the grandchildren’s
generation
Sorry, not finished yet!
(This chapter will
describe the grandchildren’s generation as seen by the author: composed mainly
by the offspring of the Undeveloped of today, who will adsorb the Developed’s culture
and technology. Basically they will be the Kunta-Kinte’s grandchildren. The
author does hope that they will remember where they came from, and will be much
more sensitive to the welfare of Mother Earth).
And now, after writing so much all around, I will get
to the point: Let’s present the Grandchildren’s Generation.
Until now I avoided the direct use of tables, graphs
and figures within the text, sending the reader to other web sites for more
precise and authoritative information, but to understand the Grandchildren’s
Generation essence, I need a more visual approach, so I suggest the reader to
“jump” to the hyperlinks of this paragraph in parallel of fluent reading.
In order to
characterize the Grandchildren’s Generation, namely the people that around the
middle of XXI century will ‘take over’ the job of managing our society, we will
take a look at some Statistics graphs called Age-Sex or Population
Pyramids. Those graphs are defined as bar charts
(histograms), arranged vertically, that shows the distribution of a population
by age and sex at a determined time. By convention, the younger ages are at the
bottom, with males on the left and females on the right. The orizontal
axis shows the absolute population or, more often, the percentual fraction of
the age group (usually of 5 years), within the population of some country/society. The whole population is
represented by the total area covered by the bars of the histogram. An age-sex
pyramid ‘freezes’ the population distribution ‘as it is’ at a determined time,
but it may be regarded also as a single frame of a dynamic distribution over time,
for you can plot a sequence of graphs, each one of them showing the population
distribution every five years. Animating the
slide-show you will see the bars climbing upward, as the people in an
age-group get older and replace the upper bar. The ‘standard’ graphs look like
a pyramid, since in a typical population there are many youngsters and less old
people, beginning from a broad basis at the bottom of the graph and terminating
with a vanishing tip around age 90. This standard pyramidal pattern, though,
may assume a
quite different form in diverse populations and in the same population in
different times. In a typical
developing country (Mexico) the basic pyramidal form is maintained (in this
specific case the bars at the bottom of the pyramid are about the same length,
showing a reduced infant mortality in the last years). In a typical
developed country (Finland) the graph looks quite different. Here the base
of the pyramid is narrowing, showing that less and less and less children are
born every year. Let’s take a look at the pyramids of a developed country
through the XX century: The
USA population pyramid of 1900 resembles that of a today developing nation,
but the graph is quite different from the 1960
and 2000 USA sex-age pyramids. Sometimes the
asymmetrical shape may be the consequence of particular events. The population
graph of Germany
in 1946 shows a bottleneck (sometimes called a “bite”) around age 25-29,
especially among men. The cause: World War II. I found a beautiful example of
Japanese ‘fussiness’ in the well explained population pyramid of Yokohama.
Between the classical war “bites” and Baby-boom “bulges”, seen also in graphs
of other nations, you can see the footprint of a special once-in-60-years
astrological event: 1966– The
Fire Horse Year (women born in that year are believed to bring misfortune).
Beyond that curiosity, the graph is interesting, because it divides the
population in three main groups: the Child Population (0-15), the Productive
Population (16-65), and the Aged Population (over 65). Another special case is
a ‘reversed pyramid’. Sun
City, Arizona is a Retirement Community. The main age group is around
75-80, with almost no population under 50. Sun City is the extreme case of a
community composed entirely of aged people, with a spare productive population
and no children at all.
Let’s
now look at Population Dynamics. A population changes in size and composition
due to an input-output process: people are born and die. Obviously the newborn
occupy only the bottom bar of the pyramid, while dying people can influence the
size of any bar, since people die at any age. When the birth rate is greater
than the death rate (more people are born than die), our graph assumes the
‘classic pyramid’ form. When less people are born every year, the histogram
slowly reverses, until it assumes the ‘reverse pyramid’ form of Sun City. The input-output
process, though, has another component: Migration. People can join or leave a
community anytime in their lifetime. The dynamic size of a population is
expressed as the Growth Rate, which is the net increment (positive growth
rate), or decline (negative growth rate), due to Births+immigration minus
Deaths+emigration.
At the
beginning of XX century most nations had a positive growth rate, but at the end
of it most developed countries show a negative growth rate, while most
developing countries have a slowing down, still positive, growth rate.
Beginning from the ‘70s, the developed countries are experiencing a population
decline. The causes of it are quite different from the past. The developed
countries are no more involved in bloody wars, nor afflicted by deadly
epidemics. They just make fewer children, because of late weddings, voluntary
family planning, career and so on. In the past childbearing was the consequence
of sex, and child weaning was the ‘old-age insurance’. Now children are almost
a nuisance for a comfortable life. You can have sex. You mustn’t become
pregnant. You can have retirement insurance. Without weaning children. Anyway,
with such a ‘wonderful world’ around, with nuclear
weapons, pollution, metropolitan crowding, urban violence, radioactive
and harmful
substances all around, what’s good in bringing a child upon Earth? Now the
shrinking bottom bars of the age-sex pyramid are climbing upward, reaching the Productive Population range . A few
decades more, and the most developed countries will resemble Sun
City, Arizona or even Solaria in Asimov’s
‘The Naked Sun’: a sparely populated, high-technological society, where the
productive work is done by machines… Well… Let’s not go too far, after all
that’s just good Science Fiction…
The Picture is
quite different in the Developing countries. They still believe in children.
Children is Joy, Children is Blessing. Children is the better future of a
not-so-good present. Demographic projections
show that over the next 50 years there will be massive population growth in
developing nations. The natural resources, even if better exploited than in the
present, will hardly sustain the future population. Herds of ‘underdeveloped’ will seek
for new pastures and that will result in large migration from developing
countries into the western, developed nations. Actually the migration is
already happening. For some developed countries the fact is barely new. The USA
development, that brought the nation the place it is, was carried out thanks to
the once-poor European fellows: Irish, Italians and others. Now they are rich.
They don’t come anymore, but there is plenty of Mexicans to fill their place.
The ‘old’ immigrants, like the WASP population, are aging as well. The mean age
for USA immigrants, until World War II, was around 35, then arose gradually
until the ’70s, and now is back to the former value, thanks to the newcomers
from Latino America. Old people stay home. Young people take the risk to begin
a new life abroad. How all this will influence the population pyramid? There will be changing age distributions in the population.
In the past, the U.S. had a population pyramid, with many young people and few
old people. In the future, the population will resemble a rectangle, with about
as many older people as younger people. However, this will differ greatly by
ethnic group. The U.S. will have a young immigrant population and an aging
white population. In 2000, the U.S. population had a majority of about
71 percent non-Hispanic whites. By 2025, non-Hispanic whites will be 62 percent
of the population, and this will fall to 55 percent by 2045. In the European
developed countries the picture will be similar, but with a substantial
difference: The elder ‘retired’
population will mainly be composed by ‘native’, while the young ‘producing’
middle bars of the graph will be essentially filled by the ‘Extracomunitary’:
Moroccans in France, Turks in Germany, Albanians and Africans in Italy, and so
on.
The above picture,
however, is misleading. As we shall see, it does not take in account a very
important process: The Underdeveloped’s Development.
New immigrants
have some peculiar, well known, characteristics. They don’t speak the host’s
country language well. They don’t like the taste of local food. They stick one
another, living frequently in poor ghettos. They are considered by quite a few
‘native people’ as annoying weed in an otherwise tended lawn. New immigrant’s
offspring, however, speak the local language fluently, they eat cheeseburgers
instead of chili con carne and they have friends of different extraction. Their
children speak the original language with a terrible accent, only to please
their grandparents.
It will be
interestig to look at a age-sex pyramid that shows, separately, the cumulative
percentage of immigrants and ‘old residents’ for each age group. I was not able
to find one on the web. Perhaps some reader will take the challenge: try to
plot an age-sex pyramid, where different colors indicate a different
‘immigration status’. Use blue for new immigrants, green for pure
‘first-generation’ offspring (both parents were immigrants), yellow for pure
‘second-generation’ offspring (all four grandparents were immigrants) and
finally red for offspring whose families resides three-or-more generations in
the country. The histogram will look as the title of this book , with all the colors above, and some more
intermediate hues, because of mixed situations: some people will have a ‘native’ grandmother [red] (by father’s
lineage), and an immigrant mother [blue] as well. Children
of ‘blue’ people will be ‘green’ and their offspring ‘yellow’. Quite complex,
isn’t it?
The bottom line of
all this is that a couple of generation from now, all the western developed
countries will be a potpurry of people whose ‘ancestors’ came from everywhere,
each one of them with his/her own cultural heritage. Three generation from now,
and our grand-grand-children will hardly be able to say where they came from.
Mix together all the colors of the spectrum. What do you get?
The
Underdeveloped’s Development
Sorry, not finished yet!
(Who will be Kunta
Kinte’s grandchildren?)
Conclusions
Sorry, not finished
yet!
(This paragraph will
review the achievements of the future generation).
…After
many years of hard work, our grandchildren will be able to leave to the
following generations a restored and sustainable Earth. Their grandchildren
will live in a better world, with plenty of energy for leisure. Perhaps they
will use it to chat with the Extraterrestrial living far away. But this is
Philosophy or Science Fiction and, as I said at the beginning, it is not the
purpose of this book.
A letter to the reader
Dear
reader,
If
you had the patience to read all the previous pages, you might have reached the
conclusion that something of what was written in them makes sense. If I was
lucky enough to get your attention, perhaps you are now a little more concerned
about the Earth’s future than you were before, and you are wondering whether
you can do something about it. Don’t bother: you will overcome the concern
about the future as soon as the present will keep you busy.
As
you understood, I am very pessimistic. To my opinion neither the present
generation nor the next one will ameliorate the situation. On the contrary, the
truth is that Humans will accelerate constantly the pace of environment
disruption until is almost too late. But what is true in general ought not to
be true individually. In fact you can do something, but, please, do not think
big. Just pay a little more attention to your immediate nearby environment and
care a little more. The best you can do is to teach the lesson to your own
children as soon as they can understand it. Any little boy or girl taught in
the kindergarten to respect wild flowers will preserve them also as an adult.
You
can do very little, it is true, but very little is better than nothing, and if
you still remember the fat driver’s story, think that the very same synergic
effect that might doom our existence on Earth, works exactly in the opposite
direction as well: if many of us give their little contribute, the effects will
be much greater than we can possibly expect.
This
is a relay race. I hope I took my modest part in it writing these pages. Now I
am passing the baton to you. Run a few more steps and, when you are tired, pass
it over to the next runner, without dropping it. But remember that this is a
very long race. Neither of us will see the finish line. Neither of us will win
a medal. Our grand children surely will not give us one to the memory. The most
we can expect from them is a phrase like: “Wow! They knew they were ruining the
world, and they did almost nothing to avoid that!”.
If
you choose to do something, do it, whatever you choose. It is worth to deserve
that “almost”.
Sincerely yours
Daniel
Shalev