One of the few benefits of being a retired university professor is that I can take classes without paying tuition. I’m not sure how many of my former colleagues take advantage of this perk since I have yet to encounter a single retired faculty member in any of my classes. After years of telling students that education is important, it turns out that phrase was just a mantra.
Note. To be fair, Enema U also gives retirees a “special price” on parking permits. Since the price is exactly what they charged for a regular permit, I guess the special part is that they didn’t raise the price.
Free tuition means that I get to study interesting subjects besides history, that frequently look at the same events from different perspectives. For example, consider those periods of time that historians call ‘boom or bust’ cycles: economists tend to call them, “periods of economic expansion or contraction.” What is fascinating is that the two disciplines do not agree on when, why, and how long the periods lasted. Anthropologists and art historians have different views on how those events shape culture, and I’m sure that if I ever became an education major I would learn that they have never even heard of those events.
A while back I wrote about a research trip to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. The country has been suffering from a water shortage for years. Whether this is a result of climate change or due to the simple fact that if you cut down a rain forest it is no longer a forest and it stops raining is still being debated. Regardless of the explanation, the capital’s water utility company had a unique method of rationing the water.
About an hour before sunrise, the town’s water supply was turned on for two hours and only two hours. The town’s water pressure was a little on the anemic side, so as the water slowly refilled the pipes through the city, the escaping air made an eerie moaning sigh. The sound was impossible to sleep through, even if every inhabitant were not planning to get up and fill buckets and assorted containers with sufficient water for the day.
There were several consequences of this water rationing. Unless you ate in a large, well-established restaurant that could afford to install a large water tank, it was reasonable to assume that your eating utensils were cleaner at breakfast than at supper. I also learned that it is far better to brush your teeth with a bottle of beer than with Coca Cola and I learned that one of the reasons the locals hated the American Embassy was that embassy had its own well and flaunted it by hosing down the sidewalks in front of the building every day at noon.
Of course, another consequence of having your morning sleep interrupted daily by that unnaturally low moaning noise was that the town had a spectacularly high birth rate. As one resident explained it, “At that hour, it is too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.”
Unfortunately, the water situation has gotten worse since I visited thirty years ago. Today, the water is only being turned on once a week and the city is contemplating changing that to only once a month. As a consequence, the birth rate will probably plummet.
I was reminded of this about a week ago, when one of my economics professors stated that there was a definite correlation between the availability of electrical power, rising productivity, and a declining birth rate. Naturally, I trust all the professors at Enema U, so I promptly researched this myself. Sure enough, there are well-documented studies, done not only in the United States as the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) brought electrical power to remote homes, but also recently as the power grid was extended into the remote regions of Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ghana. Regardless of the location, when communities were able to use modern lighting and electric-powered appliances and tools, productivity increased dramatically while the birth rates invariably dropped.
The increase in productivity is easy to understand. Better tools meant more work was accomplished more quickly and more effectively. Less obvious is that the use of electricity for home heating and cooking eliminated the long hours necessary to gather wood, freeing more time for productivity. The increase in productivity is obvious, but why the drop in fertility?
There are several studies done to answer just this question, almost all of which offering theories that suspiciously confirm the convictions and desires of the groups funding the studies. Groups promoting the laudable goal of increased access to contraception have studies that show that, as access to radio and television reached women, this caused increased the knowledge of family planning. Unfortunately for proponents of this theory, the drop in fertility in third world countries today almost perfectly matches the drop in fertility during the 1930’s when the American Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to American farms and ranches. None of these homes had television nor was information about fertility and contraception being broadcast on the radio.
The real cause seems to be a little less technical: Before electricity, there are far fewer things to do for recreation in the dark.
Leave it to our intellectually better leaders to decide that us peasants might be swayed to eschew sex thanks to their carefully brilliantly crafted education/propaganda programs. Perhaps something simple like having more choices as to what we do at the end of the day might be a more prosaic solution. Our intellectual elite persist in thinking they are so much smarter that without them we proles can't really think for ourselves. Some how they find it unlikely that when we schlubs are really tired at the end of the day, rather than expend unnecessary energy on an activity that makes more children who make more work for us, we might choose instead to lay up in bed and watch Netflix till we drift off to sleep.. No matter how much fun making those children might be, we're pooped and there is alternate entertainment available. It more likely occurred to them that they really didn't want ten children. Not much chance they suddenly remembered the public service ad about birth control. I suspect a lot of folks, equipped with radio and television and light by which to read books, just found it easier to put off a pleasant activity that carries with it the danger of adding mouths to feed to the family budget for a good movie. I mean by the end of the day we're tired enough already. Who needs another half a dozen or so rugrats to get up and bring water to at bedtime. It's been shown in multiple studies that the more educated people are, the fewer kids they have. So the more they learn from TV and stuff, the less interested they are in having 10 kids or so.
ReplyDeleteVery likely it's that simple.
ReplyDelete