It's interesing that this post has been up for 6 hours & so far no comments.

I don't know about anyone else, but this subject is really depressing for me, especially since the recent post & comments on this forum "Irish Apes: Tactics of De-Humanization" which included a number of comments about racism directed against Black people. Thinking & writing about racism can be very emotionally and mentally fatiguing for me (I'm African American. I suspect that other People of Color also experience this. I wonder if any White people also experience this).

Furthermore, while I recently wrote a post on this forum in support of the White economist Jeffrey Sachs* featured on this video with the host Dalton Conley (who also appears to be White), in light of this discussion's topic, I really wish that the guest on this segment would have been a Black African (economist or otherwise).

It's not that I can't accept what Sach is saying because of his race, but still I think it would have been good to hear from someone who is Black. I'm just so tired of White people talking down Africa and I'm really tired of people appearing to lump the vast continent of Africa in one unit, like it's just one country.

And that's all I'm gonna say on this subject.

* see the link you provided

seems like a pretty simplistic take on "how to end poverty" in Africa, a continent with a myriad of complex cultures, not to mention a history of colonialism and exploitation. kind of like Sach's "shock therapy" in Poland in 1990.... that had quite a few unintended consequences that many still-impoverished Poles continue to deal with 20 years later.

An interesting use of north-west Europe, and eventually the U.S., as a "test case". Has the same link between an increase in women's age at marriage, lower child mortality, and economic growth been demonstrated anywhere else in the world?

(For people curious what I'm talking about, Google "European marriage pattern"--it's the hypothesis that the reason England and the Low Countries suddenly shot past Italy in terms of economic development in the early modern era is because women married later => started having kids later/had fewer kids. In the 18th/19th centuries, the U.S. and Britain show similar jumps in economic development roughly correlated with women having fewer kids, so it's not just a one-time phenomenon. But I'd still like to know if it's been demonstrated outside of a Euro-American context).

Excellent point

It would also help if much of the continent were not drowning in debt from the IMF & World Bank. Industrialized countries get to bring in their businesses and take the profits back to their home countries, while the indigenous economy must (due to loan conditionalities) center around agriculture rather than industry or anything else. Then these countries can't sell to big markets like the U.S. because of our own agribusiness lobby. Sounds like that might have more to do with poverty on the continent than a simplistic "stop having babies" approach.

Wow, I really disagree with this economist. It is just so much of an oversimplification as to be useless. There are factors which affect fertility rates outside of that which is predicted by the demographic transition model. For example, the lack of social structures to support elderly people encourages people to have more children to ensure support when they are older. Also, local beliefs may have a huge effect- there are some African indigenous beliefs that access to the afterlife is through kinship relations, so the more children, the more likely a person is to gain access.

What he is basically espousing is letting the forces of the demographic transition work, but there are many other experts who believe that social change which lowers fertility rates have not been a product of unconscious social progress, but have often been driven by governmental policies such as the child labor laws in Britain.

Additionally, much of the plan does not hold up under scrutiny.
1 and 2: Hospitals and schools need to be funded, built, staffed, etc., no easy task for impoverished countries, many of whom attempted to build up infrastructure and education in order to develop under nurture capitalism systems around the 1970s. Much of the money had to be borrowed against future production, and unfortunately, the commodity crisis of the 1980s hit, leaving these countries with massive debt. The IMF put them on structural adjustment programs which included cutting as much government spending as possible- i.e. bye bye social programs.

3: Contraceptives can only decrease unwanted fertility. If people still want five or more children, they will even with contraceptives inexpensive and widely available.

Unfortunately, much of sub-Saharan Africa is in a bind. Economic growth will alleviate population pressure by the better utilization of resources and reduce fertility rates; however, it will not be able to grow economically with the burden of a rapidly expanding population as population growth easily surpasses any economic growth.

China's solution to the problem was the one-child policy, and even that is very controversial. Interestingly, the Indian Medical Association has already proposed that India adopt a similar policy. It will be even more interesting to see what happens as the Chinese government ends the one-child policy in the next ten years or so. It may have a drastic effect on how other countries approach the problem of high fertility rates.

Riiight... It's because African countries are handing out welfare checks to all the citizens of the continent that it is having such difficulties.

(Methinks that you are getting your extreme stereotype of African Americans mixed up with the real situation of Africans... Unless you know something that I don't about the availability of welfare checks, malt liquor, and porches throughout the African continent...)

I'm hoping the appropriate response is "lol." If this isn't a joke I'm very sad. (Hey, it's not always easy to tell on the internet.)

i've always seen high birth rates as the *result* of poverty, infant mortality and culture not the*cause* of poverty.
Poverty means no healthcare except by having kids to support you in old age and if you have high infant mortality you have more kids so some are certain to survive.
Thus wealthier more educated countries have lower birth rates.
I'd say education and economic support to alleviate debt were more key than birth control except for its role in prevention of disease.
To be fair i haven't yet had the chance to view sachs vid but i hope you feel my arguement is valid.

Whenever I listen to things like this I get irritated. I'm Kenyan, there are a lot of qualified African experts talking about this, but somehow they are never listened to or featured in Western Media. We are still in the era where the first qualification prerequisite seems to be white skin. In addition, people like Sachs tend to ignore history.

For example, look at the bullet points.

1. Bring down mortality with advanced medicine. Declines in childhood mortality lead families to choose to have fewer children (’cause they don’t have to).

Of course one cannot discount the facts above, the first 2 points are absolutely on point. But I get the willies every time I hear Western experts talk about reducing African population growth while at the same time failing to talk about the consumption and pollution disparity between developing and developed. The current danger to the planet is not overpopulation in the developing world, but rampant consumption/pollution in the developed world (I remember a random statistic that the Average American consumes and pollutes as much as 100-200 Bangladeshi).

But the largest factor has to be Africa's historical exploitation and ongoing exploitation. For example, Kenya's economy is 70-80% foreign owned, something directly traceable to massive and fraudulent transfers prior to Kenya gaining its independence from Britain. No money stays in the country. If Capitalism has 2 modes, farming (where you plough back money into the economy) and strip mining (where you attempt to extract maximum value and don't reinvest) the flavor of capitalism practiced in Kenya is of the strip mining variety.

Add in the ruinuous IMF and World Bank policies and you have a perfect storm. The average Kenyan has seen their situation worsen between 1970 and the present due to the IMF/World Bank policies that favor African countries as producers of raw materials (extremely low to no profits) while penalizing said countries for attempting to use tarrifs to protect local nascent production industries.

Add in the Western support of dictators as long as they are good for business, and I have no stomach for Western experts opining about how to fix Africa. That very first bullet point, the one about mortality? Mortality has gone up in African countries as the IMF and the Washington consensus has pushed countries to privatize everyting, from Health to Education. This neo-liberal thinking, forced down African countries throats with loans from the Cold War (and independence, for example, Kenya had to take a loan from Britain at independence to buy back property from white settlers, notwithstanding the fact that this was land that the British government stole at the barrel of a gun. That loan got rolled into future IMF loans).

Want to fix African poverty (and I hate the blanket term 'Africa')? Start talking honestly about all the above, rather than taking a paternalistic 'Lets show the Africans how to help themselves' attitude.

Partial mea culpa. I should save my powder for someone other than Sachs, who in other cases has addressed African history.But I still wish that African experts could actually get a voice in Western media.