VK3UU and Curmudgeon,

Try googling Iran birthrates and see what you find.

I understand they reduced their birts from 6.5 per woman to less than 2 per woman. Done through education with support of religion.

That seems to me to be a good step in the right direction.

Here is a wikipedia link and there are other docs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

<< Ludwig, I would be intrigued to know you easy solution to population growth. >>

VK3AUU, it is just so blitheringly easy in Australia. Get rid of high immigration and the baby bonus … and Bob’s your uncle!

But yes, it’d be a whole lot harder in India or Africa or for the whole planet.

We’ve got a global effort to address climate change. So why on Earth isn’t there a global effort to stop population growth and properly address sustainability? This makes no sense to me.

If we put our minds to it, I reckon we could easily come up with policies that would encourage significantly lower birthrates and immigration rates in developed countries and assist third world countries with contraception, education for women, and all the other things that go towards improving quality of life and reducing birthrates.

Banjo gives a great example of what can be achieved in countries in which many of us would have thought there’d be no chance of significantly reducing population growth. We just need a concerted effort to expand these concepts globally.

But then, it would take a whole lot of effort on the global scale… and by far the easier thing to do would be to just wait for the collapse, as Curmy says, and then pick up the pieces, and perhaps learn from the disaster that we need to live sustainably. That’s a real option. In fact, it is about 99.9% certain to happen.

<the "technological advancement, improved efficiencies" that are prerequisites for your model, will happen anyway.

In fact, they are far more likely to occur in a situation where increasing population is the driving force.>

If this were true, Pericles, you would see it in parts of the world with higher population growth. Unfortunately, what you often encounter are cesspits of misery and deprivation. The limiting fact is that a life requires a physical infrastructure, and that infrastructure costs money. Grow the population too quickly and you face the prospect of degrading living standards and incurring debt. Even Australia's recent high population growth is a case in point.

The world's population would stabilise if contraception were made available to those people who wanted it. This will only happen when those in power consider the benefits from a stable population to outweigh the value of slaves and cannon fodder which come from rapidly growth.

<< But still we get the oddest of claims. Ludwig takes today's prize: >>

Yay!

To repeat my prize-winning statement: With a so-called zero-growth economy, we would still have growth.

<< Apparently there is "good growth" and "bad growth" >>

YES, Pericles! And you know perfectly well what I mean. Obviously, growth which is made up of the continuous expansion of population and of economic turnover needed to supply goods and services to that population, to the extent that we just have ever more of the same, with no average gains for all of society, is BAD growth!

If we do away with this, we’d still have the good growth, which is as you quote: technological advancement, improved efficiencies, etc.

The only thing that is misleading is the term; ‘zero-growth economy’. We don’t want that. We want a zero population growth society with a growing economy, which can actually provide an improvement in per-capita income and quality of life.

With a zero population growth society, we could have an economy that is growing at a much lesser rate than at present but which would provide much more benefit to the community.

This is all very basic.

<< In fact, they [technological advancement and improved efficiencies] are far more likely to occur in a situation where increasing population is the driving force. >>

Yes, where increasing population pressure is driving the need for them. That is; where the ever-greater strains that population pressure is placing on our society, environment and resource base is driving the need for better ways of dealing with it. In other words, technological advancement and improved efficiencies would basically be chasing the tail of population growth and trying to reduce its negative effects.

Obviously it would be far more preferable to stop this absurd regime of continuously increasing pressure and use our technological abilities to actually produce real improvements rather than competing with the negative pressures and trying (and failing) to maintain the status quo.

So um, why did I win that prize again?

I am not convinced that the fundamentals of the economic system would have to totally change.

Let's remember that the vast majority of Australians are not getting signficantly wealthier, and any wage rises are simply maintaining their current wealth. It is only a minority of already wealthy individuals that are getting significantly wealthier from continued growth. The biggest shock due to a steady state economy will be for the wealthiest individuals while significant pressure will be taken off the vast majority of Australians.

No interest payments......well I doubt that there will be many Australians complaining about that.

One thing is clear how ever. A steady state economy would be capable of sustaining far fewer people. So steady state economy and population decline would go hand in hand until a stable configuration is reached. We have been there before in historical times.

In fact the way our modern economy has evolved 'wealth' for a minority is conjured from generation of debt for all the 'serfs'.