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.)
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.
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.
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.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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.
"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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Do you realize that you just described Todos Santos? (Read Oath of Fealty by Niven & Pournelle.)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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.
I'm sure there's no correlation between rising /. usage and lowering pregnancy rates.
None at all.
Hotnutz.com
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
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
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.
Of course the long term result is that there are more mouths to feed, but in agrarian cultures, those mouths can also work at the earliest possible age, thus providing more food for everybody.
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.
Don't believe me? Check out any of the works of the late Julian Simon, who forsees a future in which the most precious resource, human beings, will be the the most scarce.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
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
People in third-world countries aren't stupid. They do know where babies come from. They even have access to birth control. Unfortunately, that birth control often is only available in one of two forms: abstainance or (dangerous, do-it-yerself) abortion.
The U.N. has figured this out, which is why their main efforts in reducing the world population are educating women and distributing contraception.
By educating women, they're not just talking about educating them in where babies come from. Believe me, women already know about that. They're educating women in job skills, so they'll have more to do with their lives than just breed more youngsters. They'll also get skills they can apply toward putting food on the table for the kids they do have.
Can you say "lack of proof"? Can you say "sampling artifacts"?
Can you say inbreeding? With hardly any natural enemies left, individuals who in earlier days would have died at a young age because of deseases/predators now reach an age where they can breed, thus spreading their DNA.
Weaknesses in the human DNA that usually caused an individual to die early now make it into future generations. So the examples you mention are not necessarily caused by environmental contaminants (thought this probably plays a role too) but by the fact we have little enemies that can do the darwinistic selction for us. Brain cancer can sometimes be cured, so can other deseases. People who survive such an illness can breed and spread their DNA even though it contains bad genes.
Jilles
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...
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.
\
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
"People aren't going to stop breeding"
More precisely, they are not going to stop having Sex. It is the consequences of having sex that are changing. In most industrialized countries having a child is a conscious choice. The number of unwanted/unplanned childs is not so high.
"People aren't going to give their money away."
In an industrialized country kids cost money. So if you are right that is a good motivation not to have kids.
"People aren't going to start being nice to each other."
That's not necessary.
"Countries aren't going to do anything as troublesome as helping to do some population control"
China does.
So, I believe that there might be some truth in these findings despite the four arguments you gave.
Jilles
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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 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..
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...
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 ?
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.
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.'