Global Population Implosion? 343
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.)
Disagree on many levels... (Score:1)
Also, we have a very real, serious population problem in many parts of the earth. To consider implicitly not addressing it because of a belief that the worlds population is going to decline, is silly.
-- Moondog
That's half. The other half: the welfare state. (Score:2)
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.
--
fears (Score:1)
Our #1 reason, I suppose was selfish. We wanted to be still young when our kids leave, so there's enough of life left to enjoy.
My parents, by the time the last of their kids left, are now too old and decrepit to do anything enjoyable.
#2 reason was, well, frankly, the UN spouted a lot of FUD back in the 70's and 80's about too many people, and ohmygod, we're all going to starve - or die in a nuclear war, so who wants to raise kids in a world like that?
#3 reason, I never thought I'd be able to AFFORD a third child. I wouldn't want to have to skimp on Christmas presents and whatnot for three kids, when I can adequately provide for two.
Do I regret this decision? I kind of feel guilty after getting fixed, because I know so many couples who CAN'T have kids naturally, and many of those who have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to conceive, and failing, and just giving up, when, well, our second kid was conceived with a single act, as far as we can tell. Seems like fertility was a pretty valuable gift.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:Yeah, but ... (Score:1)
Most North American sewage gets cleaned up considerably before the water gets dumped back into the rivers. The outflow from a sewage treatment plant is usually cleaner than the river or lake it is going into. And we keep our garbage in nice compact landfills where we will be able to go back and mine out all that valuable stuff we are throwing away now.
People in third world nations tend to generate more sewage per person. (even a lot of the undernourised ones) That's one of the side effects of a high fiber diet.
Re:Neo-Darwinist approaches to population (Score:4)
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.
Re:That old Texas canard . . . (Score:1)
I ran some numbers on this, somebody correct me if it looks wrong. 6billion people / 261914 square miles area of texas (State of Texas website) = 22908 people/sqmi 5280 ft/mile squared /22908 = 1217 sq ft per person. Which is roughly a 35 foot square for each person. I wouldn't call that comfort, but it was more than I expected.
Re:My Contribution (Score:1)
Re:Find the fallacy (Score:3)
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.
Re:The Cycle of Poverty (Score:1)
Oh, give us a friggin' break. And the timing of the rooster crow seems to suggest that there is a causal link between its crow and the sun rising. Now does the rooster make the sun rise, or does the sun rising make the rooster crow? Isn't it much more likely that greater affluence allows for increased education?
If a couple has to scrape dirt with blunt sticks in order to grow enough food to survive, how are they going to afford an education? And what the hell would they do with it after they have it? (Son, I know you're hungry, but look that this cool website I've designed. Ain't Perl great.)
One poster claims that Linux and the Internet will raise the world out of poverty. WHAT? If we could just get this fertilizer to the poor farmers... People who live by subsistence farming are a long way from needing ANYTHING the internet provides.
I know some people will find this statement blasphemous, but COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET DID NOT MAKE THE US A WORLD POWER. If any one thing could take credit, it would be the internal combustion engine. Give the 3rd world decent tractors so that they can farm more than an acre per man. This removes the need to have six kids as a retirement plan, and frees up people to move into other specializations. Very soon, the society moves to a state where education becomes useful, SELF actualization becomes important, children become more of a burden, and THEN population will decrease.
So the UN goes to the 3rd world, passes out condoms, and tells everyone the world is going to blow up if they keep having babies. The people still need that retirement plan. Why don't they pass out a few cheap deisel powered tractors, and see what happens. One man can do the work of 100s, people move off the farms into the cities, and population drops.
After that, maybe the Internet will become useful.
Re:energy limits (Score:1)
The Dismal Science is Neither; You're Still Wrong (Score:1)
I've heard this kind of reasoning about oil reserves as well, used by Randites and other lunatics to prove that there's no sense in conserving resources; it goes like this:
Known oil reserves (R) double every n years, while consumption doubles every n - x years (I don't know the correct values for R, n, and x but you get the idea). This has been continuing since 19??!
Okay, so far so good. But here's where we get into trouble . . .
Therefore this progression will continue forever, and we'll always have enough oil.
Hello?! No, we won't. If you keep doubling R every n years, you end up with a mass larger than that of the Earth. I'm sorry, but it's not very damn likely that the Earth contains a mass of oil greater than the total mass of the Earth. You can postulate interstellar space travel if you like, but there's no way you can assume that n and x will retain the same values in that situation. Furthermore, the people on those far planets will start reproducing too, and they'll sooner or later need their resources for their own population. At that point, they'll be glomming resources from colonies of their own. We'll be competing with them for colonies, but they'll be a lot closer to the new colonies and culturally they'll be a lot closer to their violent pioneer-society roots. We'll lose. You can postulate industrially feasible generation of electricity by fusion, but that's likely to pose exactly the same problems, but with a much smaller tonnage value for R. Plus you'll have wastes to dispose of. Roughly the same logic applies to farmland/livestock as well (but without the radioactive wastes). Solar panels in orbit? Hmmm, that sounds good. No moving parts, nothing consumed. They'd eventually degrade from collisions with tiny space-crap and need to be replaced, but the rate of degradation might be slow enough to stretch the replacement cycle out to the point where it's ridiculous to worry about it. Of course, with your population doubling every 20 years, you'll have to double the number solar panels every 20 years. Damn, we're right back where we started. Industrial-scale transmutation of elements? Good luck.
Or, at least he grossly miscalculated the maximum possible world population.
Good call. I agree with you about that, but if I understand your main point correctly, it's a total capitulation. If there's a maximum, there's a maximum. The only way to find that maximum is to get there and start feeling a bit hungry. When that happens, people will shoot the entrepreneurs and take their food. Will those people be shortsighted? Maybe so, but that will be cold comfort indeed for the people they shoot.
However, Malthus was indeed wrong about something important, and it's right on-topic too: He thought that human populations expand by just the same rules as yeast, with a direct and immutable correlation between "standard of living" (which just means food supply and oxygen if you're a yeast) and rate of reproduction. He was dead wrong. For a hell of a lot of reasons, most of which probably aren't fully understood, human birthrates turn around and decline when we exceed a certain level of material abundance. Moving in the other direction, the birthrate increases in inverse ration to a declining standard of living, until you hit a point where you've got a really serious famine. Even then, look at the Sudan. Are they running out of people yet? Beats me, actually [1].
This is important. Malthus' conclusion (which led to economics being called "the Dismal Science", though it is neither
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[1] I don't have any before'n'after-famine population figures. It seems safe to assume that a severe famine will reduce the overall rate of population growth in the afflicted area. It certainly happens with animals: If they lose their predators, they overbreed, overgraze, and die off. Once their population has been massively reduced, their food sources get a chance to recover and the whole cycle can start all over again. When people are reduced to a certain level of poverty and hunger, they're still able to manipulate their environment better than animals can, but not necessarily enough better.
Re:three guesses (Score:2)
--
Re:The UN is wasting their time and money (Score:1)
Even if you imagine that our inventiveness will take us all the way to the earth's carrying capacity for human life, what happens then? Do we just magically stop breeding? Or do we experience a Malthusian crash?
Let's imagine that 100% efficient human society for a moment. Our resources: the sun's light, the earth's matter, our brains. We perform our own photosynthesis, recycle our own water. Nothing on earth but humans, rock, and an ocean. I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like much fun to me.
The question to ask is not how many people can the earth hold; it's how many people can we really stand to live with.
Six billion, and feeling pretty damn crowded.
-Mars
Re:Doesn't have to be expensive. (Score:1)
Check this out for a more fair analysis than I could give:
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTH-CONTROL/
I'm sure the rhythm method is better than nothing, but there's no way you could get me to rely on it. I'll take latex and hormones over thermometers and guesswork any day.
-Mars
Our problem is... (Score:1)
You see, for the most part people in general tend to only think in the realm of two dimensions when it comes to living space. We build cities, and continue to build outward in a "ring-like" configuration, devouring more area for a larger population - area that could be better used to feed the larger population. Consider this:
Let us take a plot of land of dimensions of 1000 meters by 1000 meters (a square kilometer). We now give each family (of two adults and two children) a bit of the land - an area of 25 meters by 25 meters (for sake of simplicity, we will assume no roads, bear with me) for enclosed living area. If we made this entire complex enclosed (think of it as a large warehouse, subdivided into cubicle-like living spaces), we could house 1600 families, of four people each, in relatively spacious living quarters. This amounts to 6400 people living in a square kilometer.
Now, what happens if we want to add another 6400 people to the population? That's correct, the population must take over another square kilometer of space. But what happens if we do the simple thing - put them on top of the first 6400 individuals in our complex? Correct, again - we double our population in the same amount of area.
Ok, now - let's say with current technology we can build this system to a height of 1000 meters, and we gave each "level" 10 meters to play with (which would allow for structural and evironmental support). We would end up with a 100 level community - each level holding 6400 people. In the end - the "Cube" would hold 640,000 people, all in the area of a square kilometer!
How many square kilometers would it take to hold that many people in our current society (assuming a single level structure)? Unstack the cube - 100 square kilometers! An area larger than most cities! In our original single level (and Cube), we didn't make allowances for roads, etc - so the area would have to be even larger!
So how is it we get this number of people in (sometimes) smaller areas? Well, number one - not every family has an allowance of a 25 by 25 by 10 meter living space - most don't even have half that. That is quite a large house, by anyone's standards. Cost for a house that size is the major concern.
In reality, we couldn't create a Cube - nor would we want to (most "houses" would have no windows, there are other psychological reasons as well - plus, there may be a few technical reasons for a structure that size, like fire escape). Even so, there still should be no reason why we shouldn't be thinking up/down instead of out...
I invite more discussion on this...
Snip, Snip! Woo-hoo! (Score:1)
Seriously - if you're not shooting blanks, and you sleep with a woman, you're taking the full financial risk of any progeny that may be developed. Them's the legal breaks. The alternative - that the law permit a male be able to force a female to have an abortion against her will, Just Doesn't Work in any ethical scheme, no matter how twisted, I can dream up.
If you don't want kids, and you posess a Y chromosome, get thyself snipped. It's the best birthday present you'll ever give yourself. And if your partner doesn't want kids either, it's the best present you can give her too. For less than $500, it's a hell of a lot cheaper and safer than asking your partner to have a tubal ligation.
Here's some recommended reading [childfree.net] for both for those who don't want kids, and for those who do, but can't understand why we don't. (I particularly liked Why books are better than babies [childfree.net].
Another website for your perusal: alt.support.childfree.moderated archive [home.net].
Finally, to the Epopt, who said that folks who described having children as "pointless" as "obsessively self-centered": a reminder that obsessive self-centeredness [ninapaley.com] can be as much a trait of breeders as it is of the childfree. (Woo-hoo, I get to re-use a link from yesterday's post!)
(But - in the Epopt's defence - while I resent his implied characterization of the childfree as selfish, he's quite right in one thing: if you have to ask, you'll never understand. That goes for both sides of the "to sprog or not to sprog" debate. While I understand the reasons for spawning on the surface, I'll never grok in fullness the desire to sprog. A few years ago, I broke off a 5-year relationship because we were each dumb enough to get into it before realizing that we just couldn't agree on this subject. We've remained friends - she's got 2 kids now and is ecstatic about it, and I've got none and am equally ecstatic. Had we continued our relationship, it would have been hell. She'd curse me for the child I'd never give her, or I'd curse her for the one she saddled me with. Eech.
As one who probably would be tempted to "throw 'em away" if I ever ended up with one, I took the responsibility for making damn sure I'd never end up with one in the first place. Better for me, better for my companion, and better for a putative kid not to exist at all than to have me as a Dad!
I'm a firm believer in the "if you don't like 'em, don't have 'em" school. Naturally, if you do like kids, go nuts. After all, someone's gotta breed more geeks to make up for those of us who prefer DOOM's "Knee-deep in Dead" to the Mommy Track's "Elbow-deep in baby shit!" :-)
Feeling fine? Yea right. (Score:1)
As any person who understands the present issues with space travel, any long-term exposure to the conditions of space, causes you to loose bone mass and causes heart problems, among other things.
Not to mention the large expenditure of resources just so ONE MAN can be 'feeling fine'
So, using 'Zero G and feeling fine' is VERY appropriate.
For the 'feeling fine' is at a cost. The cost of health. The cost of resources. The cost of environmental contamination.
And, is the way Americans live a long-term healthy choice...either for the people or the planet?
I look forward to your reply KingJawa.
It's a tad expensive... and (Score:1)
If you can afford a condom (Score:1)
Plus, people in rich countries do not need to have more babies to increase the chance that at least one or two survives and can help run the farm.
Re:Why have kids? (Score:1)
Indeed. And to think they're not teaching evolution in Kansas. All those school board flunkies have to do is log on to
Re:The UN is wasting their time and money (Score:1)
I've heard this before, and I still don't believe it to be true.
People use LOTS of resources. People need to have things like garbage and waste removed. Can you design an efficient machine (a city is a machine of sorts) which can distribute resources (food, water, clothing, fuel) to 6 billion people in Texas and remove the trash (and sewage)? NYC, which is a decently spread-out city (across 3 islands and the mainland of NY) can't find room for its garbage. It has to remove 20,000 TONS each DAY. How could your Texas-sized city remove that garbage on-time to prevent a serious health hazzard?
Would you care to police this mess? Crowding makes people do crazy things. People need space.
The doomsayers might be wrong, but the reason why the doomsayers are wrong is that they scared people into doing something. We worry that oil is running out, so we develop better techniques to find and extract oil. We worry that food is running out, so money is poured into genetically engineered foods. The reason why Y2K won't be a big deal is that people got worried and tested and/or fixed all of the important systems.
If you want to see a society which had no doomsayers, take a look at Russia. No one was allowed to question the asinine decisions made by the leadership, no one ever explored any "What ifs" and you get the mess you see now. God bless the nuts who make us worry.
-jon
Re:Our problem is... (Score:1)
Plus, these things would be much, MUCH larger than a "project" home - 25 x 25 x 10 meters? Think something the volume of approx 80 x 80 x 30 feet - know of many house near you that size? Personally, I can only think of one place near me with "houses" that size (not counting an apartment complex). The place is a multi-story high-rise housing complex - houses in it go for $250,000 a pop - not a "project" by any means.
As far as an elevator ride is concerned, it shouldn't be too much of a problem with high-speed elevators, especially if the elevators could traverse in three dimensions (via special corridors, etc).
BTW, the two kid family was just for the sake of simplicity - with a house of the size mentioned, they could probably have six and still have more than enough living room.
Also, rather than a monolithic cube, I could see a "sparse" cube type structure, with individual cubes linked by walkways/tunnels, so that each cube could have windows. Or, bring in sunlight via fiber optic systems, and views via plasma screens and cameras. The place wouldn't even necessarily have to be a cube - how about a staircase/spiral type shape (think of a thick triangle rolled to make a screw shape).
At any rate, a system which utilizes volume will be superior to one that concentrates on area (as far a number of people housed). We aren't at the point where we need to do this, but we should be thinking heavily about it - the alternative is to pave over/destroy every last inch of land left, leaving none for farming, perhaps causing incredible starvation.
Society needs to cooperate, rather than compete, which is what, in the end, all of this is about (keeping up with the Jones, etc)...
momentum (Score:1)
At least I think that's what I was supposed to learn. I haven't gotten my exam back yet, so I could be totally wrong.
That is a dangerous statement. (Score:1)
6 billion people is a lot of people. I can't even imagine what 9 billion will be like.
Grr...
Re: Zero Population Growth (Score:1)
If you want ZPG, feel free to not reproduce. While you're busily engaging in an empty life that, however fulfilling, will mean nothing the day after you die, others will be propagating themselves. Their memory and their genes will be preserved after their deaths.
I know of nothing sadder than only children who die childless. That entire line is dead once and forevermore, as if it had never existed. What's the point of that? You're born, you live and you die. Even an atheist (wh. I'm not) can live on through his progeny and theirs.
I plan on having as many children as my wife and my wallet allow me. I love my family; why would I let it die? I know a family of four boys, each with several children. It is truly a model for how a family should be. They all pool their money, so the lawyer and businessman supported the other two throughout the hard times. They have a kind of success and bond which few families in this day and age can dream of having.
But if you have no family, you have not even the chance. What a depressing thought.
Well (Score:1)
Re:Implosion? Hmmm... (Score:2)
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 [resolve.org] web site for more information.
Re:Kind of obvious... (Score:1)
For a specific refutation of your argument, consider China, which is not by any means under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, yet is the most populous nation on earth. India, the second-most-populous nation, is relatively independent of Roman-Catholic influence as well (as compared to, say, South America, where fertility rates tend to be lower).
What's to figure out? (Score:2)
That old Texas canard . . . (Score:1)
BTW, did you know that the entire population of the world could fit comfortably into an area the size of Texas with room to spare?
What do you mean by "fit comfortably"? How many square feet each? Would they have enough room to grow the food they need? I doubt it very much. Talk to somebody who's been to India: India is overpopulated to the point of discomfort already, and IIRC they're less than 1/4 or 1/5 of the total world population. India is larger than Texas. Get a grip. Just because people repeat this gibberish doesn't make it true. All it means is that some people are desperate to believe gibberish.
Re:exponential function (Score:1)
The Yeast, of course, stopped reproducing as it choked in it's own waste.
I think something similar is happening in industrialized nations. It may be as complex as the social or economic issues others have cited, but there might also be something to the declining sperm-production rates among males, and enviornmental effects of toxic chemicals, atom bomb testing, television, cell phones, flouride in the water, reduced biodiversity, global warming, etc. etc. etc.
This is my thesis. Someone else can fund and execute the testing.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:Neo-Darwinist approaches to population (Score:2)
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.
Good news! (Score:3)
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!
aging population (Score:1)
<ramble>
Social Security in the US works on the premise that those currently working pay for those who are retired. Many people bemoan this since it can't survive the future trends - that older populations will come to outnumber the younger populations.
So, eventually, it seems Social Security must die, if these trends continue. But, older people will still want to retire. There'll be two possibilities - earn and save and grow your money with interest until it is enough to support your retirement, or work forever.
With current inflation rates and economic growth (in the markets), it is not difficult to amass enough money in 30-40 years to support indefinite retirement. Consider what happens as more and more people do this, and the younger, working generations dwindle in number. You end up that the younger workers are still paying for all those retirees - just the mechanics are different. The workers create wealth, the wealth is reflected in the market, thus feeding the elderly. Except, it's not forced. The numbers will eventually add up, and inflation will result. Fewer workers - huge demand - higher wages, bingo - inflation. Wages will absolutely have to go up to high enough levels that retirees are enticed to go back to work. Inflation will go up and force some retirees to go back to work.
I just find it interesting, since many point out the difference in the value of children between agrarian societies and industrial. In the end, we all live off the backs of the young in our old age, unless you keep working. If the population size of the young decreases dramatically, there must follow inflation since demand will stay roughly the same, and supply will dwindle.
UNLESS, as the truly conservative economists like to argue, productivity rises to the challenge and keeps supply high even as the number of workers goes way down. That would mean large-scale automation of tasks, far beyond what we see currently. Follow this trend and we end up with a sci-fi like future of total leisure as the robots do all the work and a whopping 5% of the population is under the age of 50......
</ramble>
Extrapolation is sooooo much fun.....
Here's why: (Score:1)
Technological cultures tend to be a lot more Individualistic, giving more power and possibilities to a single person. In such cases, large families are (often seen as) a luxury and/or a hindrance to success.
Re:What's to figure out? (Score:1)
Matyas
Equality is Evolutionarily Unsound (Score:1)
Okay, during their evolution, lets look at how the Blork species evolved. During their evolution, lots of things were very natural to them, as they were, of course, little better than animals. Hence, sex was commonplace and often forceful, the strong dominated the weak, and the weak were left to die.
Now, as the Blorks evolved, they became more intelligent. Now, most reproduction was still done by the thugs who used force to get what they wanted. Since nobody "knew any better", it was just accepted.
The point being, intelligence still kept creeping in from the sides, even though it was not always a reproductive trait. (However, the reverse is true, stupidity IS an anti-reproductive trait!).
So now the Blorks develop a crazy religion which says that sex is bad, and then give all genders equality. Now the whole matter of "forcing the issue" becomes criminal instead of natural, so, of course, it becomes a MUCH less important factor in gene selection. But on TOP of that, their culture had, for the longest time, been male-instigated in reproduction, but they lost their grasp...
Now, try to draw some of the same parallels. I agree, it's not a pretty thought at all. But it appears that three things we all seem to love so very much contributed greatly to it: The high status of women, contraception, and Christianity (or similarly anti-sex flavored religions.)
Obviously the solution is NOT to lower the status of women. That is just WRONG. Eliminating contraception could only make matters worse. It seems that, in the end, our very beliefs will have to change.
Otherwise, the human race has peaked. And that could be VERY _BAD_.
Re:More info on pop.org (Score:1)
Not surprising, really. Why would anyone run a poll this way? When you poll people, you ask them about themselves- what they do or feel or think. This is especially true on the internet, where a poll can hope to reach truly large numbers of people.
pop.org seems to be polling people about everyone else. If you want to know more about population growth, you collect information- you ask people, "Why are you having this number of children?" Asking "Why do you think someone else is having this number of children?" is a way of collecting disinformation. It doesn't yield facts, only opinions, which can then be construed to mean almost anything the poller wants- particularly when, as in this case, the real conclusion (that westernized societies will inevitably have fewer children) has already been assumed.
Re:If you can afford a condom (Score:1)
It's Because... (Score:1)
Seriously I think it comes down to changes in society, the availability of birth control and China's 1 child per couple law probably has had a significant impact too.
Bringing up kids is hard work. It takes a lot of effort and resources. People in Western countries realise this and are waiting to have children later in life and are having fewer children.
I think this is a good thing. In the past people were having children when they weren't ready. Today people try to be prepated.
Rational population growth extrapolation (Score:1)
The projection in question was the "low variant", which is to say the "fantasy variant". There is a heavy element of fantasy in almost all population growth discussions.
If a population consists of three subgroups with growth rates of -10, 0, and 10 percent per generation, what is the overall long term growth rate? 10 percent, right. Every population growth extrapolation I've seen to date ignores this, which makes the results largely fantasy.
Asimov pointed out decades ago that the lamebrains who think technology can somehow enable indefinite geometric population growth Just Don't Get It: At current growth rates, in not very many centuries the human population will be a solid sphere of protoplasm expanding outward at lightspeed. If the lightspeed limit is licked, in a few millenia the human population will weigh more than the observable universe. This will not happen. :) As Malthus correctly noted, exponential growth must always be a short-lived transitional phase in a finite universe. Less than half of all humans are dead: This has never been true in previous millenia and will never be true again in future millenia: It is a unique signature of the millenium centered on today.
Re:6 billion and NOT feeling fine (Score:1)
for a bowl of rice a day,
slave for soldiers till you starve, and your head is skewered on a steak,
so now you can go where the people are one,
now you can go where they get things done,
what you need my son,
what you need my son,
is a holiday in Cambodia. . . "
- Dead Kennedys
I think that there are plenty of population-reducing forces at work, especially in the third-world. Life sucks for them. Six billion and feeling fine my ass.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Abortion (Score:2)
The second wager (Score:2)
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.
Privatizing works only so far. (Score:2)
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.
--
Re: Zero Population Growth (Score:2)
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.
---
And you believed your model?! (Score:2)
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.
--
Re:Doesn't have to be expensive. (Score:2)
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"
Re:That's half. The other half: the welfare state. (Score:2)
Re:That's half. The other half: the welfare state. (Score:2)
You might want to read a book by a Harvard economist that recently came out called Development as Freedom, that talks about this.
And if you are worried about Social Security, the projections that it is going to go bust are based on GNP growth projections that lower than any historical period in this century, including the 1930's, so either the experts are quite wrong or we're in for a half-century depression
Re:Find the fallacy (Score:2)
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.
--
Eve's Herbs (Score:2)
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:What did you leave out? (Score:3)
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.
Re:energy limits... and predicting the future (Score:2)
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...
Re:What's to figure out? (Score:2)
Re:That's half. The other half: the welfare state. (Score:2)
I'm not worried about Social Security, I'm taking care of my own retirement thank you (but I wish I could get that money out of the government's clutches and into my own far-better-invested portfolio).
--
Re:What did you leave out? (Score:2)
three guesses (Score:3)
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?
I agree (Score:2)
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.
Re:Our problem is... (Score:2)
--
Re:Find the fallacy (Score:2)
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.
The UN is wasting their time and money (Score:3)
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 [herring.com], which describes his work quite well.
That depends on circumstances (Score:2)
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.
Trends. (Score:3)
None at all.
Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com]
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
This is all fine and dandy, and I cannot say that I begrudge them that money (although in 1997 it was to the tune of $1,986 per man, woman and child in public medical expenditures for the elderly). But if there are more and more old people and fewer and fewer young, eventually the young will revolt against it.
Who do you think actually creates resources like food, shelter, clothing, homes and education? The young. Without producers, these things don't exist. Most of the economy, while based on natural resources, is devoted to building on those resources. Workers built your computer. Workers laid the fibre to Slashdot. Workers run Slashdot. The old don't produce (much), esp. regarding material things. They do tend to produce more intellectual artifacts, but someone must print the books, cut down the trees for paper &c. Again, there's nothing wrong with this; after a lifetime of labour, it's nice to relax (although 20 years of relaxation seems a bit much), but one must recognise that the workers (i.e. the young) are the motive force for economy. They consume and produce while the old simply consume.
Procreation is a Good Thing(tm). It ensures the survival of one's genes (biologically) and one's experiences and thoughts (socially, as one's children, raised right, carry at least elements of one's philosophy). There are other ways of making a mark, but only a handful may be famous in their own right, and only a fraction of those are known to a third or fourth generation.
Plus it's so fun:-P
P.s.: Yes, I used US social programs. It is a) because I am from the US b) I am taking a class in contemporary health care policy (bleachh, but...) and c) more non-US citizens are likely to know about the US system (from simple exposure) than non-Blueland citizens are to know about programs in Blueland.
The Reason... (Score:3)
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.
Lies, damn lies, and demographics (Score:2)
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
Yeah, but ... (Score:5)
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.
Re:Kind of obvious... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Kind of obvious... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Disturbing trends (Score:2)
Re:Disturbing trends (Score:3)
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.
Take this with a *barrel* of salt... (Score:3)
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...
Re:The UN is wasting their time and money (Score:3)
You're feeling fine, but trust me, most of the other ~six billion or so are not. And it's not just because you've got neat technology and they don't.
Erlich and company weren't totally wrong - they just underestimated the impact that technology could have. Human ingenuity may be limitless, but the arable surface of this planet is not. Technology can help us care for all the humans on the planet, but it'll do it by allowing us to have fewer of them to care for. We can have fewer people without having to kill more of them, if we'd just stop making so many. Technology will help make that possible.
Technology gave us fertilizers, pesticides, clear-cutting, and contraceptives. I suggest more use of the latter, so we won't have to use as much of the former to care for all the humans.
Creativity, not procreativity!
Several Assumptions Here: (Score:2)
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 [aei.org] (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute [hudson.org] (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.
Increase Standard of Living = Lower Birth Rate (Score:2)
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 [sculptors.com] 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
Re:Soooo... What? (Score:2)
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.
Let's see if I got this straight... (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but I don't find anything mysterious about that. It's a classic example of circular logic.
As Scott Adams said... (Score:2)
Population of Mars in 2050? (Score:2)
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.
What did you leave out? (Score:3)
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.
Neo-Darwinist approaches to population (Score:5)
Most animal populations, even those without predators, manage to limit their population before they reach the starvation and disease point. The reason for this is easy to see from a neodarwinist perspective: the odds of having any surviving offspring drop dramatically if the population is at the limit of its resources. For millenia primitive human societies were stable without predators, famine or disease as major problems. This was not entirely clear until fairly recently, and some of the reasons are still a little mysterious.
Nonetheless, human populations have crashed in the past. The reason in most cases is that resources appear to be plentiful until they are completely spent. That is what happened on Easter Island and it has happened repeatedly in China. It doesn't seem that unlikely that it's true for us too. Petroleum will seem plentiful until it's gone. The oil fields in Pennsylvania seemed plentiful until they dissappeared. New fields were found, but one by one they are emptying too. There can not be an infinte amount of oil in the world. Technology may bring us new energy sources in the mean time, and it may not - but do you want to bet your life on it? There are fairly important reasons to think the end of oil isn't too far off.
These days in industrialised countries, the best chance you can give your children is to have fairly few and not strech your resources too much in raising them. The odds of survival of a single upper or middle class child are far greater than that of a child from a large, lower class family. Neodarwinism simply favours the smaller family. Birth control and abortion makes this possible.
Another major trend in population is the social empowerment of women. Women, having invested generally far more in a child than men, tend logically to raising fewer of them and devoting more of their resources to each child. The correlation between the education and empowerment of women and low population growth is very, very strong.
So, the decline in the birth rate is good news, but not necessarily a cure-all for population problems. A continuing decline in the birth rate depends on continuing industrialisation of the underdeveloped world - by no means a sure thing these days - and a growth in the education and empowerment of women. The general catastrophy of global overpopulation may be avoided by lower birth rates in some countries, but Malthusian collapses are already going on in some parts of the world, and that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
Also, it's worth noting that not everyone gains in a low or zero growth population. By the time population stabilises, median age in many countries will be very high, and most of those societies will only be able to function if they allow a lot of immigration. The future is not very rosy for culturally isolating ethnic nation states. How will the Japanese or the Germans feel about the possibility of a nation where they are not a majority? How will Americans feel when most of the young come from another culture? There is already one country that looks like this: the USA's northern neighbour.
Not everyone will be very happy about it, but the future looks more and more like Canada.
The Cycle of Poverty (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Infinite in Real Time (Score:2)
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!
Doesn't have to be expensive. (Score:2)
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"
The relative cost of kids. (Score:2)
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.
I'm all right Jack! (Score:2)
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.
*nodnodnodnodnod* (Score:2)
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??
Find the fallacy (Score:2)
"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.
Two assumptions that people make: (Score:2)
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.
Time to start ZPG? (Score:2)
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.
Working Women and Career families.. (Score:2)
Actually... (Score:2)
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!
Jamaica has it both ways. (Score:2)
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.
Economics is the reason (Score:5)
energy limits (Score:2)
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!
More info on pop.org (Score:5)
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.'
Re:Neo-Darwinist approaches to population (Score:4)
Re:Yeah, but ... (Score:2)
For low enough population levels, that works. (And we aren't doing too hot on the soil conservation thing, either.)
They burn inefficient fuels, with no emissions controls.
And they burn much, much less of them per person.
They dump their garbage and sewage into the local rivers with no thought to what it may be doing down stream.
(Sounds kinda familiar. How much thought do most people give to what their garbage and sewage is doing downstream?) And they produce much, much less garbage per person. Probably somewhat less sewage, too.