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Population Control

#41
Against Will said:
Bingo,

Richer countries have smaller families than poorer ones, for a variety of reasons. Population spurts occur when a nation grows wealthier and healthier, cutting the mortality rates of infants and children (in poor countries, those mortality rates tend to keep the # of surviving children around 2-4). So where before you had 8 or 9 kids because only 2-4 would survive, now 8-9 survive. As time goes on, those kids and their grandkids will average 2-4 kids in their own families (or maybe none) causing population growth to plateau. This of course doesn't take into account immigration, but families of immigrants also tend to follow this rule.

Any shortages are the result of distribution problems, which a market can correct for, but there's still the problem of rampant corruption that prevent markets from working and can rob countries of their resources.

I also take issue with comparing a market economy with natural selection. In the latter, a trait or idiosyncratic characteristic of an animal gives it an advantage in the wild and allows it to survive to pass on its genes. In today's economy, most of the wealth is inherited from a person's parents or grandparents, regardless of an individuals own intelligence or resourcefulness. In fact, I would argue that there are more resourceful and intelligent people in the bottom billion than there are in the top 1%. In this scenario, however, the bottom billion are the first to lose out.
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current levels of production can be maintained only with heavy use of pesticides,and chemical fertilizers.......huge tracts of rainforest that absorb co2 have been eliminated to facilitate cattle production...

..back in the sixties there was a group called zero population growth......it seems that many of their dire warnings of over population are coming to pass now....the world's population then was just over a billion.......just imagine the mountain of feces produced daily by a billion people, and the necessary water,food,fuel,infrastructure for survival by ten times that number
 
#42
I'm sure I just repeat what has been said earlier, but I think it's as simple as survival of the fittest. And perhaps some government policy on procreation like China's (I don't know if they've scrapped it though).
 
#44
Natural populations always grow exponentially until they run into the limit of their resources but there are exceptions to this among many human populations. In most countries with stable, market economies and a high standard of living, populations have leveled off to zero growth and in some cases, even shrinking. This is due to the fact that parents plan ahead and use birth control to limit the number of their children in order to keep their household expenses manageable. This is true for many European countries and it would be true for the United States, except for the fact that annual immigration is responsible for the entire increase in our population.

Extrapolating this out to the entire world, if the majority of countries could be brought up to the socio-economic status and standard of living of most modern western nations, the world's population would stabilize at some point determined by market forces, rather than environmental forces such as starvation, disease or war.
 
#47
Here's my piece. The whole idea that people with physical or mental challenges should be discouraged from reproducing is sickening and highly offensive to me, to say the least, and for the sake of the rules on this forum. I believe that everyone should be given the opportunity to lead the best life that they're capable of leading, and if some people need help, then for Christ's sake they need help. It's not the end of the world. Letting people with mental or physical handicaps fall by the wayside and to discourage them from reproducing is hateful, bigoted, and ignorant. Now, let me shut up before I get political and in trouble. Peace out.
 
#50
hover said:
hahaha, indeed. Second runner-up?

"Oh, obviously I was kidding" as evidenced by Arbitrary in his "write a paper" thread...;)
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Eerily prescient!
jonathan_matos5 said:
im ok being called out for being an $%^&$%^ as long as people are aware that it is misanthropy and not racism. "i dont like people" not "you people"

i have been known to be a troll from time to time.
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Bassman316 pretty much said what I was thinking. The mentally ill and the developmentally disabled have been treated terribly in the past. You didn't demonstrate any racism, but bigotry is bigotry and it's still ugly. Oh, but maybe you were trolling.:rolleyes:
 
#51
Most of what I think has already been said. Eugenics is eugenics no matter the criteria. By the way don't the physically and mentally disabled already have a wee bit of a disadvantage in the breeding market? I don't think that growth in human population has much to do with the disabled overbreeding.

The anxiety being expressed by the OP is what's called Malthusianism (after a French thinker named Malthus who first theorized overpopulation) and it's controversial to say the least. The main problem is the notion that a given area has a fixed "carrying capacity." That might be true at a given technology level, but the history of technology shows that human beings have a remarkable capacity to find new resources and use them to leverage the availability of basic things like food. There are not a lot of cases of mass die-offs in history to justify Malthusianism as a rule (nearest candidate I'm aware of is 14th century Europe, when a string of famines were capped off by the Black Death).

The population of Europe is currently shrinking, North America is increasing relatively slowly, Asia, Africa and Latin America are growing pretty dramatically. As others have said, the areas growing fastest are poor parts of the world due to drops in infant mortality and I am among those who believe that these will self-stabilize as their cultures adapt to the idea that so many pregnancies are no longer economically beneficial to families.

But if we're really going to be panicked about overpopulation, I suppose we should napalm all the poor countries or something. A modest proposal. I hear they make good eating.
 
#52
hrodbert696 said:
human beings have a remarkable capacity to find new resources and use them to leverage the availability of basic things like food.
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soylent-green.gif
 
#53
Against Will said:
I also take issue with comparing a market economy with natural selection. In the latter, a trait or idiosyncratic characteristic of an animal gives it an advantage in the wild and allows it to survive to pass on its genes. In today's economy, most of the wealth is inherited from a person's parents or grandparents, regardless of an individuals own intelligence or resourcefulness. In fact, I would argue that there are more resourceful and intelligent people in the bottom billion than there are in the top 1%. In this scenario, however, the bottom billion are the first to lose out.
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Thats a point that a lot of people forget. Much of the concentrated power and wealth that exists in the world is passed along rather than earned from scratch.
 
#54
Bassman316 said:
Here's my piece. The whole idea that people with physical or mental challenges should be discouraged from reproducing is sickening and highly offensive to me, to say the least, and for the sake of the rules on this forum. I believe that everyone should be given the opportunity to lead the best life that they're capable of leading, and if some people need help, then for Christ's sake they need help. It's not the end of the world. Letting people with mental or physical handicaps fall by the wayside and to discourage them from reproducing is hateful, bigoted, and ignorant. Now, let me shut up before I get political and in trouble. Peace out.
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What about the people who are born with horrible debilitating conditions because their parents who were carriers/sufferers of the disease knew they would pass it along genetically but still procreated just because they felt like it? People should be more considerate when deciding to create new lives. If I had some kind of genetic condition that could be passed on, and I wanted to have kids, I sure as hell wouldn't breed any of my own, I'd adopt. Regardless of one's genetic makeup, I think people should always deeply explore and consider the reasons they feel the urge to reproduce before they go ahead and do so.

Unless human population growth slows down and regulates itself naturally, it's doomed to crash. To base the functioning of civilization on a dependency for ever-increasing population is basically like setting up humanity as a pyramid scheme.
 
#57
lunarpollen said:
What about the people who are born with horrible debilitating conditions because their parents who were carriers/sufferers of the disease knew they would pass it along genetically but still procreated just because they felt like it? People should be more considerate when deciding to create new lives. If I had some kind of genetic condition that could be passed on, and I wanted to have kids, I sure as hell wouldn't breed any of my own, I'd adopt. Regardless of one's genetic makeup, I think people should always deeply explore and consider the reasons they feel the urge to reproduce before they go ahead and do so.

Unless human population growth slows down and regulates itself naturally, it's doomed to crash. To base the functioning of civilization on a dependency for ever-increasing population is basically like setting up humanity as a pyramid scheme.
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I'm wondering what you're trying to say with that post, whether you're simply stating what you'd do in that situation, or if there should be something governing the reproduction of people with various genetically passable diseases or handicaps.
 
#60
To whoever said it, Malthus was British, not French. The irony is that when Malthus wrote his paper in the early 1800s it was a dire prediction that soon things would go bad due to population. Guess he was wrong. The issue with Malthusian thought is the perception that the way people produce things and harvest resources is some sort of static thing; every year there is more innovation due to the simple fact that there are more minds in the world. And yes, I think the OP probably should have done a bit more research on eugenics before posting this, he would learn that he is in good company with alot of terrible people. And beyond ad hominem, it is a pretty arrogant/disturbing desire to control someone else's life in such a way.
 

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