Loudmouth,

Very rapid population changes (in either direction) are obviously going to cause serious problems. A country would only adopt a one child policy if it were facing collapse, as we discussed earlier in relation to China. However, the top 10 countries on the World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index are Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, the US, Germany, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Canada. All these countries also rank high on the UN Human Development Index. The population growth rates are miniscule in most of those European countries and are well below ours in all ten. Germany and Japan actually have (slowly) declining populations. These countries already have stable age structures, with generations of approximately equal size, apart from extreme old age. Although some have raised their retirement ages, they are obviously coping reasonably well, without the inflated housing costs and infrastructure deficits that we are experiencing.

Just a few points. There is abundant evidence of past societal collapses in history and in the archaeological record, and population played a role in many of them, often by making safety margins dangerously thin. People are now a major geophysical force and putting serious pressure on planetary life support systems.

http://aap.newscentre.com.au/acci/110523/library/education_2/25737105.html

This is the view of mainstream scientists who publish in Nature

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

Open version

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Your childlike faith in technology solving all problems clearly isn't shared by a lot of scientists.

Most of humanity is living in grinding poverty and consuming renewable resources faster than they can be replenished.This is mostly due to sheer numbers, not because the top billion, actually responsible for about 38% of consumption, are consuming everything.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/ecological_footprint_atlas_2010

If you can call us fascists, perhaps we can call you ostriches.

Thanks for your reasonable critique, Divergence.

My main point is that any population reduction (short of extermination) necessarily has very major effects on the birthrate and on the younger working generation: people who are already born are not going to 'reduce' their population by evaporating away, so it has to be a question of reducing the starting population over the decades and generations and centuries, i.e. the number of births.

Even so, it has to be a relatively slow process: as we will see in the case of China in a decade or two, reducing the birthrate massively impacts on the next generation, and two generations, later, i.e. on the younger population - if you reduce the birthrate, there is a relatively much higher population in the older generations to be cared for - isn't that so ?

After all, it's not as if the population can be reduced by somehow cutting down on the older generations, unless we take the Soylent Green option. Isn't that so ?

So the burden would always fall on the two working generations, those between the younger one still in nappies and in school, and the older one in nappies and retired. In their turn, that younger generation will grow out of its nappies and schooldays and take on an even greater burden than its parents and grandparents had. And in turn, their children will have to take on an even greater burden. Isn't that so ?

So it's a matter of how fast and how great we want to impose that burden on the younger generations. If I were in Gen Y, and if I were selfish (which I'm sure they are not), I would be campaigning for gradual population growth, not rapid population reduction.

There is one sure method that history has shown to engender population control, indeed reduction. Unfortunately it is so counter to the social control fantasies of the greenshirted eugenicists that they simply refuse to even countenance it.

Make sure people are healthy, rich and educated. Especially women.

That's all it takes. Put these three worthy goals in place and, almost magically, people in even the most religious societies simply choose to have less children.

But, no, the screeching neo-Malthusian ninnies will hysterically insist, as they always wrongly do, that we are scant decades away from the imminent and unavoidable disaster of being overwhelmed with a tide of nasty, poor, brown people intent on murdering Mother Gaia.

No matter how many times they're proved wrong, the neo-Malthusians never change.

*Make sure people are healthy, rich and educated. Especially women.*

Funny that, Clownfish. Now if we take Thailand, where the Govt
provides a good family planning service, population growth is
down to around 0.5%. In the Philippines, where the Catholic Church
still interferes all the way, population growth is around 2%.

Clearly your theory is just a little bit flawed, as we can see
by the evidence.

People all over the world enjoy sex, that does not mean that they
want all those babies. Give them a choice, they will have less.

Fester, you are quite correct.

Yabby, how about not cherry-picking?

The Philippines' fertility rate is a middle-ranking about 3.5. Another strongly Catholic country, Italy's, is about 1.2; Spain's is 1.29. Australia's is 1.79.

Thailand's is 1.83.

Clearly factors other than religion are at work.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2757948.html

Nicco, you asked a good question about why I'm so hard on the anti-pops.

I'm not hard on them, only in the way they view the world through 'population glasses'. They have boiled complexity of cause and event - of almost all of the world's problems - down to population.

Check out Chris Berg's article above re the silly polly claim that the uprising in Yemen has to do with population. Ditto food shortages, global warming, earthquakes, drowning polar bears, rising oceans, droughts, heat waves, killer storms to name just a few.

But there is a harder edge to my criticisms because unfounded claims such as these always single out people and in this case, with population, it's women.

Whenever men start talking about cutting the population, what they really mean is cutting a woman's rights to do with her body as she pleases. This might be taken for granted by some but it is a relatively new and novel experience for modern women to control their own reproductive destiny.

When the anti-pops talk about population, they are really talking about is people - you and me, our neighbours, husbands and friends - all of those who make up the social fabric of Australia. So far their claims have been laughable (and enjoyable) but their thinking has a nasty regressive element which needs to be exposed.