If, if, if, if, if, if, if.

Why is it progressives are always referring to the ideal, rather than what's real, right here and now?

Hi Chockaholic,

Pot & kettle, my friend :) So you don't rely on a sheaf of dubious 'ifs' ?

What have been some of the trends in demography over the past century ?

1. As women become better educated, they postpone their child-bearing, and have fewer children, if any.

2. As agriculture is mechanised, as irrigation systems improve, and as plant-breeding develops higher-yielding crops, farmers need fewer children to work the land. New occupations blossom and are taken up by people who need higher levels of education. Including women.

3. As Marx would point out, both capitalism AND the 'people' have inexhaustible ingenuity to develop technologies, mostly capitalist fiirms exploiting the ingenuity of people, especially as they get more skilled. Especially women. And they have fewer children as a by-product.

4. The upshot of all this is that birth-rates n developing countries fall, sometimes precipitously.

Is any of that false ?

And thank you for calling me a 'progressive', by the way, it's an honorable title.

Cheers :)

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Loudmouth,

What part of damaging our life support systems don't you understand? Do you think that the scientists warning about these things (see the Rockstrom et al. paper I linked to) are all fools or are lying to us? See the Global Footprint Network Atlas I linked to earlier for the biocapacity values for the various countries. There are some countries such as Papua New Guinea that are still within their biocapacity, but a great many aren't, nor is the world as a whole. As I said, we are in environmental overshoot. Something like 190 million people in India and perhaps 130 million in Northern China are dependent on unsustainably pumped groundwater. No water, no food. It is just like running through an inheritance or lottery winnings.

What you say about bringing down fertility rates in Africa is quite correct, but this isn't the main issue. If they don't bring down their fertility rates, they will deal with resource problems by killing each other, as happened in Rwanda (see the Malthus in Africa chapter on Rwanda in Jared Diamond's collapse and note the extremely low figures for agricultural land per person). The real issue is the numbers that are going to be added by demographic momentum in the countries that have recently brought down their fertility rates. It can take up to 70 years to stop population growth after this happens, because of the pyramid shaped age distribution that is associated with fast population growth. The births are in the very big young adult generation, while most of the deaths are occurring in the relatively tiny elderly generation.

Globalisation is also allowing a lot more people around the world to consume more. China now emits more greenhouse gases than the US, even without including production for export, and consumes twice as much meat, even though less on a per capita basis. As well as the environmental problems, most commodities are vastly more expensive in real terms than in the 1990s. See

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/

What is likely to happen with half again as many people?

Hi Divergence,

Yes indeed, the world's population will keep rising, until those social and technological and economic and educational changes have a chance to kick in, and will keep rising after that as more people reach extreme old age.

But then it will start to level off and fall, as it has done in developed countries. Yes it might take a century, with a population around ten billion, but innovations of all sorts will also move towards less polluting and more sustainable modes of production.

Otherwise, how do you see any reduction in population occurring ? Mass exterminations ? 'Solent green' solutions ? Sterilisations ?

It seems to me there is either a peaceful, education- and technology-driven solution, very broadly speaking, or a more brutal solution.

Do you have any other positive suggestion ?

Cheers,

Joe
www.firstsources.info

So Kettle, what are my sheaf of dubious 'ifs'?
I note you can't refer to any.

Loudmouth, you've just changed the word "if" to "as".

"As" only applies where events have actually occurred.
Where they are only conjectures about the future, the word "if" applies.

When Africa get its act together (with China's "help": Hide a dagger behind a smile), let me know.
Until then, I would prefer political decisions be based on "what is", not "what ifs".

Loudmouth

It would be a help if we could address how to get to a genuinely sustainable population cooperatively rather than adopting such an insulting manner. Divergence is simply presenting the facts. What would YOU suggest about the 190 million in India and the 130 million in China who are being fed by the unsustainable use of groundwater? At some point most of them are going to starve unless we can produce food in a sustainable way elsewhere and get it to them. What will they produce to pay for this food? Probably little, so a lot will have to come as food aid. Will there be enough food on the world market for the World Food Program to buy? These are questions we have to answer rather than blithely assume we can get to 10 billion people and gently decline in numbers. Those of us concerned about population are in the forefront of worrying about how to feed people, just as Lester Brown was in 1965 when he went to India. He realised drought would cut yields and so encouraged the US to ship massive amounts of grain to India. This staved off mass famine. That was when India's population was about a third of what it is now. The likelihood of any country doing it again on that scale is unlikely. Hence the spectre of famine looms as climate change bites, but it is hardly what we in the population movement want.