World Overpopulation?

Great Debates
1

About 20 years ago, I got this interesting book on trivia facts. And it had this equally interesting article, apparently by a respected scientist, on overpopulation.

I think the book itself was written around the late 60s or early 70s. But it said the first and foremost problem the earth we face in the future, is overpopulation. It will effect every aspect of human life and existence. Every other problem will just take a backseat to this one, some day at least.

It has been a while since this book was published. And I have just one question: **What (if anything) is being done now to address the issue of human overpopulation? **

And indeed, what are the solutions? Contraception works well in developed countries. Should it be made more freely available in more underdeveloped countries? And what about compulsory contraception? Will it be required some day? Could it be necessary even now, for that matter?

:slight_smile:

2

The Population Bomb - Wikipedia

Other countries, developed or not, are different cultures, with different views towards sex, procreation, religion, social mores, economics, etc. Contraception is a fine concept. How do you “sell it” to a [ country / region / society ] whose social, political and/or religious mores cannot reconcile with it?

Here’s just one example, India and the problems associated with family planning.

3

India 's total fertility rate is around 2.7 now, a few tenths above replacement (which for a poor country like India is probably around 2.3 or so). More than half of Indian states have a below replacement fertility right now, which will result in population decline in the long run.

For what it’s worth, there are only a couple of groups in India whose religious mores forbid contraception (Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, specifically) and those groups have the lowest fertility rates after Parsiees, not the highest. (Muslims have relatively high fertility, but as far as I know islam does not forbid contraception). When it comes to decisions about how many children to have, surprisingly enough, religion seems to play very little role in people’s decisions (which is not to say none, just very little).

4

You do realize that outside of Africa, birth rates have cratered in most of the developing world? El Salvador, famously a country with too many people, not enough land, and a high birth rate, currently has lower fertility than the United States of America. So does Iran. Most of Latin America is at replacement level plus or minus a few points. Same is true of east and southeast Asia, the Caribbean countries, essentially all of Europe. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are actually trying manfully to increase their fertility.

Population growth, such as it exists today, is a local problem, focused on Africa and to some extent parts of India and Pakistan. Those areas are taking somewhat longer, but the cratering of world fertility rates have been so universal (across all races, religions, political orders, socioeconomic systems, and levels of development above a certain threshold) that I suspect Africa will everntually follow suit too.

5

Correction: I’m not that knowledgeable about Hinduism, so there may well be Hindu sects that disapprove of contraception, as Gandhi did. Hinduism as a whole does not.

6

FWIW the USA fertility rate is at a historic low, and without immigration our population would be falling instead of rising.

7

The most common estimate is that the world population will reach a peak of about 9.2 billion in about 2050 and decline after that point. There are various other estimates that are above or below this. In any case, this isn’t the problem. There is no doubt that the population will peak sometime late in this century and decline afterwards. The real question is if we can sustain an acceptable world society after that point. Will there be sufficient water and food for everyone? Will global warming be out of control? Will there be plagues? Are there other resources that will run out?

8

India just came out with a Total Fertility Rate of around 2.3 (India’s birth rate shrinks)

It seems to make a big difference in the USA. At least there’s a strong correlation between faith and number of children.

9

The differences are not huge, though. Evangelical Christians have around 2.5 apiece, mainline Protestants and Catholics about 2, nonreligious people about 1.5. And it’s not clear there is a causal relationship. (Evangelicals typically do not disapprove of contraception, with some exceptions like Al Mohler). It might instead be reflective of education (the education-fertility link, among women specifically, is much stronger than the religiosity-fertility one). Or it might be that both are correlated with underlying psychological traits like low openness.

The point I was making was a more subtle one though, so let me restate it: whether your religion disapproves of contraception or not isn’t a very strong predictor of the number of children you have. If it was, birth rates in Catholic / Orthodox countries communities all over the world wouldn’t be cratering. (It does have an effect for groups like Hasidic Jews, probably, but their numbers are tiny anyway).

10

Overpopulation has been of interest since at least Malthus.

Advances in technology have enabled the human species to continue feeding itself. The cost has been consuming the earth–or, at least, irrevocably changing its “natural” (non-human) ecology.

Since we can’t predict the future, we don’t know how much of a survival problem will face us in coming years. Right now we are pretty dependent upon GMOs and modern farming, not to mention weather. Perhaps global warming will open up vast new areas for farming; perhaps it will disrupt farming. Perhaps ocean changes will disrupt ocean productivity. Perhaps technology will keep up with all of those.

It’s hard to say if we are doing just fine, or if we are right on the edge. It is in the nature of ecosystems to sometimes collapse rapidly. Think mice plagues.

There isn’t anything of note beyond ordinary social voluntary forces that can, or will, be done about it, and those will have minimal effect on trends.

In general, as people get richer, they are inclined to produce fewer offspring. But it’s going to be hard to get africa richer and even harder to slow down population growth there.

11

Although scientists don’t use a crystal ball, they don’t grope in the dark either. They know roughly how much energy humans need, what their pressure on the environment is, how many resources the planet has left, and what the carrying capacity of human beings as a species is. It must have been calculated and even published somewhere…

12

Nothing, because there is no issue of overpopulation. Right now, with a population of about 7 billion persons, we can provide food and water and all other necessities to everyone. The only reason why anyone goes hungry is obstacles to the distribution of food in certain countries, not obstacles to production of sufficient amounts. And we can do this while still having vast amounts of land preserved as parks, wildlife refuges, and so forth.

Overpopulation has always been a fictitious threat.

13

It seems to me economies need to grow, and to grow, they need increasing populations. If the world hits ZPG, are there any plans to prevent economies from contracting? What are we planning to do with increased numbers of elderly and fewer workers and tax payers?

14

Paul Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb and scared the crap out of a lot of people with dire predictions in the 1960s. Predictions like mass starvation in the developed world by the 1980s.

Some of Ehrlich’s predictions:

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

and

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

And my all time favorite:

“I don’t think there’s going to be the centuries to come with our kind of civilizations and with the kind of ethical issues that at least some people (Republicans) in our civilization are concerned with,” he said, chuckling. “I think the issues are more likely to be “is it perfectly OK to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry.”

Seemingly taken aback, Zepps asked, “Really? We’ll get that bad?”

“Oh,” Ehrlich said. “It’s moving in that direction with ridiculous speed.”

A note about this last quote. It was made on May 21st, 2014. This is 40 some odd years after making predictions that the U.S. was going to starve in the 1970s*.

Interestingly, none of Ehrlich’s predictions came true. And, in fact, the opposite of his predictions came true.

Julian Simon, on the other hand, looked at the numbers and came to a different conclusion. Simon wrote a book called "The Ultimate Resource’. Simon said that, in general, things (food, material goods, the environment) would generally get cheaper, more abundant, cleaner and better.

Simon’s predictions, in general, came true though his predictions were a bit more simple and a lot less DOOM-y.

“The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world’s population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely.”

‘First, humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.’’

Yet, for some odd reason, people seemed to only pay attention to Ehrlich even after he has proven to have absolutely no talent at making predictions. Hell, Ehrlich is now predicting Doom and Gloom about climate and other things that he knows nothing about (and he supposedly knew something about population, being a population biologist but he still got everything wrong in his area of expertise).

As far as the food issues go, well, those are mainly caused by political issues, not production. According to the U.N. World Food Program, we produce enough food to feed everyone. The reason people go hungry is not one of production. Link. Fix the political issues which lead to poverty and war and the food issue will most likely go away. And ff Africa can get it to together agriculturally the food problem basically goes away.

Over population isn’t the issue. War and political problems which prevent rational use of resources is the problem.

Slee

  • I can’t imagine why Ehrlich keeps making predictions. If he predicted the sun would rise tomorrow, I’d have to bet the other side.
15

But if we fix the distribution issues, people will have even more babies, will they not?

16

I don’t see where you get that. The pattern has been that as living standards improve, population growth rates tend to drop. That’s more or less what is meant by fixing distribution issues. We could live in a world where everyone gets a basic level of food, clothing, shelter, sanitation and health care, but a lot of people don’t seem to want that world. But, given historical patterns, if we did create that world, population growth rates would be dropping everywhere.

17

Um, Ehrlich was quite well grounded in making the predictions he did, and he’s certainly a smarter man than Julian Simon. His predictions turned out to be wrong because he didn’t predict the global demographic transition or the green revolution. He couldn’t have, because those trends were just getting started in the 1960s. Julian Simon, on the other hand, relied on some hand-waving astrology about people being the ultimate resource. (Part of the reason we have lower fertility today is precisely because countries like India, Iran, South American countries and others became concerned about Malthusian limits, and started doling out contraceptives).

Being wrong for the right reason is generally better than being right for the wrong reasons.

As for Ehrlich being a population biologist, his expertise was (IIRC) butterflies and other insects, which do (like every nonhuman animal) observe Malthusian limitations.

18

Regarding the notorious Simon-Ehrlich bet on metal prices, Simon won that one through luck. Had they bet during most other decades during the last century, he would have lost.

19

Is it a pattern or a blip? I don’t think recent trends in certain countries is enough. It sounds a bit like you’re saying “more food = less babies” but it can’t be that simple. Also, countries experiencing low population growth automatically turn to increased immigration, guest worker visas and incentivizing child birth. Even if we could, today, distribute food more equally and efficiently etc, we still need more kids. What are our plans if the world’s population does stagnate? If we actually do need an ever-increasing population, then “make food distribution more efficient” isn’t going to cut it forever. Earth has a human carrying capacity. We can argue over what that is, but we’re going to hit it eventually. You can’t forever “improve distribution.”

20

For me, the bottom line on population growth and what is/should be done is simple: continue to raise the level of prosperity.

In a poor and pre-industrial society, kids are a source of free labor. Put them to work on the farm. You actually need a certain minimum of labor before a farm can even break even, so having just one or two kids might not even be an option. Even in an early industrial economy, kids might be put to work on assembly lines if the laws permit it. So more kids = more money. Plus, you don’t have much health care, limiting contraception option and increasing the odds that children will die.

For a middle class family in an industrialized or knowledge economy, kids are expensive. The law doesn’t allow them to work, and there’s not a whole lot of work they even could do without skills. Even those rote jobs on assembly lines are mostly going to robots. The skills they need require substantial education, even through college. So kids aren’t in a position to contribute to a family’s financial needs until they’re 30… by which time they have their own families.

So I firmly believe that the population boom of the 1900s is a temporary phenomenon fueled by incomplete penetration of technology and prosperity. Medicine has raised fertility and survival rates faster than industry has changed the economic reward for runaway population growth.

The Population Bomb, in particular, is like someone running around saying “It’s getting colder! We’re all going to freeze!” Relax, man. We call that winter.