Defusing Africa's Population Bomb

 

The front page of New York Times last Sunday, informed readers that “in a quarter-century, at the rate Nigeria is growing, 300 million people—a population about as big as that of the present-day United States—will live in a country the size of Arizona and New Mexico.” The capital alone houses 21 million people and has all the accompanying strains—ungodly traffic, potential for political unrest, upward pressure on food prices, insufficient hospital capacities—which the article uses as an example of how a “population bomb” will hurt sub-Saharan Africa.

The article implies Nigeria and other sub-Saharan countries must figure out how to engineer a decline in family size and birth rates before achieving economic progress—in this account, people start having two kids instead of 12 and can invest much more time and money and education in each child.

But limiting population growth isn’t necessarily a precursor to economic development. In fact, it’s the other way around: Economic development is usually a precursor to limiting population growth, and scare-mongering about exploding populations isn’t helping solve any problems.

Small families are basically a luxury. It shouldn’t be surprising that poorer countries like Nigeria, Mali, and Uganda have some of the highest birthrates among countries around the world, while wealthier nations like the United States, Germany, and Japan are near the bottom. When people achieve a certain level of income, they can afford to worry about having fewer kids and investing more in each because they no longer have to worry as much about concerns like whether enough food will be on the table.

Sky-is-falling overpopulation stories have roots in the 18th century, when economist Thomas Malthus warned that unchecked population growth would threaten food supply and lead to a Soylent Green-like dystopia. The Times’ “population bomb” rhetoric is tired too—it was the title of a 1968 book in which Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation to come in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. It sold like funnel cake at the state fair. He received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award in 1990 and wrote another bestseller, in 2008, chock-full of similar themes.

But as early as the 1960s, eventual Noble laureate economist Simon Kuznets worked on seminal research about the relationship between economic growth and other factors like population and environmental quality. His research provided evidence that rising income correlates with slower population growth and better environmental quality.

Kuznets even argued that population growth was a net positive. In the long view, more people means more brains to dream up innovations like books, penicillin, the internet, Peruvian chicken, and ideas to solve to problems like rising population growth and pressured food supplies. Kuznets’ work influenced University of Maryland professor Julian Simon, who for decades crusaded against population growth doomsayers.

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo provide an in-depth and sober look at population growth in the developing world in their 2011 award-winning book Poor Economics, noting that people in developing countries don’t have large families due to a lack of self-control or “backwards” cultural norms. Instead, it’s an economic calculation.

“For many parents,” they write, “children are their economic futures: an insurance policy, a savings product, and some lottery tickets, all rolled into a convenient pint-sized package.” Families in rural Africa might have a lot of children because they need as many hands as possible to work in the fields, or a Lagos mother may think that having 12 kids gives her better odds of seeing one grow up to be a doctor or other professional.

There are tangible reasons for higher population growth, like contraception not being widely available in much of sub-Saharan Africa, or people choosing not to use it. While ensuring that women have the opportunity to control their reproductive choices is important, making those choices for them isn’t very effective. Consider the problems caused by China’s one-child policy, or the experience of India in the 1970s, when the country offered incentives like land and money for citizens who volunteered to be sterilized and a few states even considered compulsory sterilization laws. Banerjee and Duflo point out that by the 1977 elections, Indians so resented the civil liberties violations that resulted from sterilization programs—sometimes, for instance, male villagers were rounded up, falsely arrested, then forcibly sterilized—that a popular slogan became “Get rid of [incumbent Prime Minister] Indira and save your penis.”

Just like Indians or Americans or anyone else, sub-Saharan Africans make a practical and rational calculus about how many children to have—or at least as practical and rational a calculus as can be expected from anyone, given the process that precedes pregnancy.

While population growth clearly strains infrastructure in cities like Lagos across sub-Saharan Africa today, in 50 years, doomsayers and “population bomb” true believers are more likely to look like Chicken Little than Cassandra.  

Article by TATE WATKINS.

 What are your thoughts on this? Do you think we should really have that law that stipulates the number of children a couple can have in Nigeria? 0r Not?

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Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and began dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss. 

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. 

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. 

My third story is about death. 

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much."

Steve Jobs gave the world the i-pod, i-phone and i-pad. He was the CEO of Apple Computers and Pixar Animation Studios. He gave this commencement speech at Stanford University on June 12, 2005. Steve Jobs died at 56 on the 5th of October, 2011. 
Adieu, Steve Jobs

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Hatch 2.0

Okay…Okay…New Blog. Thanks for coming 'homie'


I was just gonna talk about the old blog and why I'm putting up a new one but you see...I don't wanna bore you. I'm still going to bore you sha. i have no choice.


I originally planned that the first post on this blog would be -you know- mind blowing and all that...but again...I might never be able to pull that off till this blog too dies a natural death. [this could even be the only post] + [ I'm not sure yet if I'm going to even publish this one] *sighs*


I just want you to read this stuff I picked up somewhere. Actually, I also want to keep this article somewhere safe (like here), so I can come back to read it over and over…


Here:

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar … and the coffee.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.

 When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “Yes.”

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, ” I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things–your God, family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favorite passions–things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else – the small stuff.

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your wife/husband/kids out to dinner. Maybe even play another 18. There’s always time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter.

Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.”

.

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