BewaConsensus Science

Greetings Lucio,

Yes, I agree that classifying demographics by
education is a poor one - though I was at a loss how
better to describe this point in a short space. Once
again generalities prove to be problematic.

Since the Roman empire at least (and probably long
before) there has been a deficit of children of the
rich and well educated overall. The Romans adopted
promising slaves if I remember my history right.
Extinction has not happened yet though in the long
term the meek do seem to inherit the earth.

Cheers, Thor

> By the time there are space colonies and the means
of
> getting there worked out the population of the world
> may be shrinking not expanding. This is because the
> educated do not have enough children to replace
> themselves and the poor are wiped out by diseases,
> natural disasters, etc.

Well, that is not true (except in extreme cases),
because as technology progresses it becomes cheap
enough to be acquired/assimilated even by
the poor. As a result, the vast majority of the
population growth along the later half of the 20th
Century happened in poor countries, because
they were not-so-poor that they could not take
sanitary and agricultural measurements to promote the
death of less children and the production of
more food.

Also, if it is true that, as a general pattern,
educated people tend to under-reproduce, then
civilizations of educated people are simply doomed
to go extinct (and replaced by "uneducated people") in
a couple of centuries.

However, I think that "educated people" may not be an
accurate label for the members of the kind of society
that under-reproduce. I think that
the kind of society with under-reproduction is simply
the one that gives equal rights and opportunities to
men and women and where it is not considered a moral
duty to the society to have children. The fact that
the West fits that definition *and* has an average
level of education higher than other civilizations may
be a coincidence; I think that we
have just too few examples of civilizations to make
bold generalizations.

Even though, maybe the West will escape extinction
because there are some very small Western populational
groups that would not fit the
definition above - Fundamentalist Catholics, for
instance. Or perhaps the West will shift to baby
factories a la "Brave New World". :-)