Slashdot Mirror
Global Population Implosion?
J-bar writes "The Mathusian nightmare of an ever increasing planetary population has suddenly gone into reverse. UN-sponsored demographers are now predicting that the world's population will
shrink in our lifetime. But what the boffins can't explain is WHY rich countries have stopped having babies. Post your own opinion in the only netpoll that addresses this weird demographic trend." (Commentary by J : this is based on the UN's "low variant projection," which assumes everyone stops having so many babies. The UN's "most likely" projection is nine billion by 2050 and continued growth into the 22nd century.)
As a biologist and an avid believer in overpopulation issues, I totally disapprove of this outlook on our future. First of all, Yes, 1st world countries are seeing lowering population increases. Does this mean a population implosion is imminent? No, of course not. Most of the world isn't first world but third. Are third world countries moving toward first world status? No, many are not. So therefore, since the populations in third world countries are growing very fast, it is unreasonable to believe that the worlds population is going to decrease anytime soon with out major changes in world policy.
Also, we have a very real, serious population problem in many parts of the earth. To consider implicitly not addressing it because of a belief that the worlds population is going to decline, is silly.
-- Moondog
One huge and very un-publicized reason for this is the rise of government-funded retirement programs. The laws governing FICA/ERISA had a lot of thought put into them, but they goofed horribly in ignoring crucial issues such as:
- Intelligent responses to changes in life expectancy; a pay-as-you-go program can't have the same tax rate and retirement benefits for a population with a life expectancy of 85 as for a population with a life expectancy of 65. This is a no-brainer.
- Responses to changing demographics, ditto.
- Last and most important: the influence of government-guaranteed retirement on the need to have children as a guarantee of support in old age.
That last one is the killer. Thanks to the government taxing other people's kids to support a nation-wide retirement program, you don't need to have any of your own! You can enjoy the same benefits as the people who worked to raise a productive family and incur none of the costs; you even benefit, because you can work more and raise your retirement payouts with your increased lifetime average income. Couples by the millions have responded to this incentive and have foregone having children, but still expect to get that Social Security check every month. It's no mystery that the biggest drop in fertility rates has been in the European states with their rather generous social policies.The simple fact of the matter is that we've got to have more than just money to make the system work. We have to have people. And not just any people either; they have to be educated and motivated. Half-literate immigrants from small villages can pick our crops, but they won't become the medical specialists needed by an aging population. They won't be the engineers to design their products, and they won't be the teachers and professors to educate the generation to follow. And we can't continue to brain-drain the world; aside from the likely revolt of imported labor under punitive taxes to support our aging native population, we should be doing this ourselves.
There's a rather simple management principle that needs to be applied here: what gets rewarded, gets done. If we are going to stabilize our situation and actually have the workers to keep things going in 20 years, we are going to have to provide both short-term and long-term rewards to the people who make it happen. This means giving parents retirement bonuses based on the productivity of their children (and their spouses if married), and immediate benefits for raising kids who are educated instead of social problems.
If the middle-class and poor folks could shave a couple points off their tax rate because their kids were doing well in reading and math, do you think they'd have such a disinterest in the performance of their local schools? They'll hang incompetent educators from the playground swings if it means something that personal. They'll read to their kids and help with their homework. If they're the victims of bad schools, they might even start studying this material themselves so they can make sure their kids can do it (better to have an educated public and electorate late than never, eh?). Reward it, and it'll get done.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
My wife and I stopped at 2, I got "fixed".
Our #1 reason, I suppose was selfish. We wanted to be still young when our kids leave, so there's enough of life left to enjoy.
My parents, by the time the last of their kids left, are now too old and decrepit to do anything enjoyable.
#2 reason was, well, frankly, the UN spouted a lot of FUD back in the 70's and 80's about too many people, and ohmygod, we're all going to starve - or die in a nuclear war, so who wants to raise kids in a world like that?
#3 reason, I never thought I'd be able to AFFORD a third child. I wouldn't want to have to skimp on Christmas presents and whatnot for three kids, when I can adequately provide for two.
Do I regret this decision? I kind of feel guilty after getting fixed, because I know so many couples who CAN'T have kids naturally, and many of those who have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to conceive, and failing, and just giving up, when, well, our second kid was conceived with a single act, as far as we can tell. Seems like fertility was a pretty valuable gift.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Most North American sewage gets cleaned up considerably before the water gets dumped back into the rivers. The outflow from a sewage treatment plant is usually cleaner than the river or lake it is going into. And we keep our garbage in nice compact landfills where we will be able to go back and mine out all that valuable stuff we are throwing away now.
People in third world nations tend to generate more sewage per person. (even a lot of the undernourised ones) That's one of the side effects of a high fiber diet.
> Economists may be dull, but they have generally
> found out that if a country has a government
> that allows a free market in goods and people,
> the economy grows so quickly that virtually
> everyone who wants a job can have one. People
> with jobs come home too tired for procreative
> recreation, so the population busts.
The history of free-market economies has largely been one of boom and bust. State management of national economies since 1945 has tamed the economic cycle somewhat, but a simple look at Britain in the 1980s shows that moving to a more free-market economy does not necessarily reduce unemployment, and in many cases does the opposite. Under Thatcherism, unemployment shot up, and has only now, 20 years on, begun to fall back to pre-Thatcher levels.
Your free-market argument also ignores the fact that the crisis of low fertility rates is even more acute in the former Soviet Bloc than in Western Europe (the fertility rate in Italy is higher than, for example, in Slovakia). Moreover, the fertility rate in the UK is a good bit higher than in most of Continental Europe, and the fertility rate in the USA is considerably higher than either.
While this is true, if you take it literally, I don't think anyone (certainly not Simon) has ever claimed it literally.
Actually, I suspect Simon did take it literally. But that is neither here nor there. Technology can do amazing things, but it can't create resources that don't exist. Even uranium exists only in finite amounts. My point is to ask if you want to bet on discovering a new source of energy before the last one runs out? Fusion may save us all, or not. Counting on a resource that doesn't exist yet strikes me as very foolish.
Yes, population crashes have occurred, but only in severely limited areas. Easter Island is a very small place (only 45 square miles) and the inhabitants had little technology and little contact with other people. None of those conditions applies to the world at large.
Untrue. China has repeatedly suffered population crashes in its history. Scale is not the most relevant issue - the earth is much larger than Easter Island, but it also has a lot more people.
Do you have any evidence at all for this? Look at the introduction of rabbits into Australia: did they voluntarily limit their own numbers?
Wolves, whales, most primates, cats, and yes, even rabbits. Rabbits spread all over Australia because they could. If and when they reach the limits of Australia's ability to support them, they will start having smaller litters and their population will stabilise. This may happen with a large crash when resources run out, or they may begin to lower litter size as they approach the limit. It depends (in part) on whether resource scarcity becomes apparent before the resource runs out or whether it appears (to the rabbits) that there is still plenty of food right up until the limit is reached. I am not anthropomorphising rabbit behaviour. Their biology responds to their circumstances, as does ours.
And even if 9/10 of the next generation dies of starvation - so what? All the more reason to have more offspring than anyone else, so that your genes are more likely to survive.
Not true. Living on the edge of starvation means there is a higher risk that 100% of your offspring will fail to reproduce. Remember a parent animal is already a mature adult and has to feed all its offspring. Which strategy will give it the largest number of offspring: split a small amount of food among a large number of offspring, who will all be unhealthy until some starve off and will have some permanent disability because of early starvation, or to have only as many offspring as your ability to find food enables you to feed, and all (or nearly all) of your offspring will be healthy?
I'm afraid you need to have a better understanding of neodarwinism. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is a good place to start.
Frankly, your version of events sounds like a fairy tale for Greens, opposing the "natural wisdom" of the animals, wisely limiting their numbers, against the foolish "growth-at-all-costs" ideology of Man, doomed to starvation because he wouldn't listen...
Don't ascribe to me an ideology I haven't expressed. I have no such belief in any "natural wisdom." Animals do what they are programmed to do, and if they survive, it was probably the right thing. No more, no less. Most animals employ some kind of strategy to control offspring. Not all, yeast for example doesn't. Strategies vary in the natural world, but larger animals don't usually have populations that grow to starvation.
Again, with all due respect, I'd really like to know where you're getting your information from. Resources appear to be plentiful until they're gone? So people just wake up one morning to discover there's no more wood, or coal, or what-have-you? History provides no evidence for this.
On Easter Island, the amount of time it took to go from plenty of trees and fruit to very little was probably shorter than one generation. China's frequent starvation usually happened when a natural condition (like climate cycles) reduced the fertility of land that was at or near its carrying capacity. Humans, like most animals, do not inherently plan for variations in their natural situation.
As for a paper resource, I'll have to look around in my library - I'm afraid I have little in the way of bibliographic resources in my office. Recent literature on the Easter Islands should tell much of this story. As long as I can't provide a citation, I do understand your suspicion.
Historically, resources get more expensive as they become harder to find, which encourages research into alternate resources, and eventually the rising price of the original resource (and/or falling prices of new ones) make it cheaper and/or easier to switch to a new resource...without the old one ever having been entirely depleted.
Sometimes, it works that way, sometimes it doesn't. The island of Nauru was mined for phosphates until nearly all of the island was destroyed in the 1970's. People there lived the good life - their GDP per capita was comparable to that of an oil-rich middle eastern country. Then, the island was depleted. This happened pretty much all at once - full steam ahead, then nothing. On Easter Island, the same phenomena appears to have occured with regard to food resources. The decline in fertility in the middle-east and the collapse of access to wood in many parts of Europe in the late middle ages also happened all at once in many places. Historically, it has gone both ways. Replacements often were not easily available, or the replacement cost more than the original to use. In the middle east, very expensive irrigation projects raised the cost of farming, and the region has never fully recovered. In Europe, the transition to coal was terribly expensive at first, and industry suffered badly in many places until organised methods of mining and distribution were in place. The solution doesn't always come before the exhaustion of a resource, and you can't count on it working that way in the future.
I ran some numbers on this, somebody correct me if it looks wrong. 6billion people / 261914 square miles area of texas (State of Texas website) = 22908 people/sqmi 5280 ft/mile squared /22908 = 1217 sq ft per person. Which is roughly a 35 foot square for each person. I wouldn't call that comfort, but it was more than I expected.
Seems to me I read an article a few months back about how pollution is causing lower sperm counts... Pollutants in the air, pesticides and herbicides on/in veggies and fruits, hormones and antibiotics in meats...all of these are contributing to a general decline in sperm counts in American and European men. (At least, according to this article I read - the study compared average sperm counts from 30 or 40 years ago with much more recent ones.) With all the poisons we dump into our bodies, is this any surprise?
I can't imagine a religion embracing people having less children. That religion sure wouldn't last long, would it? I suppose you could argue that my religion, Unitarian Universalism, embraces this in a sense.
The supply of this is close enough to infinite for an economist.
This sentence disturbs me. An economist during the Irish potatoe famine once lamented that he was afraid the famine wouldn't kill enough Irishmen to do any good.
The amount of petroleum in the world is not something economists are qualified to predict - that is the domain of geology. Good enough for an economist counts for nothing. Hubbert, who was a geologist suggested that sometime around 2005 oil supplies would peak, and then fall from there. His reasoning strikes me as sound, although I will admit not to being a geologist. He does have one advantage over nay economist: he accurately predicted when oil wells in the USA would start coming up dry. I don't know how much oil there is in the world, but I do not that it is not infinite in any sense of the word.
Over the course of recorded human history? I would argue they have been true as well. The development of substitutes and innovations like scientific farming requires PEOPLE. Over most of human history, there have only been a few million people, so of course the rate of innovation has been much slower.
No, scientific farming requires scientific knowledge. Larger populations may improve the ability to do science, it is hard to say. However, innovation doesn't always save the day. The dust bowl in the 1930's was caused in large part by a transition from cattle grazing to sheep herding in the plains in the US. Sheep graze differently from cattle, and tend to destroy grass in arid areas. The result was a loss of grass cover and the collapse of farming across a large swath of the United States. No one found a solution to this problem, American agriculture simply had to take a step backwards.
Although the development of coal mining and rail transportation saved Europe after it started running out of wood, that solution didn't come for centuries after the problem started. In the mean time, large populations suffered. Irrigation didn't save the middle east from soil depletion in the middle ages - whole populations were displaced and wealth simply disappeared, even though those middle eastern societies were, at the time, the most technologically advanced on the planet.
Maybe technology will save us, but counting on it seems pretty dumb.
As for the Ehrlich-Simon bet, Ehrlich fell to the same mistake Simon did, thinking that a trend was the same thing as a prediction. Why did Simon win? Let's take a look at the circumstances:
The bet was made during the Vietnam War. At the time prices for many commodities were artificially high, due to the US military purchasing very large quantities. (There was a brief period when a penny was worth more than $0.01 for the copper in it.) What happened afterwards? A lot of commoditiies come from underdeveloped countries, many of whom went deep into debt during the 1970's and 80's. Today, many of them export commodities at below cost in order to gain the foreign exchange necessary to make payments on those debts.
Also, a number of countries started to have military dictatorships during that period, like the world's number one copper producer, Chile. After Pinochet took over the government, he brutally suppressed the unions, then lower wages in the mines. The same thing happened in many other countries. The result: lower commodity prices.
The future is inherently unpredictable and only fools and economists try it. I don't know if or when shortages in any commodity will appear, but I do know that there is cause for concern, and Julian Simon's preference for burying his head in strawmen and bad math won't make anything better.
I swear the upper limit of the birth years of so-called baby boomers keeps going up and up. No one wants to be in that "Generation X" category. I thought baby boomers were people born in the immediate post-WWII era (1945-50), later to 1955, then to 1960, and now includes the 1960s as well. Is someone born in 1969 (now age 30) a "baby boomer"? Or has baby boomer simply come to be a label for whatever current generation of people is age 30 or over? I expect to see people born in the 70s next to be defined to be part of the all-encompassing "baby boomer" generation.
>>The second suggestion is more intruging. It seems to suggest that there is a causal link between level of education and birth rate. Indeed higher education levels have all sorts of good effects like spurring the economy and generally improves the standard of living.
Oh, give us a friggin' break. And the timing of the rooster crow seems to suggest that there is a causal link between its crow and the sun rising. Now does the rooster make the sun rise, or does the sun rising make the rooster crow? Isn't it much more likely that greater affluence allows for increased education?
If a couple has to scrape dirt with blunt sticks in order to grow enough food to survive, how are they going to afford an education? And what the hell would they do with it after they have it? (Son, I know you're hungry, but look that this cool website I've designed. Ain't Perl great.)
One poster claims that Linux and the Internet will raise the world out of poverty. WHAT? If we could just get this fertilizer to the poor farmers... People who live by subsistence farming are a long way from needing ANYTHING the internet provides.
I know some people will find this statement blasphemous, but COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET DID NOT MAKE THE US A WORLD POWER. If any one thing could take credit, it would be the internal combustion engine. Give the 3rd world decent tractors so that they can farm more than an acre per man. This removes the need to have six kids as a retirement plan, and frees up people to move into other specializations. Very soon, the society moves to a state where education becomes useful, SELF actualization becomes important, children become more of a burden, and THEN population will decrease.
So the UN goes to the 3rd world, passes out condoms, and tells everyone the world is going to blow up if they keep having babies. The people still need that retirement plan. Why don't they pass out a few cheap deisel powered tractors, and see what happens. One man can do the work of 100s, people move off the farms into the cities, and population drops.
After that, maybe the Internet will become useful.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
don't forget the caspian oil... now if only the political situation was stable there we would have plenty of oil for some time
I've heard this kind of reasoning about oil reserves as well, used by Randites and other lunatics to prove that there's no sense in conserving resources; it goes like this:
Known oil reserves (R) double every n years, while consumption doubles every n - x years (I don't know the correct values for R, n, and x but you get the idea). This has been continuing since 19??!
Okay, so far so good. But here's where we get into trouble . . .
Therefore this progression will continue forever, and we'll always have enough oil.
Hello?! No, we won't. If you keep doubling R every n years, you end up with a mass larger than that of the Earth. I'm sorry, but it's not very damn likely that the Earth contains a mass of oil greater than the total mass of the Earth. You can postulate interstellar space travel if you like, but there's no way you can assume that n and x will retain the same values in that situation. Furthermore, the people on those far planets will start reproducing too, and they'll sooner or later need their resources for their own population. At that point, they'll be glomming resources from colonies of their own. We'll be competing with them for colonies, but they'll be a lot closer to the new colonies and culturally they'll be a lot closer to their violent pioneer-society roots. We'll lose. You can postulate industrially feasible generation of electricity by fusion, but that's likely to pose exactly the same problems, but with a much smaller tonnage value for R. Plus you'll have wastes to dispose of. Roughly the same logic applies to farmland/livestock as well (but without the radioactive wastes). Solar panels in orbit? Hmmm, that sounds good. No moving parts, nothing consumed. They'd eventually degrade from collisions with tiny space-crap and need to be replaced, but the rate of degradation might be slow enough to stretch the replacement cycle out to the point where it's ridiculous to worry about it. Of course, with your population doubling every 20 years, you'll have to double the number solar panels every 20 years. Damn, we're right back where we started. Industrial-scale transmutation of elements? Good luck.
Or, at least he grossly miscalculated the maximum possible world population.
Good call. I agree with you about that, but if I understand your main point correctly, it's a total capitulation. If there's a maximum, there's a maximum. The only way to find that maximum is to get there and start feeling a bit hungry. When that happens, people will shoot the entrepreneurs and take their food. Will those people be shortsighted? Maybe so, but that will be cold comfort indeed for the people they shoot.
However, Malthus was indeed wrong about something important, and it's right on-topic too: He thought that human populations expand by just the same rules as yeast, with a direct and immutable correlation between "standard of living" (which just means food supply and oxygen if you're a yeast) and rate of reproduction. He was dead wrong. For a hell of a lot of reasons, most of which probably aren't fully understood, human birthrates turn around and decline when we exceed a certain level of material abundance. Moving in the other direction, the birthrate increases in inverse ration to a declining standard of living, until you hit a point where you've got a really serious famine. Even then, look at the Sudan. Are they running out of people yet? Beats me, actually [1].
This is important. Malthus' conclusion (which led to economics being called "the Dismal Science", though it is neither
---------------------------------------------
[1] I don't have any before'n'after-famine population figures. It seems safe to assume that a severe famine will reduce the overall rate of population growth in the afflicted area. It certainly happens with animals: If they lose their predators, they overbreed, overgraze, and die off. Once their population has been massively reduced, their food sources get a chance to recover and the whole cycle can start all over again. When people are reduced to a certain level of poverty and hunger, they're still able to manipulate their environment better than animals can, but not necessarily enough better.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Ingenuity is fine, but all it can do is make us more efficient. It can't create resources that aren't there. Geometric population growth and finite resources will always be headed for a collision; all that our inventions and technology can do is slow down the inevitable. The problem of population must be solved in social terms.
Even if you imagine that our inventiveness will take us all the way to the earth's carrying capacity for human life, what happens then? Do we just magically stop breeding? Or do we experience a Malthusian crash?
Let's imagine that 100% efficient human society for a moment. Our resources: the sun's light, the earth's matter, our brains. We perform our own photosynthesis, recycle our own water. Nothing on earth but humans, rock, and an ocean. I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like much fun to me.
The question to ask is not how many people can the earth hold; it's how many people can we really stand to live with.
Six billion, and feeling pretty damn crowded.
-Mars
I obviously wasn't suggesting that we move everyone to Texas. I used this merely to illustrate how far away from any real overcrowding we are. Would they be able to grow their food? No, I wasn't suggesting that.
Well, okay, but then what was your point? The amount of land required to provide us all with 1/32 acre is irrelevant, because we need a lot more than that to live. The example illustrates nothing that has any bearing on reality.
Furthermore, does this 1/32 acre provide for anything other than houses and yards? What about roads? What about rivers and lakes -- I assume those are subtracted from the total land mass before the 1/32 acre figure is reached? What about food storage and distribution, schools, etc?
Hell, you could cut that down to 1/16 acre for each family of four, and declare that the entire population of the world could fit in half of Texas! And you still wouldn't be saying anything at all except that there are roughly 187,500,000 acres of land in Texas (assuming 1/32 acre for each of 6x10^9 people).
India's problems stem more from bad policy choices and a repressive government than anything else.
If you first assume that India is the US, then you've certainly made a meaningful statement. Since India is another country entirely, where conditions are and always have been radically different, could you back that up somehow?
How exactly is this repressive Indian government preventing people from farming land that isn't there, or forcing them to have kids that they want anyway?
It takes a bit of luck in addition to that education and commitment. And it's not an option for everyone; some women's cycles just aren't that predictable.
C ONTRACHOICES.HTM#FAMs
Check this out for a more fair analysis than I could give:
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTH-CONTROL/
I'm sure the rhythm method is better than nothing, but there's no way you could get me to rely on it. I'll take latex and hormones over thermometers and guesswork any day.
-Mars
The way we live - or more appropriately, the design and layout of the structures we live in, the devices we call "homes".
You see, for the most part people in general tend to only think in the realm of two dimensions when it comes to living space. We build cities, and continue to build outward in a "ring-like" configuration, devouring more area for a larger population - area that could be better used to feed the larger population. Consider this:
Let us take a plot of land of dimensions of 1000 meters by 1000 meters (a square kilometer). We now give each family (of two adults and two children) a bit of the land - an area of 25 meters by 25 meters (for sake of simplicity, we will assume no roads, bear with me) for enclosed living area. If we made this entire complex enclosed (think of it as a large warehouse, subdivided into cubicle-like living spaces), we could house 1600 families, of four people each, in relatively spacious living quarters. This amounts to 6400 people living in a square kilometer.
Now, what happens if we want to add another 6400 people to the population? That's correct, the population must take over another square kilometer of space. But what happens if we do the simple thing - put them on top of the first 6400 individuals in our complex? Correct, again - we double our population in the same amount of area.
Ok, now - let's say with current technology we can build this system to a height of 1000 meters, and we gave each "level" 10 meters to play with (which would allow for structural and evironmental support). We would end up with a 100 level community - each level holding 6400 people. In the end - the "Cube" would hold 640,000 people, all in the area of a square kilometer!
How many square kilometers would it take to hold that many people in our current society (assuming a single level structure)? Unstack the cube - 100 square kilometers! An area larger than most cities! In our original single level (and Cube), we didn't make allowances for roads, etc - so the area would have to be even larger!
So how is it we get this number of people in (sometimes) smaller areas? Well, number one - not every family has an allowance of a 25 by 25 by 10 meter living space - most don't even have half that. That is quite a large house, by anyone's standards. Cost for a house that size is the major concern.
In reality, we couldn't create a Cube - nor would we want to (most "houses" would have no windows, there are other psychological reasons as well - plus, there may be a few technical reasons for a structure that size, like fire escape). Even so, there still should be no reason why we shouldn't be thinking up/down instead of out...
I invite more discussion on this...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Seriously - if you're not shooting blanks, and you sleep with a woman, you're taking the full financial risk of any progeny that may be developed. Them's the legal breaks. The alternative - that the law permit a male be able to force a female to have an abortion against her will, Just Doesn't Work in any ethical scheme, no matter how twisted, I can dream up.
If you don't want kids, and you posess a Y chromosome, get thyself snipped. It's the best birthday present you'll ever give yourself. And if your partner doesn't want kids either, it's the best present you can give her too. For less than $500, it's a hell of a lot cheaper and safer than asking your partner to have a tubal ligation.
Here's some recommended reading for both for those who don't want kids, and for those who do, but can't understand why we don't. (I particularly liked Why books are better than babies.
Another website for your perusal: alt.support.childfree.moderated archive.
Finally, to the Epopt, who said that folks who described having children as "pointless" as "obsessively self-centered": a reminder that obsessive self-centeredness can be as much a trait of breeders as it is of the childfree. (Woo-hoo, I get to re-use a link from yesterday's post!)
(But - in the Epopt's defence - while I resent his implied characterization of the childfree as selfish, he's quite right in one thing: if you have to ask, you'll never understand. That goes for both sides of the "to sprog or not to sprog" debate. While I understand the reasons for spawning on the surface, I'll never grok in fullness the desire to sprog. A few years ago, I broke off a 5-year relationship because we were each dumb enough to get into it before realizing that we just couldn't agree on this subject. We've remained friends - she's got 2 kids now and is ecstatic about it, and I've got none and am equally ecstatic. Had we continued our relationship, it would have been hell. She'd curse me for the child I'd never give her, or I'd curse her for the one she saddled me with. Eech.
As one who probably would be tempted to "throw 'em away" if I ever ended up with one, I took the responsibility for making damn sure I'd never end up with one in the first place. Better for me, better for my companion, and better for a putative kid not to exist at all than to have me as a Dad!
I'm a firm believer in the "if you don't like 'em, don't have 'em" school. Naturally, if you do like kids, go nuts. After all, someone's gotta breed more geeks to make up for those of us who prefer DOOM's "Knee-deep in Dead" to the Mommy Track's "Elbow-deep in baby shit!" :-)
>and this is the same thing.
As any person who understands the present issues with space travel, any long-term exposure to the conditions of space, causes you to loose bone mass and causes heart problems, among other things.
Not to mention the large expenditure of resources just so ONE MAN can be 'feeling fine'
So, using 'Zero G and feeling fine' is VERY appropriate.
For the 'feeling fine' is at a cost. The cost of health. The cost of resources. The cost of environmental contamination.
And, is the way Americans live a long-term healthy choice...either for the people or the planet?
I look forward to your reply KingJawa.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
for some reason, I'm having trouble finding a woman who likes my glasses, monitor tan, solar allergies and umbelical keyboard. ^^ OK. No, seriously, it's just too expensive. 40 years ago, people could live well off one man's income and have 4 kids. Now we need 2 incomes just to live decently...
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
and abortions are available then you do not have give birth to unwanted babies.
Plus, people in rich countries do not need to have more babies to increase the chance that at least one or two survives and can help run the farm.
Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in.
The point of having children is children. I boggle at having to explain this; I'll swipe Louis Armstrong's answer: "If you have to ask, man, you'll never know."
/. or alt.support.childfree to see examples of "survival of the fittest." They're easy to see - do a ctrl-f on "breeder".
Indeed. And to think they're not teaching evolution in Kansas. All those school board flunkies have to do is log on to
Let's imagine that 100% efficient human society for a moment. Our resources: the sun's light, the earth's matter, our brains. We perform our own photosynthesis, recycle our own water. Nothing on earth but humans, rock, and an ocean. I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like much fun to me.
This is PRECISELY the kind of radical-socialist dystopian HELL ON EARTH that you are working for by promoting the radical-socialist anti-life UN birth control agenda. You and Al Gore: Brother and sister to Adolf Hitler! (Hey, that rhymes. I like it.) You worship the life of trees and see human life as of no consequence. You are radically anti-human and anti-life. You worship death. You are genocidal war-criminals of the first water.
Here's my theory of why we're seeing a world-wide population decline. I support my confreres and my consoeurs in saying because people, even in developing countries, as they become more and more educated on all sort of things, including birth control, have less interest and less need for reproduction. But, hey, let's give credit where credit belongs. With the internet our world is becoming smaller, hence the population declines. I even predict that the number of new businesses with decline, too.
Yours,
Noble Coward
I've heard this before, and I still don't believe it to be true.
People use LOTS of resources. People need to have things like garbage and waste removed. Can you design an efficient machine (a city is a machine of sorts) which can distribute resources (food, water, clothing, fuel) to 6 billion people in Texas and remove the trash (and sewage)? NYC, which is a decently spread-out city (across 3 islands and the mainland of NY) can't find room for its garbage. It has to remove 20,000 TONS each DAY. How could your Texas-sized city remove that garbage on-time to prevent a serious health hazzard?
Would you care to police this mess? Crowding makes people do crazy things. People need space.
The doomsayers might be wrong, but the reason why the doomsayers are wrong is that they scared people into doing something. We worry that oil is running out, so we develop better techniques to find and extract oil. We worry that food is running out, so money is poured into genetically engineered foods. The reason why Y2K won't be a big deal is that people got worried and tested and/or fixed all of the important systems.
If you want to see a society which had no doomsayers, take a look at Russia. No one was allowed to question the asinine decisions made by the leadership, no one ever explored any "What ifs" and you get the mess you see now. God bless the nuts who make us worry.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The UN's high figures for population growth show the population stabilizing towards the end of the next century at somewhere around 10-12 billion (I don't recall the exact figure). So no, you don't get exponential growth unless you have constant birth and death rates, (with birth rates exceeding that necessary for replacement), whereas the world is experiencing declining birth rates.
Luckily, I just happen to be in geography 101 this semester (loads easier than my engineering courses). Anyways, I think the birth rate slowed down a while back when we heard the world was going to become overpopulated. However, population growth has a kind of momentum and it's taken this long for the lower birth rates to actually slow down the population growth.
At least I think that's what I was supposed to learn. I haven't gotten my exam back yet, so I could be totally wrong.
Considering how little seriousness the public gives the population problem, I think it's really not very responsible for the UN to go saying that. Joe Sixpack will here that and go "Oh, ya mean I should have kids?" (insert goofy look here).
6 billion people is a lot of people. I can't even imagine what 9 billion will be like.
Grr...
If you want ZPG, feel free to not reproduce. While you're busily engaging in an empty life that, however fulfilling, will mean nothing the day after you die, others will be propagating themselves. Their memory and their genes will be preserved after their deaths.
I know of nothing sadder than only children who die childless. That entire line is dead once and forevermore, as if it had never existed. What's the point of that? You're born, you live and you die. Even an atheist (wh. I'm not) can live on through his progeny and theirs.
I plan on having as many children as my wife and my wallet allow me. I love my family; why would I let it die? I know a family of four boys, each with several children. It is truly a model for how a family should be. They all pool their money, so the lawyer and businessman supported the other two throughout the hard times. They have a kind of success and bond which few families in this day and age can dream of having.
But if you have no family, you have not even the chance. What a depressing thought.
Maybe its just that the people that caused the baby boom are becoming infertile! Then again with everyone on a mellinium baby sex binge, who knows?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Falling fertility in Western countries (15% drop in sperm count over last 10 years, IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong...)
This is the first thing that came to my mind. Currently in the US, 1 of every 6 couples who would like to have children cannot without assistance of some sort (IVF, ICSI, IUI, GIFT, ZIFT, etc). This percentage is rising.
See Resolve's web site for more information.
The population explosion in the Third World hasn't happened because of higher fertility rates, it's happened because of lower mortality rates. The issue isn't lifespan per se, it's the percentage of people born who reach adulthood. Disease used to see to it that most of them never did. With the introduction of modern medicine, this has ceased to be the case. A fertility rate which once kept the population level will now produce a population explosion.
For a specific refutation of your argument, consider China, which is not by any means under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, yet is the most populous nation on earth. India, the second-most-populous nation, is relatively independent of Roman-Catholic influence as well (as compared to, say, South America, where fertility rates tend to be lower).
At last check, wealthy contries are wealthy because both the men and the women work outside the home which necessitates the use of birth control. Additionaly, bringing up a child in a wealthy country is prohibitivly expensive (college, video games, christmas, health care, crack, etc.) which makes is so that if parents want to raise their children to have a better life then they had (isn't that the point?) then having many children negates the possibility of the aformentioned.
BTW, did you know that the entire population of the world could fit comfortably into an area the size of Texas with room to spare?
What do you mean by "fit comfortably"? How many square feet each? Would they have enough room to grow the food they need? I doubt it very much. Talk to somebody who's been to India: India is overpopulated to the point of discomfort already, and IIRC they're less than 1/4 or 1/5 of the total world population. India is larger than Texas. Get a grip. Just because people repeat this gibberish doesn't make it true. All it means is that some people are desperate to believe gibberish.
When I was in HS bio, we did this simple experiment with Yeast in a sealed test-tube. We plotted the population rise of the yeast, then levelling off, then falling.
The Yeast, of course, stopped reproducing as it choked in it's own waste.
I think something similar is happening in industrialized nations. It may be as complex as the social or economic issues others have cited, but there might also be something to the declining sperm-production rates among males, and enviornmental effects of toxic chemicals, atom bomb testing, television, cell phones, flouride in the water, reduced biodiversity, global warming, etc. etc. etc.
This is my thesis. Someone else can fund and execute the testing.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"How will Americans feel when most of the young come from another culture?"
I think our conventional approach is to put them in pots and melt them...or so I've heard...
But on a serious note...I a tiny part of the reason poor, or underdeveloped countries have more children per family, is that as you reach the asymptote of scarcity of resources, conditions become different. Now death is a lot more random. Your chances of survival, even if you are the best equipped given the circumstances, may still not be enough. For instance, disease kills almost indiscriminately. The logicaly choice then would be, against conventional thinking of maximising the resources per child, to have somewhat more children in hopes that random events don't kill your only as-well-as-can-be-expected cared-for child.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What happens when the southern nations catch up to us in energy & material consumption?
The world will finally be a wonderful place!
This would seem to be good news. For most of history, the human population has been below one billion. Even if populations were to drop drastically (provided they drop through decreased birth rates, not increased death rates), I see little to worry about. Yes, the average (not to mention the median) age would get older, but with less resources used to feed, shelter, clothe, house and educate the young ('cause there will be less of them) it should be quite easy to care of the old. And the young that are born into this less-crowded world will have more adults to care for them, and less other children competing for resources.
This doesn't mean the end of the human race - just the end of humans running roughshod over each other and everything else on the planet in their blind race to procreate.
Creativity, not procreativity!
This is a bad thing, IMO. And it's why youth voilence is increasing. Children are growing up in isolation or in uncaring day-care centers instead of in a home with a loving parent. When you have a child, one parent needs to make the committment to stay at home with that child at least until it reaches its late teen years. Which parent? The one who makes less money. Or maybe parents could stagger work hours, one day-shift, one night-shift so 1 parent is always at home. Parents who can't make this kind of committment to their kids shouldn't be having kids. And women who brag about being "empowered" while sloughing off their kids to day-care ought to be shot. They're "empowering themselves" at the expense of their children's well-being. And that's sick.
I think one of the most interesting effects of an aging population may be inflation.
<ramble>
Social Security in the US works on the premise that those currently working pay for those who are retired. Many people bemoan this since it can't survive the future trends - that older populations will come to outnumber the younger populations.
So, eventually, it seems Social Security must die, if these trends continue. But, older people will still want to retire. There'll be two possibilities - earn and save and grow your money with interest until it is enough to support your retirement, or work forever.
With current inflation rates and economic growth (in the markets), it is not difficult to amass enough money in 30-40 years to support indefinite retirement. Consider what happens as more and more people do this, and the younger, working generations dwindle in number. You end up that the younger workers are still paying for all those retirees - just the mechanics are different. The workers create wealth, the wealth is reflected in the market, thus feeding the elderly. Except, it's not forced. The numbers will eventually add up, and inflation will result. Fewer workers - huge demand - higher wages, bingo - inflation. Wages will absolutely have to go up to high enough levels that retirees are enticed to go back to work. Inflation will go up and force some retirees to go back to work.
I just find it interesting, since many point out the difference in the value of children between agrarian societies and industrial. In the end, we all live off the backs of the young in our old age, unless you keep working. If the population size of the young decreases dramatically, there must follow inflation since demand will stay roughly the same, and supply will dwindle.
UNLESS, as the truly conservative economists like to argue, productivity rises to the challenge and keeps supply high even as the number of workers goes way down. That would mean large-scale automation of tasks, far beyond what we see currently. Follow this trend and we end up with a sci-fi like future of total leisure as the robots do all the work and a whopping 5% of the population is under the age of 50......
</ramble>
Extrapolation is sooooo much fun.....
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
> People aren't going to stop breeding. People *are* stopping breeding. Fertility rates are decreasing all over the world, and are below replacement levels in many industrialized nations. > Countries aren't going to do anything as > troublesome as helping to do some population > control. This is demonstrably false -- or haven't you heard of China's one child policy? Furthermore, it appears that governments don't *need* to do anything about it. The reading I've done on the subject indicates that as soon as people become aware of and can afford contraceptive measures, fertility rates start dropping. > People aren't going to give their money away. > People aren't going to start being nice to > each other What do these have to do with population growth? (And I have to say that my experience contradicts both of these claims.)
Large families are a neccessity in rural/tribal agrarian societies where there is a lot of physical labor to be done and a high rate of mortality.
Technological cultures tend to be a lot more Individualistic, giving more power and possibilities to a single person. In such cases, large families are (often seen as) a luxury and/or a hindrance to success.
**>>BELCH
Okay, during their evolution, lets look at how the Blork species evolved. During their evolution, lots of things were very natural to them, as they were, of course, little better than animals. Hence, sex was commonplace and often forceful, the strong dominated the weak, and the weak were left to die.
Now, as the Blorks evolved, they became more intelligent. Now, most reproduction was still done by the thugs who used force to get what they wanted. Since nobody "knew any better", it was just accepted.
The point being, intelligence still kept creeping in from the sides, even though it was not always a reproductive trait. (However, the reverse is true, stupidity IS an anti-reproductive trait!).
So now the Blorks develop a crazy religion which says that sex is bad, and then give all genders equality. Now the whole matter of "forcing the issue" becomes criminal instead of natural, so, of course, it becomes a MUCH less important factor in gene selection. But on TOP of that, their culture had, for the longest time, been male-instigated in reproduction, but they lost their grasp...
Now, try to draw some of the same parallels. I agree, it's not a pretty thought at all. But it appears that three things we all seem to love so very much contributed greatly to it: The high status of women, contraception, and Christianity (or similarly anti-sex flavored religions.)
Obviously the solution is NOT to lower the status of women. That is just WRONG. Eliminating contraception could only make matters worse. It seems that, in the end, our very beliefs will have to change.
Otherwise, the human race has peaked. And that could be VERY _BAD_.
Not surprising, really. Why would anyone run a poll this way? When you poll people, you ask them about themselves- what they do or feel or think. This is especially true on the internet, where a poll can hope to reach truly large numbers of people.
pop.org seems to be polling people about everyone else. If you want to know more about population growth, you collect information- you ask people, "Why are you having this number of children?" Asking "Why do you think someone else is having this number of children?" is a way of collecting disinformation. It doesn't yield facts, only opinions, which can then be construed to mean almost anything the poller wants- particularly when, as in this case, the real conclusion (that westernized societies will inevitably have fewer children) has already been assumed.
dont ask me questions then answer them for me, I do not know the information because i saw it on a tape and some books a couple years ago, go out and look for videos/books from militias, they will tell you where they get your info, if they dont then laugh at them they must be wrong, but if you want more info get it yourself dont say Im making it up though
People need to read Uncle Robin's ace hacker pimp tips on Slashdot (check it out - there are some great replies to this somewhat misguided post) before they can git down and git giggy!
Seriously I think it comes down to changes in society, the availability of birth control and China's 1 child per couple law probably has had a significant impact too.
Bringing up kids is hard work. It takes a lot of effort and resources. People in Western countries realise this and are waiting to have children later in life and are having fewer children.
I think this is a good thing. In the past people were having children when they weren't ready. Today people try to be prepated.
The projection in question was the "low variant", which is to say the "fantasy variant". There is a heavy element of fantasy in almost all population growth discussions.
If a population consists of three subgroups with growth rates of -10, 0, and 10 percent per generation, what is the overall long term growth rate? 10 percent, right. Every population growth extrapolation I've seen to date ignores this, which makes the results largely fantasy.
Asimov pointed out decades ago that the lamebrains who think technology can somehow enable indefinite geometric population growth Just Don't Get It: At current growth rates, in not very many centuries the human population will be a solid sphere of protoplasm expanding outward at lightspeed. If the lightspeed limit is licked, in a few millenia the human population will weigh more than the observable universe. This will not happen. :) As Malthus correctly noted, exponential growth must always be a short-lived transitional phase in a finite universe. Less than half of all humans are dead: This has never been true in previous millenia and will never be true again in future millenia: It is a unique signature of the millenium centered on today.
"well you'll work harder with a gun at your back,
for a bowl of rice a day,
slave for soldiers till you starve, and your head is skewered on a steak,
so now you can go where the people are one,
now you can go where they get things done,
what you need my son,
what you need my son,
is a holiday in Cambodia. . . "
- Dead Kennedys
I think that there are plenty of population-reducing forces at work, especially in the third-world. Life sucks for them. Six billion and feeling fine my ass.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
AND as if this weren't enough... stress, damage from vaccinations (e.g. the consequent 15-20% marginal encephalitis rate per capita) and a few less significant factors like the UN pacifying people to death and religious zealots (this includes atheists - consider the USSR for example) killing people who disagree with them are all doing their bit. Wait till AIDS and BSE/CJD really hit, then you'll see some population decline.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It started in England. Liberal Democratic capitalism: government strong enough to ensure the smooth operation of the market, but not so strong as to dominate the people and lead to tyranny and thence the destruction of the market and capitalism. This system is phenomenally productive.
However, there is a catch: nearby agrarian societies get the products of capitalism, including those which alter the demographics of the society: medicine. Their death rate plunges. Suddenly, all the children they were having just to ensure two or three live to adulthood survive. Suddenly the adults are not dying from tooth infections. The agrarian society swells drastically beyond its carrying capacity.
All these "extra" people must do something. Some of them emigrate, either to unfilled land (i.e. America circa 1800), or into the liberal capitalist society, where labor is highly rewarded due to all the capital accumulating there. However, many more stay, leading to overpopulation: the incredible misery as labor prices drop below sustenance. Liberal memes from the capitalist society infiltrate the population. The combination is volatile. Revolution happens, replacing the old order with liberal democracy.
Thus, the process of modernization spreads along the trade routes, sweeping from society to society as they each modernize in turn. First England, then the UK, then the continental powers... each time causing mass displacement, war, struggle, and masses of people yearning to be free coming to America. (English, Scots, Welshmen, then Germans, Dutch, and Frenchmen.) Then the same thing here, in the eastern cities, leading to further masses of population pushing west. And the flame burning into the middle of Europe as the 19th century wore on. Russia, Italy, Hungary, poland, etc. -- and those are the immigrants to America at the start of this century.
Then a big pause, as the world experimented with new types of government made possibly by the bounty of capitalism: communism and fascism. Wars results, but the productivity of the liberal democracies prevail. And even then, societies at the edge of the conflict ignite: the Asian tigers.
1999: transportation and communication have improved so much that the entire world is touching the flame. And they are changing, being changed. Again, the modern immigrants to America fit the pattern: Hispanics and Asians. Soon, these places too will join the "west".
Finally, in the next 50 years or so, the last places will burn: Africa mainly. And we will see massive African immigration then.
Now what is the consequence of this dynamic? One is a continual entry of unskilled labor into the global labor pool. As capitalism takes over societies, they start at the bottom. But prices also equalize, as emigrants move to the places with higher labor prices. Thus, the price of unskilled labor will remain low until the last traditional society is destroyed and absorbed.
What is the correlary of that? If you want your children to enjoy the same standard of living as you have, they have to achieve very significant education. Skilled western workers are capital intensive. That is why we have so few: they are expensive. All societies have socialized part of the cost of raising children, but not a significantly large portion so that people are having children as freely as they might like.
Note, though, that as the final traditional societies get snuffed in the next 50 years, an interesting thing will happen: labor prices will rise across the board, skilled and unskilled. When that happens, societies which encourage women to produce children will gradually outcompete those that do not. And that will mean that in the long run, the human race will keep growing. Of course, there may well be an adjustment for back to a billion or two pop before the equilibrium is reached.
Any projection based on trend lines like those in this article fail to take into account that people are intelligent and respond to changes in their circumstances with changes in their memes, at the level of individuals, groups, and even whole societies.
-Leonard
Jesus said, "I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I'm guarding it until it blazes."
Of the stars and stripes of corruption
Makes me feel so ashamed
To be an American
When we're too stuck up to learn from our mistakes
Trying to start another Viet Nam
Like fiddling while Rome burns at home
The Boss says, "You're laid off. Blame the Japanese"
"America's back," alright
At the game it plays the worst
Strip mining the world like a slave plantation
No wonder others hate us
And the Hitlers we handpick
To bleed their people dry
For our evil empire
The drug we're fed
To make us like it
Is God and country with a band
People we know who should know better
Howl, "America riles. Let's go to war!"
Business scams are what's worth dying for
Are the Soviets our worst enemy?
We're destroying ourselves instead
Who cares about our civil rights
As long as I get paid?
The blind Me-Generation
Doesn't care if life's a lie
so easily used, so proud to enforce
The stars and stripes of corruption
-- THE DEAD KENNEDYS
Life sucks for you too, american boy!
But you just don't know, blind-me generation!
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
On the other hand, the cost of going to work is giving up the family, which clearly is of little benefit.
With that in mind, the choice is obvious. Make the choice with the least cost.
I couldn't agree with you more. I think men and women are both turning away from families especially early in life. They often want to get their career going before thinking about "settling down." Not to mention the fact that less than 50% of marriages last - and kids from broken homes often grow up and create broken homes themselves.
Whatever happened to "until death do us part" ?
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
Trouble is, that's an "ignorant savage" theory that doesn't hold water. Humans all over have long known what causes babies. They even knew ways to play without pay, until a couple centuries ago. We used to know the plants in our backyards well enough to use them to regulate the population. But once men took over medicine, and the midwife's skills with these herbs were relabeled as witchcraft by the RC Church, this knowledge began to disappear. And just about the same time, the world's population starts its apparently hyperexponential growth.
(I'm not convinced longer lifespans have much to do with it, because I'm not convinced they've gottn much longer. Psalm 90 speaks of a 70-80 year span (although the same people apparently believed in multicentury lives). I think the true globalisation of the RC Church and its infamously deus providebit attitude is more significant.)
So, IMO, what the world needs, in general, is education... but not about those expensive pills and rubbers that'll disappear when the industrialised countries collapse, but about the sustainable cultivation and processing of contraceptive and abortificant herbs.
[ref: Eve's Herbs]
Indeed, and the number will only grow when the government (clinton) supports it.
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
Please explain the fallacy in this argument.
In practical terms the energy supply is non-finite. We have enough coal, oil and natural gas to last quite a long time and it is quite probable that cheaper, more efficient alternatives will be developed before these are exhausted.
This is true of most natural resources.
Simon's argument is not that any past trend will continue indefinitely. His argument is that the
quality of life or standard of living of the human race is better now than it ever has been and that all available evidence shows that the standard of living of the human race will continue to rise.
Do you dispute this ?
A similar situation occurs in the Navy. All of my parent's friends kids were born with a few weeks of each other (I was 6 weeks premature, so predated the rest). This was nine months after the ship got in. It's really rather funny growing up in a Navy town; a lot of your friends have birthdays within two weeks of each other, then there are few.
I have even heard that rates are high in September from Christmas to New Year's. No idea if it's true, though.
Abortion is part of the reason that population growth has declined. We slaughter millions of babies every year, which not only keeps them out of existence, but all of their potential offspring as well. I don't intend to turn this into a pro-life/pro-choice debate (cause it would only get ugly) but I believe it contributes heavily to the US not having as high population growth.
From POPs own website:
http://pop.org/missionst.html
"...Our mission is threefold:
To document abuses of human rights in the name of population control, which have occurred in China, Bangladesh, and dozens of other countries around the world, and work for their elimination.
To make a case against the widely held, but fundamentally wrongheaded, development paradigm which places economic and population growth in opposition to each other.
To articulate the material and social benefits of moderate population growth and promote economic development through models which respect the dignity and rights of the individual human person and the family."
Clearly, they have a bias against believing there will be high population growth.
It could be a bias against birth control, but it's written in such universal, impossible to fault, terms, that you can't really tell, what their motive is (at least not from the mission statement).
Alas, this trend has been known for some time now, and the causes have been thoroughly examined. The only thing that surprises me is how deep the ignorance of the 'psuedo-educated masses' really runs. The UN is full of a bunch of phonies and idiots who have no clue what calculus, reason, or anything else useful is. It is so sad and frustrating to see so many people living in a modern day dark age, their thoughts contaminated with petty ideological and/or religious interests. The only reason the 'population boom' was disseminated like so much free beer and dog food was that certain ideological zealots found that it served their ideolgoical interests. Peace
From the 1998 US Forest Service Report: Nonfederal Forest land in the US -- 487.6 Million Acres. If the TIME Article is true, that means since 1998 that the US alone has increased forest land by 54 times. Since I don't think this is the case, it should be safe to say that TIME magazine has no clue what it is talking about.
We are already overpopulated. Take a look around you. I live in Seattle and work in Redmond. It takes me sometimes more than an hour to get to work, and more than an hour to get home, which is only ten miles away. Why? Because there are too many people. I've been to almost every state in the Union, including EVERY coastal state. Every beach has pollution. Why? Because there are too many people. Travelling across the country, I challenge you, besides Alaska, find me ONE, only ONE strip of land 25 miles long that has neither a road or a barbed-wire fence across it. Why? Because there are too many people. I rarely get to go to a nice dinner without some god damn baby crying. This even happens in movie theatres. Some moron brought their baby to American Beauty. Out of general principle, everyone else in the theatre should have monkey-stomped that asshole to death. Have you ever been to Europe? Ever see any virgin forest in Western or Central Europe (not including Northern Europe)? Why? Because there are too many people. Even been to Asia? Just try swimming in some of those rivers. You know which ones. Why? Because there are too many people. Funny that there are incidences of frogs all over the country with five or six legs, three or four eyes, and other sick deformities. Because too many people pollute everything. There's nothing left that isn't somewhat polluted. When I was living in California, I remember going up to practically virgin areas of the Sierras, but still having to deal with smog. It's because, THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE!!!
What's even more telling is the second wager in 1996 where Simon publicly offered a wager to "any prominent doomsayer... that by any material measure, living standards would only improve."
No one would take his bet.
It just seems odd that after Ehrlich's predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize over the past three decades that people still cling to them.
As for the detractors of the original post, it seems like they didn't even read the article to which he or she linked, because it wasn't about the "...mostly placid and content, high-living, energy-consuming, SUV driving populace of the western democracies" and how just because they're fine the rest of the world must be too. In fact it alluded to one of the primary reasons people in less fortunate areas of the world are unable to utilize the resources that have been expanded by innovation, namely a lack of free enterprise in those areas.
As far as "...a westerner probably [having] the environmental impact of 5 or more third world citizens." I have to say I have my doubts. My understanding from geography and economics classes is that underdeveloped countrys actually have a greater negative environmental impact than western societys because they don't have the resources to avoid things like burning inefficient fuels and dumping wastes into the water and the ground. One economics instructor explained it as environmentalism being a luxury of first world countries, which makes sense to me. I could be wrong though.
I didn't spell check this.
We are not even close to approaching the maximum limit that this planet can hold. We could put the entire population of the world in Texas and have them each have 1/8 of an acre of land with the entire rest of the planet for agriculture, industry, and garbage disposal. If estimates on the maximum carrying capacity of Earth were reasonable, we would have run out of oil, food, and a host of materials by now according to ZPG advocates like the Club of Rome.
There is more than enough food to feed the world. Famine is caused by governments stealing food/resources from people at this point. There was a recent Nobel prize in economics given to Amartya Sen that demonstrates this conclusively.
If you wish to have less children, that's your option but you are going to have to drag millions of people forcibly into medical clinics for those snip, snip operations you advocate. That's tyranny of the worst, most intrusive kind. This is what's happening day in and day out in China where forced abortion and infanticide are a daily occurence.
ZPG is evil in the large and the small sense of the word.
TML
In the 1970's it was believed that countries like Brazil would not reduce their population growth rates because of religious taboos. In the early 1980s, birth control was legalized by Brazil's military junta (since replaced by at least the appearance of democracy) and the number of children per woman dropped from six to two in twenty years. In 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa which stated that all forms of birth control, except abortion, do not conflict with Islam. Iran is experiencing the same results as Brazil. These are NOT developed industrial societies. The reason why these things are taking place is because elites realized that a large population increased control expenditures- there are simply too many people's demands to deal with which may conflict with your own. This is why we are having fewer children- now not only do we consider them to be too much trouble: our rulers do as well. So expect birth control to be widely available to anyone with a competent ruling class in the future.
What is China's current birth control policy?
Were the allegations of mass infanticied during the early 90's unproven?
Boy! that has been a lot of men (and thankfully there were representatives from both factions of feminism) ranting about this topic. Here is my tuppence as a young woman.
I am unmarried, but I do have an idea on the subject. The man who wrote that women should stay at home and rear children must indeed be pretty short-sighted. Let me show you why a working woman can very well manage her children.
Granted that babies need mummy around for a few months. There are solutions such as telecommuting for that these days. And many companies are very understanding as far as maternity leave is concerned, I understand. They apparently put up with a lot of telecommutable hours.
After that, daycares are really ok. I agree that daycares are 'a mixed bag'. But opinion of friends can help choose a healthy daycare centre. In anycase, most big companies have a daycare of sorts right in their basement! So mummies can be around even during office hours (feeding time etc.), lunch hour, tea-time etc.That is sufficient.
After 3yrs it is school-time. It is of course nice, if you have mum at home ready with your tea and some freshly made snack, curious to know what transpired in school that day. (I have had that luxury for a while.) But then, it is not psychologically shattering or demoralising or any such disasterous consequence if no one is home when you come back from school. Most of my life has been that way. Big deal.I seem to have turned out normal enough. ;-) . Psychologists exaggerate problems a great deal. Take it at 70% of face-value only. :) You simply learn to take things from the refrigerator and microwave and eat and go to play. When you come back from play, your parents are probably home already. That is fine. Only that atleast one parent should be responsible enough to leave things in the fridge for the kids to eat when they come home; and preferably they are fresh enough too. :-) And when they meet their children, they should take time off to share their day's worth with each other and maybe help with homework.. This is important.
My example of food is just an illustration. These are things that affect in small but significant ways in the growing up process. It is not so important that parents are home ALL the time. What is necessary is that they should be around when the shild has a problem. And of course, they should be able to build a trust relationship with their children so strong that the first person the child thinks of when encountering trouble is either mum or dad. And parents should be receptive to their children's woes, however small or trivial.
Who says working parents can't manage kids? They definitely can and do a good job of it too. And examples abound. You may want to look around and be pleasantly surprised.:)
--gND.http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~sujathan
Linuxian Girls of the world, UNITE!
The welfare state is at least as important a factor as birth control. It allows individuals to be supported by the labour force in general, rather than by their children.
Oil is cheapest because it's the most plentiful. Once it runs out (and it will because there is not an infinite supply) every thing else will be much more expensive and harder to harvest.
War is necrophilia.
Never mind that most women are horniest at the time they are most fertile, and least horny when NOT fertile.
There's a surefire recipie for a happy and satisfying marriage! Only have sex when she doesn't want to, and never have sex when she wants to!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Italy is notionally Catholic, yes. But having
:-)
spent 6 years there I would say it's much
less Catholic than... well, virtually anywhere.
Italian Catholicism seems to consist of saying
"Yeah, sure, your Holiness. Whatever you say."
and then doing whatever you want. See "How
Far Can You Go?" by David Lodge for details
-- You've got to get a hat if you want to get ahead.
Reducing people's taxes if their kids do well in school gives you the same results, and it would create pressure to improve public schools. I have nothing against private schools (went to one for three years myself), but we used to have pretty good public schools and I see no reason why we can't have some again if we don't destroy them first in a fit of pique.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I was looking at the UN projections into 2050 and its amzing how linear the population increase is. OK only after 1950. If you include all the figures from 1000AD it looks very exponential. My 0.02c
You're a gene slave.
You didn't get to pick them. They don't reflect your own values. You don't even get to pick which of them your children inherit from you, vs which come from your mate. Funny that you were saying something about an "empty life" when your body is just a machine built by genes whose goals are totally unrelated to your concious thoughts.
What is important about you that you wish to preserve forever, even after your death? What is your true identity? Is it your flesh, or the contents of your mind?
There's something else happening a lot faster than any woman's uterus can produce babies, and compared to the crude influence of DNA, it has a staggering effect on how people live their lives. Look upon the works of politicians, artists, and media whores, and despair. For they have millions of offspring. For at least a thousand years, the important stuff has all run on software, and the ones who have realized it are the people who have become truly immortal. A family is nothing compared to a well-constructed religeon.
My ancestors are all on bookshelves and in text files; they're in the things I've seen and heard. And my offspring are ... who knows? I've always been such a philandering lech, spilling my seed so recklessly. Slashdot and Usenet are the sleazy hotels where I've had one-night stands, and a conversation with me may be a full-blown honeymoon suite, if I'm in a talkative (memetically horny) mood.
I bet I just reproduced right now, right in front of your eyes.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have one word: feminism
;)
Well, I have nothing to back that up, but we were talking about that in class today and I thought it applied.
Political power is largely derived from economic power. Economic power amongst technological peers is directly related to population:
The largest G7 economy is the USA, followed by Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Canada.
The most populous G7 country is the USA, followed by Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada.
The only discrepancy between these lists is France, and its very close, both in population and GDP, to the UK an Italy.
At the end of the day, the most important resource in an industrial economy is people. If China and India reach the level of industrialisation found in the West, their economies will dwarf the economies of the West. However, severe pollution issues are likely to prevent them reaching parity with the West. Even now, pollution in China has reached virtually apocalyptic levels. If the trend continues, the country will probably be uninhabitable well before it could hope to reach Western levels of industrialisation.
A theory I once heard on population growth/implosion that stuck with me was the following: in a poor country you have lots of children because most of them are going to die. As a country becomes more advanced, the child death rate drops quickly, and over generations people start having less children. You have population booms that parallel times of prosperity, when medicine advances faster than the must-have-lots-of-kids mentality is changing. It's a reasonable theory, and I can see how the UN was thinking along similar lines. The problem with basing a study on this reasoning is that it might take a hundred years for a society to shift to a balanced "1.5 kids per couple" (or whatever a balanced rate would be). Lets see here...a billion in China and it's area, a billion in India, a billion in Africa...all of which are just starting to get the good medical science, but who have had centuries without it. The "civilized" world is slowing its growth, but even now that's only a quarter of the world's population at best. So yes, it looks like some day the population will stabilize. Also looks like it won't be any day in our immediate future. I'm much more inclined to trust the predictions that just follow the overall trend, for our lifetime...the stabilization will be a little after. On a side note, I'm seeing some idealist thoughts here along the lines of "humans should control their population like nature does." My opinion of this is...well, I'm reminded of the first time I saw The Matrix. Remember the scene where the Agent is sharing his thoughts with the captive Morpheus about humanity being a virus, growing and spreading uncontrolled everywhere? He implied that humanity was freakishly unnatural in that sense. I thought, "hmm...what about deer? Rats? Trees? Grass? Bacteria?" All life behaves that way. Perhaps instead of mistakenly arguing that we preserve ourselves by being more like the animals, we should be striving to succeed where they always fail. -evilWurst
The United States (and other industrialized nations) has a smaller population than man places, but its impact on the environment is much greater.
We 'industrialized' types use energy, burn fossil fuels, generate trash, and pollute the environment much more than our 'quota'.
Less people but nearly all industrialized will not solve our problems unless we change the way we treat the environment and use our energy.
Zipwow
"They said they need it today!"
"Bah, that's what they said yesterday."
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I'm 34, so "in my lifetime" is a rather optimistic view :-)
This is a great story!!! I especially liked the twist ending :)
..the pain of British system - feet and miles - use metric, you will not doubt your numbers ...
Seriously though, I do not know about feet per head, but it certainly feels awfully crowded in California...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
It's the girls -- they don't give it up anymore. OTOH, there are a lot of guys my age (late teen to early twenties) who *ahem* haven't.. um.. "gotten any". I think the main reason is because my age group (most, but definitly not all, I've seen proof .. pregnant teens and teen mothers taking their child to school) have matured mentally. We understand that it's a serious task to bring a child into this world, and IMHO, I'd rather not bring a child into the world if I can not take care of it and provide for it with the best of my ability and still live comfortably, and provide for myself. Mainly, the girls just don't give it up as easy... either that or I'm butt-U-G-L-Y.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
On the other hand, if the exercise was intended to show you that mathematical models are often good examples of GIGO, I'd say it was a good class.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Like you, I will omit rendering an opinion, except on your conclusion:
Abortion does not occur frequently enough to put a serious dent in the birth rate. There would have to be millions of abortions each year and there are only (serious hand-waving here) a few tens of thousands performed each year.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
It's the girls -- they don't give it up anymore. OTOH, there are a lot of guys my age (late teen to early twenties) who *ahem* haven't.. um.. "gotten any".I think the main reason is because my age group (most, but definitly not all, I've seen proof .. pregnant teens and teen mothers taking their child to school) have matured mentally. We understand that it's a serious task to bring a child into this world, and IMHO, I'd rather not bring a child into the world if I can not take care of it and provide for it with the best of my ability and still live comfortably, and provide for myself. Mainly, the girls just don't give it up as easy... either that or I'm butt-U-G-L-Y....NOT
da w00t. mtfnpy?
"extreme right-wing foundations"
"radical free market types"
"very conservative think tank"
Oh my. Somebody better call the FBI and tell them about these subversives.
another reason is that educated women realize there is more (much much more) to life than making babies.
another reason to spread education!
*elevator music plays*
> People aren't going to give their money away. >
People aren't going to start being nice to > each other What do these have to do with
population growth? (And I have to say that my experience contradicts both of these
claims.)
Then, my friend, you are VERY lucky and/or haven't experienced much of the real world. Pray you never find out (or ignore the clues that are all around you) how foul and bad this world really is. Too many works of art have covered this topic for me to hope to add anything new.
Not true. It is not guess work, rather it is scientific fact. Most women's cycles are not predictable do to health problems. Usually this can be fixed by a more appropriate diet, etc. This is a great example of how NFP can improve health, unlike pills.
As far as taking risks during fertile days, this is the beauty of it. You have control over what risks you want to take. With medicine, you depend on your doctor and other people you pay.
And a clarification, the rhythm method is different and is not reliable, since menstrual cycles vary in length. Thus, with NFP, you base your decisions on the symptoms and not on guess work. Unfortunately, people confuse the rhythm method with NFP.
Granted this method does not work for those that need sexual gratification on demand. But that's a whole other topic....
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
... I disagree with you compltely. Just becase most Italians call themselves 'Catholic' doesn't mean they close followers of the church doctrine. And why should it? Does calling yourself French mean that you religiously abide all French laws? There are cultural aspects. Italy has a culture of disregarding authority, as can be seen in their disregard for traffic lights, road death statistics and tax-avoidance among the macho. Italy typifies a first world nation, in this sense much more than countries like the US or Australia. My knowledge of the area is straining here, but I understand their high immigration levels to contribute towards higher birth rates, because of culture carry-over. Whereas Catholics in developing, poorer and most importantly less educated countries are very much more likely to obey the 'wisdom' dolled out to them so generously by the church. If asked in a religious survey what I was, I'd probably answer Anglican - but I don't go to church, and while I consider my morals very close to the spirit of teaching we got at school, I make up my mind on things without religious considerations.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Its the brittish word for old geek.
Take the exact opposite event: the Baby Boom. At the height of the 18-year long Baby Boom in the US, fertility rates were something like 3.6. (Compare this to the notoriously out of control demographics of India today: fertility rate 3.7.) Then, in a matter of a couple years around 1963 or so, it all stopped. Now the obvious questions are a) why did it happen, and b) why did it stop. Problem is, we don't really know the answer to either of them.
Well, this might seem a trifle obvious, but wasn`t it in the early sixties that the Pill came into common use? So as soon as people had the choice to stop having children, they stopped having children.
6 Billion people enjoying the highest standard of living in human history. For the first time ever, a majority of people, even in poor countries, actually surviving into adulthood. The quality of human life in almost every country in the world rising along with the population. It is any wonder the critics of Julian Simon refuse to speak of the evidence? Tim
Yeah, but by what these articles are saying, we may have to enforce the opposite; Force DINK couples (Dual Income, No Children), to have exactly 2 kids, so they don't throw off the average, so we can maintain a population level; limiting people to 2 kids won't work if some families opt to not have kids.
.
DINK's forced into parenthood:
Biff: honey, I'm taking the beemer to the gym for a couple of hours, should I meet you at the beach afterwards?
Patti (with an i): Sure biff, I'm taking the silver mercedes, so try to park close to where I am, I'm bringing the picnic basket and the wine, and bring your cellphone so we can do some trading. We'll go out to a dinner and hit the opera. . .
Biff: okay honey, have you been putting on weight? You look like, what, 115?
Patti (with an i): oh Biff, I don't know, I just haven't felt myself since that last trip to the doctors. They put me out, and it was some kind of government mandated thing. I don't know what they did. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You seem to have missed the problem that not all parents are loving and nurturing, and if theyre forced to stay at home they may very well, consciously or not, become resentful. Frankly, if you want some sort of base standard, youd be better off with daycare. With daycare personell, chances are theyve had some education, theyve done it before and someone has interviewed them for the position. You dont need any sort of qualification to become a parent.
Neither is very idyllic, and most kids will get screwed up either way, but if the parents are working they can at least start up a therapy fund for the kid when its old enough to need to deal with it.
First, let's look at extremes. The smallest number of children born/woman is Italy. We shall call this woman Paola. The largest number of children born/woman is in sub-saharan Africa. Since I'm no great scholar of African languages, I'll take a name from Philip Jose Farmer and call her Kuta. Both are are in their late twenties.
Paola's husband is a white-collar worker: perhaps an industrial designer, named um...Angelo. She also works, for the city, let's make it Milan, in the building and zoning board. They have a five room apartment, kitchen, living, dining, and two bedrooms, that Paola is proud of having snagged in a renovated 18th century palazzo, and one daughter, Lucia (pronounced "Lew-sha".)
Kuta lives in a traditionally-styled compound with her husband and four children, although she has given birth six times. One died soon after birth, and is therefore according to tradition, nameless, and one at the age of three. To be fair, she has two boys and two girls. She, and her husband, work a family farm, as well as occasional hunting and foraging for delicacies.
Paola's biggest concern, day in day out, is where Lucia is. Even though she has employer-sponsored daycare, and Lucia is almost ready to start school, there are times when Paola can't be sure that someone is looking after her. Her mother is living in another part of town, and is concerned with her own life, and it's often the case that she has to drop Lucia off before daycare starts and pick her up after it ends. When she starts school next year, she'll have to navigate through heavy traffic to come home, and have a full two hours unsupervised....simply unimaginable, even though she's been little trouble...it's enough keeping track of her shopping, much less trust her to walk home alone.
Kuta's greatest problem is keeping everyone "well-mannered" -- that is, not greedy at table, obedient, and respectful of tradition. Although she, too, is busy all day, the bulk of childrearing doesn't fall on her: there are always sisters-in-law, mothers-in-law, and other relatives to take care of the children, who all look after each other. Even when the clan goes to market in the truck once a week, it never occurs to anyone that someone might get lost....everyone "in town" knows whose kids belong to whom.
Paola and her husband wonder about whether they should give Lucia a brother. In modern Italy, as in ancient patrician Rome, children are expensive. Two thousand years ago, the main expense for a son was a toga, a huge hand-loomed piece of wool twenty feet long and eight wide, which could cost as much as a modest villa, and a horse, which cost as much as a luxury automobile today, with much greater upkeep, and several slaves. In modern Italy, it's more the little things: a room apiece, clothing for each child, education, whether state-sponsored or private, further education at a university, and for girls, their eventual wedding. Paola doesn't want to have to move; the dining room is not suitable as a bedroom, and to get a comparable apartment calls for at least a two-year waiting list. Scholars are still divided as to why the birth rate in patrician Rome fell: Paola has her own theory. At any rate, even without child labor laws, it would be difficult for Lucia to help her parents out economically: there's little place in a modern office for someone who can't read or type, and even to understand what her parents are doing is beyond six year old comprehension.
Kuta has no such problem. Although it's sometimes true that there isn't enough for everyone to fill their bellies at once, everyone helps out as well as they can. As soon as they can walk, the children run errands and work beside their parents; her oldest son, at the age of fifteen, is able to do everything his father does, both in the fields and in the forest. Everyone sleeps together at night -- when things get too crowded, as it does during the rainy season, a new adjoining hut is constructed over a few days. Her older daughter is an eager seamstress and gatherer, and does what she can towards keeping things going -- she sees herself as doing what everyone else does. Education in tribal ways is free and ongoing: everyone is quick to correct the young'uns.
Even though Paola's brother (a priest) jokes about them getting a dog, so that they can have a domini-cane in the family to carry on the tradition of having one child take Holy Orders, Paola isn't all that concerned that she's going against Catholic doctrine in using birth control. "It's a political thing." she says. Kuta would like to take advantage of the local free clinic, as well as the local school, but is afraid that enrolling in one or the other will alert the authorities that she has sons old enough to be soldiers in the ongoing border dispute. As for birth control, she's of two minds: while she's heard it's a good idea, her cousin died after an abortion (performed in the traditional manner, with a sharp stick and many rituals). It's true that city women have fewer children, but she's not at all convinced that education and city living will make a difference in their lives. Neither one of them, therefore, has much faith in the government or other authorities to make informed decisions over their lives.
Let's go on from these extremes to a society in transition: Mei, who is an ethnic Chinese living in southeast Asia. She is a stay-at-home mother, having three children, living in a city apartment of three rooms. All day, she works hard to cook, clean, and look after her children, who range from two to ten, while occasionally making money out of her house, sewing and doing other chores. She sees nothing wrong in putting her daughter to work, sewing beside her: after all, a five-year-old girl is "hard to raise", and it's good that she's learning a trade. As they work, they watch TV: their favorite shows are talk shows and soap operas depicting Europeanized women in expensive clothes who almost never have more than one or two children apiece. Mei remembers living with her five siblings in a tiny farmhouse, and is determined to make a better life for her children in the city -- perhaps like the women on TV, whose kids all go to college. Actual college students in her country hate these programs, since they're leading women to abandon their age-old ways -- however, few of them seem likely to go back to the farm and raise large families either.
Mei's country is growing, but less and less quickly over time. Kuta's is growing explosively. Paola's is shrinking. I, an American woman of forty, have no children, and cannot figure out a way to afford any. The twenty-first century awaits.
teleny, friend of cats.
I'm serious. Most of the USA's phone communications used to be carried over heavy cables. Many pairs of copper wires inside a jacket of lead. This worked for a goodly part of a century, but along came...
Plastics. Polyethylene insulation is a lot cheaper than cloth, and allows the use of smaller wires. After a period of advancement, it became worthwhile to dig up the old cloth-wrapped, lead-jacketed cables and recycle them. The cables that went into the ground to replace them had less copper and NO lead. The difference went onto the market, with predictable results for commodity producers.
Today we're replacing copper with glass (silicon dioxide). SiO2 is a goodly fraction of the earth's crust; guess what happens when metal is replaced such a common substance? The price falls again! This is why copper plumbing is in no danger of being priced out of reach.
Moral of the story: Technology can throw a monkeywrench into any projection that depends on substances being both rare and valuable. Sperm oil, once the ultimate source of light, is useless. Plus ça changé, plus c'est la meme chose.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Too many people.
see : http://www.dieoff.org/
Depressing stuff. There'll always be enough stupid
people out there to fsck things up for all of us.
And guess what... we're all driven by the same
things. The human race is doomed to failure - it's
in our selfish nature.
Have a nice day.
I haven't read the "Eve's Herbs" book, but I've read enough anthropology articles to have learned that those contraceptive and abortifacient herbs generally fall into one of two categories. Poisons and placebos. The poisons are effective but very dangerous. They tend to be abortifacients rather than contraceptives, and given the choice I'd take the surgical abortion (if it were my body) rather than the herbal one. The placebos work as contraceptives, only because the "magic" that allows then to work depends on the woman abstaining from sex all or most of the time. It's about as effective as the Catholic Church's infamous "rhythm method", and for about the same reasons. Instead of thermometers and calendars, the herbal method employs plants and plant extracts. But it's still a crapshoot that relies largely on abstainance for its effectiveness.
...once men took over medicine, and the midwife's skills with these herbs were relabeled as witchcraft by the RC Church, this knowledge began to disappear.
That is certainly lamentable, but it's not the only (or even a major)cause of overpopulation. It is probably the cause of much delay in medical knowledge tho'. I often wonder where modern (western) medicine would be today if, instead of persecuting them in the middle ages, the anatomists (mostly men who made their medical discoveries by carving up cadavers) had merged their knowledge with the herbalists (mostly women).
Think about that. Most grandparents I knew had 4-8 kids. Most parents I know had far less. What was introduced between these two? Far more reliable forms of birth control such as the pill.
Re: #4
India has 2.4% of Christians in its population, and there are even smaller groups of Catholics in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
While Italy, the negative population growth rate example used in the article, is nearly 100% Catholic.
Theory and data do not match.
Most North American sewage gets cleaned up considerably before the water gets dumped back into the rivers. The outflow from a sewage treatment plant is usually cleaner than the river or lake it is going into.
Kinda offtopic, but I can personally attest to the absolute truthfulness of that. My dad is a chemical engineer employed by our municipal sewage treatment plant, and he spends all day analyzing "whitewater" samples to make sure that the output is absolutely clean (our city dumps its treated sewage into a river so...) A few years ago I dropped by on a "meet the public day" to check out his actual work environment, and was quite amused to hear this woman (who obviously knew nothing about modern treatment methods), complaining loudly about the environmental damage resulting from our citys discharges. After trying to straighten her out for over 10 minutes, one of my dads exasperated coworkers grabbed a whitewater sample and downed it in front of her. While it was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen, it absolutely impressed on me (and everyone else...including the woman) the high quality of modern waste treatment methods. Like he said, modern treated sewage is actually cleaner than modern well water.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
offtopic? hardly.. listen to the original song (10 in 2010)
--------------------
this space left intentionally blank
--------------------
this space left intentionally blank
They are more aware of birth control, too.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Agreed.
Predicting the future is easy. [see note 1]
Note 1: *If* current trends continue. The trouble is, they tend not to. This article and the dramatic reversal it represents as more trends are considered in the projections, proves that point. Alas, there are more, smaller trends that will come to the fore by 2040. Will they have a significant impact? Which direction will they tilt the next projection? Stay tuned for updates as they happen...
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I won't ask you to change your minds. Obviously you're doing the human gene-pool a favor by not reproducing.
well.. we know there's a correlation (as slashdot readership is rising, pregnancy (birth?) rates are declining), but we deny that one of these things causes the other.
[snipped from webster's, www.m-w.com]
correlation: a relation existing between phenomena or things or between mathematical or statistical variables which tend to vary, be associated, or occur together in a way not expected on the basis of chance alone
The shareholder is always right.
From statistics I have seen, there have been over 30 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. That's more than a few tens of thousands per year. It's also over 10% of the current US population.
Yeah, China's coercive policies have been fantastically ineffective in stemming population growth, though it manage to eliminate a whole bunch of women, if you like that sort of thing. Bangladesh managed to cut its fertility rate by almost half in a decade without adopting that policy. Educating women and giving them access to credit made them a hell of lot less interested in pumping out toddlers
-Every time I see you flourishing with a metaphor I experience the same anxiety I feel watching a child with a razor-
So your saying that it's anti-semetic to be pro-life?
Or to have an optimistic view of population growth?
--
Clear, Dark Skies
Whoa, this guy just stepped off the Thorazine Expressway!
Given that:
/. overall is the commoditization and increased availability of the PC worldwide;
/. is the increase in economic opportunities afforded by the advent of the Open Source movement; and
/. theme is the "grassroots" empowerment of poorer countries and peoples through the increased availability of information on the Internet and ever-cheaper hardware...
a) A recurring theme in this topic is the economic factors which favor large families (lots of kids to help on the farm) in underdeveloped or agrarian countries and which mitigate against them in industrialized countries (because the family's
subsistance -- and the economy as a whole -- is based on jobs in which children cannot contribute, due to educational requirements, etc.);
b) A recurring theme in
c) Another common theme in
d) Another frequent
All this leads to a question: Will there come a day when PCs become cheap enough and 'net access becomes widespread enough (and cheap enough) that the economies that lead to smaller families (in point "a" above) will become available to rural villages in India, Africa, S. America, and other high-population-growth regions?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
- Brain cancer -- rates way way up in the last 10 years
- Penile deformities in male babies in the last 10 years
Can you say, "Environmental contaminants"?Plot a graph of mobile phone usage versus the rise in brain cancer...scary
In richer countries, women have access to more forms of birth control and both sexes are reasonably aware of what happens when you roll in the hay without protection (and I don't mean those pesky pitchforks!). Women having babies later...women choosing careers over families...no expectations of having a dozen babies...my dad is Greek and his family was rather disappointed my parents stopped at two kids...whereas in poorer countries women aren't educated about birth control, can't afford it, it's not available (no OB-GYN around the corner in a place like Namibia!), men won't use condoms, religious barriers...man, the UN can't figure this out of all organizations?
I hardly think that those people are enormously better off than there ancestors in 1840. For one, I'd say the level of starvation across africa is probably worse. Who gives a flying fuck if your a little better off when your still dying of disease and starving to death. Brad
Yes, but it doesn't solve the problem. There is no correlation between the (nominal) power of the Catholic Church even in non-First World nations and population growth. For example, Latin American nations tend to have lower natural rates of population increase than nations in Africa or South Asia.
The essence of Simon's statistical argument is this:
Historically there always exists a multitude of alternative ways and technologies to feed us, cloth us and keep us warm. Some of them are more elaborate, some less, i.e. expensive or cheap.
Historical data shows that things have become less scarce and we have become more productive.
We have found new solutions faster than we get into new trouble with the old ones. Everything, including the chance to enjoy a healthy and a pleasant environment with no disease or uncomfort, has become cheaper and easier. These are all different sides of the same economical facts.
Resources are the non-destroyable in theory (physics), and infinite in practice (economics). We don't have to bet on a technological salvation in the future, just on modest natural continuity of our history.
We will not consume matter/energy into nothingness, we will enjoy it ever more clever ways! "Sit back and enjoy the afternoon!", like the Wired editor concluded his article on Julian Simon.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Guess 1: In rich countries, children are very expensive to raise. You can't make them work and you need to provide huge amounts of money for education and the expected status symbols. Since birth control is easily available, it's easier just to have one or two kids. In poor countries, children often earn more than their keep.
Guess 2: People breed under pressure. If you don't have a reasonable guarantee that one kid will make it to adulthood, you have six. As the survival pressure goes, so goes the reproductive pressure.
Guess 3: People in rich countries are completely disconnected from their biological roots. While not working insane hours for status symbols, they drift from entertainment to entertainment which keeps them happy and distracted. Kids are only a hassle.
Probably each of these has a grain of truth. Now, what did I leave out?
Hm, let's do a little math. http://www.governor.state.tx.us/Texas/facts_figure s.html says the area of texas is "261,914 square miles." 6*10^9 people/261914 sq miles is 22908 people/sq mile, or 36 people per acre, or 14.5 people per hectare, or 113 m^2 per person. Seems it depends on your opinion of comfort.
Look at the two US states that have the highest fertility rates:
Alaska and Utah.
In both of these states the necessity of an adult male in the family is emphasized: in Alaska, by natural conditions present on a frontier, and in Utah by indoctrination.
However, the general trend toward affluence devalues male contributions to households. Females become more capable of providing for themselves as their general environment is more affluent.
With increasing affluence in the absence of countervailing indoctrination of females, average males are are less and less likely to pass the ever rising instinctive barriers to impregnation presented by females who are less and less in need of a husband. By replacing the man as head of the household with his emerging role as "boy toy", female fertility naturally wanes.
Females tend to affiliate with the source of their long term security just as males tend to affiliate with their source of sex. As affluence increases the source of security for females tends to be their careers. We find ourselves in the evolutionary psychology of enormous industrial harems without any real "alpha male" present to impregnate the females. The instinctive gears that drive fertility simply disengage.
However, as the taboos against large harem sizes are removed things will change radically.
Look toward African patterns of polygyny within the context of "family businesses" for the future of fertility.
Seastead this.
The reason wealthy nations aren't seeing the population growth poorer countries are is because of the cost of living. It's just not terribly attractive notion to have a family with much more than three children these days when it already takes a two income household to make basic living close to comfortable. In in the US people aren't having as many children as their parents did because it's just too expensive. In Italy I've heard it's bcome such a potential problem for the future that the Italian gov't is actually giving incentives for having more children.
But in poorer nations it's still not terribly feasible to have bunches of kids either, it's just that given low education levels (both in general and sex ed. in particular), cultural traditions, and limited access to birth control has skyrocketed growth.
That was Ehrlich's big mistake, betting money that a trend would just go on. It's just like the statement that comes with a mutual fund prospectus - past performance is never a guarantee of future income. I wouldn't dare make a long term prediction of commodity prices - too many outside factors exist.
ITT was a major stockholder in Chile's mines at the time of the coup - the company that used to lay all the undersea cables - because they were a major consumer of copper. The pressure they placed on the Nixon administration to do something about a pro-worker government in Chile is frequently credited with America's support of Pinochet.
My point remains, technology might save us, and Ehrlich was stupid to bet money that prices would go up, but betting that they can go down forever (as Simon did) is much worse, and even though we can replace copper with sand in wires, we can't be sure that we can find a substitute for everthing that runs dry.
Gambling that future technology can solve specific problems isn't very sound, and our lives may depend on the bet.
The worlds population, baring catastrophe like a holocaust or famine is an exponential function. We just reached 6 billion, pluging data into the continuous function 12 = 6(e)rt (where rt is the exponent and r=present continuous growth rate) solving for T reveales we will reach 12 billion around 2050.
-doog
Television made it even worse: now we have something that keeps us amused with very little effort--you don't even have to turn the page. The moving pictures stimulate your brain until it's exhausted and you have to go to sleep. Cable television is even worse.
The whole problem comes down to the things people do to alleviate their boredom: If you have an Internet and a television and a VCR and books to read, you surf and stare and rewind and read; if you have an S.O., you diddle. Here's a short play, set in California:
Here's another one, set in the middle of Africa:
So that explains the slowing population growth in countries that have "arrived." The reason population has exploded elsewhere is essentially first-world altruism: we (being the rich world) gave them (being the poor world) antibiotics and vaccinations, but we forgot to give them televisions. So they still have sex and still have eleven babies per couple, but instead of eight of them dying, only one or two die. If you want to control the world population explosion and avoid a Malthusian crisis, instead of giving third world countries rubbers, we should be giving them VH1.
Disclaimer: I am a crackpot.
--
This is not my sandwich.
In practical terms the energy supply is non-finite.
There are a number of poorly defined terms in that sentence. The sun will continue to burn for a very long time, and we are not likely to consume all the energy the planet takes in for quite some time. However, if practical is taken to mean cost-effective with reasonable technological assumptions the amount of energy we can easily extract from this relationship with the sun is quite finite. The bulk of the energy extracted for industrial use comes from fossil fuels. Even if fossil fuels represent a significant portion of the earth's crust (which in all likelihood they do not) it does not take much exponential growth before it's all gone.
The energy supply in the thermodynamic sense is unlikely to run dry so long as the sun shines, but the type of energy used to power factories and homes, and to raise human standards of living is an entirely differnet thing.
What do you mean by non-finite? We have no complete inventory of how much coal, oil and natural gas is present in the crust, but we do know that the figure is not infinite. We do know that oil fields can run dry - many have in the last century. Pennsylvania no longer produces a significant amount of oil. Neither does Bavaria or Romania.
We can also look at the trends for the discovery of new oil fields. New fields are not being discovered as frequently as they were 30 years ago, and the ones that are being uncovered are increasingly expensive to work. They are much deeper, at lower pressure or in worse environments like off-shore.
There is quite a lot of coal in the world, but still, known reserves are limited. One reason they may seem like a lot is that the industrialised countres burn petroleum instead. If petroleum resources run short, coal may not last as long. Furthermore, the varieties of coal that burn the most cleanly are the ones in the shortest supply. Coal pollution is not a trivial issue.
Much of the world's natural gas is associated with oil fields. When an oil field starts to drop in pressure, natural gas is pumped in to make the field more productive. Natural gas availability is closely linked to petroleum availability.
Under these conditions, non-finite seems to mean any resource that hasn't run dry yet.
Standards of living have not improved for everyone. In sub-saharan Africa, conditions are worse than they were in 1950. Not all of this can be blamed on bad government - the ratio of mouths to acres of arable land has a lot to do with it. In Asia, access to food has improved, access to water, fuel, education and housing have not in all cases.
Even in the USA, income has fallen for nearly 40% of the population since 1970, and access to housing and medical care is worse for much of the American population, although I would hesitate to credit overpopulation with those failings.
No one knows whether standards of living will continue to rise. They do not always rise, history has its fair share of reversals. Extrapolating a trend is not the same as predicting the future, otherwise Malthus would have been right. My critique of Simon is the same as my critique of Malthus, a trend is not the same as a prediction. But Simon has an addition killing error against him - the planet is finite, and it's the height of sophistry to claim that a resource is infinite just because its availability is unknown.
If you still believe that population growth is a problem (that is, that Thomas Robert Malthus or Paul Ehrlich are correct), then you have never heard of Julian Simon.
While Malthus (centuries ago) and again Ehrlich (late 1960s) hypothesized that geometric population growth combined with a finite amount of resources would lead to massive problems (mainly starvation), they missed two things that would prevent this: technology and ingenuity.
Combined, we find that people will always be looking for a way to build a better mouse trap, or, in this case, get more use out of less copper, find different ways to grow more livestock, etc. As world population grows, there are many more consumers who are looking for options, and the entrepeneur wins.
Malthus' argument fails to realized the ability of mankind to find solutions to problems, and therefore, is most likely incorrect. Or, at least he grossly miscalculated the maximum possible world population.
Six Billion And Feeling Fine.
For more about Julian Simon, I suggest this obituary, which describes his work quite well.
1) Resource consumption is variable. When oil prices shot up, people cut back on their oil usage, higher efficiency engines were developed, and all that. $100/bbl oil never happened. When the need to reduce resource consumption arises, it'll happen, complaints notwithstanding.
2) Notice how the US tax code is rigged to favor massive mortgage debt? Notice all those McMansions going up? (Hell of a lot of them where I live, ~$500K each, give or take.) Of course, to qualify for that mortgage so you can claim your tax deduction, you pretty much have to have two high incomes... so you end up with this massive unproductive asset and very few kids. It's not just the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses McMansions, tho, it's the $40K SUVs, nice shiny stuff to fill the McMansions, dumping cash into the stock market... which are nice and all, but doesn't do much to raise the next generation. Seriously messed up incentive system.
3) Feminism. Way too many women have been brainwashed into believing they *must* have careers. I think this has just about run its course now that there are enough 30+ year old single women wondering what happened to serve as warnings to the next generation, but I could be wrong.
3a) The least intelligent women with no good career choices are the ones most interested in marriage and families. Mix in the welfare state and low birth rates in the upper-IQ quintile and you have a really disturbing situation from a Darwinian perspective.
4) Colonization. As in Mars. It'll happen. And be practical within the next century. But the main incentive to migrate there will be to get away from the repressive governments on Earth.
Course of action? Nuke the welfare state, pass the Flat Tax (no more behavior-distorting rules), learn that time and not material goods is the most scarce resource, nuke the zoning boards that make it next to impossible to build high-density housing, break the government education monopoly with its leftist political indoctrination...
A tad rambling, but I'm in a free association kinda mood.
I would argue that one reason for overpopulation in poor countries has more to do with poor information about the availability of future resources.
Death isn't all that random, even in the third world. Disease is less likely to strike those who can afford food and medical treatment and the likelihood of escaping poverty conditions grows with better educated children. War will tend to avoid those with the money to flee. Having more children only makes sense when food and other necessary resources are plentiful and you can feed all your children. Otherwise, it tends to reduce, rather than enhance, the survival of your genes.
After many years of relative plenty, people are not changing their behaviour quickly enough in shortage.
However, humans are not merely the products of biology. Culture and conditions dictate counterproductive behaviours at times. That too is part of what is killing the underdeveloped countries.
Sounds like this is a "Best/Worst case". And if all the users got off the system, the lavag would go to 0. Great, but it's not going to happen.
Somehow I have trouble believing that any trend that requires humans to give up basic values is going to come true.
People aren't going to stop breeding.
People aren't going to give their money away.
People aren't going to start being nice to each other.
Countries aren't going to do anything as troublesome as helping to do some population control.
Insert your own pessimistic comment here! Everyone can play!
-- I'm omnipotent, I just don't care.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
That is possibly the most lose/lose attitude I've ever heard! My hat goes off to you.
Emigrate: think Exodus.
Immigrate: think Inundate.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
I'm sure there's no correlation between rising /. usage and lowering pregnancy rates.
None at all.
Hotnutz.com
What someone else said.... That maybe more people are realizing that it's a CHOICE, not a GIVEN, to have kids. Wheras, most people don't think about WHY they want kids, they just have 'em becuase, well, that just what you do, isn't it? You don't HVAE to breed with all the other lemmings.
Wasn't a while ago people predicted 20-30 years later, we'll have machines with human intelligence? Maybe after the next 20-30 years humans in high-tech contries start convert themselves with mechanical organs, so the count of human bodies decline? :)
Yes, I know it's an "explains a bit too much" theory at the moment, but as Dr. Susan Blackmore covers in "The Meme Machine," the pressures of the memes are not always consonant with those of the gene, as sociobiology would predict (of our culture)
Memetic pressures.
Low vertical propagation memesets have have the advantage of a high lateral propagation.
i.e. Successful, flashy people aren't at home raising kids.
The idea catches on.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Niiiiine in twentyyy fiftyyyy
well... now that song is going to be stuck in my head.
Mar's population should get to 100,000,000 before anyone even thinks of trying to control it.
Not a chance! Some form of government will already be there. A war for control might happen(ie Indepedant Mars vs USA/Mars Consortium). I will probably bet that government of Mars will end up being democratic. Simple look at the G8, all(is China included?) are democratic. They are the ones who actually do space exploration.
1) People raised in a democracy probably aren't ready to give it up.
2) Nations funding this will want to encourage their choice of government to grow.
3) The citizens of Mars will eventually setup their government they way they want it. see 1)
You don't exist. Go away. --SysVinit Halt
Absolutely. Children were once needed to help tend to farms, help rear the other children and aid with other family related duties. With most people having much lower maintenance needs in their everyday lives, the need for help in these areas has diminished (especially thinking about urban areas where most people live in apartment buildings with not even a yard to tend to).
We've also shifted away from community. People keep more to themselves today and with that we've become more self-oriented than ever before. Now that kids are a larger financial liability than a help, it is no surprise in our society (heavy into self gratification and material goods), that having children either early or often isn't as desirable as it may once have been.
Children are a larger financial sacrifice than many young people wish to take on. Not while they are still at a point where they can have their 'toys' and comforts. Having children commits you to 18 years of looking out for someone else at the expense of your own wants. That added to the frustrations of long work days, long commutes and very little personal time leaves very little room for children in the working couple's lifestyle.
Your post is very subjective. "And women who brag about being 'empowered' while sloughing off their kids to day-care ought to be shot." What about the fathers? They are just as responsible for the well-being of the child as the mother. To imply that only women, i.e. mothers, are responsible to raise children is to earn a sexist badge. Grow up and greet reality. And as to your idea that day-care should not be used, I can understand. But only to a point. Most families must have both parents working in order to feed their children. This suggests that only rich people deserve to have children, which is ridiculous. If you want to solve this problem, try encouraging corporate america to share the wealth. The rich are rich enough.
well actualy its a undisputed fact that men make more money on average at work. so for the man to stay home is a bad idea,
The angle of the Dangle is equaly proportional to the heat of the beat. ---Beavis
Running out of oil is an unlikely scenario. However energy prices rising steadily is a likely scenario. Oil extracted from tar sands is more expensive than oil pumped out of the ground. Also note that solar power, biodiesel etc. are very capital intensive and consequently expensive. I'd be all for fission and fusion except that so often it seems like selfish, insensitive and shortsighted people somehow seem to end up making the decisions and are only too happy to compromise safety, liveabilty and the environment to achieve their goals. Just look to relatively recent news for examples.
For all the aforementioned reasons I very much agree with the planet full of nukes. *sigh*
There was a good article in Scientific American last year about oil prices. I think they were predicting the "knee" in the price curve to hit in about ten years. So enjoy that gas guzzling SUV now!
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
The concept of a "Cube" was done by Robert Silverberg ("The World Inside" I believe was the title) - please correct me if I am wrong.
The more asthetic style structures of this sort were also popularized/architected by Paolo Soleri (My spelling might be off on this one), with his Arcology designs (most all of which are practical, efficient, beautiful - and could be built today if society wasn't such a greedy warren of rats). These designs are ones I would move into immediately if they existed (I guess I could move to Arcosanti)...
I am sure such designs have also been proposed earlier (if you look at some of the future city designs from the early part of this century, you would find that many structures were very tall with ramps inbetween buildings, etc) by others.
On a smaller scale Southwestern Indian Pueblos are reminiscent of the design (though actually closer to apartment buildings - however, the asthetics and energy efficiency of the designs are what really make them special)...
Nothing should stop us from building these style cities - we have the technology (go into any modern large office tower or large stadium for a proof of concept) - I fear we don't have the will to do so (until, of course, when it gets to be "too late")...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Actually if they lived in the same desity as NYC they would fix in about 1/4 - 1/8 of texas. Look at http://www.pop.org/students/texas1.html .
To fix in texas you could have a very low desity actually.
There is plenty of room on earth, and there is plenty of food on earth. There is no reason to have a smaller population. Some people might have a reason to have less kids. Too bad for them.
-Ariel
This is one of the underlying reasons for this trend. And it is a trend that has been observed for the past thirty years. In fact, some European countries are approaching negative population growth, even when emigration is factored out.
IMHO, Julian Simon is the authority on this subject. Well worth reading his stuff if you are interested.
Spencer Ogden
-Ariel
Even Malthus repudiated Malthusianism before he died.
There's been more than a bit of propaganda attached to the idea of overpopulation and resource depletion foisted upon us since the 60's, I fear. Not even food is scarce, though we know that the problems of distributing it sometimes are huge. Still, that seems like a political problem; not to be ignored, but solvable.
To keep this whole thread on-topic, I submit that the only true shortage to watch out for is the shortage of human brains. Especially good ones, in the high-tech professions, in the medical professions, in the teaching profession (and how about in the legal profession, anyone?). I will not be too surprised to see underpopulation be touted as the "problem of the 21st century" before I die.
J.
In nature there are 3 curves: sinusoid, (decaying) exponential, and s-curve. Population most likely follows an s-curve.
Your point is what? That you object to adjectives?
Think about, in the age of IPO frenzy, and everyone working 80 hours a week to "get ahead" in the world, people just don't have time to have kids. It's also a known fact that the average age of marriage is going up. Combine that with both parents working full time, and good ol redily avaiable birth control, and people just aren't crankin the kids out like they used to.
I work at a young company (age of employee-wise) and can see this every day. Average age here is probably 26, and 90% of the married people are over 30. 10-20% don't want kids at all, and a vast majority of the rest only have one, because there just isn't time. I don't see my company as being all that unique either. I think the days of seven kid families (such as my parents families) are slowly dwindling...at least in the US.
Natural resources might not be infinite, but the resources needed to make money might as well be. If you can smash shit on a canvas and sell it as art, anybody ought to be able to make a living.
I'm not sure I understand the point of your post, Coward. Um, yes, we all know the French Revolution-era Committee for Public Safety had some population concerns. And yes, the UN has generally called for population reductions. And yes, the Sierra Club, traditionally considered leftist (despite occasional anti-immigrant mutterings from within the ranks), has often expressed neo-Malthusian concerns. But I believe the point of the original post was merely to note that the new don't-worry-be-happy arguments in re: population were all coming from the same, very politicized places, i.e. not some sudden *scientific* consensus. Your post, on the other hand, was barely readable, and I am unable to discern your underlying point...please amplify.
One-couple/one-child is fine for now, but China's social-economic system is (like most governments) a buy-now-pay-later Ponzi scheme where the young people support the old. What happens when all those children from one-child families have to support their parents?
but easily available birth control and abortion in "developed" countries probably has a lot to do with it.
Japan already was a military powerhouse 50 years ago, so it was easy to assume they'd be technological. Remember, they defeated Russia as early as 1904-5. But you are right about the other nations.
Um, I'm Jewish, so I don't have anything against Judaism ;-)
Fact 1: By Jewish law a man is required to have at least a boy and a girl (i.e. keep trying till succesfull).
I belive I said this. Apologies if this wasn't clear
Fact 2: Birth control is not permited by jewish law.
Which halachic authority are you citing for this? Take a look at This site for the standard orthodox opinion.
Fact 3: Having sex during the time when a woman menustrates till 5 days after she stops is not permitted (i.e. 2 weeks on, 2 off) - if this bothers you, you'll be interested to know that Jewish men have the most sexual encounters of all other groups during the course of thier lives. In addition sex is almost required after the 5 days are over.
While I don't know anything about this study, yes, the no sex rules you outlined are true. I don't know what this has to do with population control, though, other than Jews aren't supposed to have sex during the time when a woman is least fertile.
Fact 4: By Jewish law _only_ physical damage counts - psychological does not. The reason physical harm counts is that the baby is considered as an attacker, and the mother can use "self defence". In no other cases is abortion allowed.
The "rodef" argument has been applied by Beit Dins for psychological reasons. For example, Israel will allow abortions for teenaged girls. Considering that teenaged girls are perfectly able to deliver normally (and a rather large percentage of them did give birth less than a century ago in Western nations), it can't be for physical reasons.
(for the goyim in the audience: "rodef" means intruder; under Jewish law, you are allowed to kill an intruder who seeks to do you harm. A "Beit Din" is a religious court which is usually composed of 3 rabbis.)
Fact 5: Jews consider life to begin 30 days after the baby is concieved.
Untrue. Please cite your halachic source for this. You do not sit shiva for a stillbirth. Life begins when the head passes out of the birth canal and you can start breathing. Life ends when you stop breathing (feather test or fogged mirror test). It's that "breath of life" idea.
There might be some orthodox sects which agree with your interpretations, but I certainly don't recognize their authority, and neither do most Jews, or for that matter, the State of Israel.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
and it's rather draconian birth-control policies. The country that accounts for about one fifth of the world's population won't be happy until their population declines for a while.
Sorry for the long post; I've got lots to say about this.
.1 is to take care of all the kids who die before they reach adulthood and can reproduce). Here in the US, we're just below that--about 2.05 kids/woman--and once you take immigration into account, our population is expected to be slowly growing for quite a while. In much of western europe, though, it's already quite a bit different. In most of the Scandanavian countries, as well as France and Germany, they're already down to about 1.4/woman. Same thing in Japan. In Italy, it's an astonishing 1.2--elementary schools are closing all over the country; in some towns, there are more residents over the age of 85 than under the age of 6. China and Russia each have similar fertility numbers (both about 1.4/woman), although each represents a very different situation. In China, of course, the low numbers are probably overall a very good thing: the social problems they've run into because of their restrictive fertility policies (mainly things like, it's lonely not to have any siblings, aunts and uncles, or cousins) obviously don't compare to not having enough to eat. In Russia these days, everything demographic is a bad thing. Not only do they have low fertility rates, but the average life expectancy for Russian males has dropped to something like 63 years. The end result is that Russia's population is actually crashing now, as opposed to countries with low birth rates, where the implosion, if it comes, won't be until the baby boom generation starts dying in serious numbers--prolly around 2020 or so.
/. were, say, News for Construction Workers, well, the reaction to this news might be a little more concerned. After all, a declining population means there's no need for new houses.
.1% over current guesses, the Social Security shortfall disappears completely. Of course, if you lower it by .1%, the shortfall doubles), we could be in for a lot of trouble once the Baby Boomers retire. And the situation will be considerably worse in places like Japan, France and Italy--all three have more generous welfare stats than the US, and all three have a considerably greater demographic gap looming.
Hmm. First off, of course this is old news, although most people haven't heard about it yet. I first learned about the issue in a pretty fascinating article in the NYT Magazine ~2 years ago; also, Slate had one of those little dialogue thingies about a year ago between (IIRC) Erlich and I think the guy who wrote the NYTM article. As usual for debates when at least one of the participants is a total nutcase who believes his entire credibility rests on never admitting he was wrong (I'll let y'all figure out who that was here), the dialogue ended like a particularly vicious vi vs. Emacs spat, but it was pretty informative nonetheless. In any case, NYT and Slate both give free access to current content but charge for a look at their archives, so no links here. (Note: if that isn't the most absurd internet business model I've ever heard of...but I digress.)
Just for some base understanding on the numbers here, the replacement fertility rate for a population is generally taken to be 2.1 children/woman of childbirthing age (the extra
Anyways, the second point (which, btw, even Erlich conceded eventually) is that the "most likely" UN demographic scenario referred to by J--actually, even the UN only calls it the "middle variant" scenario, and makes no claims as to its validity--is complete bunk. Essentially, it comes about by assuming that, starting right now, today, the fertility rates in every single country around the world will magically (and linearly!) begin to converge to 2.1, which they will hit in the year 2050, and then stay there, with a world population of ~8.5 billion, forever. Obviously, that's a ridiculous assumption. Indeed, the low variant figures cited in the linked article are by far the best guesses we have. They don't assume any miraculous changes in the modern lifestyle of people in developed countries that would spontaneously raise the fertility rate up to a sustaining number, and they don't assume that the uneven but precipitous decline in third world fertility rates will magically stop at the 2.1 mark either.
Of course, they're still almost completely worthless. The thing is, we have very little idea as to what causes mass cultural phenomena like prevailing birth rates. Take the exact opposite event: the Baby Boom. At the height of the 18-year long Baby Boom in the US, fertility rates were something like 3.6. (Compare this to the notoriously out of control demographics of India today: fertility rate 3.7.) Then, in a matter of a couple years around 1963 or so, it all stopped. Now the obvious questions are a) why did it happen, and b) why did it stop. Problem is, we don't really know the answer to either of them.
The prevailing notion seems to be that the Baby Boom happened because times were economically good, and people felt economically secure. This is demonstrably an insufficient condition--after all, fertility rates in the other two economic booms of the century--the 20's and the 90's--have been lower than normal. And the idea that today's economic upturn is somehow "less secure" than previous ones simply isn't supported by, for example, polls in which people overwhelmingly say that they feel economically secure.
Now, what did happen in the Baby Boom that was completely different from what's happening in developing nations today is that the culture at large strongly supported the idea that women should marry early, stay at home, and raise children. Then came feminism. While it's not really true to say that we know what stopped the Baby Boom--indeed, the feminist movement was concurrent with the Baby Bust at best (The Feminine Mystique wasn't published until 1963)--it seems like a pretty good bet that the gains of feminism are by now too firmly entrenched to allow a return to the days when women went to college, if at all, to find husbands, married at 20, and stayed at home to have 4 or 5 kids.
As the article points out, this will probably lead to some pretty severe social problems down the road. For example, if instead of being News for Nerds,
Of course, it's not just housing construction that'll be hurt by this. As the article pointed out, dropping birth rates and increasing life expectancies lead to inevitable problems paying for Social Security. Now, as it turns out, this is a bit of a false issue here--the real cause of the Social Security crisis set to hit in about 2030 that we've been hearing so much about isn't so much the low birth rates of today as the extraordinarily high birth rates of the Baby Boom; in other words, assuming fertility rates in the developed world do remain at their current low levels, we'll still only have to go through one Social Security crunch. Still, it's worth noting that, depending on the performance of the economy over the next 30 years (and that's a big depending: for example, if you raise the projected annual GDP growth for the next 30 years by just
Furthermore, disregarding all the money taken out of the economy to pay for Social Security, let's not forget all the money that doesn't go into the economy because of a shortage of workers and young consumers. Not that the poor economic performance of the 70's can at all be traced to one root cause, but it's worth noting that the decline hit in 1973--10 years after the Baby Bust--and lasted until 1982. That is to say, for 38 years after WWII, there was a huge supply of young people acting as both consumers and labor, and the economy steadily grew. Then, that supply of young people dried up...and the economy suddenly stagnated. Worth noting.
Furthermore, for an issue closer to home with most of us here, it's worth considering that most of the great ideas that we all care about come from young people. An old society is probably doomed to not be a technologically innovative one.
Of course, most of the debate so far has been centered on the idea that, since overpopulation in the developing world is a problem, there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with underpopulation. And to be fair, that's sort of due to the tone taken by the article: I, for one, find something very disturbing at the least in the author's implicit notion that the fact that brown people will outnumber us great civilized white people by an even greater margin in 50 years than they do now is necessarily cause for alarm. Still, we have to consider the ideas that a) the fertility rates of the developing world today are no greater than the fertility rates in the west when it was still developing; in fact they're considerably lower; and b) they're dropping very very rapidly.
Now, the fact that they're dropping very rapidly is a very good thing. Some of the causes of the drop--increased industrialization; increased access to health care and birth control; increased life expectancy; increased education for women--are very very good things. But there's no reason why the decline in fertility rates in the third world won't continue until they, too, are below replacement rates. And if any countries need an infusion of young labor and consumers to stimulate their economies, it's developing nations.
Of course, this is not to say that depopulation isn't better than the alternative. Our natural resources are running out, for example: oil reserves are constantly overestimated by oil producing nations, in a futile arms race to get a larger percentage of OPEC quotas for themselves; an article I read in SciAm about a year ago estimated that we'll be out of easy-to-find oil by 2010. But underpopulation still has many attendant problems, both economic and social. I know I, for one, wouldn't want to have grown up without siblings or cousins, and with very few people my age in general. And, furthermore, that I wouldn't want the few friends my age to be spoiled rotten only children of rich parents who spent too much time working to give their kid any parenting except for expensive toys...
Hmm. Sorry if that was a bit disjointed and lengthy. Anyways, just my seven cents or so...
-Dave
The reason many "rich" countries are having less babies is largely due to birth control and better family planning, in my opinion. It isn't exactely that these countries are suddenly having less babies, they are simply having less *unplanned* babies. By crossing multiple birth control devices (such as spermicidically lubricated condums and the pill) unplanned pregnancies can be avoided (in 99% of cases), assuming that they are used correctly and effectively. The correlation between these devices and the rich countries is obvoius - the pill is expensive.
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
1) It assumes that eventually the population demographics of the whole world will follow that of "more developed regions" as the less developed regions become more developed ... and it assumes that the whole world will become "more developed".
2) If, indeed, the whole world becomes "more developed", then the rate of resource consumption and environmental impact will rise dramatically, unless said development follows very different patterns. (That's possible with new technologies and intelligent "leap-frogging", but it's not a given, especially if we in the "more developed" regions don't make a major emphasis of setting a much better example than we do now.)
3) Even if this population forcast is correct, world population will peek at roughly 9 billion. That's 3 people for ever 2 we have now. Combine this with #2, and it's pretty clear that human population trends still have disasterous potential even without the related age-related demographic trends.
Most of the air we breathe is from the oxygen in the ocean. Dunno if its true, but I've heard that there is enough oxygen in the ocean to last us about 1000 years.
Colics.
Q-Bert (Daddy of a 5-week old girl)
First it was Television in 50's. Now, Internet and Phone Sex is substituting real sex, i think mainly because of AIDS fear. Condoms also helps. Elevation of cancer disease ratio is also noticed, maybe because of new medicines and chemicals that are not tested enough (or even conspiracy, who knows?)
Well, this is not so good news. Population should grow, it is natural. Something is reeeeally wrong.....
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
That all depends. Having kids and not being able to afford them regardless of total combined household income is a bad idea, period.
An another note, more and more fathers are becoming "stay at home dads." There are studies that are finding that the at-home fathers can be as nurturing and beneficial to the child as the mother (and often more so). And the dads are loving it.
Regardless of who makes more money, it's up to the individual couples to decide. There is no room for stereotype or sexism in this matter. It's all personal choice.
> (paraphrase) .. Linux will set the world free.
PUH-LEEZ! You say that anyone who can afford $30 worth of cheap-o computer hardware can run Linux and can, in a few short years, be prepared to take a top-paying job in the US? Come now. Surely you jest. There are a few problems with that theory. One of which is distribution. Even if a Mexican farmer, mired in the pit of poverty, were able to scrape together $30 for a PoS computer, where would he buy it?
More likely is the case that cheap fuel cells will change the face of humanity. Those exist NOW, but are encumbered by our DoD, DoE, and the energy industry in this country. If these things were to hit the market in an affordable fashion, gone would be the days of coal-burning power plants or (though they are much cleaner and safer) nuclear fission reactors. If ever fusion enters the picture in a meaningful way, and we've figured out a way to make a H->He-fusion/He->H-fission breeder reactor, power will be cheap and plentiful for everyone on earth.
THAT will be a revolution, and THAT will allow the hypothetical Mexican farmer to have the leisure time to buy a computer, learn C and C++ (or whatever), and go and search for a top-paying job in the US without starving.
Cripes... you'd think these people were running Linsux on their brains the way the reality mapping has been virtualized.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
You misunderstand me. I was attempting to find a reason from an outsider's point of view. I was attempting to observe the system, rather than manipulate the system (Man, I've been reading too much Godel Escher Bach). From a purely logical point of view, there is no reason for people in richer countries to have children. But since people are still having children, this leads you to determine that having children is not a logical act in richer countries. Rather, it is an emotional act. Aha!
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I never claimed that the amount of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust was infinite. I simply claimed that there are lot of fossil fuels available and that other forms of energy will be developed before all supplies of fossil fuels have been exhausted. Do you have any evidence that contradicts this view ?
Unsupported assertions and highly qualified hypothetical statements about possible exhaustion of resources such as:
There is quite a lot of coal in the world, but still, known reserves are limited. One reason they may seem like a lot is that the industrialised countres burn petroleum instead. If petroleum resources run short, coal may not last as long.
are not evidence
Why is oil not being produced in Bavaria or Romania ? Is is because the reserves have been completely exhausted in these areas or is it because it is cheaper to produce it elsewhere e.g. the Middle East and transport it to Bavaria and Romania ?
I see that you admit that new oil fields are being discovered and that natural gas is so plentiful and cheap that it is used in huge quantities to replenish oil wells.
In the event of a major man made catastrophe such as a War or the introduction of Communism then the standard of living will fall. Such falls in living standards are not the result of overpopulation or overconsumption of resources but are the result of human stupidity.
In the liberal western capitalist democracies standards of living have been rising since the start of the industrial age with setbacks caused by war or revolution. There has never been a fall in living standards in any such society that is attributable to overpopulation or overconsumption of resources. Do you have a counterexample ?
Income has not fallen sharply for 40% of the population of the US. Their incomes may not have risen but have they fallen in absolute terms ? Besides what about the other 60% of the US population. The US population being higher today (273M) than in 1970 (203M).
I restate my understanding of Julian Simon's position and my question:
Julian Simon's position is that the quality of life or standard of living of the human race is better now than it ever has been in the past and that all available evidence shows that the standard of living of the human race as a whole will continue to rise.
Do you dispute this and do you have any real evidence that there is a shortage of resources ?
And every one of those 9 billion people will want to go to your favorite beach -- with their dog.
Malthus is just a red herring. Read Garrett Hardin.
Please note the main proponents of smaller populations have always been those right-wing organizations, such as Sierra Club, UN and the Committee for Public Safety.
Surprised you there? This renowned right-wing organization, besides decapitating its opponents, also called for a reduction in France's population by as much as 80%.
people in developed countries found a way to have sex ( which is good) without having babies (which isn't a good thing for a career minded female ). Besides, I don't think people stopped having babies.. they just don't have lots of babies. It is quite uncommon to find a middle aged woman with no kids
You say, "Strategies vary in the natural world, but larger animals don't usually have populations that grow to starvation."
Contrary example: deer. They reproduce until they run out of resources, then they starve en masse or succumb to a sweeping incident of some major disease. Beaver do the same thing.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Keep in mind that this organization is a moderately-radical "Pro-Life" organization. If you look around the site a bit, you find a *lot* of propaganda-type writing. Frankly, it reads a lot like some of the Catholic Church items on pro-life. They barely mention that they are using the *low* estimate for population.
Also: Check out the following statement (From http://www.pop.org/reports/facts.htm )
the population of the world will begin to plummet in a little
over four decades. Between 2040 and 2050, the world's population will
decrease by about 85 million.
Despite the alarmist tone, a reduction of 85 million out of a total of (estimated) 9-12 billion can hardly be called a plummet. Hmm...less than one percent. For most things, that is statistically insignificant.
I wonder how the U.N. likes their study being twisted in this fashion.
Not that anyone has to worry...a bunch of baby seals is more dangerous than the U.N.
Okay, that's enough...Just wanted to point out the bias there...
The tendancy for people in rich nations to have fewer children has been well known for a long time. There are several factors which contribute to it, some of which are:
- In an agricultural society lots of kids equals lots of hands to help with the work once they have grown up a bit.
- Poorer countries don't have things like pension plans, so mom and dad make sure that there will be lots of children to support them in their old age.
- Rich parents have better things to do with their money than spend it on children.
- Rich parents have the education, and the means by which they can practice birth control.
No fair! Judaism got a head start...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
1. Lowest fertility level? Maybe it's time chicks stop falling for the stupid Italian jock myth?
2. No siblings/cousins? Cool! Now they'll be able to really hit on anyone!
3. Seems Italian females are forced to migrate (not enough rich or dumb Italian guys)
4. I guess Italian guys are just to busy fscking other (blond) Euro babes, and even they got tired of Italian women
:-)
>I won't ask you to change your minds. Obviously you're doing the human gene-pool a favor by not reproducing.
Ah, biting wit. Might you be from the British Isles then? THAT'S a land of healthy genetic diversity. Stick a bunch of people on an island and see how ugly their faces become.
Probably fewer branches than a Morman family reunion.
Social Security is the biggest pyramid scheme in the history of mankind. It depends on significantly more new workers coming in than retirees going out. If this balance were to shift, it would require so much money that even if ALL tax revenue (no military, no school lunch, nothing) went to it, it would not even begin to cover the cost of Social Security.
Needless to say, this could lead to abuse of the elderly, mandatory euthanasia at a certain age (say 65), class revolt and much more unpleasantness.
Therefore you are wrong about there being more resources for the children. There would be substantially less because the elderly will suck up every available resource and then some.
Eventually, drastic measures (euthanasia) will have to be taken, or economies will collapse, leading to a worldwide depression.
Even without having to care for the elderly, fewer consumers could have the same affect. Suddenly there is less demand, thus there is economic stagnation, businesses go out of business, and economies collapse.
Anyways, the planet is nowhere near it's carrying capacity. If people lived in one huge city with the same density as NYC, they would fit in the state of Texas.
As far as agriculture, we have more food surplus now than we ever have had in human history. Grain literally rots in storage because no one wants it. Not to mention the vast potential of the ocean for growing food. Some small experiments with kelp growing have shown that it is feasible, but there has never been an economic incentive to do it. If food ever became a scarce commodity, you can bet you would see these ocean farms pop up all over the place.
In other words, there is nothing to fear from a growing population, but there is much to fear from a shrinking population.
The CDC and WHO are telling us that the incidence of HIV and AIDS is highest in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other underdeveloped area. These are also the same areas that have the highest birth rates, which leads one to conclude that industrialism and sexual education will naturally conspire to keep birth rates down. Throw in a dash of infertility that comes with pollution, and the picture looks even better. One thing I've not yet seen accounted for in these models, however, is the end result of AIDS: Despite treatment, the many many people in underdeveloped regions who have this disease are going to (surprise) die from it, creating a population disappearance roughly equal in size to that of a decent war. Given the lack of treatment options for this in underdeveloped countries, this is something we can count on as well, and factor into the population deflation model.
Oh, once everyone hears this they'll think its okay to start popping 'em out again..
I know this is offtopic but I've never seen the term boffin before.
I take it this estimate was made before the green revolution. Right now, with 6 billion people in the world, we throw away uneaten nearly half the food we grow. In other words, with absolutely zero increases in agritechnology over today, we could feed nearly twice the world's current population. And again, even assuming we never increase our agricultural efficiency beyond today's levels, we could feed much more than that by simply farming more land. We're no where close to farming all available farmable land today. Anyone who estimates the maximum limit of the world's carrying capacity for humans at under 25 billion is seriously out of touch with the realities of modern agriculture. Now, if we take into account the fact that agritechnology is NOT going to stop advancing tomorrow, it seems highly unlikely we'll come anywhere close to maximizing the possible population of the planet during the next several centuries. And if lowering birth rate trends continue, it seems quite likely we'll be no where near our limits a couple thousand years from now. This hardly qualifies as "rapidly approaching" in my book...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
However, this is predicated upon a number of factors, chief among them that world-wide trends will follow the path laid out by us in the first world.
Here's how it has worked here: at around the turn of the century, our life spans here started to go way up; then we all started to get better educated and most of us started putting off having kids til later in life. Then in the middle of the century, women all of a sudden got sick of hanging out at home cleaning up and cooking. So they all went off to college and got jobs, and all of a sudden first-worlders stopped having kids, cause we were all too busy getting smart, getting rich, and having protected sex.
Try to imagine this scenario in India/China/Malawi/Nigeria.
There is no middle class of any substantial size (>20%/population) in any of these countries, and there won't be anytime soon. Therefore the populations will not start shrinking anytime soon. Therefore, when American population has shrunk to 100m, (which it will, barring unforseen catastrophes), most of the world will still be accelerating into a hell-hole of environmental destruction and continued overpopulation.
Yes, there are positive scenarios out there, but no, they are not realistic unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the first world deals with the third world (i.e. reduces exploitation in favor of assistance).
Also, please note that most of the prophets of a smaller world are working for extreme right-wing foundations. The slashdot cited article was by the American Enterprise Institute (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute (very conservative think tank)
That doesn't mean they are wrong, it just means they are all coming from a similar ideological perspective, which, despite protestations to the contrary, CAN affect how science is interpreted.
\
For one thing, increases in birth control and advocacy about safe sex is number one. Another is that our rich society doesn't WANT to deal with having 9 or 10 little mouths to feed! There is more to life than raising kids and changing diapers! People want to spend their money they've made and live a better lifestyle than their parents did before them. If that means having only 1 or 2 children then that is fine. IMHO having 1 or 2 kids is MUCH better than 10 since you don't have to spread your love among 10 different kids. No matter what anyone says, when you have a lot of kids, you MUST divide up your time, energy and love among them. They all can't get the same attention. Stick to 2 kids and make their lives really wonderful and let them grow up to be decent adults.
I'm surprised as well that the UN is just figuring this out. About 10 years ago, as I began studying population and global life-support issues, I discovered that there is a direct (and very repeatable) corellation between the raising of living standards and the automatic lowering of birthrate.
As noted by many other folks here, this seems to be a no-brainer when you look at industrial societies vs. agricultural ones. I won't repeat their points here, just read the above.
I will say, though, that something as simple as running an electric power-line into a village will begin to affect the living standard (bringing power, heat, light, communications, cooking abilities, appliances, and all the other stuff we take for granted in industrial societies) and thus begin to lower the birthrate. Given our newer technologies of solar cells, fuel cells, and other off-the-grid power and wireless communications systems, we no longer even need the wire.
If you're interested in this topic, and want to help us figure out ways of raising the living standards of people by finding ways to bring them power, water, shelter, local hydroponic food production, etc., then please check out the Reality Sculptors Project and join some of the mailing lists there. We're always happy to have more sharp minds focused on these issues.
If you're into geodesic domes, Bucky Fuller, Design Science, floating cities, fuel-cells, airships, futurism, and doing-more-with-less, this might be the place for you. :-)
Patrick Salsbury
if any of you are in militias than you know that the gov said when the world reaches 6 billion they will kill out 4 billion people to reduce it back to 2 billion, so now we reached 6 billion, looks like its the end folks.. well maybe not for us cause the gov will need smart computer people like us, but if you know someone who really has no purpose in life, say bye cause chances are, he will die... that is all
The problem isn't that we'll run out of oil any more. I don't know that that would be such a bad thing even, considering the pollution... (Okay, so we'd also have to trash coal, but that's besides the point.) Our real problem is: if we burn all the oil off with our cars and all, we won't be able to breathe by the time we have a crisis. Realistically, now is the time to start making the transition to non-petrolium based fuels. If it costs us more to make products and the standard of living temporarily goes down, so be it. It will only be 20 years or so before we're on the rebound, and our earth would be the better for it. Not that any red-blooded american would ever consider such a thing :) (or arab, or venusuelan, etc...)
As far as I understand, the rate of population growth has not reached a point where the sum total of people on earth is actually going down; instead, the rate of growth is slowing for the first time since any of the major worldwide plagues. In other words, if you were to visualize a parabola plotted on a graph, we have not reached the apex of the curve; rather, the curve is starting to flatten out. We're not out of the woods yet.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
Wow, am I the only logged in user on this thread?
Anyway, here goes. The first AC was more right then this one. This one seems a die hard feminist, though the previous was a little too extreme.
Lets look at the real compromise: Kids need loving, nurturing parents. Like ones that stay home. I don't care which one, it's no difference. Lets point out that it's both parents fault. And it's a decison for each couple to make, who should work. That decision should never be 'both' though.
The point about poor single mothers is well made though. But that's an ENTIRELY difference social aspect, dealing with deadbeat dads and what not. Extended family raising family can be positive. Daycares though, are a mixed bag. Some are good, some aren't. In general, a stable parent would be better.
I've never believed in these predictions that people make. It's like, when I was six in the 1970s they promised us all that due to declining birth rate and computerisation we'd have our pick of jobs and be really well employed. Not until we got up and created the Web, for ourselves, we didn't. Declining birth rate? HA! I don't believe it. In China people have two "official" children and several that hide in the woods when the government comes sniffing around. Eventually the third world is going to get on boats, head over to the first world, and start breeding like flies again. First to Canada, then through Canada to the USA.
I don't. Especially if the demand rises. We don't farm a lot of land in North America that we could if it weren't for the fact that there isn't enough money to be made at it. If the world actually came anywhere close to eating all the food it currently produces (as opposed to eating about half of it and throwing away the other half uneaten, as we do now), farmers across North America would rejoice and start cultivating all those extra acres. If that didn't saturate the market and prices remained high, they'd start buying more land to cultivate. North American farmers alone could quite easily feed a few billion more people.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I'm actually surprised that, by 1999, people are still thinking the global population growth is a major problem. Yes, it's a problem for Third World countries that have to deal with famine. But it could be pointed out that the main reason why these countries face such dire conditions is not surpopulation itself, but rather the irresponsible leaders they have. Remember Ethiopia the way it was portrayed in the 1980's? Little babies with flies all over, the more the better, because it made us cough up a few bucks out of guilt.
However, what wasn't told was that the leaders of Ethiopia were engaged in a bloody war, and that all the millions of dollars that could be spent relieving hunger were being dissimated as armament for a pointless conflict.
Anyway. My point is: the Earth is capable of sustaining us, even if we reach 10 billion. There's a lot to be learned in the meantime, but it's false to say that the sole reason for an upcoming ecological disaster is population alone. In the 1970's, the UN predicted we'd pretty much reach 6 billion by 2000, and that it would be a disaster.
What they didn't count on? Technology. Technology has made farming and the transport of goods more efficient. As such, I don't think we're any worse now as a species that we were in 1970. What we need to work on is education of the people, and try for once to coexist in peace.
I'm not advocating against birth control, mind; that's what I mean by "education". But I don't think we're reaching critical mass any time soon.
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
>Granted this method does not work for those that need sexual gratification on demand.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Isn't the ability to have sexual intercourse without getting pregnant the whole reason birth control exists? Suggesting that people practice birth control by refraining from sex (either totally or during certain times of a woman's cycle) sounds to me like advising people to cut down on auto-generated air pollution by staying at home. It may work, but it doesn't make much sense to cut oneself off from the advantages of living with a group of human beings when less drastic solutions like riding a bike or taking a bus are available.
>It is not guess work, rather it is scientific fact.
It is quite close to guess work for the untrained non-scientists doing the actual measuring and computing involved.
You do have some points: Intermittent abstinence is better than nothing, and I did fail to distinguish between abstinence based on the timing of a woman's period and abstinence based on temperatures. In my view, however, both methods are undesirable, as they do not solve the problem - they merely dodge it. They do not provide protection, physical or chemical, against pregnancy. Regardless of whatever effectiveness it has, abstinence is merely avoidance, and not a true solution.
-Mars
Check out the UN Pop Growth figgures.
The birth rate for canada, the us, and most of europe has been LESS than the death rate for years. The only source of pop growth in these areas is immigration (or is it emmigration, can never keep those straight).
For years we have known that as standard of living raises above a certain point, birth rate drops. The world population problem has been one of getting the rest of the world's standard of living up to the point where it's population stabilizes.
As to why? well, as standard of living rises, people have a decreasing awareness of their own mortality, and increasing diversion to do things that kids would interfere with. People have children to RAISE their standard of living, and in situations where it is already high, the marginal utility of that extra set of hands and the emotional conection between parent and child, can easily become negative, especialy if child labor and chattle customs are discarded.
A stable high-tech population is MUCH smaller than the one we currently have, which is one thing that many eco-alarmists overlook (I am concerned about the environment, but the world is NOT going to end in five years if I eat a burger)
My $0.02
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Two words: birth control
Birth control is pretty much a 20th century invention.
I doubt couples back in the day were like "Hey, let's have 14 kids." They just sort of, er, happened most of the time I think.
I could be wrong. I've been wrong before.
Both Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News have had thought-provoking articles on this topic recently.
I demand more genocide! This world is already far too crowded. I'm tired of walking around and seeing tons of people. Bring on WW3!
There are just to many factors to try and predict. For example, what if India and Pakistan(sp) go and duke it out with nukes? What will happen to the world population then? Or if the US & China go at it. These are just situations possible today. Who knows what technological or sociological ocurences could through of the results in the future?
Furthermore we are attempting to predict something unprecidented in the history of the Earth. Never before on has one speices dommintated all areas of life in global civilisation filling all areas of the planet. It has never happend before. In fact, the biomass of humans on the planet right now is proably greater than that of any other speices from kingdom Animila ever.
I'm just trying to say that any study of this sort that tries to predict such a highly variable things such as human population, based only upon the present, in a time period so far away, should be taken with a grain of salt. This study truly means nothing, not the dawning of a new era, or the end of the world.
"He is wisests, that knows he knows nothing." --Socrates
Maybe the ½ children are hidden away.. I mean, they must be violent; think of the saying "If I had half a mind to <violent act>, I'd <violent act>" .. makes 'ya think, eh?
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'm sorry, but I don't find anything mysterious about that. It's a classic example of circular logic.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When virtual reality becomes cheaper than dating, the human race is doomed.
first manned mission in 2010
linear increase in immigrants to 100/year by 2050
additional native-born population
Mar's population should get to 100,000,000 before anyone even thinks of trying to control it.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Guess 4: The Catholic Church and other anti-birth-control religious groups are taken less seriously in richer countries. The USA has a lot of Catholics, but most of them seem to be OK with disregarding the stance against birth control.
Guess 5 (similar to #1 but not identical): In richer countries, you're expected to provide not only more things but also more space. Ever look at how crowded apartments in the former Soviet Union are, especially by American standards? Who's going to have six kids here (at least in the higher social classes) without being in possession of AT LEAST a four-bedroom house, so the kids aren't more than two to a room??
Guess 6: Smaller window of opportunity. Biological maturity is occurring younger, marriage (and usually childbirth) is delayed until much older than it once was, at the risks of childbearing later in life are highly publicized in this country. There seems to be at most a ten-year period (mid-20s to mid-30s) for upper-middle class Americans to do all their breeding.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
There are a number of problems in the Malthusian prediction of overpopulation that were not evident to Malthus or even to later commentators like Ehrlich. Julian Simon's work, however should be disregarded as the piece of crap that it is - technology can no more make something out of nothing than religion can. Population crashes have occured in the past - the Easter Island case is a good example - and Simon's reasons why it can't happen to us are no more than wishful thinking and abuse of statistics.
Most animal populations, even those without predators, manage to limit their population before they reach the starvation and disease point. The reason for this is easy to see from a neodarwinist perspective: the odds of having any surviving offspring drop dramatically if the population is at the limit of its resources. For millenia primitive human societies were stable without predators, famine or disease as major problems. This was not entirely clear until fairly recently, and some of the reasons are still a little mysterious.
Nonetheless, human populations have crashed in the past. The reason in most cases is that resources appear to be plentiful until they are completely spent. That is what happened on Easter Island and it has happened repeatedly in China. It doesn't seem that unlikely that it's true for us too. Petroleum will seem plentiful until it's gone. The oil fields in Pennsylvania seemed plentiful until they dissappeared. New fields were found, but one by one they are emptying too. There can not be an infinte amount of oil in the world. Technology may bring us new energy sources in the mean time, and it may not - but do you want to bet your life on it? There are fairly important reasons to think the end of oil isn't too far off.
These days in industrialised countries, the best chance you can give your children is to have fairly few and not strech your resources too much in raising them. The odds of survival of a single upper or middle class child are far greater than that of a child from a large, lower class family. Neodarwinism simply favours the smaller family. Birth control and abortion makes this possible.
Another major trend in population is the social empowerment of women. Women, having invested generally far more in a child than men, tend logically to raising fewer of them and devoting more of their resources to each child. The correlation between the education and empowerment of women and low population growth is very, very strong.
So, the decline in the birth rate is good news, but not necessarily a cure-all for population problems. A continuing decline in the birth rate depends on continuing industrialisation of the underdeveloped world - by no means a sure thing these days - and a growth in the education and empowerment of women. The general catastrophy of global overpopulation may be avoided by lower birth rates in some countries, but Malthusian collapses are already going on in some parts of the world, and that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
Also, it's worth noting that not everyone gains in a low or zero growth population. By the time population stabilises, median age in many countries will be very high, and most of those societies will only be able to function if they allow a lot of immigration. The future is not very rosy for culturally isolating ethnic nation states. How will the Japanese or the Germans feel about the possibility of a nation where they are not a majority? How will Americans feel when most of the young come from another culture? There is already one country that looks like this: the USA's northern neighbour.
Not everyone will be very happy about it, but the future looks more and more like Canada.
The entry for "Distractions" was close, but it's overly simplistic. People in G7 societies have better things to do than have children, and are educated enough to know that bringing a child into the world has a significant long-term impact on their ability to enjoy themselves. It may be seen by some as a shirking of responsibility, but it can also be seen as a commentary on the state of the society: why waste your time and energy on a child when you can spend it on yourself and your spouse/partner/friends?
I don't want a child (I -abhor- children for reasons both enumerated above and not germane to this inquiry), and most of my partners have been like-minded.
"I may one day have children, but they will be beautiful, intelligent, EVIL little fuckers." This has been the philosophy my partners and I have agreed upon almost without acknowledging it.
Perhaps later in life, the nesting instinct will come into play. There is a small pang when I think the "family name" could die with me (being the only male child in the family). But neither is enough to make me want to give up my autonomy for a small screaming hunk of meat just yet.
On the other hand, sex is awfully enjoyable, but most conventional contraception is a huge detriment to sex (do be blunt, condoms -suck,- so I am personally in favor of RU-486, preventitive pharmaceuticals, or IUD applications). So there is the outside chance I might be a daddy before I want. Hopefully not, but applicants for the *ahem* position of "mate" are being accepted.
;-)
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
According to the basic principles of evolution, this will not last. Those who raise as many children as the environment allows (which means about 30*12/9 children for know, but that "9" will surely become smaller as the species adapts) will multiply (of course) and the others will fall in numbers (of course). The result will always be that, in time, all resources are being used as quickly as they can be produced, and then we will go back to living on the threshold of starvation, as is natural to our species. Nature isn't nice, even if you are nice to it.
In poor countries, the people are.. Well... poor. They don't have any money. Let's try and figure out why they have children. At first they're expensive, they consume food and water, and give little in return. But eventually they can help out in the fields farming and such.
Now, if someone has a child at the age of 25, 15 years later, they'd be 40. This might not seem to be a debilitating age to most of us, but imagine the conditions in poorer countries. In a third world, a person at the age of 40 is at retirement age! But guess what? They have no money to "retire". Hmmm, who's going to look after them in their old age? Why their offspring, of course! Children are a means of retirement! No wonder the birthrate is so high in poorer countries. They need children to be able to survive later in life.
Now, let's look at richer countries. We obviously do not need children to look after us when we grow old. That's what an RRSP is for. Besides, children are expensive to have. There's almost no point in having children. Maybe most of the children born today are accidents?! Maybe they're a status symbol, a way of saying: "We're well off enough to have a few kids of our own". Well, whatever the reasons, they certainly aren't as compelling as the poorer countries. Hence the lower birth rate.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Unfortunately, there is a "Cycle of Poverty" which results in population explosions. I seem to remember reading about this while studying Galbreith's(sp) economic theories.
:-)
It basically goes like this: a poor family starts out with a man and a woman who, without any other means, has to farm, not to make money but just to feed themselves('substence famring' I think it is called). Since they are pretty poor and can only afford to feed themselves, they can't hire help, expand their farm, or do anything else that would help lessen the burden on them. Farming with minimal tools is very back breaking work. Couple this with the suggestion that since they can't afford any other means of entertainment except for the one that they can provide with eachother(ie sex) and before long you have kids. This is great for the farm since the family get some free labor and suddenly they become more productive. For example, this family has 5 kids. This means 7 possible workers to help maintain the farm but they still aren't getting a head...only maintaining their status. The last problem comes when the parents die or become to old to maintain the farm. You now have 5 kids who are now adults who want same land. In the best case senerio, the land is split 5 ways, but this was only enough land for 7 to live on. What happens when the 5 kids start having families of their own? Couple this nightmare with various cultural practices, for instance only the eldest male gets all of the land and you have a grand mess. The cycle can repeat ad infinatum.
The suggestion on how to break this "Cycle of Poverty" is two fold.
1. Stop the population from expanding, maybe by any means possible.
2. Raise education levels.
The first suggestion is a no brainer. If a country has lower birth rates and the economy doesn't change, then average wealth and GNP have to go up.
The second suggestion is more intruging. It seems to suggest that there is a causal link between level of education and birth rate. Indeed higher education levels have all sorts of good effects like spurring the economy and generally improves the standard of living. The elderly are living long. An interesting effect in the G7 countries(almost all of which have high average age in their populations which means their population is declining) is that young couples are putting off having kids till their older(they wait till their out of college or have their job setup). Another interesting effect is that they have less kids because, unlike 3rd world countries, having big families works against you. For instance, raising 2 kids is far cheaper than raising 5. All of these facts seem to be a negative feedback against the cycle.
I'm not claiming that either of these solutions are easy to accomplish. Both are nearly impossible to do without any money. I believe in my lifetime, I will see something really horrible happen to the world wide population becuase of the population expandsion. I would not be totally surprised if there is a truly epic famine that sweeps a large portion of the world that effects billions.
Either that or monitor radiation. ;>
Heh.
To me it's ovbious. The non-industrial nations have the "grow-your-own-farm-hands" system, because it's brute force labor to survive and you neighbor is doing the same, so no one else is going to help you.
That is also why in many lesser developed countries, girls are less desireable then boys - boys can do brute force, while women have to be given away for money (dowery) and can only do domestic chores (or so goes the stereotype).
The theory proposed by some for the "individualistic in modern society" isn't right because the social norms are passed down from generation to generation. I've found people who come from big families usually want big families, while people from small families want few or no children.
And let's face it, it isn't for economic reasons -- there are a lot of big families on welfare. I have lived in these areas and the mentality is "have another child to get more welfare". Sad..
News for nerds? I think so. Allow me to meander:
I've always been of the opinion that global overpopulation is the root of a lot of our problems. Perhaps even most of them. And while this report is somewhat heartening, it's still a little depressing that will not be until 2050 before we *might* start to see any change.
That's nice and all, but there's a fair chance I might not live that long. Hell, our ecosystem might not make it that long. The time for change is really right now.
Making a bit of a stretch, I think that free software (as in beer) + low-cost internet connectivity could be what saves us in the end. Remember the stories about Linux being used in Mexico, where their CS budgets were way below those in more affluent countries? Imagine both the social and economic possibilities of hard-working people who just happened to be born in an impoverished country being able to run a powerful unix-like operating system on $30 (or less) worth of hardware. Just as migrant athletes from Caribbean islands leave their countries to play baseball in the US, someday very soon we may see people who ordinarily would have lived their lives in poverty under an oppressive government having the leisure to choose a top paying job in the country of their choice.
But I digress. My point is this: due to the rapid global socialization that Internet access provides, we may soon see the most rapid transition from poverty to total empowerment that the world has ever known. And when people are empowered about their lives, they will go from simply trying to survive to being able to step back from their lives, and make conscious decisions about their futures and the futures of their children.
It is for these reason of empowerment that I believe population rates will begin to go down in countries where tools such as internet access and good health care are available. Consider birth control. People won't start using birth control until they can a) get good information about birth control and b) get birth control agents c) they understand why it's important to use birth control in the first place. Here in the US, we have the luxury of obtaining that knowledge and applying it wisely. Once that luxury is spread around a bit, I am not certain, but very, very hopeful, that rapid change will finally occur.
And that, my friends, is what excites me about Linux. An operating system by and for the people. The viral nature of the GPL may in the end be the force that sets the people of this planet free. At least I hope it does. Global economic upheaval r00lz.
Ross
The suggestion that a redistribution of the world's population as numbers increase in developing nations and decrease in more developed ones would result in a shift in global politics is old hat, alarmist and without precedent.
Even if this were an inevitable future, it is certainly nothing to be fearful of. I would imagine that many who tout this as a possibility see it as global domination by the unwashed masses. This is certainly not the case as many lesser developed nations are gradually coming into their own in terms of technological superiority. Fifty years ago, who would have thought that Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and many other Asian countries along the pacific rim would become technological powerhouses?
Note that a larger population does not mean increased political power. If that were so, many third world nations would be equal or superior to other smaller developed nations in terms of political power. This is simply not the case. In the world of politics, money, wealth and industry mean power. An increased workforce does not necessarily mean increased production or wealth. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Note that the article is a student paper and is certainly not the final word on the subject of population decline. There are many, many other factors that can come into play.
ian
We tackled population models in my ODE (ordinary differential equations) class just last week. And we made some rather startling conclusions. Our model was a modified Von Foester growth rate equation (sometimes called a coalition model since it claims that humans, due to technology and other factors, are able to beat the standard Malthusian model) altered to have a delay factor and also a unequal use of resources factor. That is, we took into account the fact that you dont have kids if youre an very young or very old and that an infant does not require the same amount of resources as an adult.
These delay-differential equations can be tricky to solve (at least for me, I don't claim to be a math genuis) and certainly as with any model the values picked for the parameters can have big effects on the model. So we analyzed our model qualitatively:
Essentially, our model predicted that the Earth would have an infinate population in real time (in about 40 years). This clearly can't happen! So we modified our model again to include a carying capacity for the earth. Obviously, no one knows how many people the earth can support- so we tried many values for this parameter.
We concluded that there are two possible futures: In the first the case there is a "doomsday" in about 40 years where we hit a maximum sustainable population and then become extinct. In the second case we don't quite hit the maximum population and oscillate between it and a lower population level with a period of about 100 years. The delay factor (ie how long before you have kids) determines which side of the bifucation point lies our future.
Its interesting to note that the Von Foester model (which by the way agrees extremely well with historical population data) predicts a faster-than exponential-growth rate. Only humans, and a few organisims like rats that live with humans, display a growth rate this fast!
2^5
I live in the U.S. and my parents had 9 children. My wife's family had 5 children. We hope to have 7. We do it for religious reason and that will not show up in anyone's stats. You never know what new religious beliefs people will adopt in the new millenium. They may want more children, they may want less. Wealthier countries tend to have less religious devotion than third world nations. Maybe that is why we are having less in the U.S. and more in Africa. If you want to keep the population down, keep people from praying and going to Church/Temple/etc.
Sources:
I guess you could consider this the "open source" of the pharmaceutical world.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
It's that simple.
In rich countries, where afluent people enjoy their high standard of living, adding a child means more expenses. Most people, who have the choice, would rather have two luxury sedans than a mini-van and a Civic. Understandably so. Also, in afluent countries, education and material possessions are a matter of fact. Providing your kids with a nominal standard of living in an afluent country is very costly. They have to have their own wardrobe, their own school supplies, their own little-league uniform... Their own phone (line), their own TV/VCR/PC... Their own car and college fund. Otherwise, you are a despised parent, for denying your kids that which their peers take for granted.
In poor societies, where feeding the child is the biggest, and often only concern, the cost is much lower. A loaf of bread can be sub-divided a little more finely, cheaper and hand-me-down clothes have longer life-spans, and worn out shoes are the norm.
Poor countries (and poor people in rich countries) tend not to keep up with the Joneses to the same extent that the rich do. Their value systems are different - less material and more familial.
As a 20-something with a 3kGT, I'm in no hurry to trade it in for a station wagon, Mercedes or otherwise. There's yer cause.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"Six Billion and Feeling Fine" ?
Interesting comment from presumably a upper middle class North American. Unfortunately the mostly placid and content, high-living, energy-consuming, SUV driving populace of the western democracies represents a small minority of the population of this planet (fortunately for the planet).
The "average" person out of that 6 billion leads a live of quiet desperation living in a slum on the outskirts of a large city. He tries to scratch a meager existence for him and his family while trying to stay out of the attention of the military and quasi-military dictatorship running his nation state. The amazing scenes of the western consumer society flickering on the TV owned by the local blackmarket thug must seem pretty remote.
We don't even need any more people to ruin this planet. All we need is the for the poorest's 5 billion to achieve the living standard of the richest billion. If western countries's populations are starting to fall then so much the better since a westerner probably has the environmental impact of 5 or more third world citizens. The real chilling events to look forward to are forced mass population movements as sea levels starts to rise and increasing military conflicts over sources of fresh water.
I don't profess to live a life of poverty or have solar panels on my house. But at least I am not oblivious to the real state of the population of this world. I know I'm alright but many people aren't.
Most of the laws were either addressing sanitation issues (for instance, the prohibition against eating pork
Unfortunately, all this continues to be taken as "God wants us to keep making more people!" *sigh* How about providing for the ones we HAVE, first??
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Disclaimer: Be fair... read entire post before judging by the subject header. Good to see occasional humanity topics on Slashdot... I get real tired of kernel posts, etc. (which I don't want to block altogether).
:)
;D
My wife and I are "child-free" by choice. For those that don't understand the difference from "child-less" (a negative term implying something lacking or perhaps a medical defect...), this means we don't want kids, will never have them, and have already taken steps to be sure we're not taken by "suprise" where we'll have to go to the local woman's clinic and duck insults & eggs from the militant jesus-nazis protesting outside (who apparently are too busy to become a Big Brother or Big Sister for the local orphanages...).
In a rich country you can become educated and PLAN your life. Whatever your choices in life... planning them makes the most of everything. My wife and I wish to be "selfish", and spend our modest income on ourselves. This means I can be a kid forever, buy the toys that I want, and take vacations when I want. I don't have to answer to anybody except myself and my life partner. And no, we "won't change our minds" either. Stop asking.
In poor countries, SOME of the overpopulation is attributed to culture -- a good wife is a baby factory and shows what a man you are. Overpopulation is also caused by lack of education. In many parts of the world, birth control and yes even CONDOMS are difficult to obtain. If the Catholic Church wields power, they're even taught that condoms *themselves* are a sin. If you can overcome brainwashing then you can make your own choice, but this isn't everyone's fortune. Even today MANY people believe the earth is only ~4,000 years old - that's what the BIBLE SEZ. So who wants to compound their sins - just plan sex without a condom.
Even over here the presence of wealth and education does NOT equate to educated individuals making the best decisions they could. Teen pregnancy is very high in southern New Hampshire and plenty of other places.
IMO a population drop is a GOOD THING. The planet can only support so many people before we really mess it up. Up in northern New Hampshire - what you would call the wilderness - people want the State to trap and "get rid of" pesky bears that wander in to scavange the trash humans create so much of. After all, those UNATTENDED CHILDREN need to be kept safe from bears, the internet, beavis and butthead, and godsmack. Anyone can be a BREEDER, but it takes a saint to be a responsible PARENT.
Carpet-bomb the world in condoms, I say, or we'll be so crowded we'll nuke and bio-bomb each other until there's only Penguins left...
Falling fertility in Western countries (15% drop in sperm count over last 10 years, IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong...)
Western civilisations support a larger percentage of people whose sexual activity is solely homosexual. (This is not intended as flamebait; merely that in less developed countries homosexuals are tolerated less. I'm sure there are about the same percentage homosexuals, but most in underdeveloped nations are forced by their societies to conform to their societies' norm and hence produce offspring).
What about the claims a few years ago that 75% of people in the larger African cities were HIV+? Is this (and other death rates) factored into these predictions? Or was it all FUD by the UN?
Divorce rates are rising in Western nations. People are increasingly single. Anybody in the UK remember a recent article claiming the UK is turning into a Singles' bar?
Still, reduced population in the world can be viewed as a good thing. Technologies are becoming cleaner & greener, and as the nations which impose the largest damage to the environment shrink in size, there will be theoretically less impact. Add this to the alleged AIDS epidemic that the WHO promised us in was going on in Africa about 10 years ago - there will be mass deaths soon.
Gaia cleans herself...
I forget who said it, but we're behaving like insects.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource:
"Our energy supply is non-finite, and oil is an important example . . . the number of oil wells that will eventually produce oil, and in what quantities, is not known or measurable at present and probably never will be, and hence is not meaningfully finite."
I leave the demonstration of why this is false to everyone who has ever studied logic.
Simon's argument rests largely on one assumption: any past trend will continue uninhibited. If the amount of oil extracted from the ground is growing, then it will keep growing forever. If in the past, agricultural efficiency has grown, it can continue to grow indefinitely. If in the past any shortage has resulted in the development of a substitute, we can continue to substitute forever.
Over the last century these things have been mostly true. Over the course of recorded human history, they have not. Which is more likely to hold true in the long run? Simon sold a pipe dream of infinite capacity by redefining infinite to any unknown quantity.
I'm surprised that with all the speculation going on here, no one has yet mentioned the r-strategy vs. K-strategy model of reproduction. It explains this situation nicely.
There are two different ways that a parent can increase his or her presence in the global gene pool. The obvious one is to have more children (r-strategy). Another way, though, is to work to increase your offspring's presence in the gene pool (K-strategy). Because resources are limited, it inevitably comes down to a choice between more children and "better" children.
The more an individual's success correlates with the resources that were expended on him, the more useful K-strategy is.
In "undeveloped" countries, a healthy, well-dressed, college-educated individual isn't much less likely to be eaten by a lion than one who is naked and starving. Therefore, r-strategy is preferable, and the population grows rapidly.
In "developed" countries, however, things like education and wealth do make a difference in reproductive success. So instead of having lots of children, families have one or two children, and spend a huge chunk of their income on tuition, doctor's bills, etc. The result is a lower rate of population growth.
This brings to mind an interesting question... How much can the population shrink without compromising the "reproductive fitness" of the species? What happens if college educations become so expensive, and so universal, that very few families can afford to have more than one child? I suppose the population would shrink, until the amount of resources available per person is large enough to support population growth once again.
Wow, that's an interesting idea, and it just sort of occurred to me now. If that theory really works, then we shouldn't have to worry about population growth... it will stabilize naturally. Anyone disagree?
MSK
I forget who wrote it (think it was tucked into some AI textbook I read at Uni), it was a short story about how cybernetics (due to the demands of homo sapiens wanting perfect partners) had advanced to replicate humankind. The upshot was that people were no longer reproducing, and had been reduced to special preserves where "primitives" still had kids... Interesting reading, can anyone remember where it was published?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
1. the birthrate will continue on, exponentially, throughout time.
2. the birthrate in third-world countries is astronomical.
#1 is unlikely, though, it is pretty certain that it will go on for some time now. #2 is a fallacy held by massive numbers of people, often used to support #1.
The growth rate in third-world countries is not because birthrate is going up, but because deathrate is going down. Increases in medical technology, etc., means more people are surviving in poor countries these days; The birthrate has not yet dropped accordingly -- thus, the stasis is broken. But it's not as if these people are just popping out kids right and left, more than ever. It is theorized that the birthrates will eventually taper off, as medical technology continues to increase.
The U.S. can be used as an example of this theory. A fully industrialised nation, the population of the U.S. would actually be decreasing, should immigration to the nation cease, because the birthrate in the U.S. is quite low.
Well, there is one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet, so I'm going to step out of History 101 and into Biology 101.
It's a relief to see that the human race is subject to the same very basic rules that apply to populations of any other species: that any population will eventually reach a state of equalibrium between birth rates and death rates.
The only really suprising thing is that its not what we'd expect of another population because its the areas where resources are abundant that we're seeing the population stop growing, while aready overpopulated areas with fewer resources and more difficult living conditions are seeing more growth. This is the opposite of what you'd expect to see in any other species, but as a whole its really not suprising. We are becoming balanced (I recently read an article, but can't quote the source, that said that rate of increase in the world population was declining).
Because of this weird twist to basic evolution, though, I think there's a good chance things will get worse before they get better. There may be a lot of elderly people, a lot of retirees, etc., so this could mean a larger burden on the working class, but a declining population should logically rebound with a higher birth rate. Meanwhile, if current trends are accurate, those huge markets in developing areas will slow their birth rates (and death rates) as quality of life raises. Still, I like to think it will all work out, and especially like the idea that I could be alive to actually see us reach equilibrium. I imagine things will get tougher as the population increases, but it sounds like it won't be as bad as this trend is traditionally portrayed as being (but hey, a scoop's a scoop).
"Six Billion Add Feeling Fine"
This is the classic westerner's view of the world.
"I'm doing great, so everyone else in the world must be too!" What rubbish. The vast majority of humans live in desperate poverty and misery and overpopulation is a major factor. Try working in a third world sweatshop for 20 cents an hour. My guess is you won't enjoy it.
"Combined, we find that people will always be looking for a way to build a better mouse trap, or, in this
case, get more use out of less copper, find different ways to grow more livestock, etc. As world
population grows, there are many more consumers who are looking for options, and the entrepeneur wins."
I disagree. Natural resources are still finite, not infinite (at least on Earth). Technology may solve all of our problems eventually, but I'm not betting on it. Technology often has unforseen side effects that prove to be destructive.
I think the original article is fallacious in the extreme. Most studies show the population RATE decreasing over time, but the population is not likely to level off until 10 billion or so.
Don't forget, just because you read it on Slashdot doesn't mean it is true!
Surprisingly, many Sci-Fi authors have forseen this, and give a good (and rather dark) picture of an overpopulated world: Ender's Game by OSC, the "Red Mars" series, Neuromancer to some extent...
Right now, implementing ZPG does not need to be drastic, but there are ways to do it so that the growth is minimized further: tax/charge the parents for having a 3rd child, a certain snip snip after the 2nd child, and education in the thrid world countries. Some of these are dark and forbidding, and some go against my own personal ideals, but we're nowhere close to colonization of other planets, and thus it's time to think about slowing the rate down on this one until we can.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I don't remember the author, but the title is "The Marching Morons". The idea was that all of the smart people had few kids while the dumb ones had large families. The net result was a huge population of "intelligence disadvantaged" people, and the relatively-few smart people were literally working double jobs to hold society together. Into this mix comes a Rip VanWinkle character who proposes a Hitler-like solution. The plot proceeds from there...
So, the UN says that population growth will stall, then reverse and it doesn't know why. Figures. DumFux, the lot of 'em. @$@%^$%@$ political appointees that can't or won't read. ... Rant off.
... Subsistence farming is going the way of the buffalo, if you'll pardon the expression. The most populous nations are becoming capitalist economies. This places a large portion of the world's existing population in other-than subsistence farming economies. Now, here's the rub:
... Frankly, it is very hard to starve to death here. So, the need for many children, to accont for attrition and to provide for social security is not an issue.
... Somebody wanna look this up?
OK, I believe I read this in Braudel, "The Way the World Works". It's as plausible a theory as any.
In a subsistence farming economy, everybody has as many children as possible. It is a way to ensure labor and one's own "social security" in old age. But wait!
The state, in most industrialized nations, provides substantial benefits, under the guise of a "social safety net". This includes transfer payments from working people to retired people at some age. Most industrialized nations lavish free medical care on all. Even in the USofA, if you are old or very young, you get free, unlimited health care.
In an industrial economy, it is expensive to just be alive. One must, for all practical purposes, have housing, food (bought), clothing, trinkets, and pay taxes. Most folks in these economies what for their children more than they had themselves. This means education; education is expensive, regardless of "free" state provided schools. In the USofA, bringing an infant to majority and through college is an expensive proposition.
Worse, in most industrialized nations, the more you make, the higher the tax burden, both in life and at your death. Hence, the economic decision is to have fewer children, provide for their education so that that they can achieve their own wealth, and leave as little as possible for the tax man, a place where there is no return on investment.
Some learned person (?) observed that the longer it takes to raise offspring, the fewer offspring one is likely to have, regardless of species. It's economics.
Anyway, this appears to be a no-brainer. But, leave it to the UN to not be able to figure it out.
I wonder if this has to do with the fact that, at least in the US, people have less and less time, as women and men both pursue career based lives vs family based lives. People just aren't having 6 kids anymore, and less and less time is spent in family environments versus professional environments..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
HOWEVER, with the possible exception of living space (and with enough money, uninhabitable regions of the earth can be made habitable), more people on the earth does not mean less resources for each person. As an earlier post mentioned, people are the most valuable resource! Why are people starving? Distribution of food and money are the issue, NOT areable land. How about fossil fuels? With more people available, we will have more people to 1)find more fossil fuel reserves and 2)develop alternative energy sources. Material goods; i.e. toys? Simply drives the economy creating more jobs for the more people who want to consume more.
Yes, I am being overly (even dangerously simplistic), BUT so are those who claim that more people == BAD_THING. If our population was limited to agrarian groups of 100 spread 1000 miles apart, do you think we would have ever developed our techonology and society this far? Doesn't seem likely does it?
Claims that the max population for the earth are 9 billion, 15 b or some other number are pure guesswork.
That said, please don't have to many kids cause I wanna go on hikes in the woods and not have to look at your suburban houses :-)
This post is meant to encourage thought outside the box...don't take it as a serious representation of my view on life...
In typical pre-modern civilizations where the was no social safety net to look after older individuals who could no longer support themselves, people counted on adult children to care for them in their old age.
It therefore behooved you to make sure that you had children who reached adulthood and were therefore around to care for you when you got old. In societies with very high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies you had to have 7 or 8 kids to statistically expect to have one of them be around for you after 30+ years.
When public health, sanitation, etc. suddenly improves in countries, you have a whole generation of families with all 7 or 8 kids reaching adulthood. Hence your population explosion.
The flat birthrates of established 1st world countries reflects the general recognition of this principle and within a generation or two of the other areas of the globe reaching prosperity we will see the global population decline, then steady.
Therefore one must conclude that sharing the wealth between the haves and the have-not nations benefits us all. Do what you can to promote economic parity in the world!
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
One of the largest changes in population growth rates in India (if I remember correctly) is due to the spread of one major technological device: the television set. People in remote villages are now being beamed broadcasts of Indian made soap operas showing families, in cities, having one or two children ONLY. As people watched and began to understand what was going on, the number of children per family started to decline starting in the mid 1970s.
Another overall technology booster is the drop in infant mortality rates. Large families are due, in part, to the expectation that most children won't survive childhood and families planned accordingly. As basic sanitary conditions in many of the "underdeveloped" nations slowly start to improve (clean water, sewers, basic sanitary knowledge) children have been surviving at a greater rate. Add to the mix a widespread usage of low cost vaccines and it is no wonder that birthrates in most of sub-saharan africa has dropped from an average of 6 children per family to just over 4 children per family.
All of this leads up to the question of what will happen to the world as low cost computers, satellite networks and distributed power sources allow even the remotest and poorest places on the planet to link up with the rest of the world. Of course literacy rates will have to jump worldwide for this sort of technology to be useful...
==JM==
Your global village idiot!
From watching the population demographics in the U.S., we have known that there will be no 'Social Security' for quite some time and the solutions proposed to 'fix' the problem are: raise taxes, lower benefits, narrow elegibility, or all three. This comes directly from the demographics cited in the report. The population figures I have seen for the U.S. were: 6 people were paying for 1 when it started; 5 people are paying for 1, currently; 2 people will be paying for 1 in the year 2020. Therefore, in the next quarter-century, money paid into Social Security by today's workers vanishes, and when they reach retirement, there won't be money to retire on, as the younger workers, paying into the system, will be too few to support the retired population.
according to Time magazine. in 1900, there were 15 million acres of forest land in the world. in 1990, there were 8 million acres of forest in the world. every year, it's shrinking. I like to breathe clean air. Do you?
I went over to take the poll. It is *mindbogglingly* STUPID.
It has been *documented* that the first six out of the seven questions are major factors...yet the poll only lets you choose *one*.
With the exception of math...and not always then, there is no "One True Answer" to anything in the universe, and this is a perfect example.
I *will* mention that what *seems* to be the most influential factor affecting the birth rate is the educational level of the mother. I *believe* I heard, a year or two ago, on NPR, that UN demographers had evidence for this.
Nine billion? Ooog. I did some basic calculations, years ago, and optimistically speaking, the max population for the earth of humans is 2gig...which we went over early, I think, in the 19th century. And for those that disagree, I hope you *really* enjoy your traffic, er, drive out the freeway, tonight, to your homes in the far 'burbs....
mark
I live in a country with a huge and obvious gap between rich and pore ( Jamaica ). The evidence I see around me is that the more money you have the fewer kids you have. I.e. My parents are a Carpenter and a low level civil servant. I have 6 older siblings. Now we are all grown up and doing much better than our parents did financially ( They are retired now living more comfortably than when they had "jobs" ).
Of course with all those siblings I have only 6 Nephews/nieces ( included one adopted ) and no children of my own ( I'm 25 ). That means 1 child per couple. Meanwhile the people I see having large numbers of children now are even worse off than my mom ever was. I.e. Single mothers working part time for minimum wage. My customers ( I do a lot of support for home users ) almost never have more than 2 children.
Now that I have established the existence of the divide, where dose it come from ?
Well Rich people also tend to acquire more formal education ( anything beyond high school is enough ). At that level your biology classes tell how well a woman's body recovers from childbirth. You hang with people who simply don't have the time to deal with child care and as a result use contraceptives.
You also learn from people who will tell you that Condoms and Pills are smart. Rather than "I nahh throw out my seed ina plastic bag". Finally there is the financial aspect. Having lots of money up front saves you more in the long run. Ask any girl who is now a mother because she couldn't find the cash to demand the quarterly injection.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
This might come out slightly more alarmist than I really intend it, but slower population growth carries with it the danger of economic disaster.
... unsettling and unstable ... time.
Consider: pension schemes in most countries are really elaborately financed pyramid schemes which, in practice if not in theory, depend on younger workers to pay for the retirement of older people; if the rate at which younger workers are born and enter the workforce decrease, the pension programs become increasingly unstable.
Or consider that 'economic growth', as known in modern times, depends on increased demand for produced goods. If population falls, demand for many items that nobody really needs more than one of (sofas, for example) will fall; this could easily lead to a deflationary depression. (Especially if you consider the likely effect of reduced demand on land values; people who owe $200,000 in mortgage on a house now worth less than that will be reluctant to spend. Demand falls.)
Of course, there may be ways out of this. Rapid technological growth creating new products; goverment-sponsored space exploration creating a boom in certain industries; leaps in medical technology allowing people to work, and spend, longer than they do now.
But i'd still expect the time around the peak of the population curve to be a very
I don't understand this "more people is bad" meme.
Look at the people we have and have had in our world: (to list a few relevant to the Slashdot crowd): Torvalds, Stallman, Einstein, Turing, Tesla, Newton, etc. Do you not think the presence of people like this and lesser contributors more than makes up for the losers in the world? Don't you think that if we had more people with access to opportunity, we'd have more people of this calibre and the world would be a better place?
The resources argument is invalid: this is shown by the low prices of food and commodities. The pollution argument is invalid: we have less pollution now than we used to, even though we have more people.
Luckily many of the misguided population organizations are acheiving means I approve of anyways: distributing contraceptives and education in the 3rd world raises the standard of living there.
I want to live in a world where any of the 6 billion people of the world have the opportunity be a Linus or an Einstein. If this is any of 12, we've just doubled our chances, haven't we?
To study this further, read Julian Simon. It's too bad he's no longer around to utterly humiliate Erlich with accurate predictions.
Bryan
I think it's pretty obvious. 1st world nations are just realizing that women might just be good for more things than popping out babies. When countries become more "advanced" they put aside thousands of years of deeply rooted sexism because women can make money and add to the economy. When that happens, couples have one or two kids to satisfy our instinct for propagation, and then get back to work.
I've been arguing this theory with every anti-overpopulation environmentalist I've seen for the past five years. Then, if I'm drunk enough, I'll start in on how it ties into my theory of the nature of the universe, which eventually leads me to why the government really shouldn't make it illegal for me to drink. Then I usually grab another beer and start explaining my philosophy of why AC/DC rules and some band you like stinks.
When I'm sober I usually just talk about computers.
-- I don't really have anything useful to say. ~Tuts
My father grew up on a farm. By age six he was contributing to the economic wealth of his family (doing chores- feeding chickens, etc.). By age 14 he was contributing a signfigiant amount. And this was on an American farm- in the very poor countries children contribute a much greater amount to the economic wealth of the family. It made _economic_ sense for my grand parents to have a lot of kids (which explains why I have eight aunts and uncles). My Dad then went off to college, got a PhD in Math, and started programming computers. His children weren't capable of working in the same office as he until their early twenties, by which time they had moved away and started their own families, or at least stopped contributing to their parent's economic wealth. While he was an economic asset, we were an economic burden- it made sense for him to have fewer children (which explains why I only have 2 siblings). Now, I'm not stating that this is the _only_ factor in deciding how large of a family to have. But statistically, by switching children over from an economic advantage to an economic disadvantage, will drop the average number of children in the family. Indeed, the population census clearly shows a trend of smaller urban (i.e. industrial) families as opposed to rural (i.e. agricultural) families dating back to at least 1840. Religious or social forces do not overcome the fundamental economic forces. Speaking as a catholic, catholicism is pro-large-family religion (everybody: "Every sperm is sacred..."). And yet, Ireland and Italy are also seeing the same population growth slowing that the Protestant countries are (I've lost my bookmark to the CIA's world book). George Bush wasn't kidding when he annouynced a "new world order" (that bit about the taxes was a joke). The late eighties and early nineties saw a fundamental shift in American foriegn policy. Since the 16th century, colonies were the route to economic power (and colonies were the heart of the cause of both World Wars- the colonial haves, England, France, and America (America having claimed the Spanish and Portugese colonies) teaming up against the colonial have-nots, especially they newly-united Germany and newly industrialized Japan). But the economic shocks of the 1980s showed us that our most important trading partners were not our colonies (which had, by that point, expanded from just central/south America to include much of Asia), but rather the other rich industrialized nations- mainly Japan and Europe. In this new economic order, poor colonies are worth squat- illiterate peasants can make much of anything we want to buy, and don't make enough money to buy anything we want to sell. Thus a switch occurred from discouraging colonial independence and economic development to encouraging it (a trend the colonial powers have been bucking, with some success, for over 200 years- we didn't cause it, we just stopped impeding it). With rising economic conditions comes the economic disincentive to large familes, and thereby decreases the population growth (even pushing it negative). Two comments- one, technology is a much bigger influence on military power than numbers. If there is one thing the Gulf War showed, that was it. There is some disagreement by how much Hussein's army outnumbered the allies- I've seen numbers as low as 2x and as high as 5x- but simple numbers didn't help much. The second thing is that modren warfare is incredibly destructive- even conventional warfare. The European theater of WWII was entirely conventional- and it took Europe decades to recover (England still had rationing into the fifties). The "sudden emergence" of Europe and Japan as economic powerhouses in the seventies wasn't- it was a re-emergence after having to rebuild their economies after WWII. Nuclear weapons just make the situation worse. This is one of the main reasons we didn't go to war with the Soviet Union in 1962-63 timeframe- both sides looked at the results of WWII, added a large amount for nuclear weapons, and declared it to expensive. That didn't stop the colonial sniping that went on for another three decades, but it did stop the massive tank thrusts into central germany. Second, by itself, the population implosion doesn't solve the Malthusian dilemna. Yes, you have fewer people being born, put the demand for raw materials and energy per capitia is increasing to make up the difference. There is a solution to this, which I'll post if anyone cares.
I adopted the Chinese Retirement Plan and am now expecting my eighth child (ANOTHER girl!... up to seven!) Fertility rates are decreasing worldwide (author and wife apparently excepted) due to both lower sperm counts and lifestyle changes. The changes are especially sharp in 1st world countries. Italy, as an example, is going to cease to exist as a nation in the next hundred years if the trend does not reverse. So many of my associates have no children because it ruins their life style, and I would not be surprised to find this narcissim effect occuring everywhere where people have money. Also, check out the articles on chemicals that mimic estrogen. Interesting read!
There is obivously lots of differant things that have been published on this subject, so there are lots of facts and statistics out there, more than can be made sense of, but some do stick out upon view of them. One of a biological nature, and is probably the scariest, is that sperm rates have dropped by 45% in the last 45 years (i've seen this from 3 differant sources, i wouldn't have believed it had i seen it from one or two) most likely from chemicals and elements of our diets that cause this to occur, although it has never been locked down to a single compound or food. The second fact that seems to be most prevalent in discussions of this nature, is the almost perfectly linear relationship between women's education levels and birth rates overall. If you look at a population in terms of labor populations and efficiency rates, then it only makes sense that a population has 2x the "workability" if woman are included, plus, and i don't assume to understand why exactly this trend is true, but the arguements for smaller families (ie. more resources invested per child) if educating your children is a high priority, which is more likely if the parents are educated themselves. These kind of discussions need to get out of the mindset that we're talking about the US or even Europe in a big way. These kind of "trends" base MAINLY on the unknown, which is the rapidly changing populations of South East Asia, Africa, and the other developing areas of the world, so it is important to know that everything could go quite opposite what they "expect".
We do not depend on fuel oil, it is merely used because it is the cheapest thing for the job right now. Things like biodiesel and plant-derived alchohols could easily take up the slack, if need be (never mind solar power, fission power, or the just-out-of-reach fusion power; any of which could provide all of our energy needs if necessary).
Don't be too sure we'll run out of oil any time soon either. I remember how when the oil prices went up, they started a huge project to extract oil from the north american tar sands, which hold more oil than the middle east (and I think more oil than has already been pumped out of the ground through history). The project died when oil prices went back down again, but only because they couldn't compete with prices from where people can just suck crude oil right out of the ground.
Energy needs don't worry me. What worries me is a crowded planet full of nukes. I want off this crazy rock!
From: http://www.fieldingtravel.com/blackflagcafe/messag es/6559.html
r ent/Groups/Opposing/pri.html
According to
http://www.iti.com/cgi-bin/iti-cgi-bin/mfs/01/Cur
the "Population Research Institute" 'is a bogus organization set up by the Catholic Church to provide
population mis-information.'
And
http://205.177.10.11/agm/main/news/pri.htm
says:
'In the past few days, opponents of the upcoming international family planning vote in Congress have been
rallying around
something called "Population Research Institute." Quotes from this
organization have appeared in wire stories, newspapers and on
television without mentioning just what "Population Research
Institute" is.
According to papers filed with the IRS, "Population Research
Institute" is simply an arm of the infamous Human Life International
(HLI) -- the venal ultra-right group that claims as its founder and
board chairman the venomously anti-Semitic Paul Marx.'
As technology expands and a computer in every house occurs who suffers... the young boys sitting in front of their CRT screens soaking up the radiation and welcoming impotence before they know what it even means.
For those of us in our 20's or 30's that is even more true since our monitors were not Energy Star complaint when we first started.
we now return to our regularly scheduled reality
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
The population explosion is still with us and will be with us for some time to come. This so-called news is just the lowest case projection, and has been hyped in the developed world by corporate interests as an excuse to plunder and pillage the environment and rest of the world as if there were no tomorrow. Free clue: There is no excuse to drive a 3l V6 to the office - imagine all 6G of the world population doing the same.
Here is something many peaple missed. With the exception of China, the most productive farm land in the world is located in the industrial nations. Here in Illinois, I would say that about 15-25% of all farm land goes un-used. Why? well, the last figures I saw said that one farm worker could produce enough food for 15 peaple. I believe that this is actualy higher now that farmers use GPS, and scince, this is now higher. if you look where the population is booming (S America, Pacific Islands/SE Asia, Africa), this is precisly where they have the worst farm land. Once Brazil gets done burning its way through the rain-forest, it will eventualy run into a food shortage. This will 1) decrease there population 2) increase there reliance on 1st world nations such as the US. I dont have any hard figures, but I doubt that the US and Canada could easly produce food for over 1 billion peaple with out much problem. I'm not saying that this is good, but there is definatly a trend that the best farm land is precicly where the population is ether decreasing or going to decrease.
The women of our society have been fighting for equal rights for decades now. They are becomming more educated (more degrees than men if you look at the numbers) and are entering the workforce in record numbers. When your in school and your working at a carrer kids take a back seat. They are also not as likely to give into the social pressure of having kids as they would have say back in the 60's or before. Women are taking control of their lives and since our society is turning into one of single mothers and deadbeat dads how could you blame them. Most of the women I have spoke with have said they do not want kids now and possibly never. They're reasons for this is that they do not want to bring a child into the world we live in and I can not blame them. This world at this moment does not look like its going to get any better. Just my 2 cents. I might have majored in IFSM but my minor was Sociology. :) ...Mr. Pantz
Most people associate an exponential growth curve with the way population grows. Recently I had been thinking about that a little bit. The difference between human population growth and a pure exponential growth curve is that you have to have two parents to create a child. This means that if every couple in the world has two children (ignoring lifespan considerations), the population will not grow. Now compare that with the average American family. I don't have any statistics, but it seems to me that the majority of families probably have 2 children or less. This could be a reason for the projected population decrease. I realize that this idea ignores the developed formulas on human growth, but it is still in interesting possible explanation.
In other words, all the exact same crap that America & Europe used to do (often still do), then taught other nations to follow by example. And why do they follow? In order to produce goods for our consumption, and build their economies on our model.
The blame is still right here. What happens when the southern nations catch up to us in energy & material consumption?
"Brain cancer -- rates way way up in the last 10 years"
So what percentage of the world's population gets brain cancer? The corresponding drop in births would be negligible.
"Penile deformities in male babies in the last 10 years"
Are you implying that these = 10 year old males can't have kids right now or that parents don't want to have kids because they don't want to risk having a boy with a deformed penis? Either way it is absurd.
This is a bad thing, IMO. And it's why youth voilence is increasing.
You're pathetic. You feel threatened by women having jobs, so you blame that for all the ills of society. You have no evidence to support this childishness. A link to an opinion piece on CBN doesn't count. Your pastor's opinion doesn't count. The bible doesn't count. FACTS count. Okay?
And women who brag about being "empowered" while sloughing off their kids to day-care ought to be shot. They're "empowering themselves" at the expense of their children's well-being. And that's sick.
Why not just be honest? You are sick. You feel threatened by capable women. You're probably an inneffective and unsuccessful individual. Well guess what -- tough shit! That's your problem, not theirs. Your desire to punish them for your own self-perceived shortcomings is contemptible. There is something profoundly depressing about the willingness of insecure losers to impose their twisted fantasies on others. "Sick"? You really consider yourself qualified to judge?
In fact, there's very strong evidence that good daycare is a very viable alternative. Studies have been done. Kids in good daycare do better in life than kids with poor stay-at-home mothers. Guess what? What we now call "daycare" is essentially the way the human race has been raising children for the past fifty thousand years or so. For most of that time, very large extended families lived together and raised kids cooperatively. Contrary to the bizarre assertions of religious fanatics and other idiots, US suburbs of the 1950's were not the default state of the human race. In fact, they were a mess. The coldness and isolation of that environment contributed to serious anomie and alienation on the part of young women with kids. Their doctors ended up giving them armloads of sedatives, because the environment was axiomatically assumed (by idiots like you) to be "good" -- so obviously, these women must all be crazy if they don't being imprisoned there! This is well documented. The kids raised in that environment grew up to become the Woodstock generation. Get it? No, you don't get it. You're trapped in your little Focus-on-Family fantasy ideology. Facts don't interest you.
It's true! It was in an article Steve Ballmer wrote for the Weekly World News!
Rates of brain cancer in civilized nations directly correlate with use of free software! RMS has had terminal brain cancer since 1974, that's why he wears that giant wig so you can't see that he lost all his hair from chemotherapy!
This also explains the erratic and peculiar behavior of Eric Raymond and Tom Christiansen.
It's so obvious that there's a population implosion, people! Think about it for a minute. How many parents do you have? Two, right? How many grandparents? Four. Great-grandparents? Eight. The numbers are dwindling down at an incredible rate. Pretty soon there won't be anybody left.
well actualy its a undisputed fact that men make more money on average at work.
Right-wingers do occasionally dispute that, when they want to pretend that sexism doesn't exist. When they want to turn around and justify sexism, they start quoting it again. Ho, hum.
so for the man to stay home is a bad idea,
You're an idiot. Do all men make more money than all women? No. Do all men make more money than their wives? No. Is more money necessary in all cases? No. Enough is enough: You could imagine two doctors married to each other: The husband is a Foo specialist, at $200,000 per annum; the wife is a Baz specialist, at $150,000 per annum. Who really gives a fuck which one stays home?
Beavis, you're a dumbass.
There is a very simple explanation for the stagnant population of western civilization. It is the empowerment of women: when women have the power to choose when, and if, they will have babies the population growth plummets. The pill is the key to everything, because, for the first time in history, a woman can truly choose when she will have a baby, and therefore control her own destiny. When women get the vote, got to school and begin to enjoy their freedom in country's like Ethiopia, their population growth will go down as well, just wait.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Untrue. I guarantee that within 5 to 10 billion years, the world's human population will be very small indeed. The only question is whether we die out, move away, or stop being human... ;p