I’ve read articles reporting on the declining birth rates in many countries. Most of the articles report this as a problem which puzzles me because, from the perspective of climate change, reducing our population is one of the most important changes we can make. It’s a good thing, worth celebrating as a long-term path to hope. I understand how this undermines the Social Security-type safety nets that some governments have created but those safety nets can be altered.
I encountered another one of these articles last week that struck me as especially egregious. I thought I might be able to use it in an essay I’ve been struggling to write (a Commons culture).
Why China’s Shrinking Population Is a Problem for Everyone NYTimes, April 19, 2023
“Here’s why economists and others are alarmed by the developments….In the long run, a shortage of factory workers in China — driven by a better-educated work force and a shrinking population of young people — could raise costs for consumers outside China, potentially exacerbating inflation in countries like the United States that rely heavily on imported Chinese products. “
“A shrinking population could also mean a decline in spending by Chinese consumers, threatening global brands dependent on sales of products to China, from Apple smartphones to Nike sneakers.”
My response was “What? We need to keep the population growing so that we can keep consumer costs down outside of China?”
“In the short term, a plunging birthrate poses a major threat to China’s real estate sector, which accounts for roughly a quarter of the country’s economic output. Population growth is a key driver of housing demand, and homeownership is the most important asset for many Chinese people.”
So are we supposed to have lots of kids to drive housing demand? What’s the more important asset for many Chinese people, homeownership or a sense that one’s grandchildren have a viable future?
Forty years ago, a girlfriend of mine was taking an anthropology course and the professor urged the class to read The Structures of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn so I read her copy of the book. That was the book that expanded/deepened the word “paradigm” into the meaning most people use today. What fascinated me in his book was the idea that the new scientific paradigm created different interpretations of certain words so that practitioners of the old and new scientific paradigms found it hard to communicate. They would use the same words but the words held different meanings. One of them would speak what was factual to them and the other would hear what they interpreted as misconceived opinions. That is how I experienced this op-ed piece. “Threatening global brands dependent on sales of products to China” is of more concern than threatening the viability of the ecosystems human civilization is dependent on? What is the goal in this person’s thought? The placement of values is so different.
Plus, the op-ed’s perspective appears full of contradictions. Example: “The government’s efforts to start a baby boom to solve the demographic crisis — including offering cash handouts and easing the one-child policy to allow for three — have failed to stabilize falling birthrates. Educated Chinese women are increasingly delaying marriage and choosing not to have children, deterred by the high costs of housing and education.” So one of the barriers to more births is “the high costs of housing”… “which accounts for roughly a quarter of the country’s economic output.” Greater population leads to higher housing costs which is supposedly economically good which leads to young couples not being able to afford housing and so not have children which is supposedly economically bad. What is more important for a country: rising real estate values or affordable housing for young couples? Why? Where should a country locate its wealth?
Hopefully I’m explaining myself well enough that you can sense the disconnect between that op-ed’s author and my view. Different paradigms about what are the fundamental systems that determine one’s actions. So I started work on this as a piece in my larger essay of a Commons culture. And then the following presentation came to me via the Open Global Mind mailing list < https://openglobalmind.com> . Here’s the link.
https://youtu.be/3ryB_gjz0us
The End of the Billionaire Mindset: A Celebration with Douglas Rushkoff | SXSW 2023. It’s an hour-long talk in which he analyzes a similar experience: two different world views, each of which is facing in a different direction from the other. I had never heard of Douglas Rushkoff before and I enjoyed his presentation, especially the last half when he talks about four different ways to shift both oneself and one’s culture to a more grounded paradigm.
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In the last two minutes of a question and answer period at the end of his talk, he presented another example of the difference between two paradigms of schools. What he says matches my work at Chrysalis (“Encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter”) so I realize that though he and I are working in different domains, we are working on the same fundamental issue. Seeing the different places where we each are working makes me aware of just how extensive and deep and fundamental these paradigms by which we understand our world are. How should we live our lives?
I transcribed those last two minutes of his talk and I’ll end this post with them.
“What we have to do, the easiest way to break that is to change the purpose of school right now. You talk to school principals, talk to the presidents of universities. You know who they are meeting with to find out how to change their curriculum? They’re meeting with tech-bro billionaire CEO’s. What skills do you want our students to have?
“‘What skills do you want our students to have?’ I’m going to pay 80,000 dollars a year to train myself for this frigging corporation?
Or my pubic school. Since when is the purpose of public school to absorb the externalized cost of worker training for corporations?
“School was the opposite. School was invented for the opposite reason. It was to give the coal worker a bit of dignity. So after they got out of the coal and went home at night, they can open a novel and read it and understand what it said. So they could read the newspaper and be informed about the issues and vote effectively. It was compensation for a life of work, not the pass to a life of work.
“So if we flip education on its head and say this is not about increasing the utility value of these students but increasing the awareness of the intrinsic human value of these people, we flip the whole script just like that. They are no longer in the machine metaphor or the digital metaphor for learning and experience. They’re in a room with a teacher… They’re doing mimesis. They are looking at a human being up there learning, exploring, understanding and their bodies are mirroring what that is in real time and real space. And that is a reinforcement or an acknowledgement of the basic human dignity that everybody has and that is what we all need to be students of.”
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