IAP Political Forum

Is that the real problem with the Environment (if the Environment thread is where this comment actually belongs?).

Too many people using too many resources? And the Environment fed to extremes by consumerism/capitalism?

Just mix alittle Gaybecome in the water supply, soon only those who subsist on Beer or Bottle water will be straight.

http://www.itsallpolitics.com/forum/index.php?topic=1167.0 (http://www.itsallpolitics.com/forum/index.php?topic=1167.0)

 :laugh:

The scary thing is that the eugenics crowd may find this to be a viable option.  :-X

You sound Malthusian perhaps you should read the "Population Bomb"  by Paul Elhrich.  Anyway, turns out as marginal productivity increases and land is constant we have a diminishing returns effect.  But if we have technology that constantly advances then idea all goes down like a sack of shit.

I don't think eugenics is necessary. Eugenics implies that certain classes will be steralised (or killed) and others wont. The best way would be routine steralisation after the 1st birth. (I know it's horrible but the population cannot continue to expand unbounded)

The Chinese have done just that, and the results so far are disasterous. 

Eugenics has long had a strong relationship with the overpopulation crowd, after all, someone has to play god.

I'm against eugenics. If this is to happen it must be applied equally to all.

The Chinese apply the law equally to all families.

Yes, perhaps forcing people to do it is too far, perhaps voluntary steralisation with tax incentives.

Europe did it and now finds its own population at risk. 

Over-population = greater chance for people to catch and spread diseases.

Nothing works better than opportunity. Europes negative population growth has a lot to do with economics. It also allows new cultures to come in and mix into a static culture, since the popultions will continue to grow globally, this means we can all look forward to new cultures mixing with ours. (Just as it has always been). (Europe's population isn't "at risk" in any human sense, it will be replenished, just not by the preferred races and creeds of some bigots).

However, you're right, overpopulation is a severe problem. Perhaps its time for a Global Flood, eh?  That would make more than few people on this Forum giddy with glee!

Seriously, though, you have to give China credit for making a tough decision. As much as it caused female infantcide, it kept their population lower than it would have been.  Of course, now the sheer numbers are becoming impossible to manage.

I don't think there are policies that can fix the problem (in terms of pop. control), war, disease and famine will be much more effective, as sad as that is.  We in the upper classes and richer nations have little to fear. We will always take the resources fo the poorer and defensless.

However, we will fill tomes on how we have moral responsibility for this and that, and we should do this and that, etc....

One thing is certain, we cannot fight climate change if the worlds population continues at this unsustainable level. For example, food prices are currently rising globally because more and more land is being devoted to biofuels (this is one of the reason why I say we shouldn't take extreme measures to prevent climate change but prepare instead).

We are also using valuable resources (not just fossil fuels), mineral deposits etc. There was an article in New Scientist last year about the state of the Earth's resources. It said that would run out of some elements within around 20 years.

I think the population problem will be solved through economics. The US is looking at a shortage of workers after the baby boomers. And the baby boomers are mostly due to advances in health care but people still following the tradition of a large family because of high death rates.

The economics plays in because almost every country has followed the same population growth based on economic growth. When countries are poor and health care is bad people have more babies, but they also die at higher rates. As the economy and health care improve initially families remain large, but then people realize that they no longer need a large family and the larger the family the bigger the economic burden (which isn't the case when people are primarily farmers in an undeveloped economy). After this population growth shrinks and the elderly population grows (this is where Europe, Japan, USA and some others are at right now). Japan and Russia have incentives for families to have babies because of a shrinking population. I really think through economic development and waiting until after each nations baby boom generation that population will stabilize. 

Fuck floods. Give me a Class III zombie outbreak. I'm ready for it. I can get along for a couple years on my own in the compound.



 ;D

At least zombies would lead to a real sense of communal brotherhood when you off 'em.

Screw brotherhood, pal. Piss on that. I'm on my own here.

Gane
IMO, poeple don't have more babies because they are poor and vice versa.
western Europe population growth stopped well before europeqn became wealthy and full of social benefits.

Russia as well as the Baltics and north eastern europe has got a declining population because poeple were poorer than before after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today these countries see a slight reversal in this trend, yet still under replacement rate while the economic situation is improving, also slightly.

It has much more to do with culture: For West and East eruorpean, you first have to make sure you have enough money, have a degree and started a good job and have a car and an home before having your first child.

For Chinese, the most important is to have a son, otherwise your name will disapear in shame. This is much more important than money, confort and education. Chinese either will have as many kids as it take until they have at least one boy or, more recently, make use of echography to abort if the featus is female. Some chinese would even kill new born babies if it's a girl because the law forbid them to have a secnd chance.
This seems horrible to us, westerner, but it's absolutely obvious for Chinese.

In Africa, India and other 3d world countries, large families are a sign of wealth. They care less about boys but any kid is seen, traditionaly as one more arm to work at the family farm, thus a source of prosperity. While it was true in the past, the equation is now wrong because rich land and water is much more a problem than labor. In cities, where poeple don't live out of agriculture, large families is even more a source of poverty. Still, the tradition is so strong and contraception so much ignored by their culture, that they still do many children.

War, famine and epidemic will never solve the problem: They only worsen it.
In such situation there is no money and no safety for protecting the environement and the population plunder natural resources in the least rational manner. In Congo villagers have been eating mountain gorillas, an highly endangered species. In the Amazonia bassin, farmers are burning forests because it's the fastest and cheapest way to enrich the soil. In these two example, poeple couldn't afford to do otherwise.

There is overpopulation because there is an inadequation between the large traditional family and the economic reality.
Let's hope that these poeple will finaly realize that they are better off with one or two kids who will recieve decent health care and education and who will earn more than 8 kids with no school degree.
But let's not forget that they have a completely different view than our. For them lining up 8 kids is the sign of success, never mind the shack they are living in.

I realize what you are saying but you are not looking at the big picture. The problem with what you are saying is that Europe has been wealthy compared to the rest of the world for nearly 300 hundred years. You're comparing a poor European or American to a a poor person in India and it is just not the same. When I said poor people I meant the subsistence farmer in Nigeria, not the guy who lives in a trailer and has a bad car. The population boom is in third world nations such as Nigeria and other extremely poor nations, and as their economies grow and the people gain some economic strength their populations will begin to shrink. Here is an example of the beginnings of population decline, using Iran as an example: http://www.populationaction.org/Publications/Reports/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come/asset_upload_file463_6092.gif (http://www.populationaction.org/Publications/Reports/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come/asset_upload_file463_6092.gif)

What this shows is a decline in births since 1980. Iran is not a wealthy nations, but standards have improved over those 15 years and as a result population decline.

The pre-transition equilibrium, historically experienced in impoverished rural communities, features birth and death rates that are high (40 to 55 per thousand) and, by definition, equal to each other.  Social customs favor high fertility to compensate for high death rates, which have to do with elevated infant mortality (200 per thousand live births or more) as well as short life spans (i.e., life expectancies of 30 years or so).

Post-transition equilibrium is characterized not just by birth and death rates that are in line with each other – though at a lower level (around 10 to 12 per thousand) – but by a stable age profile of the population as well.  No country has achieved this equilibrium yet, although natural increase has ceased in quite a few.

These definitions are taken from a class that I am taking now. What most of the world is in is the in between stage. This is when people are still having lots of babies to compensate for a high death rate. What happens though is the death rate has fallen so births remain high for a short period of time and within a few decades it begins to hit an equilibrium.

We really are on the same page I just think you misunderstood what I meant by "poor". Here's a site that does a much better job at explaining this than I can though: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html (http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html)

Add to the fact that your name is Turd Ferguson and you have a Fear & Loathing avatar, and this makes me chuckle.

Gane,
Another theory is explaining how when a population increases to a level of overpopulation it reach a point of sudden famine and massive death rate.
Today global solidarity and other mechnism made that even in case of overpopulation (when the land can't feed poeple on it anymore) famine and the number of deaths by hunger is reduced enough so that the population still increases.