ourse he consistently tries to prove the point that it is not a very big issue “isolationist view of population growth should be rejected”. He brings in many factors like income, education and so on and rightly so. But this blogger humbly submits that whatever argument Mister Amartya Sen is giving for not looking population in its isolation is contradicted by his very surroundings itself!!. Wonder why people don’t look around them?. Anyway his insightful and sometimes brilliant understandings are here for the reader. He titled it Reality and Delusion (dated 1994), very correctly so. “The increase in the world population has vastly accelerated over the last century. It took the world population millions of years to reach the first billion, then 123 years to get to the second, 33 years to the third, 14 years to the fourth, 13 years to the fifth billion, with a sixth billion to come, according to one UN projection, in another 11 years.
Has development, in fact, done much to reduce population growth? There can be little doubt that economic and social development, in general, has been associated with major reductions in birth rates and the emergence of smaller families as the norm. This is a pattern that was, of course, clearly observed in Europe and
It is what people do when they have some basic education, know about family planning methods and have access to them, do not readily accept a life of persistent drudgery, and are not deeply anxious about their economic security. It is also what they do when they are not forced by high infant and child mortality rates to be so worried that no child will survive to support them in their old age that they try to have many children. In country after country the birth rate has come down with more female education, the reduction of mortality rates, the expansion of economic means and security, and greater public discussion of ways of living.
Post script: Amen
