With roughly 200,000 new people being added to the earth every day I'd like to have some of the economic geniuses on this forum come up with an economic solution to the challenges of providing for all these new folks. You haven't got a solution? Then what alternative do you contemplate?
Humans are a virus. There is no soltuion. We do nothing good for the planet, yet we continue to multiply. The current problems will only grow in scale.
The obvious answer put forth years ago by Julian Simon (in response to the limit to growth movement in the 70s) is that Malthus was somewhat wrong: geometric increases in population also result in exponential increases in productivity, for a variety of reasons. The gist of the matter is that larger populations can support synergistic institutions like university, research institutes, government agencies, large businesses enterprises, which if done right result in efficiencies and increased production that can not only "take care of" the increased population, but allow them to live in a higher living standard. Educated people are more productive people, and education is to some extent a function of larger populations sustaining these institutions. But of course the doesn't mean you haven't identified a real problem or that this increase can continue indefinitely. Also, there is a genuine issue of whether this system depends on the exploitation of cheap labor elsewhere, which of course eventually runs out as prosperity spreads. Whether we've reached the limit of sustainable economic growth (my opinion is, probably), obviously, it's foolish to play brinksmanship and population growth should be addressed as a public policy. I have absolutely no idea what would be a good policy on such a touchy complex issue.
Owning real-estate anywhere in the world will be like owning a pot of gold. People may be broke, but they still have to live somewhere.
That is the million dollar question: How do we stop population growth, esp when population growth is fastest among the least educated people. Something tells me we will find a way. Maybe via nano technologies. Reproductivity that can be turned on and off like a switch.
Is it really that high, net population growth? What is the mortality rate vs the birth rate for the planet?
The births - deaths per day comes out to around 200,000. Per year it's around 80 million. I'll do a google check if you like or you can. These are well known approximate figures.
There is a widespread belief that in order for our ponzi like economies to survive each succeeding generation must have a larger workforce than the previous to keep the social programs funded. So naturally all of the nations with aging populations are expected to fare poorly for a few decades. This kind of thinking may seem rational when you consider it alone, but like the similar thinking of Julian Simon it is actually extremely naive and fails to consider the MACRO economy that includes the Earth and the the EARTH's resources. There are significant downsides to a swelling population such as it consumes massive quantities of resources with very little real productivity return for decades, and when that productivity arrives it arrives in the form of the cheapest and least productive of all labor. BUT IT THEN REQUIRES AN EVEN MORE MASSIVE FOLLOWING GENERATION TO PAY THE UNPAID BILLS OF THE FORMER GEN. And then of course there are issues revolving around limits of the Earth's bounty vs consumption which we yet know little about. But suffice it to say that the downsides of such shallow thinking may have consequences that tower above any advantages gained once we passed say a 3 or 4 billion human population. Who can know? We can't. And we won't have any clue until we see what the limits on human consumption are. All this theorizing before the fact may be looked upon as disastrously infantile thinking if disaster strikes at the 9 billion mark.
I'd say the principal reason that Malthus could not foresee was he didn't plug into the abundance of fossil fuel and the tooling up for its uses, not the least of which was its use as a fertilizer for greater food production. Then why didn't the industrial revolution take off first in India instead of England? One perspective I got was the plague in Europe freed up land to be farmed for income beyond mere subsidence, which produced the capital for industrial development and world trade. My guess we could have just as much development with a half billion people if that's what we wanted. That's what makes suspect the argument that one only needs to increase poor folks standard of living and they will have less children. It ignores how the cheap labor in crowded third world countries subsidizes the stable populations of the major industrial countries. Not to mention that bringing them up to our standards means more consumption. From what I've read we reached that limit back in the 80s. Since then we've been more and more living off of capital, think depletion of the fish population. The last analysis I got said we were living at a sustainable rate for 1 1/2 planet earths. I also understand that about a half the biosphere is being exploited for our use. Kind of hard to take it much further.
There is no solution except to take a more realistic approach and stop believing that we can just keep churning out more babies and taking care of people who aren't pulling their share of the load. We use up resources like there's no end to what we can produce.
There is a direct relationship between level of economic acheivement and family size. If you want to reduce population growth the most effective method would be to increase economic opportunity and economic growth in those places with the greatest rate of population growth. There is a huge amount of excess capital sloshing about the world markets creating overinvestment, market bubbles and general economic instability. If this excess money was siphoned off to finance infrastructure, capital investments, and the development of markets in the undeveloped nations economic gains would quickly reduce the rate of population growth and stabilize the international finanicial landscape to boot.
How do you bring the bottom 6 billion up to the level of the top 1 billion in an era of resource and environmental limits? As far as the rich showing the way population wise that doesn't seem to be the case in the US. You also run into an interesting mathematics problem. The voluntary restraint on child bearing results in an exponential growth in the percentage of folks devoted to having large families. I expect the Mormons are increasing quite nicely as a percentage in this temporary era of no more than two children. So in the rich countries expect steady state or drop in population temporarily followed by a return to exponential rise. And we haven't even factored in refugees. Also the biggest loss of population that I know of recently was in Russia, due in part to a breakdown in all sorts of things. General wealth increase as a panacea answer for overpopulation borders on denialism. Anything that doesn't encompass an aggressive program of less population virtually everywhere and a per capita average lowering of our carbon footprint is just one more path to suicide.
The only limit to economic advance in the less developed world is the greed of the developed world which hogs all the wealth. There is plenty of resources that can be deployed without environmental degradation. it is shameful to imply that the impoverished should not be helped because the wealthy have already squandered the environmental capacity of the planet. The only reason the population in the US is increasing is immigration. Even with the large families of Mormons and others the population in the US would be declining without immigration. Historical evidence has shown that every nation experiences a decline in birth rate as median income increases beyond subsistence levels. It is the denial of historical fact to take the position that increasing wealth in impoverished nations will not decrease birth rates and population growth. There are numerous studies and reports from the UN, OECD, World Bank, IMF, and many independent economists that confirm this and none that contradict it.
Not so fast, hombre. This is patently false. The poor spend a much higher % of their income on raw commodities. While every third world entrant into the global labor market can be expected to invest the majority of his income into raising children and bare survival his first surplus will be invested into a higher protein diet and a cell phone. Meanwhile the wealthiest people on the planet invest $25 million at a shot into recycled art from the 12th century. Poor people consume at least 3 times as many resources/dollar of income as rich people do. Which means that the more we enrich the world's poor the more dire resource scarcity will become. And THAT is why there is a continual trend toward increased income disparity as population increases and as the poorest nations move toward developed status. Radical income disparity is the most efficient mode of resource allocation. The poor will squander far, far more resources than the rich did once the poor have money to waste.
Yeah. Several. 1: Get space and resources from other planets and asteriods. 2: More birth control. 3: Recycle and use resources efficiently. 4: Ration.
Yes, well, historical evidence also indicates that declines in birth rates follow increases in educational achievement too. But none of this is based on causative influence, or at least not as far as we know. It could be something else entirely that actually causes these lower birth rates.
Yeah, well...maybe in a few centuries this will be worth the expense. Until then we will have to make due with our little blue planet.
I'm certainly for more equity but even if we even everything out we will still be hitting resource limits and wrecking our environment. I simply don't know how anybody who is for the poor doesn't support birth control, if only to give them a better shot I think you missed the mathematics. As the Mormons and others of their orientation inevitably become a larger percentage of the population then exponential growth gets back on track again. As for immigrants they come for the jobs that for the most part locals aren't taking. There is both push and pull and on the pull side they are our children. A decline in birthrate isn't enough. Anything above two kids per family puts you on the exponential doubling track. And you haven't even mentioned the higher resource use associated with that greater wealth. And if the wealthy nations are bringing in immigrants to take jobs the locals won't take that counts as a deliberate adding to your population. And to the extent that your economic success is based on the cheap labor of other nations then you are contributing to population growth, even if it isn't in your own country. There is no easy way around less people and more sustainable practices. We all have to get on that train, the rich even more, clearly.
The rich first. The impoverished as they can afford it and the best way to make that happen is to accelerate economic growth and technology transfer of sustainable practices perfected in the rich nations. There is no reason why the impoverished nations need to follow the historical environmentally destructive path of economic development. They have already leaped traditional growth model in communications and trade through the stunningly rapid penetration of cell phones far beyond traditional land lines and the use of those phones to transfer funds and market information, a homegrown solution to bypassing the traditional banks and trading centers which were cumbersome, inadequate, and often corrupt.
No, everybody first. The extensive family form of social security is running smack dab up against resource limits. They'll just be compounding poverty and resource depletion by having big families. The big family competition is just war conducted on a smaller stage. I'll go with the transfer but not economic growth. Economic sustainability should be our goal. China and India seem to be the models, both good and bad. More bad. As far as I can see banks and Wall Street and the stock exchanges still have a formidable presence. I don't get any serious institutional changes produced by cell phones. Goldman Sachs and their financial brothers still issue their orders and congress jumps.
Why are we responsible for providing for them? Presumably that is their parents job until they can do it for themselves. Problem solved.
The rich nations have the ability now. The impoverished nations do not. Transfers should be towards sustainable effort only but a lot of work still needs to be done to determine their best applications in impoverished nations. Meanwhile immediate transfers that push up general economic growth and median income would be most immediately helpful. They are both using the old models. Africa cannot follow them. I was not talking about them but more local institutions. The changes in markets and trade in sub-Saharan Africa brought about by cell phone penetration are quite significant. You should look into it.
