Marriage may not necessarily change your lifestyle and habits but having children almost certainly will. Upon becoming a parent, you may start referring to your next 18 years, like many others, as your ‘big sleep’.

Before the noughties, it was more common for men to pursue careers and develop a working life and women to stay at home as housewives. However, with women utilising equally high educations and expertise, couples can nowadays struggle to decide who should give up their career.

Whoever chooses to stay at home, living through the big sleep can be a challenge. Although there is no sick pay, no sense of holiday time and an endless amount of chores, carers often want to keep themselves occupied outside of childcare so that they are not left behind in the working world. This is often hugely important as for many, the ability to work and do so productively is an essential part of one’s identity, which may go some way to explaining why many have started up home businesses. It may also be one of the reasons behind cloud computing’s growing popularity.

Take a look at our recent articles:

• A web-based future: cloud computing and home business
• 10 Apps for your business

Garrett Hardin first described the dilemma of consumption of natural resources in 1968 with his article, ‘the Tragedy of Commons’. This details, from an ecologist’s point of view, the problem of sustainable development and expansion of the human population on this planet. If the optimal number of people that can survive on a finite amount of natural resources can be ascertained, should we as a population really allow ourselves to continue growing? This can be a difficult question to ask oneself, especially when Hardin describes a phenomena so recognisable in modern society today; that multiple people acting individually will often choose to serve their own self-interest and deplete a shared resource even when it is clear that it is not in everyone’s long term interest to do so.

In the same year, Paul R. Ehrlich published ‘the Population Bomb’ which discussed the then imminent risk of mass starvation due to over-population. One of the countries that is talked of in detail is India, a country which Ehrlich is famous to have said there was little hope to prevent famine amongst its inhabitants of half a billion. The country needed self-sufficiency in order to survive. By the mid-60s and despite the US shipping 20% of its total wheat yield to India as emergency aid, there was mass starvation across the subcontinent. At this point it would seem that Paul Ehrlich’s predictions were coming true.

Today India has a population of over one billion people. It is continuing to grow and is seen as a future leader in the world economies. Though there is still much in the way of poverty, the country is undoubtably traversing a path to stability. What changed? The story is intricate and uplifting and continues in our next installment!