overpopulation

Can t.v. solve the population problem?

   A few months ago, the world,s population topped 7 billion people. A friend of mine, Doreen, has often worried about the soaring number of people on the globe.
    "Unless you control the number of people on this planet," Doreen told me several times, "you can't solve many social problems."
      Doreen is now mostly confined to her home in Kitsilano, and is now in her 80's. During her lifetime, the world's population has more than doubled. Doreen is right, by the way.
      Every social project that takes place in the poor countries of the globe gets trashed by rising numbers of people. Land reform, medical care, stopping hunger, education for everybody, and so on, get defeated by the population bomb. More people means killing hope for people needing help.
    The population bomb is a poor people's problem. Population keeps rising in the poor places of the world, not in rich areas. In Canada, most couples I know have two children or less. Single mothers I know have one child. Across the world it's the same. In other rich countries like Great Britain, France, and Germany, young couples  are having less children.
    But in poor places like India, Africa, parts of the Middle East, and parts of Latin America, many women just churn out one child after another. A Kenyan said on CBC a few years ago, "I live in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and I have seven children." staggered. I knew nobody who had seven children.
    Recently two friends of mine, Rodger and Lilli went off to  Mexico City to get a rest from cloudy rainy Victoria. The massive number of people in Mexico City nearly overwhelmed them. When Rodger first went to Mexico City in l973, its population stood at 12 million. This is big number. Today that number has more than doubled to 26 million.
     "I would not recommend  that you visit Mexico City," Rodger told me on his return. "You would be overwhelmed by the numbers of people there." I told Rodger that I'd seen eight homeless people recently ine one day in Vancouver. By the way I visited Mexico City in 1970. Rodger told me, "I saw a million homeless in Mexico City. Eight homeless people seems like a very small number to me right now."
     So can we solve the population problem. Governments have tried to China only allows one child per couple. Other governments have tried too. They've provided free condoms, given classes on birth control and so on. Not much of this seems to work.
     But now comes the solution. It's called cable t.v.. For example, there's a billion pople living in India right now. In l948 when India won her freedom from Great Britain, there were 'only' 500 million Indians.For a long time, it had only one government-run t.v. network. But then things changed in the 21st century.
     Tens of millions of people in India are now watching private t.v. stations on cable. "The steep fall in price of equipment and distribution," write Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book 'Super Freakonomics', "means great swaths of India have been wired for cable and satellite t.v."
      Suddenly due to these new channels, millions of Indian women, who have been terribly treated by men, woke up. They keep their daughters in school which they haven't done before. They stand up to their husband's abuse. And one way or another they forced their husbands to wear condom while making love. Or they started to use the pill. Or they stopped making love on demand. Or whatever.
     "Rural Indian families who got cable t.v." say Dubner and Leavitt, "began to have lower birth rates than families without t.v." In the past I cursed Rogers and Shaw as they upped my cable fees. But who knows? Maybe the giant cable companies who squeeze money out of us every month may be great benefactors of humanity.