{"id":39636,"date":"2018-10-24T07:37:21","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T12:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39636"},"modified":"2018-10-24T07:37:21","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T12:37:21","slug":"debating-population-poverty-and-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39636","title":{"rendered":"Debating population, poverty and development"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2018\/10\/debating-population-poverty-and-development\/\">Debating population, poverty and development<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Last week, Small Farm Future chalked up yet another first \u2013 the first vehement critique of one of our posts by a working academic with apparent expertise in the matter at hand. The post was <a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2018\/06\/population-whats-the-problem\/\">this one<\/a> about global population and its entailments that I published in June, and the critique came from Dr Jane O\u2019Sullivan of the University of Queensland in Australia (our exchange is linked below).<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d precis the main substance of Dr O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s critique as follows: my post failed to consider the importance of top-down government or expert-led population control policies (broadly conceived) in reducing global fertility (ie. births per woman) over the last 50 years, and failed to consider the implications of the recent slowdown in the decline of the fertility rate and its causes. If that was all that Dr O\u2019Sullivan had said, it would have been easy for me to concede these points (especially if she\u2019d made them politely). I don\u2019t think the concession greatly alters the main points I was making in that post, though perhaps it does a little. But in the course of our ill-tempered exchange (I\u2019m sure the fault was partly mine\u2026though not, I think, entirely) Dr O\u2019Sullivan also unleashed quite a barrage of assertions that in my opinion varied from the somewhat questionable to the downright misleading, along I\u2019ll admit with the occasional useful nugget. I should probably give myself more time to reflect on the issues, but some of them are highly relevant to the wider themes of this blog, and I think are less clear-cut than Dr O\u2019Sullivan supposes. So I thought I\u2019d write a quick, work-in-progress kind of response now to present the issues as I see them, in the hope that other commenters may bring some wider illumination.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Debating population, poverty and development Last week, Small Farm Future chalked up yet another first \u2013 the first vehement critique of one of our posts by a working academic with apparent expertise in the matter at hand. The post was this one about global population and its entailments that I published in June, and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15683,1546,22555,22556,1371,642,9738],"class_list":["post-39636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-chris-smaje","tag-development","tag-dr-jane-osullivan","tag-human-fertility","tag-population","tag-poverty","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39637,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39636\/revisions\/39637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}