Acknowledging Europe's Population Problem - Why is Global Education key

Who else but a scientific community to analyze, debate and address the future of the global education, healthcare and population dynamics. Writing scientific articles makes me wonder if eventually we can do more to impact the world, in small steps at the beginning, but increasing in consistency throughout our progression.

_{Source: Pixabay}

Europe, once the center of the world, the cradle of most of the world's most powerful empires, the basis of the New World's Colonization and a major spring of culture, technology, ideologies and social development is faced with a problematic future.
According to countless census studies of individual countries but also EU as a whole, Europe's population is stagnating, following a steady increase slowdown over the last 50 years and a rapid decrease in comparison to the global population.

But Europe has a very high quality of life index, why is population decreasing?

It appears that, as others stated population growth tends to reach a "stasis". I can't help but to mention that I was brought into the world of statistics and population dynamics by Hans Rosling, whose research was very easy for me to understand even though I was younger. We will get back to him a little later.

So that stasis state that populations organically want to reach is based on the dynamic of survivability, which means that families learn from their families and ancestors (maybe even through genetics) to have as many children as to guarantee the continuation of their genetic lineage, among other factors.

A high quality of life index also means that women have better access to education, are more involved in the economic processes and their life goals can also come in conflict with the concept of being a mother. Employability and also the high cost of raising a child, including healthcare and education is lowering the fertility rates across the globe, in all developed countries.

Overpopulation myths?

I am always reading about overpopulation, the fact that the planet can't sustain all of us and that we will soon reach dangerous levels. As an inquisitive and an avid traveler, I have never seen that farming is taken to the edge, actually wherever I look, farming is still done at a pretty basic level. And I tend to travel in developed countries as well, there is no evidence that either the farming fields are depleting or that the farming is using the latest technologies and can't be improved upon. After researching a little I have come upon this: "agricultural land covers 38.4% of the world's land area as of 2011". After reading what agricultural land actually is regarded as, my hope returns, as the figures cover everything that is viewed as agricultural land. Perhaps in developed countries this land is properly cataloged, but in developing countries including my country, most of the fields are not worked by anybody, and if they are, they are worked in subsistence farming.

In the developing countries however, due to the lack of education, especially women education, the lack of access to contraceptives, the need to have children to help out around the house, the fertility rate is higher.

This will lead to a significant change in populations over the globe in the future. Figures in billion inhabitans.

Source via Gapminder.

According to the studies, as developing countries will improve public health sectors, their education and their overall quality of life, family sizes will reduce in the next generations, due to the fact that infant mortality and general mortality decreases and more children will survive to adulthood. But I am not a statistician, so let's see and hear it from one:

^{Creative Commons - Gapminder Foundation}

Or hear it from Bill Gates, poor Bill was taken out of context and featured on all of the conspirationist websites I have visited, even searching for the Creative Commons video first gave me the taken out of context video. Let's hear what he has to say without taking him out of context:

^{Bill Gates's foundation}

So by the end of the century Europeans and Americans will be minorities. Are we waiting until then to take measures?

We already know that minorities are not always treated right, but this is because of misconceptions and of misrepresentation of personal goals and political gain of some people in the chain of command, capitalizing on the fear that minorities are generating. We stopped living in the medieval ages so let's put our brains to work for a minute.

What options does Europe have?

I will start with the crazy ones:

• Close its borders and build robots to cover the needed jobs? This is assuming that the science is right and the population will decrease, because we assume that the quality of life will steadily increase.
• Close its borders and develop artificial womb technologies? Cloning?
• Close its borders and specialize on high ROI technology and services to leverage against Africa and Asia?
• Issue laws to transform women into unwilling wombs, like the laws in some country in the Middle East I shall not name, where women can be denied food for the lack of performing marital obligations?
• Incentivize families to have more children through tax reductions?
• Attract only the highly specialized immigrants and their families and deny access to the rest, voiding their own countries of the most intelligent people, which will cause their growth to stagnate?
• Accept immigrants without trying to integrate them?
• Accept immigrants and integrate them in the existing communities, maintaining the values that attracted the immigrants to Europe in the first place?
• Get really involved in the developing countries, educate,feed and ensure healthcare reaches everyone to ensure a speedy development of the needed areas and thus ending the dramas that are unfolding there?

It is a tricky subject and this is why everyone seems to avoid it. But waiting for someone else to solve it is not going to help the greater cause. It is highly unlikely that everyone will be on the same page, as usually it is the case with immigration, but we have to consider that science has time and time again proven that the best economic and societal progress is achieved not through wars but through collaboration. It is the basis of all the trade agreements and the reduction of tariffs.

Education as a pillar of societal change

By spreading education to all the countries that need it, we can achieve more. I am living in a country which has the highest emigration rate in Europe. I have first-hand experience of unemployment rates and vacant jobs, not because they would be paid low, but because there are not enough educated people to fill them. Foreign companies open up business here, requiring technicians and blue collar workers (manual labor), in the car industry for example and then they struggle to find workers. They actually train their own people from scratch and there are not enough workers nonetheless. On one side they can't afford the training if they are not paid, because they need to sustain their families, on the other hand they seek jobs that can bring them money without actually working. It is why most of them gamble, I am astounded to find small "casinos" opening up on every street. In Romania, I doubt that you are ever more than a few KM away from a casino, and sadly, this is even maintained in some of the rural parts.

Education plays a big role, because these people have no idea that life could be better, and they have no understanding of how Europe can help them, or how a liberalization of the job market in Europe could help them. They couldn't care less about laws and inter-human relationships are suffering because of that. They are the main consumer of negative news, which resonate with their negative financial situation and they develop in antithesis with the European values because of that.

And this is happening in a country that has already been in the EU for more than a decade.

The root of the problem

Immigration is determined by the individual pursuit of happiness, which in this case it rather is the pursuit of anything but extreme poverty. The immigrants come from places where adverse situations prevented them from developing and sometimes even dehumanized them. Their integration will be harder and this is why some countries refuse to admit their responsibility in educating them. Europe (and the other developed countries for that matter) should sustain more programs in the developing countries, as the studies show that healthcare is already improving and education level is growing fast, at least in Africa and India. There is a lot more work to be done in Asia and China in particular, but the work is good. The main question is:

How faster would the educational progress be if we would get more involved OURSELVES, and not only rely on the institutional education programs?

Steem is a good start since it brings many of the people together, and the idea of an open community that can reward dedication and improvement is clearly doing a good job of bringing new people everyday. It is one of the reasons I want to be a mentor to anyone who needs advice, scientific, life or anything in between.

Conclusions

My articles has obvious conclusions and some not so obvious. There isn't a single approach to this, but the science and previous data always point to the same general conclusion: Societal division cannot sustain global growth and it is our own responsibility and every single one of us who can contribute to the global education, healthcare and progress has the moral obligation to help improve others. In the end, as science shows us, we can't rely on borders and close us off, while ignoring the global problems.

I am open to any kind of discussion on this subject as much more is to be said that I couldn't possibly fit in a single article. I am also not the best writer there is, so any questions on the subject are welcomed. We are a think tank above all, and a very decentralized one nonetheless, a built in feature that we inherently have that can help us reach the ends of this graph that connects us all.

Further reading

https://www.gapminder.org/
Take their population misconception quiz - http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/ - the world data