Thanks for your feedback Foxy. Some interesting points- a Macro-Economic perspective- I generally favour a more Micro-Economic perspective but- there you go.

Uncertain source of information...

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNazhjUIrHePir_sJ_q6eow

peyton
6 days ago

Alice Friedemann, in her 60s, no kids by choice, and prolific writer with a hard-science background, posted this interesting and refreshingly direct information:

"Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. The more people there are, the less one individual matters." - Isaac Asimov . . .

Humans have controlled population sizes since time immemorial. As sociologist Jack Parsons said, “population control is an ancient institution.” Even cornucopian economist Julian Simon said, “every tribe known to anthropologists, no matter how ‘primitive,’ has some effective social scheme for controlling the birth rate.”

Some of our oldest literary documents, the Babylonian “Atra Hasis” circa 1750 B.C. and the Philippine Code of Sumakwel from 1250 B.C., contain population control policies.

Confucius, Plato, the “first city planner” Hippodamus in Greece, the Indian sage Kautilya, the influential Catholic Church figure Tertullian, and even Benjamin Franklin, all spoke of the dangers of overpopulation and the need to manage our numbers - before Malthus ever entered the scene.

Today’s population sizes– unprecedented... made possible by the unprecedented energy supply from fossil fuels. (Factors driving reduction need) 1) the inability of a reduced future energy regime to support our current numbers, and 2) the destructive impact (of us on the planet, non-humans, us) .

Best estimated optimum global sizes of one to three billion indicate that populations virtually everywhere need to be reduced. Given our sheer size of eight billion, reductions will take a very long time. A global one-child policy enacted by around 2045 would get us down to roughly 3.5 billion by the end of the century. On the other hand, business as usual will leave us with over 10 billion people by 2100. Our recommendations are made in light of this daunting reality and out of a commitment to reduce suffering.

What a silly article.

Why is the author and the writer he quotes talking about solving a problem that they both don't believe is real?

Is it some way of getting around having to accept there is an issue before doing something about it?

Either both of them need to come clean and acknowledge what is evident to most of the thinking population of this planet or they should just keep on being themselves.

Foxy & CM,

On the relationships between women's education and timing/amount of child-bearing:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data#:~:text=The%20economic%20theory%20of%20fertility,power%2C%20including%20on%20family%20size.

In many backward societies, there is a preference for male children, so in societies where child-bearing starts early and often, it will be the girl children who may be 'sacrificed'. BUT in societies where women can forgo child-bearing in favour of education, and higher forms of employment than the fields, they may prefer not to marry, to marry later, and not to have so many kids, or any at all.

So trying to adjust a society's future population is going to be extraordinarily difficult. Too few kids and - fifty years later - it is discovered that an ever-smaller number of working people have to support an ever-larger number of old non-working people, who (if they're lucky) sometimes look after their one grand-child. And how does a society dictate to women how many kids they will have, like it or bloody not ?

All a bit academic, since so many societies now are experiencing stagnant or slightly-falling populations (South Korea, Japan, Russia, most of Europe, the US and Australia without immigration). In a generation or so, China's population will start to slowly fall, perhaps disastrously. A generation later, India's. A generation later still, maybe most of Africa's.

And that's something that all the Chicken Littles in the world can't do anything about either way.

I suspect that an annual population decline of more than 0.1 % p.a. could indeed be disastrous, i.e., 0.1 % fewer babies being born than people dying, i.e. i.e. more than 2.5-3 % per generation, or 9 % from the grandparents' to the grandchildren's generations. How any of that can be controlled is perhaps going to be impossible to control and/or dictate for all those OLO inner-dictators.



Joe

Thanks for your feedback Loudmouth-

Loudmouth said "I suspect that an annual population decline of more than 0.1 % p.a. could indeed be disastrous, i.e., 0.1 % fewer babies being born than people dying, i.e. i.e. more than 2.5-3 % per generation, or 9 % from the grandparents' to the grandchildren's generations."

Answer- I don't believe what you have said here. Feel free to believe it yourself. Maybe you could back up your claims more to support your statements. I call them statements because what you have said is not really an argument.

Anyway thanks for your feedback Loudmouth.

Canem Malum, read Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson and some of your questions will be answered.

To Bernie Masters- Here is some information on the book "Empty Planet" you recommended.

http://steadystate.org/book-review-empty-planet-the-shock-of-global-population-decline/

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-empty-planet-the-shock-of-global-population-decline-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson-people-will-disappear-5lr726vn0

http://www.wsj.com/articles/empty-planet-review-a-drop-in-numbers-11549497631

Mr. Stone is an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.

http://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Darrell-Bricker/Empty-Planet--The-Shock-of-Global-Population-Decline/23364359

http://overpopulation-project.com/review-of-empty-planet-the-shock-of-global-population-decline-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson-part-1/

From my understanding it appears that the population of the world is increasing significantly faster than effects due to female education reducing it- but I haven't read the book or seen what data they are actually using