Brazil Doesn't Listen To The Pope?

[Hypognosis]

Dr Hans Rosling was the the guy with the graph on Newsnight last night.

http://www.gapminder.org/

The graphic showed how birth rates in developing countries are reducing as they become steadily more developed and wealthy.

The graph is animated and Brazil's babies per family figure drifts towards a lower value. Dr Rosling made a throwaway comment to the effect that "Brazilians don't listen to what the Pope says" and that they're using contraception.

This is news to me and I'm sure it's news to the Pope too!

The upshot is that world population is now forecast to plateau in the next few decades, as prosperity filters out to the rest of the developing world.

Does this give you more hope for the future?

As a side-issue, was his remark believable?
Side issue to the side-issue: Was it tactless?

[youngmafbog]

An interesting question. If the birth rate is dropping and contraception is not used (in any form) then why? Are the Brazilians too tired to copulate all the time now or has their fertility dropped?

If there really is a link between prosperity and a lowering birth rate then that is good news. The population of the planet is far too high and needs to stabilize.

[Hypognosis]

There's a quiz attached to the news story here (scroll down the page a bit)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24836917

I got a decent score mainly because I saw the piece on Newsnight last night so all the questions which were supposed to take me by surprise were 'spoilered'.

[Hypognosis]

@youngmafbog

there is a recognised problem to do with pthalates, the 'plasticiser' compounds added to plastics, where the compounds break down into compounds which mimic female hormones. If the plastics have prolonged contact with food then the compounds get into us and can affect us at every stage of life, including during foetal development.

It's another one of those uncontrolled global experiments that we're the guinea-pigs for.

Other than that, you appear to be of the opinion that this guy was talking out of his West End farce?

[jno]

it's sometimes supposed that all Christians believe every word of the Bible, and that all Catholics act exactly as the pope tells them to.

I don't know where these fantasies come from., but they fly - most unscientifically - in the face of the evidence.

It's always been the same thing: as countries get richer, and as child mortality falls, people have fewer children, because they need fewer whether to plough the fields or perpetuate the genes.

[naomi24]

It comes with education, something that has been sorely lacking in religious communities until recent times. Generally, as education increases, religious adherence decreases.

[FredPuli43]

Education in contraception must help but even people who are ignorant of it or who can't get it must be aware of a woman's fertility time.

The answer may be that high mortality rates in children dictate that people have more children; how many children did Queen Anne or our early Victorian ancestors have, yet they were often prosperous? And poor countries often have such a rate.

And it is hardly news that people don't follow every diktat of a bachelor in Rome.

[Hypognosis]

If you get around to family history search you will see large families in every census, even up to late Victorian times and low income labour seemed to be no obstacle to family size.

It is as if, however many kids you raised, there was always no shortage of work nearby for them. Maybe it's the case that, in poor countries, more kids is the path to increased household income.

The rich could bring up equally as many children, with no financial obstacles to whatever life aims they had for them.

It is the educated middle class who I think are most likely to resrict family size. They may have had higher education themselves, got into professional occupations and want the same standard of living for their offspring but might experience harder times, financially, than their parents (the "you've never had it so good" boom times didn't repeat in subsequent generations, for instance) and they limit themselves to one, two or three, because they forsee the costs of getting them all through as far as tertiary education.

Other than that, the technological advancement of the world is such that you need high educational achievement just to get through the sift for interview, let alone perform the job itself. No-one these days aims to work in a field while envying the careers of everyone who drives past whereas, in Victorian times, that kind of work was as high as many people could realistically aspire to. The higher demand for educational success drives parents of all social strata to concentrate their resources on fewer offspring, as above.

[jno]

I've found that sort of true and sort of not. Some of my ancestors had big familes but others didn't. In some, lots of children died young; in others all lived to a healthy old age.

This may have been related to local conditions (one family grew up during the Irish potato famine; only one of them lived past 30, though their parents, who grew up earlier, lived much longer). Only last century, many of my father's siblings died of TB, seemingly spread during the depression.

And in many cases they did move, usually to villages within 10 miles or so, though whether for love or work is hard to say.

So I haven't been able to draw any hard and fast conclusions from my own family's history, and it may be there is no general truth.

[Hypognosis]

//And in many cases they did move, usually to villages within 10 miles or so, though whether for love or work is hard to say.//

Love, more often than not, I would think. If a village is small enough, it's not long before there isn't anyone left to marry who isn't your cousin!

//So I haven't been able to draw any hard and fast conclusions from my own family's history, and it may be there is no general truth. //

As generalisms go, that's not an unreasonable one. :-)

There was a 1 hour documentary Thursday 9:00pm, BBC2 by this Dr Rosling. I'm watching a recording of it now. I'll be back.

[Hypognosis]

A good programme, all round and he got his points across in an engaging and light-hearted way.

Much fun was had about the results of surveying the British public about what they thought conditions in the developing world are like and how wrong they were about factors like literacy, family size and so on. More amusing still that those with a degree were even more likely to answer wrongly.

Advanced education evidently doesn't make you immune to preconceived ideas, it seems.

Either that or ALL of the news media is consistently feeding us with something less than a fully balanced picture. Then again, "good news" stories are often not sufficiently dramatic or attention-grabbing for our tastes (and we've been meticulously trained by them, over the years, to recognise what is 'stimulating' and what is 'dull').

The global wealth distribution stuff was certainly enlightening and to see a subsistence farmer upgrading from a pushbike to a motorcycle was inspirational. He gets his crop to market and back home saving hours on each trip, enabling him to increase work done in other areas on the family's farm. Get others like them out of poverty and they'll be able to afford fertilizer and land productivity goes up. Population will continue rising - to 11 billion - but food production may well keep pace with the extra mouths.

Any pessimism I may have expressed in the past has largely been dispelled by all of this.