist with RSC Energia, one of Russia's largest aerospace companies. "We
should not place all of our eggs in one basket."