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With regard to Bangladesh specifically, having fewer children is something they teach in the schools. Children are taught that the road to poverty is followed by having many children.
With regard to the world at large, I think it is more a reflection of the realization by almost all populations that is is simply not necessary to have large families. Never before in history have women found freedom the way they are finding it now.
Thanks for posting a wonderful lecture on this topic.
All the people who think we need to fill the world with more humans are those who have no understanding of history as you wisely pointed out.
I just finished reading a book about Marie Curie (Madame Curie), and it was not that long ago that she was treated poorly and scoffed at for being a woman attending University to study science.
The world is definitely overpopulated, at least if you believe that we must share the planet with other species, which I believe. Most of the problems we have can be attributed to too many people - global warming, loss of fisheries, loss of forests, severe strain on fresh water in many parts of the world, air pollution, water pollution, extinction of species.
But we are never going to fix it and the reason why is economics. We depend on growth in our economy. When it is not growing everyone freaks out and the stock market crashes. But growth is dependent on more people and increased productivity, with more people to sell all those products to. If we stop populating, we will slow growth and might even stop it. Another problem is that it takes about 8-10 working people under the age of 40 to support one retired person. We keep advancing the longevity of people so we will end up with an inverted population in which the world is full of old people with not enough young people to keep the economy going. That is why many countries rely so heavily on immigration to keep enough young people around.
So, basically if we were a rational species we would slow or reverse our population. But we aren't, we are way too self-interested and suspicious of others to listen to such advice, and so it is pointless to stop having babies. But who knows what the planet will end up becoming in another couple hundred years when there is 50 billion people. I think it will be an ugly place.
The world is definitely overpopulated, at least if you believe that we must share the planet with other species, which I believe. Most of the problems we have can be attributed to too many people - global warming, loss of fisheries, loss of forests, severe strain on fresh water in many parts of the world, air pollution, water pollution, extinction of species.
But we are never going to fix it and the reason why is economics. We depend on growth in our economy. When it is not growing everyone freaks out and the stock market crashes. But growth is dependent on more people and increased productivity, with more people to sell all those products to. If we stop populating, we will slow growth and might even stop it. Another problem is that it takes about 8-10 working people under the age of 40 to support one retired person. We keep advancing the longevity of people so we will end up with an inverted population in which the world is full of old people with not enough young people to keep the economy going. That is why many countries rely so heavily on immigration to keep enough young people around.
So, basically if we were a rational species we would slow or reverse our population. But we aren't, we are way too self-interested and suspicious of others to listen to such advice, and so it is pointless to stop having babies. But who knows what the planet will end up becoming in another couple hundred years when there is 50 billion people. I think it will be an ugly place.
An increasingly high-tech world would be able to support an ever increasing population in relative comfort. There is virtually no limit to the number of humans who could live in a solar system with very cheap energy and robots that make themselves and everything else we need from rocks. But, on the other hand, if our level of tech and wealth trend downward, we will indeed become drastically overpopulated, even with the current number of people.
An increasingly high-tech world would be able to support an ever increasing population in relative comfort. There is virtually no limit to the number of humans who could live in a solar system with very cheap energy and robots that make themselves and everything else we need from rocks. But, on the other hand, if our level of tech and wealth trend downward, we will indeed become drastically overpopulated, even with the current number of people.
Well, for one thing you are speculating on what we can achieve with technology. But even if we can have a world with 100's of billions of people, what would life be like? Packed like sardines into living cubes, eating Soylent green no doubt (look it up if you don't know what it is). No birds, no animals, every square inch of earth devoted to one thing: supporting people. If that is your view of our future, you can have it. It's not for me. I like our Darwinian world where a multitude of species live in balance with each other.
Thanks for posting a wonderful lecture on this topic.
All the people who think we need to fill the world with more humans are those who have no understanding of history as you wisely pointed out.
I just finished reading a book about Marie Curie (Madame Curie), and it was not that long ago that she was treated poorly and scoffed at for being a woman attending University to study science.
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on where it will all end up - I mean in, say, two hundred years and beyond.
By "it", I mean the population of the world as well as the health of the planet, and by "health of the planet" I mean the quality of atmosphere and availability of clean water and food.
Location: Somewhere between the Americas and Western Europe
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TwoByFour
The world is definitely overpopulated, at least if you believe that we must share the planet with other species, which I believe. Most of the problems we have can be attributed to too many people - global warming, loss of fisheries, loss of forests, severe strain on fresh water in many parts of the world, air pollution, water pollution, extinction of species.
But we are never going to fix it and the reason why is economics. We depend on growth in our economy. When it is not growing everyone freaks out and the stock market crashes. But growth is dependent on more people and increased productivity, with more people to sell all those products to. If we stop populating, we will slow growth and might even stop it. Another problem is that it takes about 8-10 working people under the age of 40 to support one retired person. We keep advancing the longevity of people so we will end up with an inverted population in which the world is full of old people with not enough young people to keep the economy going. That is why many countries rely so heavily on immigration to keep enough young people around.
So, basically if we were a rational species we would slow or reverse our population. But we aren't, we are way too self-interested and suspicious of others to listen to such advice, and so it is pointless to stop having babies. But who knows what the planet will end up becoming in another couple hundred years when there is 50 billion people. I think it will be an ugly place.
There are no demographic projections ever showing our population at 50 billion people.
The FACT is that population growth is FALLING. Population is expected to peak round 2050 at about 8 billion people, and the fall. (Other projections I have seen see peak at 2100 with around 11 billion).
And that could even be sooner depending on how fast backwards parts of the world learn about birth control.
Because it's not "the environment" you should really worry about. It's what's going to happen to everyone else when the world is made up primarily of people with really religious attitudes and low IQ.
Saying whether or not the world is overpopulated requires defining what is an acceptable standard of living, as the OP alludes to.
An acceptable standard of living becomes more resource-intensive over time, because of hedonic adjustment. This is one reason development is linked to lower birthrates; people detect through market signals, generally inflation, that the cost of living rises because expectations for the "good life" rise faster than productive capacity.
Free market advocates fall back on the evidence that humans are capable of devising more productive systems to satisfy rising expectations. However the imagination and foresight that drives such innovation is also the imagination that drives rising expectations. Given the fact that birthrates fall as a country becomes more developed, I think it's fair to say that rising expectations always outpace productive capacity.
Now that we have global mass communication, huge populations of people in developing countries have become aware of how good life can be, and this has pulled a lot of expectations forward, much faster than what occurred in what became the developed world during the industrial revolution. Since Europe and North America were setting the pace with no role models, the "expectation frontier" was only a bit farther out than the "productive frontier".
Cheap global communication has caused a worldwide demand shock for resource-intensive, developed lifestyles, while productive capacity in developing countries has not kept pace. This widening gap between expectations and productive capacity produces political instability and unsustainable resource mining, which is why I think the world is overpopulated now.
Well, for one thing you are speculating on what we can achieve with technology. But even if we can have a world with 100's of billions of people, what would life be like? Packed like sardines into living cubes, eating Soylent green no doubt (look it up if you don't know what it is). No birds, no animals, every square inch of earth devoted to one thing: supporting people. If that is your view of our future, you can have it. It's not for me. I like our Darwinian world where a multitude of species live in balance with each other.
Dystopian visions are popular in fiction but they're hardly inevitable.
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