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.)
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.
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!
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.
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?
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'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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.'