Energy Use and Population Growth

I've just started reading the book http://www.amazon.com/Resource-Efficiency-Improvements-Earthscan-Research/dp/1844074625">The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements. kristopher and I had a brief discussion about it here, and I was interested enough to buy it despite the ferocious price (I bought it used). I'll be reviewing the book itself later, but right now I want to post some thoughts that came up as a result of reading the foreword.

The foreword is by Joseph Tainter, author of the book The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is somewhat famous in doomer circles. In it he discusses areas where we see Jevons's theory at work in our everyday lives, including an interesting look at the increase in police weapons use due to the lower personal cost to the officer of using a Taser versus a handgun. One of the things he mentions in passing is the cost of raising children, with the comment that Jevons might predict that as the cost of raising kids went down we might have more of them. That made me say, "Hold on, we're seeing exactly the opposite! As societies get richer, which lowers the cost of everything including children, their fertility rates drop! What's going on?"

Then I remembered a quote earlier in the foreword, which clarified the law of supply and demand with one crucial word: "Any time one reduces the cost of a valued resource, people will respond by consuming more of it." A little light bulb blinked on. If the value the consumer places on a good drops, even lowering the price will not tempt more consumption. Perhaps the value societies place on children is changing, and that change is causing some of the drop in birth rates we're now seeing.

My hypothesis is that increasing energy use lowers the marginal value of children as labour.

To generate the hypothesis I followed this chain of thought:

• One significant value of children is as workers, especially as field hands and manual labourers in less developed countries.
  
• A child would lose that labour value as the society became richer and used more machinery to replace human labour.
  
• As children lost their economic value there would be less incentive for parents to have them, even though their cost would decline as the society got richer.
  
• Machinery requires energy to operate.
  
• The per capita consumption of energy is a useful proxy for the level of a country's mechanization.
  
  
• Therefore, if the hypothesis is correct, a country that used more energy per capita (lowering the need for human labour) should exhibit a lower fertility rate as the marginal value of children as labour declined.

In Wikipedia I found two lists of countries organized by Total Fertility Rate and per capita energy consumption. I plotted the values for 135 countries against each other and came up with the following graph:



The correlation is clear. Countries with high levels of energy use tend to exhibit low fertility rates, and vice versa. What this seems to imply is that increasing energy use is one of the most significant mechanisms driving Stage 3 of the Demographic Transition (possibly up to half the total influence). This relegates all the other factors such as contraception, urbanization, education, female literacy, etc. to supporting roles, as they split the remaining 50%. The primary factor in reducing population growth rates is shown to be rising energy use that displaces the value of human beings as labour.

What this finding might mean for an energy-constrained future needs more reflection, but if the hypothesis holds up there could be significant upward pressure on birth rates in such a world.

But that's just me.

I believe Howard Beale said it best...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

However, Arthur Jensen said it better than that...

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU...WILL...ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those *are* the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

Would you be easily able to name those five countries? Seems to me they have abundant energy (or a hell of a disparity in use) and still value their children - for other reasons.

Turkmenistan, Libya, Israel, and Malaysia. Three out of the four are Islamic nations, and even Israel has a large Islamic population.

I also discarded a few of the Middle Eastern oil producers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE because they obviously skewed the data. Oil-rich nations with strong Islamic cultures have very high energy use plus very high fertility. Islamic cultures that are not major oil producers don't show this anomaly as strongly.

Not what I was hoping to see, but not unexpected. What a shame.

in the industrialized west. It's true that parents no longer view children as an economic asset, but they now view them exclusively in terms of the parent-child bond. Of course, parents have always seen children from this parental bond perspective (there are any number of stories from the ancient Greek literature, Shakespeare, the bible, etc., that illustrate this) but in pre-industrial times they also viewed children, of necessity, as economic assets. The high mortality rates among infants also played a role in this. Modern parents would rather have fewer children and give them a better lifestyle, more attention, and a better education.

There might be an upswing in fertility rates for a period of time, especially as peak oil makes contraceptives less available, but I would expect this modern valuation (parental love as opposed to economic asset) to remain as a kind of cultural artifact - parents simply aren't accustomed to regarding children as economic assets, and in fact tend to see them as liabilities, especially in times of hardship. It seems to me that these days we get baby boomlets in periods of prosperity when people feel more optimistic about the future. As the reality of peak oil starts to set in, I suspect more and more people will opt to go childless. Food scarcity and the inability to feed their children would outweigh any notion of being cared for in their old age, especially as the "long emergency" and a deteriorating climate make the latter questionable in any case.

In a personal note, I have two children in elementary school, a seven year-old and a ten year-old. I expect sometime in the next ten years to have a conversation with them about the advisability of having children of their own. Of course, I would never tell them that I think they shouldn't have kids, but I'd advise them to think seriously about what their own and their kid's future will hold. For me, facing peak oil without kids would be relatively easy. I know that making drastic personal changes in lifestyle that only affect myself would be difficult but do-able. But when you have children, facing the future of peak oil becomes a very scary proposition.

that in a post-peak society with all the other shit-storms converging as well, the true costs of having children (in an ecological sense) would be seen alongside their economic and human benefits. Recognizing those costs might reinforce our assessment of the human value of children rather than seeing them in primarily economic terms. In any cost-benefit calculation, both the cost and the benefits need to be recognized for good decision-making.

It may not happen that way, but it might.

a data-based model, but I just happened to come across this bit in an article on informationclearinghouse:

Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Play Chess

"The United Nations publishes population projections for Russia up to 2050, and I have extended these to 2100. If the UN demographers are correct, Russia's adult population will fall from about 90 million today to only 20 million by the end of the century. Russia is the only country where abortions are more numerous than live births, a devastating gauge of national despair."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20551.htm

It then occurred to me to look for info about fertility rates during the great depression, and I found this:

BIRTHS, DEATHS, AND NEW DEAL RELIEF
DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

"The Great Depression has always been seen as a period of low fertility, as marriages were delayed and plans for children postponed. This description of the 1930s as the nadir of the birth rate has been driven partially by the rise in fertility during World War II and the baby boom that followed. However, the Depression contributed to lower fertility even if we focus on the trend established between 1915 and 1929."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~fishback/Births,%20Deaths%20and%20New%20Deal%20Relief%20working%20paper.pdf

I would speculate that the survival strategy of having larger families evolves over long periods of chronic hardship, but that a sudden catastrophic downturn would have the opposite effect. It may be that if humanity experiences a catastrophic die-off in the next century fertility rates will only rebound among generations born far enough in the future as to have no personal experience of our current lifestyle or the subsequent die-off.

I'm currently working on a follow-on to this article, that expands the idea of "the value of a child".

It seems to me that the decision of whether or not to have a child (either to conceive one or carry it to term if the pregnancy was unplanned) could be expressed as the outcome of a classical cost-benefit analysis, though the analysis in this case would be largely intuitive and unconscious. If the benefit exceeds the cost the decision is positive, if the cost exceeds the benefit, the decision is negative.

If that is the case, then each individual decision will have its own set of cost and benefit factors, but they will be strongly normalized by the physical and cultural conditions in place at the time. As a result, similar influences (for instance falling energy supplies) could have different effects in different cultures, depending on what other conditions were in effect. You point to something similar, and I'd agree with your observation about any rebound in birth rates following a die-off taking a long time. I'd bet on it taking several generations.

Revise your thinking on allocation of causal factors a bit. It is probably more accurate modeling to think in terms of first order, second order etc., than in percentages. For example, birth control is perhaps better conceptualized as a first order element rather than a supporting element. Without it, the amount of energy usage (second order) wouldn't really be able to have an impact.

How are you establishing causation? Not saying you are wrong, just suggesting that the data presented doesn't seem to do that.

All I'm saying is the data seems to support the hypothesis.

Birth control of some sort is how the population decline is implemented, so it's definitely a first order effect. However, without the incentive provided by the value shift, birth control alone wouldn't work. It would be (and in fact is) rejected by people who perceive its effects as contrary to their economic interest.

China is an interesting case study in that the imposition of economic penalties is deliberate and intended to counteract long held values about children. It will be interesting to see if their economic progress and increased energy use alters the number of infractions.

Nice work.

EIA also lists the energy intensity of many nations. I'd say that would also be an important, easy to plot variable as it translates the energy use into productivity. It would also tie in the idea of increased efficiency, which is set to be a large part of the future energy landscape. It may turn out that with increased efficiency, the curve shifts sufficiently to alter the scenario you envision.

The intensity data is from Wikipedia. 117 countries are included in this chart. The R^2 is a bit tighter than without the intensity compensation, but the message doesn't change.

I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that the perception of the economic value of children is probably the driver for Stage 3 of the Demographic Transition.

Between 5-10K seems to be a significant transition point.

Interesting.

"I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that the perception of the economic value of children is probably the driver..."

This is in the Harris book I recommended, in case you missed it. I recall you said you bought it, right?

You've provided some good supporting data. Thanks.

A french social scientist called Emanuel Todd who specializes in demographic studies makes a totally different point.

Children are very cheap in poor societies because their parents don't spend money on them. It is easy to demonstrate that kids of a NY couple making 200,000$ a year will be considerably MORE expensive, even as a percentage of total expenses, than the children of a poor couple of Mexican immigrants making 15,000$. They'll never have to pay for university, private classes, more expensive food, karate classes, etc...

This guy's model is very convicincg, they seem to have a strong correlation on explaining why the number of children diminishes with rising income.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Todd

He has a lot of interesting stuff to say about literacy, demographics and so on as factors to predit the evolution of a society.

I cannot access the oil drum--I keep0 getting the "Internet Explorer cannot display the web page" message. Microsoft says contact the web page. I can't find their e-mail address.

Any other help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Amanda

theoildrum at gmail dot com

It works for me in both IE and Firefox.

The tricky bit is convincing them to help out in the way you meant.

Whoever came up with this fairytale was clearly a parent: