In “Dwindling rates of fertility test child strategies across the globe” (FT Series, April 21) Federica Cocco et al cite work by demographers and economists for various regions of the world. It is interesting that since Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), many people have been exercised by the idea there are too few babies being born.
While a few economists like Herman Daly and Kenneth Boulding have called for a stable and sustainable world economy, the concept of sustainability strikes at the heart of capitalism, and especially consumer capitalism. Without a constant flood of new consumers to buy and become debtors, the system is thought by many to be subject to collapse.
But climate change is unlikely to be stopped without a drastic reduction in human population. David Herlihy, one of the few historians of population in his book Women, family, and society in medieval Europe (1995), clearly linked the Renaissance, where people were inclined to have fewer, healthier and better educated children — if they had any at all — to the population decline of the Black Death.
The effects of the transfer of stupendous wealth to the mass of people and especially to women with the death of husbands and fathers, also had a levelling effect and stimulated agriculture and industry. Let’s go with fewer, better educated people with more technology and less pollution for a better future.
Niccolo Caldararo
Department of Anthropology
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, US
