I read something about introducing male mosquitoes into the wild, which only produced mosquitoes that couldn’t bare further offspring. No mosquito abortion clinics needed, no financial penalties for having baby mosquitoes needed, no health issues for the non-mosquito parents, just a fact they’re unable to have further offspring. Once those mosquitoes know they can fornicate, party and explore with abandon, for the days they’re alive, they might have more fun than having to bring up babies who’ll generally be a burden on them for most of their adulthood.
There are two important factors to take into consideration when discussing world population.
- Once a nation obtains a per capita income of about $5000, the total fertility rate (TFR: the number of children born per woman) drops to replacement levels or below. If women are half the population and the TFR is about 2, then that is replacement level (replacement level is actually 2.1, but you get the jist).
Virtually every nation with a fertility rate above 2-3 is dirt poor. In fact, most western developed nations are at below replacement levels. I think the TFR in Japan is only about 1.3, which means their population could drop from 130 million now down to about 70 million by 2100.
- Due to things like this, global population in every part of the world except Africa is expected to stabilize. Virtually all the population growth of the 21st century will occur in Africa. They will go from the current 1 billion people to about 4 billion. That’ll move global population from 7 up to about 10 billion.
Ergo, lifting Africa out of poverty while also pushing family planning there is the most important thing we can do.
There is a risk that down the line, humanity will figure out how to cure the aging process. When that happens, people could easily start living to be 200+ years old (who knows when we will figure that out though). If that happens, then that’ll create a whole new overpopulation problem because people will be born, have kids, and then not die for a while.
When people used to fret (more) about ‘over population’ it was generally understood to mean inability to grow enough food on the simple Malthusian basis of food production growing arithmetically and population geometrically. Now global population is on track to peak at a level requiring a lot more food, but an amount that’s quite plausible to achieve everything else equal.
As mentioned, you can cast the climate issue as a population issue, though it isn’t usually emphasized. I don’t think the de-emphasis on the population aspect is because ‘the right is ascendant’ though. It’s because pure increase in the number of people isn’t as much the issue as increase in emission per person if it followed globally the pattern it did in the developed world, though again the global population isn’t increasing as fast as it once appeared it might. And you can’t call for a big population decrease and find much of a hearing in the mainstream.
Per other responses population is at replacement or declining levels in developed counties. Why? Kids are very expensive in industrialized economies and are not necessary for economic maintenance into the future. Kids are effectively lifestyle decisions not necessities.
As to population increases in Africa and some areas of the less developed world the issue will solve itself. If there is not enough food one or two famine cycles will make people re-think the number of children they intend to have and there are lot of effective ways not to have kids with modern contraceptives. Not even poor people want to live like starving, impoverished animals if they have a choice. I think population will adjust itself to real world constraints a lot more dynamically than economists predict.
The Right never cared for the topic very much; the Left found it littered with charges of a wide range of different “isms”. So all in all it seems it is one of those things left to be worked on but more quietly.
But, Love of Christ, the cost! The tidal wave of human misery. There may be no other answer; people are clearly not limiting their own reproduction, but trusting to some magical future where food falls, like manna, from the sky.
And the developed countries will not be unaffected: refugees will migrate in vast numbers, and, alas, so will diseases.
By consensus average, at least one-third of all human edible food harvested is uneaten. So an additional 4-billion people could be fed at current standards with current production, just by eliminating waste. This fact is completely ignored, but maybe, if hunger becomes severe enough, someone will start addressing that solution.
As long as political and economical decisions are made by people who are well-fed, hunger will persist regardless of food production and distribution capability.
Trump’s machinations aside I think borders were/are already in the process of closing up across the developed world and have upended political parties. The overall cost/benefit of taking in immigrants from less developed countries is not a net positive in many voting citizen’s minds. I think we are heading into an era where developed country borders are going to be very tight for at least a generation.
Modern agriculture is pretty efficient. Statements that X amount of food is “wasted” are specific to circumstances. The main waste in less developed counties is at the production stage, primary waste in developed countries is at the consumption stage. You’re not going to be able to reduce waste and feed poor people by addressing the consumption waste of developed counties. The production waste in less developed countries is endemic to the fact they are poor and lack the production infrastructure to efficiently produce and store food. The only way to make them waste less in production is to make them more efficient which (effectively) requires that they be more developed which is a gradual process and can be easily throw off track by wars, economic collapse and political and cultural issues.
My father was a project director for the AID and I grew up in Africa where he worked in the 60’s to help them improve yields with better grains, planting and harvesting methods and infrastructure improvements. The communists kicked us out of the Sudan in 1968 and things went back to the way they were.
That is all fine and good. Now finish your dinner. There are starving kids in Africa! (I never quite figured out how that helped anyone thousands of miles away).
Total food production is only loosely linked to food distribution. Those are two separate issues as you point out but many people conflate them. Distribution is often the hardest part because of corrupt governments, inferior infrastructure and incomplete information.
The white populations are in fact going DOWN.
So are those up_the_junction mentions. It’s not about skin tone, it’s about economics and about how children and the relationship between children and their parents are perceived.
If children are viewed as a display of wealth (as some of the immigrants to Spain from Central African countries do), you want to have as many as possible. If they’re viewed as something which happens or does not happen, like rain happens or does not happen, you won’t do anything to control their happening. If they’re viewed as someone you have to take care of and raise (not just pop out), and you have the means to limit how many you have, then you are likely to establish a limit.
Define “white”. Do you mean anyone not of African ancestry? Or do you not include those of East Asian ancestry? Or do you also not include those of South Asian (i.e., from the Indian subcontinent) ancestry? Or do you also not include those from the Middle East? Or do you also not include those of Native American ancestry? I’ve heard people use “white” in each of those senses.
Having defined the term “white,” give us some citations on the assertion that white populations are going down, in comparison with non-white populations. Where do these respective populations live? Show us that skin color (or whatever you’re talking about) has more to do with the distribution of the fertility rate than the wealth of the country.
I’d grant there are people who don’t care about the topic and those scared off by possible accusation of ‘ism’ especially since it’s now mainly Africa projected to have significant further population growth combined with any significant doubt of ability to lift food production to meet it (assuming no big macro change like climate, which as I and others have mentioned is a population issue in a way but not quite the same way: basic food supply is a problem of very poor countries, GHG emissions is often more a problem of countries not being very poor).
However IMO there’s a certain common sense in conflict with neither ‘right’ or ‘left’, in any thoughtful version of either, which realizes that rich countries have a very limited ability to tell people in poor countries how many kids to have. To the extent the problem is portrayed as stuff like tiny amounts of money to distribute condoms that’s a gross oversimplification (and really about scoring points in the US’s own internal debates). Population dynamics are a much deeper issue. As numerous posts have pointed out there’s a strong correlation between development and fertility rate. But how to really help the poorest countries with obstacles like corruption, lack of rule of law or outright civil conflict is quite intractable. And even if we don’t make cheap shot recourse to the R word, a swift solution to that by the rich world would almost by definition be paternalistic. And rapid development means more GHG emissions, so there’s a mixed agenda there also.
I think in some cases ‘the right doesn’t care’ is reasonably seen from the right’s perspective as ‘the left signals its virtue by emoting about problems “we”, as in a given Western polity, can’t actually solve’.
Countries that have been well developed for a while have seen their populations stabilize or sink. “Race” (whatever that is) has nothing to do with this!
What do Italy, Russia (a very diverse country), Taiwan and Japan have in common?
Brazil’s population growth has just fallen below 2%. It’s going to nearly stabilize quite soon. What “race” are Brazilians?
<end divergence>
Remember those horrible things people said would happen if the global population got too large? Many of those are no longer in the future. They are here, now. E.g., global warming.
You can’t do anything ethical about overpopulation in the present. So you talk about the effects of the overpopulation.
When someone says a crisis is coming, they tend to stop talking in the future tense once the crisis is happening. We’ve got to start dealing with the here and now.
Population decline - or more properly low birth rate - is a function of industrialisation in general and wealth/healthcare in particular. Consequently, populations of various cultures are declining, of which predominately white populations are one example. But it’s not because of their skin colour: it’s mostly a big old middle class paying sufficient taxes that help societal healthcare.
We belong to a species that doesn’t believe knives are sharp until we actually cut ourselves. A very, very hefty segment of the populace (and SDMB members) won’t believe overpopulation is a problem until the mass famines strike – and even then, we’ll hear the same old mantras: “There’s plenty of food, it simply isn’t being distributed properly.”
Sustainability isn’t even on the table – and it ought to be the world’s top priority.
Based on recent history the only place full scale agricultural production based famines are happening in the world over the past several decades right now is Africa, and more specifically the Sahel and proximate regions which have been subject to cyclic droughts since forever. Men and women will eventually react to resource constraints. But even if they don’t people in undeveloped regions have been dying like flies in famines for a long time now with almost zero impact to the developed world. What is it about this coming famine you project that going to make it globally dangerous or a threat to developed nations? Also what is going to cause these mass famines in developed nations that currently produce more than they need internally or can buy what they need from other developed nations. Unless the developed nations have massive crop failure and/or a huge population increase of poor people I’m not seeing how that’s going to happen.
How is this going to occur? Be specific.
If we use the definition of not having enough resources to sustain the current world population, we are probably already overpopulated, especially if you use a broader definition of the word resources.
Food is not one of the main issues, and I think it’s easy to get distracted by that. Potable water is much more likely to become a major worldwide issue. I think in a certain sense jobs can be considered a resource, and this is where I think we (meaning the developed world) are going to run into major problems. Automation is going to continue to progress, and if places like China, Vietnam, and India develop too much then the offshoring will just continue to Africa. My theory is that the collective anxiety about this issue is what led to Trump and Brexit and is the the process of leading to such folks as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen gaining popularity if not outright winning. If we have more people and fewer jobs, how are we going to get around the issue? I don’t have an answer, but I think that the decreased availability of good jobs in the developed world will become a major issue before running out of things like food, oil, coal, or even potable water become major issues.
If that happens it would obviously be the biggest game changing technology since the development of agriculture. My best WAG is that there is a decent chance it will happen within the next few hundred years. The major obstacle right now is a lack of method to genetically engineer somatic cells. If that obstacle is overcome the next steps should be straightforward (in theory).