Pericles, would you please justify your desire to take the simple life, & our hills hoist off all those who want it.

What right do you have to impose overcrowded high rise living on so many?

What is so good about your Mcmansion, & two metre plasmas, that we should all aspire to them.

I think a great many would join me in a lifestyle where they could afford to live only 20 minutes or less from work. One that allowed people a comfortable life, with home ownership easily achieved on just one wage.

If you think life is better today, you "ain't looked too close".

Some time back I read of an experiment with laboratory rats. They kept adding more rats, progressively, to a large cage. These rats were well fed, & to start with had a great life.

After a certain density was reached, discord started. As overcrowding developed, rats started killing each other. There was a stocking rate above which their society broke down.

You only have to take a look at the behaviour of too many young people, on a night out, in any of our larger cities, to see that we have all ready exceeded the safe stocking rate in these cities.

@James O'Neill. Your point is well made. Given that government has so little control over population growth it makes it even more important that it exercises what little control it has responsibly.
Part of the problem has been highlighted by Colinsett - migration has essentially become a sacred cow with very little critical analysis allowed of the claims regarding the benefits of immigration.
If we manage to limit net immigration to humanitarian and family reunion programmes we will still have some population growth but that growth will be due to advances in medical technology that has managed to reduce the death rate.
People like myself who are opposed to population growth are largely concerned at government policies that stimulate growth. Government policies should be focussed on ensuring that natural population growth does not result in a reduction in the quality of life for all of our population.

Pericles,

You are assuming that limits to growth, while they exist, are so far in the future that we don't have to worry about them, but globally, we are experiencing shortages or losses of arable land, fresh water, biodiversity, fish stocks, fossil fuels and minerals that are vital for our agriculture and technology, and capacity of the environment to safely absorb wastes. We have many of these problems in Australia as well, and concerns about them are coming from mainstream scientists. See for example

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

There have been numerous societal collapses in the historical and archaeological record. See Jared Diamond's "Collapse", "Constant Battles" by Harvard archaeologist Prof. Steven LeBlanc, and "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations" by soil scientist Prof. David Montgomery. Overpopulation relative to resources and technology, and mismanagement of the environment were major causes. The people in those collapsing societies were just as intelligent and ingenious as we are, but it didn't save them.

Your world view resembles a picture of Mickey Mouse. The face is the economy, and the environment and society are the less important ears. Nice if you can afford them. In fact, they are concentric circles. If you trash your environment, you trash your society and your economy. The government of the old Soviet Union was terribly wrongheaded about economic management and made people unnecessarily poor. Nevertheless, the average citizen had a job, a roof over his head, enough to eat, a school for his children, etc. In a limits to growth collapse, people starve, die in the epidemics that sweep through malnourished people living in crowded, filthy conditions, and get murdered in fighting over resources. It is far better to be pig ignorant about economics than pig ignorant about the biophysical conditions that determine our prosperity and indeed our survival.

The growthists are a threat to our environment, security, social cohesion, personal freedom, and general quality of life, which is getting worse, according to a government leak, not just Hasbeen:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/8536559/city-life-in-decline/

The (temporary) problems of a large elderly generation as we stabilise are trivial by comparison.

You misunderstand me, Hasbeen.

>>Pericles, would you please justify your desire to take the simple life, & our hills hoist off all those who want it.<<

If that is the life you wish to lead, I do not begrudge you a moment of it. By all means, go ahead and lead it. There are any number of towns in Australia where you can feel entirely comfortable, doing just that.

Unfortunately for you - but happily for me - Sydney is no longer on that list. And won't be, ever again.

>>What right do you have to impose overcrowded high rise living on so many? What is so good about your Mcmansion, & two metre plasmas, that we should all aspire to them.<<

This simply shows that you haven't understood a word I have written. I am not suggesting that these should be everybody's aspirations. Although I do believe in allowing them to be a choice.

If your desire to re-vegetate in this manner only affected you, there would not be a problem. Fact is though, your generation is now a net "taker", while the present and coming generations will be required to be net "givers", for the rest of your life.

The macro-economic view of your position is that you have been able to save enough to be in a position to make a choice. Your property is likely to be worth considerably more than when you first bought it, representing value that has been soaked out of other parts of the economy. Similarly, at a national level, we would not have the financial ability to release that captured value, in the stagnating economic environment that you propose.

Since WWII, the working segment of our population, i.e. that aged between twenty and sixty, has expanded, and their surplus has been ploughed back into economic expansion. If you now choose to take your "age dividend" out of the economy, and rely on the next generation to support you, the least you can do is to leave them with as much of an opportunity to achieve as you had.

Too many people

For this ancient country

Does no-one much good

Yabby:>> Japan has already found solutions to some of its problems. Toyota, Honda, Isuzu etc, all manufacture around the world, no need to
do it all in Japan. The Japanese have huge investments in
China and elsewhere. Profits are still returned to Tokyo.<<

Your usual rhetoric Yabby?

Japans unemployment rate has gone up by almost 300% in twenty years, and 2009 and 2010 were the highest in twenty years. That really sounds like they have "already found solutions to some of its problems" as you said.

Yabby if you take manufacturing from an economy it wilts and so do the citizens, and no matter the amount of cheap imported goods available to a diminishing work force the prosperity of that society ebbs. It seems that “profits back to Tokyo” are not as satiating as full employment.