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Before education and empowerment of women must come access to basic necessities and social stability. Before basic necessities can be met and these socieities stabilized, something must be done about levels of government corruption and some serious investment be made in the global environment.
.... and so on ...
A policy of one-child-per-family isn't population growth control, it's rapid population decrease. Even if 100% of your population married up and got with the baby-making you'd end up with 50% of your current population in a given age bracket a generation later. Two children per family doesn't fix the problem because not every couple is going to want/be able to have two or even one child and not every citizen is going to be a member of a breeding pair.
If you want to control population growth or maintain a stable population via government intervention the only real way would be through forced temporary sterilization. Either make every male undergo a reversible vasectomy with regular checks for auto-reversal or invent some new form of reversible sterility treatment and make it illegal not to have it. Then when a couple wants a child, they apply with a government agency. Ignoring all other factors if the current population total is below the maximum allowable the couple is selected by some means (possibly a periodic lottery amongst all applying couples) and are allowed fertility. Once they have their kid, or if they prove unable to have one, it's back to sterility. Presumably people will die frequently enough that the occasional twins or triplets aren't going to screw up your population cap.
Any sort of "please have this many or fewer children" policy is going to fail. Unplanned or illegal pregnancies coupled with a general public revulsion at the idea of forced abortion/infanticide are going to bring it down fast. You have to keep them from breeding at all outside of the allowed parameters.
As to the "should we": If the whole globe were at the same tech level with equally distributed resources then I'd say that the world would be a better place if the only parents were people who wanted to be parents and showed a monetary and emotional level of preparation for it. Unfortunately I don't see it happening until it becomes absolutely, unequivocally necessary. And then it still won't happen for a decade or two.
Also, you need some population growth if you're planning on supporting your retirees/pensioners at all, or you get into the situation where you've got fewer young people paying for more old people, which is what we're getting into right now.
EDIT: Not to mention that such a policy - or even a one/two-child policy - would require human rights violations to implement.
Yeah, I don't see any kind of population limiting policy being adopted outside of countries where the government just doesn't give a shit about public opinion or human rights unless it becomes absolutely necessary. If we don't have enough water or food for everyone and we can't beg/borrow/steal the food we'll find something new to eat. When we run out of that then we might think about the mandatory wang mutilations. I was just talking about policies that, if enacted for whatever reason, would work. The Chinese policy is imploding pretty spectacularly.
I don't necessarily think it has to happen in that order. Education and empowerment of women would most certainly increase stability in society and alow better access to basic necesseties due to less corruption and political and religious asshattery.
On the one hand you have the traditional Malthusian arguments that we're rapidly going beyond our carrying capacity and if we don't do something drastic, we're going to run out of food/resources/room/etc.
Then there's the other, Collaborative approach method by Condorcet, that argued that as a country industrializes it'll naturally stop having as many kids as it's more likely to have it's population now spend time to enjoy themselves than worry about dying.
Guess which one has had hundreds of years backing up it's assertion. The only issue is that Condorcet's approach takes time (duh). So you have to figure out whether the increase in population in the shortterm can be managed. Which I am not seeing as a problem. The UN is figuring that the planetary population will stabilize around 9-10 billion by the end of this century. Given technological advances that have made us thrown Malthusian worries about food out the window in the last few hundred years, I'm rather optimistic that in the next hundred years we'll figure out a way to provide for a 50% increase of our current population.
Helping developing countries develop now to provide for the billion or so we currently don't provide for would be a good start.
It's very comforting to see how the green on this graph corresponds to technological, economic, and political development. I'm almost tempted to say this problem is going to solve itself once Africa gets developed.
Poor, uneducated people see children as a form of insurance for themselves, since kids can work and take care of them when they get old. People who are educated and wealthy don't usually want to have a lot of kids. They want to have a few kids and spoil them.
The exception, of course, are fucking religious people. So my solution is to destroy religion. I'm on it.
Here's a question that occurred to me: What if governments and societies started systematically liberalizing their attitudes toward homosexuality? I'm talking about acceptance to the degree that being gay literally does not matter to anyone else. Would that make any difference? I suspect the number of gay people who end up with kids because of social pressure to be "straight" is pretty small, but how small? Even a change of a percent or two could make a significant difference, and would certainly be a less offensive option than mandatory sterilization of 5% of the population (or the like). In fact, it's something we ought to be working on anyway.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
I don't know... I like to think it's one of those problems that will work itself out via plague, pandemic, et cetera. A "market correction," so to speak.
-N.B: See Mr. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded
Did you just argue that humans making efforts in controlling their own population is worse than a natural or human caused calamity or were you specifically speaking about forced government intervention? If we're to survive as a species long enough to achieve spread beyond this rock, we will have a form of population control in our distant future.
It is possible that a cataclysmic event is needed for actual measures to be taken and it is also possible that a more mature and advanced society will be self controlling, but the end result will be a stable human population.
Ignoring the ethical dimension for a second:
Sterilization wouldn't need to be temporary or reversible if it still allowed for some type of IVF (or cloning) technology. Just sterilize everybody at birth. Set desirable birthing rates. Auction off baby permits for government revenue.
This is a crappy, crappy basis to bet human survival on.
Yes but as China has shown us, preventing certain people from having children also creates a bigger market for child traficking. I can't recall what the documentary is called, but it's about child abduction and traficking in China. The economic situation for some is so bad that they sell their children just to pay the bills.
'Course the culture over there is about as bad as it can get for population. If it continues along this path, it will inevitably cause a dramatic drop in the population over there.
Well, China at least is going to have a substantial gay rights movement on their hands real quick :lol:
EDIT: To address your question, if you are asking if gay rights alone will curb population growth... definitely. By how much? Harder to say. Historically gay rights have not occurred in isolation, but have been correlated with the general modernization of countries. I wonder if anyone has an data on that? Seems pretty obvious to me though that 'acceptance of gays = more gay couples = less kids produced'.
Aldus Huxley wants his idea back.
What happens if it goes unchecked? At some point, poor people start dying faster than more poor people are born. Overpopulation is so far from being an issue in first world countries that it's starting to swing into underpopulation being a serious issue.
Since I tend to think that humanity will still be around in 50 years, alternate energy technologies will hopefully have gotten cheap enough to the point where we can start developing Africa.
India will take steps to take care of its own overpopulation before it gets to the point of collapse, I think.
You mean like what is happening in Africa right now with HIV/AIDS?
People, once a society becomes sufficiently wealthy, and implements a working social security and healthcare system, people are going to stop having lots of babies. The problems in countries like Japan, Sweden and Finland is that the population is decreasing, if you discount immigration.
There is not going to be a huge global overpopulation problem in the future. In areas that are sufficiently rich, the population will be decreasing, while in poor areas, wars, famine and disease will keep the population down, until they are able to pull themselves up, empower their women and start building a solid society.
I had no idea. Was that in a book or article of his? I have only read BNW. I would love to read wherever this came up.
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Yeah, you really want this graphic of annual percentage increase:
Also two decades is a long time as Rosling talks show, I really doubt that OP map is at all accurate.
2006 version:
Look at how North and far Southern Africa, Asia and Latin America have dropped in just these past few years.
One of the thing it mentions is that The Population Bomb has already gone off. It pretty much doesn't matter what you do now. Even with a globally enforced 1 child per person policy, the population is young and are mostly yet to have kids. Birthrate will excede deathrate simple because less people are old and dying than the people who replaced them.
Yeah, I'm pretty firmly in the Condorcet camp.
We need to figure out how to reduce resource consumption per capita, rather than try to reduce our capita. The latter with self-correct, while the former will only get worse.
Throw in cheap and accessible birth control, and thats about it.
I wonder if by 'educate' we mean 'inform women that God's representitive on earth is wrong about the whole condom thing'?
Plus we need to accept the amount of HIV in Africa being spread by rape, subsequent intimacies, and childbirth - which seems less applicable in terms of education.
In general I agree that the matter will resolve itself as countries develop - I think the question has been whether more or less suffering would occur if we tried to artificially impose some kind of alteration*.
*Before we even consider our ability to enforce such a thing.
Yes, that is exactly what it means.
Its ironic that the Catholic church condemns condoms because they see it as taking lives. Let by discouraging condom use, they condemn millions to illness and death. Man do I ever hate the Catholic church.
There already is overpopulation. I don't know about you, but I define overpopulation as more people in an environment than the environment (and society) can provide for.
Or did you mean there won't be overpopulation in high-income countries?
APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY
WE CAN'T CURE PEOPLE IN HAITI OF TUBERCULOSIS BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE IN SORCERY. OH, THEY'LL STILL TAKE THE FULL COURSE OF DRUGS PROPERLY IF YOU GIVE THEM A SMALL STIPEND FOR FOOD AND HIRE COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKERS? SHUT UP THEY'RE POOR.
Come on man. Don't make excuses to extricate the industrialized world from helping the global poor. We do enough of that already.
Educating and enfranchising women is one very concrete and effective way to move third world countries out of the third world.
Implicit in your statement is the idea that there will always be a third world and there's really nothing we can do about it. It's that sort of acceptance of poverty that prevents us from doing anything more than throwing a few billion at the IMF every year
Yet, if you restrict your definition to simply looking at what the environment/state, right now, can provide for the population you're removing the possibility that if you improve the efficiency of the environment/state (through technological improvements, state development to provide more services, etc.) then you also reduce the 'problem' in that you still have the same/growing number of people, but more of them are being provided for in the same area.
Relying on altruism is a piss-poor way to get things done. Yes, we lack altruism, so find a way to get things done without it. This is, indeed, why we have laws -- to make things mandatory. Find $5 billion annually in tax dollars to control TB globally, preventing on the order of something like 2 million deaths every year. For $5 billion. That's a good deal. And you know, if the US contributed even half of that to an international fund, other countries would likely follow suit, given that the "well the US won't do it and we can't accomplish anything without them" excuse is pretty common in the international aid community.
Stop using loans, stop giving money directly to governments, and start allocating money directly and hand-in-hand with human/intellectual capital, using government partnerships, but ensuring where the money goes with your own people on the ground. Cuba does this -- they export hundreds of doctors every year all over Central and South America along with cash to help improve public health situations in those countries.
Usually this means ignoring them entirely or giving them foreign aid in the form of loans, which usually come with crippling debt. Indeed, of African nations that have received IMF/World Bank loans, 3 of 22 have gotten themselves off foreign aid, and meanwhile 5 are now considered failed states.
Foreign aid has to be more than just money, definitely not a loan, and it has to be an actual partnership between nations involving work, diplomacy, and actual people on the ground, instead of handing over money to corrupt governments with no strings attached except a crushing debt commitment that will hurt everyone in the country except the corrupt government officials.
Cuba has fantastic health stats and pretty good literacy/education stats despite its overall poverty and a lack of political freedom. Poverty can be managed. Poverty doesn't have to mean the same thing as inhuman, endless torment for everyone in its grasp. We make excuses but the facts are sitting right there. It can be done, we choose not to.
By this standard, we've been overpopulated since the beginning of human civilization.
Ethiopian famine wasn't caused by food shortages, even within Ethiopia -- indeed almost no famines are caused by that anymore. They're caused because people can't find a way to entitle themselves to that food.
The world has the resources to support nine, ten, or even eleven billion people. The problem is in allocating those resources.
Chances are he meant BNW. That's what I thought of when I read your idea, at least.