is overpopulation a problem?

Great Debates
1

Last I heard the total population of the world was something like 6 billion (its probably a lot larger with all the poor people who go unnoticed). The capacity of the world is supposedly around 1- 2 billion, which means that we are at least 4 billion people over the limit.

According to an issue of Popular Science within the next 50 yrs the population of the world will increase to something in the neighborhood of 7 – 10 billion people. Of course this means that the world will be at least 5 billion people over its max limit.

How did the world population get to such an enormous level? What other problems are being caused by the overflow of people? What can be done to fix this issue? Is it an issue? What role does the united states play in this? :slight_smile:

2

What limit? Who defined it?

Fact is, like the flies in Cecil’s column, there are about as many humans as the Earth has room for. When overpopulation reaches the point where food production can no longer meet demand (and efficiency is naturally reduced if large portions of arable land are ruined by pollution or development), the numbers will be reduced in the most suitable manner: mass warfare.

3

Seems like rational people should be able to look at the future and start using contraception.

I sometimes feel we actually perpetuate the suffering of third world countries with the humanitarian aid we send them. It would be nice if part of the money we spend would go towards family planning. You want a bag of wheat? Sure, and here are some free condoms, pills, foam, whatever, and a real quick lesson in how, when, and why to use them.

4

I hate to be trite, but could we see a cite?

5

Rational is what a person is, pluralizes them unto the point of becoming “people” and rationality goes right out the window.

Mob mentality, mass hysteria, pogroms, organized religeon, etc. All have two things in common, a lack of rational thought (see afterword), and they all require a group of peple to exist.
zen101

afterword: before anyone wants to slam me for including religeon as irrational. Irrational does not mean good OR bad, just a belief that is independant of logic. Certainly believing in invisible all powerful beings with nothing better do do but monitor our behaviour qualifies as irrational.

6

If you can stomach it, here’s a very old, very long, and very frustrating thread about overpopulation from this very forum:

6 billion?

7

LokiTheDog wrote:

This would not work in many South American countries, where Catholicism holds sway. The Roman Catholic Church still condemns the use of any form of contraception other than the rhythm method.

8

Why?

Looking at the development of the world throughout the 20th century, it appears that people are smart enough to figure things out for themselves. Where child mortality is high and people are making subsistence living, people tend to breed large families. Conversely, when living standards (and child mortality) drops, people begin cutting back on birth rates without any outside intervention.

The simplest way to reduce the birth rate for any country is to increase the standard of living. If you persuade subsistence farmers to reduce their birth rate, you condemn them to extinction. If you increase their standard of living, they will reduce their birth rate without prompting.

Conversely, reducing the birth rate does nothing to elevate the standard of living. Those are not “extra” mouths to feed, they are an “extra” pair of hands to contribute to the family’s production.

9

Don’t know if the following is true or not. If it is, it would seem to me that the “overpopulation problem” is not the “problem” some would have us believe. :slight_smile:

“In 1992 Marilyn vos Savant calculated that the entire
world population of 5.4 billion people, standing several
feet apart, would cover an area of less than eight
hundred square miles — the size of Jacksonville, Florida.
Every single global inhabitant could be placed in one
gigantic city within the borders of the state of Texas,
with a population density less than many cities around
the world. The rest of the globe would be completely
empty of people.”

10

Yes, but the lines to see Attack of the Clones would be *completely intolerable.

11

So is it immoral to have more than replacement level (2 or 3) children?

12

Part of the problem here in the States is our government. Too many times have I stood in line at the grocery store, behind someone with 5 or 6 kids, paying for their food with stamps. Then, seeing them go into the parking lot, and get into a brand new car. I’ve got two kids, 'cos that’s all I can afford. If Uncle Sam didn’t make it so easy for these people to survive on the taxpayers dollar, I’m thinking we’d see a difference in the population of these leeches.

13

A recent article in American Spectator which I read (and have just tried unsuccessfully to find to give specific date) argues the opposite. When infant mortality rates are figured in, many countries in Europe are in danger of falling below replacement birth rates.

Bandanaman does pose an interesting problem, though. The people of industrialized nations will never allow children to starve on the street, so there will never be a strong disincentive to having children you can’t support. The government will always pay for your mistakes, or else we’ll go into the nightmare of forced sterilizations and baby licenses. I think this is purely an economic problem right now. We are far from exceeding the carrying capacity of the Earth, and technology allows us to artificially inflate that capacity to an amazing degree. Right now, population increases are just an excuse for politicians to experiment with radical wealth redistribution, and the poor will keep making babies they can’t support. But the Earth *can support them, so the global problem is way off.

14

No, the simplest way is to nuke them. Perhaps you meant “the best way”. There’s nothing simple about increasing the standard of living, at least not the sort of increase required to reduce the birth rate. Giving people more food doesn’t decrease the number of children; it increases it. Yeah, I know, I know, poor people tend to have more children, blah, blah. But giving food now just delays the inevitable. Without food, all those extra children eventually die, and the overpopulation problem is solved. With extra food, the children grow up, have more children, and then those children will either get handouts or die. Eventually the handouts are going to run out, and people are going to die. The sooner, the fewer.

If you decrease family size from 8 children to 6, but there are twice as many people having children, you haven’t helped the situation. Yes, if you can manage to get it down to 2 children, the population will stabilize, but the problem is that along the way you’re going to have to go through 7 children, and 6 children, and 5 children, and 4 children, and 3 children. This isn’t a situation where half of a good thing is half as good. Half of a good thing is bad. Unless there’s a reasonable expectation that we will actually bring these people to Western standards, we shouldn’t keep giving them more food in the hope that they’ll stop having more children.

If their population is increasing, then obviously there is a birth rate between their current one and one that will result in extinction.

Yes, it does. If everyone reduced their birth rate, then everyone would benefit. Sure, each person individually might benefit from more children, but they do so at the cost of everyone else.

If they are substinence farmers, then that means that the adults barely grow enough to survive. Presumably the children are less productive than adults, and therefore they grow less than they need to survive, and are therefore a liability. Where do you see my logic as going wrong?

15

No he doesn’t. He has provided the required gratuitous slap at some undefined level of poverty and government aid with a wholly unsubstantiated (and probably false) anecdote. (Drivers of “new cars” with “large families” using food stamps are much more likely to turn out to be people who have very recently fallen on hard times (and have not had the “decency” to sell their working car for a more appropriate clunker"), social workers or neighbors providing transportation to poor people, or–even more rarely–people defrauding the government.)

As noted, birth rates are falling in all industrialized nations. These are already the same societies that provide some minimal support for the poor (and most of them have been providing those services for fifty or more years), yet none of them are being swamped by over-breeding people in poverty.

There are local problems throughout the world for food distribution and pollution. There is no evidence that overpopulation at the world level is (or ever will be) a problem.

16

Birth rates in most industrialized countries are already WAY below replacement levels. Population would be declining in almost every industrialized country if it weren’t for immigration.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Japan faces in the next 50 years is DEpopulation. Their birth rate is well below replacement, their population is aging, and they have very low immigration rates. The result may be that there will be as few as 70 million people in Japan by 2050.

The current ‘best’ estimate from the U.N. population council is that the Earth’s population will stop growing by about 2050 and stabilize at around 8 billion people. The ‘low’ estimate is that the population of the Earth will crash and will be as low as 3 billion people by 2100. Not due to natural or man-made disaster or pollution or global warming, but simply because people aren’t having very many kids any more.

This is true even in the poorer nations. Birthrates are falling throughout the world. For instance, the natural birth rate in India fell from 6.7 children per couple down to 3.2. Bangladesh used to have one of the highest birthrates, and now it’s down to about the same level.

The highest birth rates in the world right now are in the Arab world, I believe. A worrisome trend for countries like Israel.

17

Fixing the title of this thread was no probelm at all.

18

Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story in which the entire terrestrial biomass had been converted into two forms: plankton that lived in the oceans, and humans that lived on the land. Would you care to live in that world?

Earth can support far more than six billion humans. The real question is what will be able to survive in addition to humans at any given level of population.

How much of the natural world are you willing to destroy in the process of making even more humans?

19

Hey! Now this forum’s gettin’ overcrowded with Moderators! There ain’t room enough in this forum for the both of us!

Thanks, Czar.

20

It ignores the death rate.

There are a very few (and decreasing) surviving tiny groups of people who are living as hunter-gatherers or isolated and wholly self-sufficient subsistence farmers. Those people do not even come into consideration because their populations tend to be steady.

Generally, when we are discussing subsistence farming and population problems, were are talking about several specific areas in India, Africa, and a few other locales. They need a high birth rate simply to replace the number of children who die from bad sanitation and uncontrolled childhood diseases. Getting those groups to artificially lower their birth rate condemns them to extinction because they will not be able to sustain the manual labor to survive on their current land with a diminishing supply of people.

We do not have to industrialize the entire world. Raising the health standards in agricultural communities means that more children survive. With more laborers available, the couples of child-rearing age choose to lower their output because they can see that there will be too many children to “inherit the farm”.

We have already spent lot of money and energy trying to tell some of these people how to reduce their family size. Where we have also raised the level of medical services, they have chosen to reduce the number of births, even when we were not “instructing” them. Where we simply told them “Have fewer children and all will be well” without eliminating disease, they have shrugged at the suggestion and gone on having children, realizing that they needed to produce six or eight kids to guarantee that there would be two or three left to support them in their old age.

People frequently point to China as an example of a nation that has “confronted” their burgeoning population and taken steps to reduce their birth rate. Those people tend to ignore the fact that India, with no such government intervention, but with a steadily rising standard of living (despite pockets of stagnation) has lowered its birth rate just about the same amount that China lowered its.