For all those that think lowering the birthrate by reasonable means cannot be done, I suggest you have a look at Iran.

Apparently their birthrate went from 6.5 per woman down to less than 2 per woman.

For those that do not trust wikipedia, there are others you can google

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

Ammonite and Yabby. Not so much not having a head for figures (as I'll freely admit) but a simple tap on the '6' key instead of the 5, but give me a break. I'm getting old and my work weary fingers don't always go where I want them to.

I'll deduct two points off my post for the silly typo :-)
Aime.

I’m always left feeling short changed when reading leading statements on any topic. The title “There are too many people in the world” is one of these. It always seems to miss the next bit which is the qualifier.

Too many people because; not enough food, space, housing, money, transport, too many big companies, greedy banks, bad policy, need more immigrants, need less immigrants, environmental devastation, not enough plagues, too much carbon dioxide and not enough religion.

The lead topic then allows each of us to trot out our worst nightmares which we need resolved otherwise we will end up with the conclusion that there are indeed “too many people”.

Alarmisms are fascinating phenomena in modern societies. We are up to 74 since 1790, each getting bigger, scarier and more urgent.

Some of us on OLO have been wondering what the next “biggie” might be? It’s shaping up to be “overpopulation”.

Interesting that this also shares the same attributes as AGW, funny that?

A bit of pseudo science here, a few celebrity advocates there, throw in some “statistics” and get support from academia and NGO’s and bingo! Off we jollywell go again.

Entertaining but soooo SAD.

Squeers

>> Let's face it, if we were members of a small community subsisting on little arable land and few resources, we'd be having town meetings on how best to husband it, and we'd be cautioning ourselves as families to live within our means etc. <<

Absolutely spot-on. I was feeling rather disillusioned in my next to last post. The best way to reduce population is to help the countries where women are still treated as chattel (or should that be cattle?). Education, contraception and the aid to set-up small business has been a proven success.

http://www.businessballs.com/thirdworldsmallbusinessstartups.htm

Trouble is humans have not evolved in keeping with the spread of our numbers or the development of our technology. We are still village creatures.

Aime

Apologies, if I had known that Yabby was going to jump on you for the typo..... I would've kept my mouth shut. We all make mistakes, even the crustacean

Thanks Divergence, Tuesday, 14 June 2011 11:05:59 PM

All I'm trying to get at is that there are no short-cuts to population reduction. Of course, freely available contraception and more importantly, education for women all around the world (thanks, Ammonite) would massively reduced the fertility rate - educated women tend to marry later, have fewer kids and pester them to get a good education themselves.

If they could be put into effect generally over the next fifty years ('how' is the question), those measures would bring the birthrate down to close to ZPG, but actual population reduction would be a far more messy business: since you can't exterminate the elderly, or expect them to sign off at some designated age (oh, I see now the purpose of the euthanasia debate ! Thank you), then you have to find ways to cut the birthrate.

But that you can't do that quickly - and in any case, it would inevitably shift the economic burden in future decades onto the young, the fewer and fewer young, and for perhaps hundreds of years, many generations.

Hence the fascist solution must spring so easily to mind: 'we must cut the population and quickly ! Drastic measures are desperately required to save the planet ! Exterminate ! Exterminate !'

So yes, Spindoc may have a point.

And as for technology etc. etc., those 2 % in US agriculture are producing how much more now than the 50 % were back in the nineteenth century ? And if you've ever worked at, say, fruit-picking, you'd know how much wastage there is to satisfy a finicky market. I wouldn't be surprised if half the food produced in the world is wasted. The sky isn't falling, Divergence. Have a good day :)

Joe

Like a fundamentalist Christian preacher snorting lines of coke off the chiselled six-pack of a rent boy in a hotel room, or a fundamentalist Muslim suicide bomber with a hard-drive full of Western porn, the neo-Malthusians seem to think that their high-minded principles should apply to everyone but themselves.