The Population Bomb.

[wynnejj]

You miss the point. The point is NOT that earth has no limits to her capacity or that we could never reach a point of inability to feed ourselves. The point is that we are worried about the WRONG problem. To use your analogy, our speeding car is about a mile from the brick wall and the gas tank contains only fumes: crashing into it at speed is not a realistic worry. It’s the long walk home we actually need to worry about.

Look at my link. Explosive population growth is almost OVER. It was never a long term problem. It was a phenomenon of the transition between poor, rural agrarian society and wealthy industrial society. The economic system of industrial society self-regulates population (perhaps overly so). This religious person is merely pointing out that the third world doesn’t have an overpopulation problem, they have a poverty, education, infrastructure and government problem. Solve those and population levels will take care of themselves. Promotions to induce those people to have less babies are a self serving substitute for the assistance they ACTUALLY need.

I would further refine your definition of the WRONG problem.

I sense that the hypothesis offered here is that the transition from agrarian to urban society as nations develop has led to practical transition from many able-bodied children to work the farms to fewer & more highly educated children. Higher education generally means deferring starting families. I would suggest that this means two things … that many are deferring or limiting sex by full or periodic abstinence and/or, many are engaging in contraceptive sex, sterilization or abortion … for practical reasons in an urban society where ability to educate to ever higher degrees is a responsibility. That is, population control is voluntary and needs no outside agencies. People will limit family size by hook or by crook.

Then the focus goes to third world countries and the promotion of family planning by developed nations as part of the agreement for aid. The principle seems contrary for predominantly agrarian societies that need more able-bodied children to become self sustaining. As they become more developed, their ability to provide food with fewer people in the agrarian sector will increase and a transition to urban society will ensue with its requirements for limiting family size to educate the kids. So again, population is self-regulating and really needs no outside agency to impose family size restrictions. People will limit family size by hook or by crook.

Pro-Life & Pro-Choice both know that the population bomb will not explode.
Yet both sides acknowledge the need for limiting family size as the premise for defusing the bomb. So why does Pro-Life use “Over-Population is a Myth” as an argument.

The RIGHT problem is do you need an outside agency with a master plan to regulate population for the good of the world. This pre-supposes that overpopulation is not a myth in concept as a possibility.

The WRONG approach to the problem is to suggest that “Overpopulation is a Myth” and conflate that with Catholic Church teaching when we address limiting family size for serious reasons that look to considerations of the welfare of the spouses, family, church and “society”.

 

[manualman]

I partially agree with you there. Where we part is that there IS a myth of earth being currently overpopulated and on the cust of catastrophic overpopulation. This is the driving motivation behind the “one child” policies, the condom “aid” shipments and holding health care reform hostage to free contraception provisions (HHS mandate). And it is a lie. We are NOT about to have mass starvation due to population explosion. As we both seem to agree, population WILL self regulate over time in stable environments and culture.

Developed cultures had low TFRs LONG before contraception became socially respectable (European and US census data for URBAN areas confirm it). It turns out that humans aren’t dumber than all other mammal species after all: we CAN learn to tell the signs of female fertility and make behavioral decisions accordingly. When humans live in a culture in which children are extremely expensive, they have fewer of them. When they live in a culture in which children productively contribute to the wellbeing of the family, they have more. It’s not rocket science.

The LIE is the conventional wisdom today. Few people know, understand or believe that developed society has a track record of stable replacement rate TFR long before the advent of the pill or the latex condom. They simply take it for granted that pills and condoms are a global necessity for humanity to survive and not suffer a global catastrohic famine. You sounded that way yourself up until the last post. The myth of overpopulation is a means, not an end. It is a means to justifying and rationalizing sinful and self destructive behaviors in order to achieve a “noble” goal that doesn’t really need achieving. It will achieve itself over time.

Melinda Gates probably thinks she is very noble for “helping” so many third world women get contraceptives. She probably sleeps much better in her 45,000SF home each night knowing she has done so much to relieve global hunger… It’s a sham. A phony salve for a bothered conscience. (not unlike Al Gore’s carbon credits).

What it appears that cultural acceptance of contraceptance has done is overshot the previous stable TFR achieved in developed societies and created a society unable to sustain itself (subreplacement TFR). Instead of solving “global overpopulation” these contraception evangelists have created a crisis of global depopulation for their great grandchildren to deal with. Nice work.

 

[wynnejj]

The myth of overpopulation is a means, not an end. It is a means to justifying and rationalizing sinful and self destructive behaviors in order to achieve a “noble” goal that doesn’t really need achieving. It will achieve itself over time.

That’s an ad-hominem attack, whether true or false, that does not add or subtract to question of whether over-population is a myth. If you are arguing from a Catholic viewpoint, then “overpopulation is a myth” is based on some view that people will use some form of abstinence (defer marriage, NFP in marriage, or permanently celibate) when resources for responsibly raising a family become more costly due to insufficient supply. That is, it subsists on the premise that births will be regulated regardless. The question is simply whether people will adhere to the principles of “responsible parenthood” suggested by the Church or the principles of “planned parenthood” suggested by contraception & abortion on-demand secular viewpoints. Regardless, you are saying that overpopulation is a foregone conclusion without limiting family sizes. The only question is the matter of immediacy of the problem. And that question hinges on the willingness of society to abstain when responsible parenthood demands. Secular society looks at the Church and says, yeah right, you have a track record of abstaining.

Assuming that society - and those hypocritical Catholics - are not real good at the abstaining thing, if we remove contraception & abortion and assume sexual activity is pretty much what it has always been given our biological imperatives, just how fast could the overpopulation thing come about? Assume population growth rate remains the same as today and doesn’t change, start with today’s total world population divided by the agricultural land available. When will the population double time & again, and determine how much agricultural land one will have to subsist on. That seems reasonable to me.

Of course, one could point to all those projections based on trends of limiting family size by fair means and foul.

 

[Ridgerunner]

My point in all these arguments is that I disagree that there isn’t a brick wall in term of overpopulation, but more importantly, population growth must match the supply & demand requirements. That is, I disagree that there is no need for the concept of population control. The argument should be the ethical means of achieving those ends.

We have that answer, which is the Church’s concept of “responsible parenthood”. I disagree that potential overpopulation is a myth, and suggest that the Church recognizes this fact. If one reads Humanae Vitae, one realizes that one of the serious reasons to ethically limit family sizes that is cited is the consideration of “society” along with spouses, family and Church.

Maybe I’m missing the point here, and I expect someone will tell me so if it’s true. But it seems to me there is a difference between growing a population in one place or sustaining it and growing or sustaining it where there do not seem to be sufficient resources to support the population.

If, say, there is an oncoming birth dearth in the U.S., which seems to be staved off only by (likely temporarily) higher birth rates among recent immigrants, and if it requires at least a certain population to maintain the economy, then wouldn’t the ethical thing to do be to encourage births in a place like this? Should Italians, with a birth rate far below replacement, be encouraged to have more children, rather than encourage them to limit family size? If you look at the birth rates in most of the developed world, you can picture a result much like that of the Black Death in a few decades, or worse.

I live in a fairly high population density area in an area considered more or less “rural”. You can’t tell it’s high density by driving through it, but there are a lot of people out in the countryside and in a considerable number of small and medium-sized towns.

But if I get outside this rather smallish area of relatively high population, I can drive 100-200 miles in almost any direction and see almost nobody. And no growing crops, either. Well, here and there a handful of cattle. And most of it is good land…just not perfect land. It’s astonishing, too, how many very good acres are in CRP program…people paid not to grow anything at all. That’s not the secondary land, it’s the perfect land…good cropland.

It’s just very hard for me to believe the U.S. is not also headed to a population crisis…just not one was bad as that in Japan or Europe or most of China. So are we to somehow impose population control just when we need it the least?

 

[wynnejj]

It’s just very hard for me to believe the U.S. is not also headed to a population crisis…just not one was bad as that in Japan or Europe or most of China. So are we to somehow impose population control just when we need it the least?

Not as bad as Japan, Europe or most of China? An interesting juxtaposition to your argument. Is the suggestion that attempts to limit population severely by putting population growth in reverse somewhat has led to the opposite type of real population crisis in these countries?

Personally, my stance has never been to impose population control. My stance has been that you can’t argue that overpopulation is a myth. When I think of Japan and China particularly, I don’t think you could argue that the imminent threat of overpopulation in their territories is/was not an imminent threat. If they impose population controls to over-steer to a different kind of population crisis, that doesn’t mean that the original one was never there. That’s like arguing that one shouldn’t have steered away from a brick wall because you’ll just hit a tree in the other direction.

What you can and should argue is that over-population in any territory is self-correcting. And what you should argue is that there is a right way to self-correct and a wrong way. The right way is the church’s concept of “responsible parenthood” which suggest that family size is a family decision whereby serious reasons may mean limiting family size. And you can argue that there are ethical means by which this can be accomplished. It is a valid argument to say that there is no need to impose population control. It is an invalid argument to use the mantra “Overpopulation is a Myth”.

Why do you think you can’t get urban areas to vote Pro-Life? It’s like taking all the population of the world and putting it in Texas, and then asking Texans to vote Pro-Life because overpopulation is a myth. All they’ll say is what you are saying … just look around you … it’s hard to believe.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Not as bad as Japan, Europe or most of China? An interesting juxtaposition to your argument. Is the suggestion that attempts to limit population severely by putting population growth in reverse somewhat has led to the opposite type of real population crisis in these countries?

Personally, my stance has never been to impose population control. My stance has been that you can’t argue that overpopulation is a myth. When I think of Japan and China particularly, I don’t think you could argue that the imminent threat of overpopulation in their territories is/was not an imminent threat. If they impose population controls to over-steer to a different kind of population crisis, that doesn’t mean that the original one was never there. That’s like arguing that one shouldn’t have steered away from a brick wall because you’ll just hit a tree in the other direction.

What you can and should argue is that over-population in any territory is self-correcting. And what you should argue is that there is a right way to self-correct and a wrong way. The right way is the church’s concept of “responsible parenthood” which suggest that family size is a family decision whereby serious reasons may mean limiting family size. And you can argue that there are ethical means by which this can be accomplished. It is a valid argument to say that there is no need to impose population control. It is an invalid argument to use the mantra “Overpopulation is a Myth”.

Why do you think you can’t get urban areas to vote Pro-Life? It’s like taking all the population of the world and putting it in Texas, and then asking Texans to vote Pro-Life because overpopulation is a myth. All they’ll say is what you are saying … just look around you … it’s hard to believe.

Evidently I did not express myself well, prompting you to formulate what I should have said instead of what I did say.

I am, indeed, saying overpopulation is a myth in some places, e.g., Japan or Italy or the U.S., to the extent anyone attributes overpopulation to those places. To the extent overpopulation exists anywhere (which I do not concede), it is a local phenomenon. Consequently, one cannot attribute overpopulation (or underpopulation for that matter) to the world generally.

While it could be true that majorities in urban areas do not vote prolife because of some self-correction mechanism to overcome overpopulation, I have not seen anything truly persuasive to establish that.

 

[manualman]

1. If you are arguing from a Catholic viewpoint, then “overpopulation is a myth” is based on some view that people will use some form of abstinence (defer marriage, NFP in marriage, or permanently celibate) when resources for responsibly raising a family become more costly due to insufficient supply. That is, it subsists on the premise that births will be regulated regardless. The question is simply whether people will adhere to the principles of “responsible parenthood” suggested by the Church or the principles of “planned parenthood” suggested by contraception & abortion on-demand secular viewpoints. Regardless, you are saying that overpopulation is a foregone conclusion without limiting family sizes. The only question is the matter of immediacy of the problem. …
2. Assuming that society - and those hypocritical Catholics - are not real good at the abstaining thing, if we remove contraception & abortion and assume sexual activity is pretty much what it has always been given our biological imperatives, just how fast could the overpopulation thing come about? Assume population growth rate remains the same as today and doesn’t change, start with today’s total world population divided by the agricultural land available. When will the population double time & again, and determine how much agricultural land one will have to subsist on. That seems reasonable to me.

Shortened for brevity…

1. I’m with you until the italics, where you jump the tracks and go off the cliff. Demographic HISTORY (not catholic supposition) demonstrates that urban, educated areas produce low TFR’s (after a generation or two of transition) WITHOUT recourse to pills and latex condoms. Arguably some of these folks in the past used sheep skin condoms, or the Onan method or whathaveyou, but these kinds of societies are simply NOT reliant on pill/condom promotions to get down to 2.1 TFR. What happens when you DO introduce these things is that TFR goes below replacement rate. Long term, human populations tend to self regulate without conscious meddling. It just doesn’t appear so from statistics that reflect the scandalously long time humanity has taken to extend the benefits of education and industrialization to all humanity rather than hoarding its benefits among us few.
2. NO. It doesn’t work that way. High population growth rates ONLY occur in societies in transition from poor, rural and uneducated to educated, urban and prosperous. Total population growth rates in the former and latter groups have always been quite low. It’s only those societies in the transition where population explosions occur, and ONLY during the transition. Within my kids lifetime, the former group will largely decline due to development and the majority of earth’s population will be in the latter group; the group that has (since societal acceptance of contraception) consistently failed to achieve replacement TFR. A generation beyond that almost everybody will be in that latter group and we will begin to see serious population decline. Again, your assumption ignores the track record of wealthy, urban educated people prior to the mid 1900’s: they already had TFRs around 2 to 2.3. I can’t vouch for how they did it, but they certainly didn’t need an Obama or Gates around to hand them “free” pills to achieve it. Like I said, maybe humans are as smart as the rest of the mammal world after all…

To be clear, I’m not claiming that population explosions can’t occur. I’m stating the mainstream findings of the study of demographics that population explosions ONLY occur in societies in transition from rural, poor and uneducated to urban, prosperous and educated. Neither those societies firmly in the first or last category have significant population increases. In fact, since we’ve begun to dread “the population bomb” every nation in the latter category has gone to a BELOW replacement TFR.

 

[Midwest88]

Overpopulation … global warming … pfffft. Mother earth is one tough cookie; she’ll be fine.

 

[wynnejj]

To be clear, I’m not claiming that population explosions can’t occur. I’m stating the mainstream findings of the study of demographics that population explosions ONLY occur in societies in transition from rural, poor and uneducated to urban, prosperous and educated.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Looking at the colored world map on TFR of various countries, one would surmise that only central Africa is going through a population explosion which must be due to transition from agrarian to urban societies. It doesn’t seem right to me.

 

[lynnvinc]

Many tribal peoples throughout history and prehistory have practiced birth control thru celibacy. For example, the Cheyenne. The reason was so that they could focus all their attention on one child at a time. So virtuous Cheyenne would take vows of celibacy for 7 or 15 years to focus attention on that one child.

Also in the past life expectancy was only about 25 years…then eventually 45-50 years (I think that was the case for America up to 1900). Death was not associated with old age – the few elders around were considered healthy and strong to have lasted into old age – it was more common for children to die and for mothers to die in childbirth.

However, it is only with agriculture and a more sedentary life that people started having large families, and I think the main reason was so that there would be at least one son to make it to adulthood to take over the family’s agricultural lands.

I’m thinking the problem now is not “overpopulation,” but the rich nations’ overconsumption of resources and materials in a highly wasteful, prodigal, profligate, and inefficient ways.

There would be plenty of food and resources to go around for everyone – if the rich weren’t gobbling them up and hording.

The other problem are how this prodigal lifestyle of the few is grossly harming the environment and our subsistence base in major ways, including global warming, pollution, ocean acidification, etc – see stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries

So it’s not too many people, but that we the rich few are destroying the subsistence base for all people, esp the poor around the world and future generations.

 

[JimG]

Depopulation is related to civilizational decline. Here is Greek historian Polybius writing 150 years before Christ:

“nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: By avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed.”
Source

Europe and probably America is now at the same point that Greece was then, and Rome was later.

 

[Bill_Martin]

Overpopulation is not a problem; people having more kids than they can afford to responsibly take care of is.

 

[JimG]

Overpopulation is not a problem; people having more kids than they can afford to responsibly take care of is.

And people as a whole having fewer kids than needed for national survival is also a problem. That’s what the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) statistics are telling us. Right now it’s a very serious problem.

 

[lynnvinc]

I’m always a bit leery of these types of discussions. If a country is producing fewer children to run the country, it could turn to increasing immigration – which some European nations are doing.

Perhaps the real issue in some people’s mind that a certain race is having few children – below replacement – while other races are increasing. Or maybe that race is increasing in pop, but not at the level of the other races, so its proportion is declining. And then to boot some offspring of the decling race are marrying people of the other races?

 

[Crescentinus]

I grew up on fears of overpopulation until I found out that such fears are quite unfounded.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

The false “population bomb” projections and population control measures were all based on the assumption that the planet earth had limited resources to feed, house and provide energy for all those people.

There have been numerous conferences that proved we are running out of resources … and every one of their forecasts on resource availability have been demonstrated by actual experience to be false.

We are treated to polar bear stories and apocalyptic visions of false disasters that await us. We know that climate changes are cyclical based on geologic history. But instead we are treated to absolutely phony computer models that use unaudited and demonstrably erroneous (name removed by moderator)ut data.

And all of the false forecasters, for some reason, still retain their credibility.

Three years ago, natural gas in the United States was $15; now it’s $3. Because we have discovered new forms of natural gas. [And the oceans contain apparently limitless additional natural gas.] And based on the new technologies many, perhaps most, other countries are also discovering apparently limitless amounts of natural gas.

There is a natural gas revolution taking over the world right now. Small LNG plants in Europe are being used to provide fuel locally. And Middle East and South American natural gas producers are using large LNG tankers to bring LNG to places where the demand is highest … and that changes almost from day to day as new supplies come on line and as new pipelines are constructed to bring the natural gas to market.

There are HUGE new natural gas discoveries in the vicinity of the South China Sea, Australia and that area. Papua New Guinea is the scene of massive natural gas development. As is Sakhalin Island. And off the coasts of Africa.

France discovered they could easily supply 80% of their electricity with nuclear power. Political agitation has limited the United States to only 20% of electricity from nuclear power.

With abundant energy, food supplies can be expanded pretty much without limit.

Meanwhile, we are contracepting and aborting our people into oblivion. For absolutely all the wrong reasons.

The only thing we have to be “concerned” about is another glacial age, of which there have already been many. You can grow crops in warm climates, but it is very difficult to grow crops or raise livestock underneath a one mile thick glacier.

 

[manualman]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Looking at the colored world map on TFR of various countries, one would surmise that only central Africa is going through a population explosion which must be due to transition from agrarian to urban societies. It doesn’t seem right to me.

You should spend some time talking to an African or someone who is well traveled there some time then. The demographic transition in Africa is badly hampered by apalling political corruption and lack of reliable legal systems which are a prerequisite for prosperous urban development. The population exposion in Africa is precisely because of the way they are stuck in the middle of the transition where there is barely enough medicine and food to ensure moderate to high childhood survival rates, but not so much stability and prosperity that education reliably leads to wealth. A lot of those problems date to a legacy of colonial exploitation and the fact that the only sorts of region wide government those areas have ever experienced have been brutal and self serving. Almost no wonder that each successive revolution leads to just another despot. What they need to stabilize population is political reform, not boatloads of condoms.

 

[wynnejj]

You should spend some time talking to an African or someone who is well traveled there some time then. The demographic transition in Africa is badly hampered by apalling political corruption and lack of reliable legal systems which are a prerequisite for prosperous urban development. The population exposion in Africa is precisely because of the way they are stuck in the middle of the transition where there is barely enough medicine and food to ensure moderate to high childhood survival rates, but not so much stability and prosperity that education reliably leads to wealth. A lot of those problems date to a legacy of colonial exploitation and the fact that the only sorts of region wide government those areas have ever experienced have been brutal and self serving. Almost no wonder that each successive revolution leads to just another despot. What they need to stabilize population is political reform, not boatloads of condoms.

I hate to contradict you because obviously you are a person who has spent some time talking to an African or is well traveled to Africa. But alas, the contrarian in me must prevail. So let me understand you. You are saying that population explosions occur only in areas where there is a transition from agrarian to urban demographics, for reasons of both prosperity and for abject poverty.

For reasons of prosperity, I would suggest that it represents a situation where agriculture has been mechanized to such a point that less farmers are needed, so people go to the cities for jobs which results in more time for technological advancement, better medicine for longer life, and better lifestyle. The growth in economy spurs with synergy a growth in population. Population explosions make sense in this context.

For reasons of poverty, I don’t think your analysis makes sense. I suspect it is a cultural thing such that the more kids & livestock one has, the more is one’s social status. Also, since many kids do not make it to adulthood, then many must be born to ensure security in one’s old age. This is more necessary in an agrarian or hunter / gatherer society. I have a little trouble accepting that prolonged poverty leads people to have more kids if they are going to the cities where they grow no food. Are they going to the cities for entitlements? Are they having large numbers of kids because only so many make it through life to reach a higher education? What’s the reason?

 

[Monte_RCMS]

“A Curious Tendency Towards Doom”

alfin2300.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-curious-tendency-toward-doom.html

Interesting essay directly related to why everyone is afraid of some unknown fate and why it sells newspapers.

 

[manualman]

1. I’m always a bit leery of these types of discussions. If a country is producing fewer children to run the country, it could turn to increasing immigration – which some European nations are doing.
2. Perhaps the real issue in some people’s mind that a certain race is having few children – below replacement – while other races are increasing. Or maybe that race is increasing in pop, but not at the level of the other races, so its proportion is declining. And then to boot some offspring of the decling race are marrying people of the other races?

1. This works as long as there are nations with booming populations and compatible cultures. This is why America’s population is still growing and why we are fools to denigrate Mexican immigrants. We should be kissing their feet in gratitude for the time they are buying our culture. But like many Euro-centric “solutions” it has a hidden dark side. What sort of person is going to be allowed to immigrate to a Western country, the “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free” or the cream of the crop; the educated, motivated and capable people that could transform third world countries into newly prosperous and flourishing nations? Answer: the latter. And thus the brain drain ensures that said third world nations stay stuck in poverty.
2. There certainly are some racists that initially got alarmed at the proportion of whiteys declining and that of brown skin increasing. If that were all there were to the story, it WOULD be a non-issue. But it’s not. The “Asian Tiger” countries have a disasterously low birth rate. Most of South America is down nearly to replacemet levels and still dropping fast (every sign of reaching Euro-style subreplacement). You can just dismiss this global developing trend as racist alarmism. It’s a truly color blind threat that just happened to manifest first in historically white countries. Nobody is immune. If there’s racism on this issue today its the soft sort you displayed in your initial response (Oh well, we’ll just import some ‘surplus’ people from one of THOSE countries).