We might have thought of an agricultural collapse of the farming of this vast midwest as the undoing of society. For example, as we narrow the species of grain being planted in the American midwest (to some Monsanto or ADM one season special patented product). But here's another possibility for Malthusian Catastrophe [2]: the insurance industry [3]. Do you remember The Population Bomb [4] by Paul Ehrlich? It was a bestseller among people of my parent's generation, those who had been the progenitors of the baby boom. But the Green Revolution [5] interrupted Erhlich's projections.
"Cereal production more than doubled in developing nations between the years 1961 – 1985. Yields of rice, maize, and wheat increased steadily during that period. The production increases can be attributed roughly equally to irrigation, fertilizer, and seed development, at least in the case of Asian rice.
While agricultural output increased as a result of the Green Revolution, the energy [6] input into the process (that is, the energy that must be expended to produce a crop) has also increased at a greater rate, so that the ratio of crops produced to energy input has decreased over time. Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on chemical fertilizers [7], pesticides [8] and herbicides [9], some of which must be developed from fossil fuels, making agriculture increasingly reliant on petroleum [10] products. Proponents of the Peak Oil [11] theory fear that a future decline in oil and gas production would lead to a decline in food production or even a Malthusian catastrophe [2]." [12] --from the above linked Wikipedia article.
So now that we are "eating oil" will the lack of maternity coverage from health insurance policies [3] be the population control for Americans?
Ideas such as paid family leave [13] and universal health care [14] are much talked about in the presidential primaries, but are still just a dream in this wealthy country, what how will leaders cover the shortfall? Is this a warm up? Oh by the way, you can't afford to have children because you can't afford the premiums?
Last night reading Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken [15], I read through a chapter that addresses this very topic, one I have to admit our family faced when we looked at the intersection of family and money.
In a 02006 article [16], Michael Chabon poetically put it this way:
“[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now [17]. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006.”
From the article Catastrophe a good bet [18] - “Even having kids is a bet, from this angle. Still, there are less lyrical, though deeply significant, bets being placed all the time — and not just on Superbowl Sunday. One relatively new arena for betting explicitly on future possibilities in the world of finance is the catastrophe bond [19].”
It's a risky world we live in...