Pop,

You talking bout the Bihar famine of 65? Brown of the Overseas Development Council?

Mark has inadvertently raised another matter re global population control.

In India in the mid 60s, US food and medical aid was tied to performance targets for IUD implants. Expulsion rates and bleeding was over 20 percent. Girls as young as 12 were implanted. You hungry? There goes your genetic line.

Malcolm
India got that food in exchange for adopting some of the new strains of rice and wheat being developed by Norman Borlaug at the time. They lifted their yields and were able to feed their population.
Nobody condones the forced sterilisations of the 1970s in India. Some aspects of the sterilisation program were legitimate, however, where people came freely and they already had enough children. But the main problem with the Indian program was that, because it was at times coercive, it set the whole population stabilisation movement back decades.

So don't employ your usual tactic of trying to besmirch the good name of those in the population movement by associating us with something we deplore as well as you.

Pop & shockadelic,

How then ? How do you propose that world population can be reduced - not just stabilised but reduced ? Certainly, if you are proposing that the world's population should be halved, then how do you propose that can happen relatively quickly, say in a century or two ?

If you propose doing it by reducing birth-rates, then you have to be aware that smaller young populations will have to be supporting growing older populations, isn't that so ? So it would have to be done - it will be done by sheer social change - very slowly, if you do the maths.

Perhaps even a birth-rate per woman of 1.9 would be drastic, the equivalent of the loss of a year's births every eighteen years or so, i.e. fewer age-groups supporting larger age-groups as life-expectancy improves, at five years every twenty years or so.

After all, think about it - a birth-rate of 1.9 births per woman would mean the equivalent of the loss of three or four age-groups across a working life-span, supporting perhaps an additional three or four age-groups in the post-work population.

So across an average life-span of eighty (or ninety in a few generations), there would be the equivalent of about three or four age-groups, even more as time passes, supporting an equal amount of older people.

Or are you proposing something more 'subtractive' ?

It's easy to carp and bitch about a problem, but a bit harder to suggest remedies for it :)

Cheers,

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Loudmouth,

Any such problems could be dealt with by raising the retirement age a bit. In any case, there aren't enough jobs for the young people we have now. Most elderly people can look after themselves, except in the last few months of life. Generally it is grandparents who look after grandchildren, not the other way around. Any problems to do with aging are trivial compared with the problems that come with overpopulation. I would only be concerned if the fertility rate dropped below 1.5. A number of European countries have been coping quite well, despite having a high proportion of old people.

Your friend Malcolm King could bring fertility rates down very far and fast all over the world, just by cramming people into big, crowded cities. See my previous post with the link to Joel Kotkin.

population issue in western world is a sideshow of a sideshow, except where you have large ageing populations viz smaller age cohorts supporting them. Actually, it's not a population issue but a large ageing cohort issue.

Fiscal gap in Oz from now to 2050 to support aged Boomers will be about 2% GDP. Can be ameliorated by Boomers working longer - those who have jobs. Except 120,000 don't and many more women underemployed.

It's the framework for intergenerational transfer problems - another issue the anti-pops know nothing about. But I'm sure they'll try.