Quote :

"I'll dump my oil into the drainage ditch if i wan to! Fuck the environment its not my responsibility to ensure its conservation!"

Oil is something that we know will run out. There is a finite supply that cannot correct itself. Population growth can correct itself.

Quote :

"Unfortuantly many people including religious bible thumpers and ignorant lower class members do not think of their life or the world in such logical ways."

Your Tammy Sue example applies almost exclusively to the United States and select other Western Countries, and I've already agreed with you. My discussion with mrfrog dealt primarily with the population explosion that's really only happening in the developing world, where social security and welfare benefits often don't exist and rarely, if ever, encourage child production the way they do here.

Quote :

"How do you explain 3rd world AFrica?"

As I said, increased availability of birth control and education is necessary for those forces to work. Most of 3rd world Africa doesn't actually have a choice in whether or not to have kids. If they have sex -- and again, expecting them to abstain seems supremely unrealistic -- they are going to have kids.

Much of 3rd world Africa also has food. There are countries and regions where this is not the case, sure, but if you live in a subsitence society, then "as many kids as you can afford" equals "as many kids as your farm can feed," and many Africans find this balance OK enough (although high death rates from other causes helps this in the absence of BC, I'm afraid).

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"Your average middle class family does not limit the chidren they have to 2 b.c they want to offset Amjadin in Bangladesh's 10 kids. "

Yeah. I know. But mrfrog seemed to be implying that he thought people in the Western World should be having fewer kids because the rest of the world is exploding.

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"what trend is this."

Increased wealth. It's not hard to demonstrate.

5/18/2009 1:42:47 PM

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"Poor countries don't stay poor forever, and rich countries rarely fall into abject poverty. There will always be a disparity, meaning there will always be "rich" and "poor," but I submit that there is an absolute threshold for social and economic development at which population growth reaches a stable and sustainable level. And sooner or later, everywhere on the planet will hit that threshold."

This is fine, but the argument I made on the last page effectively rebuts it. As I said, population is either a increasing or decreasing exponential. If all nations become prosperous, all nations will have a declining population, and the least prosperous nation will have the slowest declining rate, and the most prosperous will have the fastest declining rate.

I think you'll agree that this means we're working on a treadmill for the social reforms you allude to. It's great if countries can rise from poverty and educate women on family planning, but the only question that matters is "can that happen faster than the replacement rate from the undeveloped areas?" Let's say progress happens in a given control area. We start with 2 female individuals, and one of them gets educated and rich, and has 1 child, but the other one isn't reached in time and has 4 children. That generation saw a multiplication of 5/4ths and is left possibly more destitute and resource deprived than before. Not necessarily, but possibly. I think that you'll concede that this forms a full demographic transport model. Just as the law of conservation of matter exists, so does the law of conservation of people.

I'll coin generically the term "progress" as the education and development of areas resulting in lower birth rates. Progress effectively forms a population 'sink'. Many regions have shown this sink to quickly envelop all the land and thus outrun the Malthusian population bomb. However, we have not seen anything close to world-wide success in this matter, which is what's needed.

Thus, I propose that it remains an open question as to whether the population time bomb can fissile.

Quote :

"Yeah. I know. But mrfrog seemed to be implying that he thought people in the Western World should be having fewer kids because the rest of the world is exploding."

I didn't mean to. My intention was to present an extreme form of the doomist argument. Such an argument goes:

We will inevitably reach the tipping point where there aren't enough resources to go around. Such a time will be an ugly day for human civilization. Since the 'time' we reach that point is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the structure and of society when do confront the inevitable.

As such, it could be taken to mean that the Western World should be having as many children as physically possible, in order to have a larger fraction of the human population well educated and well off at the tipping point.

Again, I should stress this is contingent on the answer to the open question of the population bomb. If it all stands a chance of being worked out before we start killing each other, then okay, maybe having less kids makes sense. If you are a doomist, then it doesn't make much sense to limit the number of children we have in any way. If you're an uber-doomist, then we might need them to fight for WWIII for us.

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I'll admit I'm a little facetious. But my view is that it's important to logically follow out the possible scenarios, take then to their logical conclusions, and then state personal dispositions.

Frankly, I don't even have much of an opinion regarding the moral value of people having kids. It could just as easily be construed that well-off families in Italy, Japan, the UK, and prominent America reluctantly having one child are destroying the Earth and human civilization as Sally-Que having 8 kids could.

I still find it extremely curious that one could form a cohesive and defensible argument that refraining from having kids is concentrating wealth, destroying social equality, and basically screwing us all over. Even better, good old GWB might have been a Godsend for America by refusing to fight global warming and keeping sex education out of schools. Because of him, the tipping point will be earlier instead of later, and the increase in teen pregnancies will allow us to use up the worlds resources with lightly educated somewhat-well-off Walmart Americans, instead of leaving those resources to be consumed by completely uneducated shanty-town citizens. Maybe George W. Bush actually understood it all better than we do?

5/18/2009 4:22:24 PM

Quote :

"As I said, population is either a increasing or decreasing exponential. If all nations become prosperous, all nations will have a declining population, and the least prosperous nation will have the slowest declining rate, and the most prosperous will have the fastest declining rate."

I don't see why this necessarily has to be the case, either. If everyone becomes prosperous and populations start declining, a point will be reached when some other motivation kicks in to make people have more kids, until eventually we get to the point of too many people, when it will slow back down, and so on. It's a negative feedback cycle on a grand scale.

As to what factors might promote a greater number of children among prosperous people, I can only speculate. In the past, religious or government instruments have been used to promote a increase in adherents or subjects. A number of the more archaic-seeming rules in Jewish and Christian holy books seem geared towards making babies, and fast. After all, what did God say? "Go forth and multiply?"

Presumably governments ruling over substantially diminished populations will start trying to encourage people, through money, civic duty, or some other means, to reverse the process. People who look around and see their culture or civilization wasting away from negative population growth may feel compelled to have larger broods to keep it alive. At the extreme end, loneliness could prompt people to breed kids, just to have someone to hang out with.

Quote :

"It's great if countries can rise from poverty and educate women on family planning, but the only question that matters is "can that happen faster than the replacement rate from the undeveloped areas?""

I think that eventually it can. Such activities and trends seem to gain momentum as time goes on. Right now, for example, it seems that the middle classes of India and China are growing as a percentage of their populations, which indicates that whatever socioeconomic changes they're experiencing are spreading at a slightly higher rate than the lower classes are simply outbreeding them.

So the real question is, "can that happen fast enough to prevent true overpopulation and global collapse," and I think the answer is, "yes."

5/18/2009 5:35:19 PM

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/bourne-text

6/6/2009 3:41:25 PM