Seven Billion People: Population, Problems and Politics
November 2, 2011 No CommentsHappy late birthday Danica! Welcome to the world, you’re the seven billionth person alive.
While speculation had it that the seven billionth person will be born somewhere in India, the UN selected Danica May Camacho as the symbolic newborn. As she and her family celebrates, feel free to take part in the other ‘festivities’ of the day. In fact, the BBC will even let you find out what number you are out of the seven billion here.
However, despite the light hearted celebrations, most new sources, bloggers, environmentalists, and economists find themselves playing doomsday prophet. Simply put, seven billion is a lot. It’s about 35 school bus sized stacks of pennies, and a chain of seven billion people circles the Earth at the equator about 175 times. This same chain of people needs about 7,000 Olympic size pools of water and about 28,518,518,519 Big Macs a day to survive. Need more numbers? Check out the Huffington Post.
As fun as these measurements are, they set up some interesting problems. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has been raising population growth flags since the 2000s, and he hasn’t been alone. Seven billion hungry mouths to feed, bodies to cloth, minds to educate…the list goes on for awhile. It turns seven billion people need a lot of resources.
We need a lot of resources, but we have a lot of problems. There are global distribution issues: as a world, there are people who eat too much, and people who can’t eat enough. Natural resources are running out; estimates put the age of oil depletion sooner rather than later. We lack infrastructure; we lack schools, hospitals, and nursing homes.
That last ‘we’ isn’t even a global ‘we’–that’s just America. The needs vary from state to state, from coast to coast and region to region. To name just a few, the West needs water and power. California needs more higher level education institutions, and we are not equipped to handle our aging population in a fiscally responsible manner.
Populations present problems. There are overall qualitative issues, but there are the inner quantitative issues. We have to look at demographics, consider minorities, immigrants, age, and even the gender inequalities. These issues wreck havoc nationally, dividing Congress and defining headlines. Then, there’s the problems abroad. Think about Italy and China. The Italian fertility rate is well below the replacement rate, threatening security nets for the elderly. The Chinese population is beginning to age, and with a younger generation of mostly males, is concerned with its own fertility rate. Furthermore, higher male populations lead to increased crime and decreased internal stability.
The solutions to these problems? As much as you may love market solutions, there’s going to be politics involved. These population issues have been discussed before, and as the world changes, they will need to be addressed again. New populations present new issues; new numbers and demographics present unseen hurdles for the future.
So, happy birthday to Danica and all the other ‘seven billionth’ babies. Although the number itself may serve a symbolic purpose, it serves a useful reminder of the importance of population both in the US and internationally.
Alison Shanahan
Class of 2015
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