Sir, - Judging by William Reville's Science Today piece on population and the elderly (The Irish Times, August 4th), one might be excused for assuming that he did not appreciate my criticism of his comments on the population issue. This presupposes, of course, that he read my letter (June 17th), responding to his May 26th column.
In this week's woolly article, which is long on anecdote and opinion and short on data and analysis, Dr Reville trots out the familiar line that the problem is that parents in "Third World" countries are having far more children than their "poor economies can sustain", while the affluent parents of the developed countries are having too few children. He tells us that "declining birth rates in developed countries are causing an imbalance in the population age spectrum, leading to a preponderance of old and elderly."
This imbalance, he says, is unhealthy. He suggests that parents in "the West" should be encouraged to have more children. This is to be accomplished by offering grandparents tax incentives to set aside money for their grandchildren.
I take issue with the facile idea that the population explosion is exclusively the problem of the less developed countries. This argument seems to hinge on a narrow economic viewpoint of this complex problem. Implicit here is the notion that if the less developed countries were smart like us they would also have a high standard of living and could justify their large families too. (I find the term "Third World" offensive since it suggests a Western, hubristic description of a lower class of people).
This attitude fails to face up to the reality of the exploitation of these same countries by "the West". What we have here is a global problem that must concern and involve all of us.
Clearly what we need to be striving for is zero population growth - births balancing deaths - so as to stabilise the population. Instead of encouraging parents to have more children, as Dr Reville suggests, we need to do the opposite. Were we to adopt the zero population growth approach, we would indeed experience a greater disproportion of elderly versus younger people in the short run. That is, of course, the price we would have to pay during the difficult transition period. Presumably, Dr Reville would prefer to jeopardise the quality of life and the survival of future generations for a short-term gain. This smacks of a quick-fix Keynesian rationalisation because in the long run we are all dead. We have to assume, however, that in the long run our descendants will be alive and it behoves us to hand down to them the kind of world we would have liked to live in ourselves. - Yours, etc.,
Myles Crowe,
Seapoint, Co Dublin.