Population

[Swammerdami]

"Maximizing population" isn't anyone's goal...

The problem is that trying to reduce by any means other than what is already being tried it is unethical, and doesn't actually solve any of the problems you mentioned anyway. Peabody Energy doesn't check the local population statistics before laying a new shaft, they check the market prices. Killing poor people might cause the price to go down a bit for a few years, but it won't change the scarcity of the resource and the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes; eventually, the value of the resource will bounce back up. So you'll have committed your crimes for no good reason.

"Committed my crimes"? Are you going with the idea that anyone who claims human population is too high is advocating genocide?

I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. Some think U,S. tax policies encourage having children and want revision there; but I'm ambivalent about even that. Is it wrong to outline a problem without proposing a solution? Anyway, what sense does it make to discuss "non-criminal" approaches to the over-population problem, if there's no consensus that over-population IS a problem?

 

[bilby]

"Maximizing population" isn't anyone's goal...

The problem is that trying to reduce by any means other than what is already being tried it is unethical, and doesn't actually solve any of the problems you mentioned anyway. Peabody Energy doesn't check the local population statistics before laying a new shaft, they check the market prices. Killing poor people might cause the price to go down a bit for a few years, but it won't change the scarcity of the resource and the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes; eventually, the value of the resource will bounce back up. So you'll have committed your crimes for no good reason.

^This.

Almost none of the problems described in Swammerdami's most recent post would be eliminated by even a very sharp reduction in human population; And all of them can be solved without such a reduction, particularly given that population growth has now been halted (the remaining increase is just demographic lag, and will cease in a few decades).

Population control (other than by the provision of options such as contraception), is a desparate last resort solution to an existential threat that no longer exists. Any problem you can blame on population can be solved by other, less drastic, measures - and without reference to population at all.

But then, we don't live in a world of rational solutions. People say dumb shit like "You refuse to acknowledge that renewable power would be adequate to service lower populations", ignoring the fact that:

a) We don't have 'lower populations'; and

b) We do have power generation technologies that are able to service our actual population, and to do so more safely, and with less resource use and far lower environmental impact than "Hydroelectric, wind, etc."

What we need is not a lower world population, but a higher world standard of logic and reasoning.

Saying "if the population were lower, we would use fewer natural resources" is as true, and as futile, as a parent saying "If we hadn't had children, we would be rich". Just because it's a fact that your kids are expensive, that's no excuse to even hint that maybe some of them need to die. It's a solution to the problem, sure. But it's only one that could be seriously contemplated by a psychopath.

We need to avoid indefinite growth (achieved); and then we need to solve the remaining problems for the population we have, by non-genocidal, non-psychopathic, rational, and intelligent means.

Continuing to worry about population at this point in human history is unjustifiable.

 

[Elixir]

"Maximizing population" isn't anyone's goal...

The problem is that trying to reduce by any means other than what is already being tried it is unethical, and doesn't actually solve any of the problems you mentioned anyway. Peabody Energy doesn't check the local population statistics before laying a new shaft, they check the market prices. Killing poor people might cause the price to go down a bit for a few years, but it won't change the scarcity of the resource and the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes; eventually, the value of the resource will bounce back up. So you'll have committed your crimes for no good reason.

^This.

Almost none of the problems described in Swammerdami's most recent post would be eliminated by even a very sharp reduction in human population; And all of them can be solved without such a reduction, particularly given that population growth has now been halted (the remaining increase is just demographic lag, and will cease in a few decades).

Population control (other than by the provision of options such as contraception), is a desparate last resort solution to an existential threat that no longer exists. Any problem you can blame on population can be solved by other, less drastic, measures - and without reference to population at all.

But then, we don't live in a world of rational solutions. People say dumb shit like "You refuse to acknowledge that renewable power would be adequate to service lower populations", ignoring the fact that:

a) We don't have 'lower populations'; and

b) We do have power generation technologies that are able to service our actual population, and to do so more safely, and with less resource use and far lower environmental impact than "Hydroelectric, wind, etc."

What we need is not a lower world population, but a higher world standard of logic and reasoning.

Brains in jars it is, then!

 

[Bomb#20]

I am surprised at how Pollyannish many people are about the effects of human overpopulation.

I am dismayed by how many apparently rational people in the 2020s still think that "human overpopulation" describes a plausible state of affairs.

"Human overpopulation" isn't a thing. It describes:

a) A fear, widespread in the 1960s and '70s, of a then plausible state resulting from the indefinite continuation of mid-20th century rates of population growth, whereby population was extrapolated to reach hundreds of billions within as few as five or six generations; Rendered moot by the collapse in fertility rates over the succeeding two or three decades, and ridiculous by the continuation of that collapse; or

b) A racist 'dog whistle', used to imply that 'they' will overwhelm 'us' unless 'we' act to match or exceed 'their' observed fecundity. This idea has zero basis in reality, and is factually wrong on every possible level.

To describe the recognition of these facts as "...how Pollyannish many people are about the effects of human overpopulation" seems to be a strawman; <snip>

You're one to accuse others of a strawman. Nobody but you is using "human overpopulation" to refer to (a) or (b) above.

(a) is just poor reading comprehension. Nobody was forecasting a population of hundreds of billions; that was a reductio ad absurdum showing it was inevitable that the problem of population exceeding carrying capacity was going to be solved one way or another -- either by a birth-rate solution or by a death-rate solution. The purpose was to point out that if we didn't find a way to bring our birth rate down then nature would accommodate our failure by raising the death rate; it wasn't to show the population would ever reach hundreds of billions.

As for (b), this must be the fourth thread I've seen you spreading that ad hominem garbage in. Your reasoning appears to be:

Premises:
1. There are people who reject my opinions who think overpopulation is a real problem.
2. There are people who reject my opinions who fear 'they' will overwhelm 'us' unless 'we' act to match or exceed 'their' observed fecundity.
3. People who reject my opinions are my outgroup.
4. People in my outgroup are interchangeable parts.

Conclusion:
5. The people who think overpopulation is a real problem and the people who fear 'they' will overwhelm 'us' unless 'we' act to match or exceed 'their' observed fecundity are the same people.​

Where the bejesus do you hear anyone saying the world is overpopulated and we must increase our fecundity? As a rule, people who think the world is overpopulated are just as opposed to people of their own own ethnicity having too many babies as they are to those of other ethnicities doing it. You are trumping up a groundless racism charge because in modern western culture that's the customary way to shut down rational discussion and get an unearned rhetorical victory. What the heck is your problem, that you would resort to such unworthy debating tactics? Are you afraid your substantive case for not being concerned about overpopulation isn't solid?

(Oh, and for the record, you left out "human overpopulation" describing (c) the fact that after the birth rate finally drops below the death rate, and we come out of this phase of our demographics on the other side of peak population, and human pressure on the world's ecosystems comes down to a sustainable level, the fewer babies we'd had during the interim and the lower the peak was, the more endangered species will have made it through the hump in our population curve and won't have gone extinct.)

 

[Bomb#20]

"Maximizing population" isn't anyone's goal...

The problem is that trying to reduce by any means other than what is already being tried it is unethical, and doesn't actually solve any of the problems you mentioned anyway. Peabody Energy doesn't check the local population statistics before laying a new shaft, they check the market prices. Killing poor people might cause the price to go down a bit for a few years, but it won't change the scarcity of the resource and the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes; eventually, the value of the resource will bounce back up. So you'll have committed your crimes for no good reason.

"Committed my crimes"? Are you going with the idea that anyone who claims human population is too high is advocating genocide?

Of course he is -- that ad hominem is a staple of pronatalist propaganda.

There are any number of perfectly reasonable measures we could take to incrementally reduce the birth rate and incrementally reduce the height of the coming peak in human population and thereby limit the severity of the damage we're going to do to the environment in the remaining decades before the problem gets resolved. These range from the direct: provide free abortion and sterilization services to any woman who wants them while ending subsidies for fertility treatments for parents who already have two children, and the obvious: stop making economic policy based on the make-believe notion that increasing the birth-rate in order to fund the retirements of the elderly is anything other than a Ponzi scheme, to the strategic: monitor subcultures that regard women as brood-mares and watch out for the emergence of new ones, and intervene to make sure girls who want to escape from those subcultures are provided all the support to do it that they need.

But if maximizing population isn't anyone's goal, then it's puzzling why people keep slandering the advocates of such moderate measures, accusing them of favoring "Killing poor people".

(Oh, and as for "the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes", the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes is what causes the "demographic transition" that's preventing Malthusian catastrophe.)

 

[Politesse]

"Maximizing population" isn't anyone's goal...

The problem is that trying to reduce by any means other than what is already being tried it is unethical, and doesn't actually solve any of the problems you mentioned anyway. Peabody Energy doesn't check the local population statistics before laying a new shaft, they check the market prices. Killing poor people might cause the price to go down a bit for a few years, but it won't change the scarcity of the resource and the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes; eventually, the value of the resource will bounce back up. So you'll have committed your crimes for no good reason.

"Committed my crimes"? Are you going with the idea that anyone who claims human population is too high is advocating genocide?

I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. Some think U,S. tax policies encourage having children and want revision there; but I'm ambivalent about even that. Is it wrong to outline a problem without proposing a solution? Anyway, what sense does it make to discuss "non-criminal" approaches to the over-population problem, if there's no consensus that over-population IS a problem?

If your description doesn't come with a plan of action, what earthly good is it? Especially if your description doesn't adequately and thoroughly explain the phenomena you're attempting to describe, anyway.

 

[Politesse]

"Maximizing population" isn't anyone's goal...

The problem is that trying to reduce by any means other than what is already being tried it is unethical, and doesn't actually solve any of the problems you mentioned anyway. Peabody Energy doesn't check the local population statistics before laying a new shaft, they check the market prices. Killing poor people might cause the price to go down a bit for a few years, but it won't change the scarcity of the resource and the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes; eventually, the value of the resource will bounce back up. So you'll have committed your crimes for no good reason.

"Committed my crimes"? Are you going with the idea that anyone who claims human population is too high is advocating genocide?

Of course he is -- that ad hominem is a staple of pronatalist propaganda.

There are any number of perfectly reasonable measures we could take to incrementally reduce the birth rate and incrementally reduce the height of the coming peak in human population and thereby limit the severity of the damage we're going to do to the environment in the remaining decades before the problem gets resolved. These range from the direct: provide free abortion and sterilization services to any woman who wants them while ending subsidies for fertility treatments for parents who already have two children, and the obvious: stop making economic policy based on the make-believe notion that increasing the birth-rate in order to fund the retirements of the elderly is anything other than a Ponzi scheme, to the strategic: monitor subcultures that regard women as brood-mares and watch out for the emergence of new ones, and intervene to make sure girls who want to escape from those subcultures are provided all the support to do it that they need.

But if maximizing population isn't anyone's goal, then it's puzzling why people keep slandering the advocates of such moderate measures, accusing them of favoring "Killing poor people".

(Oh, and as for "the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes", the bottomless hunger of the wealthy classes is what causes the "demographic transition" that's preventing Malthusian catastrophe.)

"Pronatalist propaganda"?

Pass out all the condoms you like, I have no objection to that. It won't meaningfully stop the population from growing, and it certainly won't prevent captialist forces from stripping this planet bare. But it will make a lot of people's lives better, so that's fine.

I do have an objection to people who avoid addressing true threats to global ecology by implausibly blaming everything on the urban poor. It's a dangerous red herring, that prevents meaningful action on ecological issues, and worse, one that has been used to justify periodic genocidal acts throughout the past 170 years of world history. Anyone who can read knows that overpopulation hysteria and mass eugenics projects are historically joined at the hip.

 

[DBT]

To state the obvious, the issue appears to be overconsumption of resources/consumerism....who or what is responsible is the question.

 

[Swammerdami]

To state the obvious, the issue appears to be overconsumption of resources/consumerism....who or what is responsible is the question.

Agriculture for food is perhaps the biggest factor in unsustainable growth; this is largely a matter of human numbers, not elite consumption vs consumption by the poor. Food production has led to over-fishing, destruction of habitats, depletion of water aquifers, and shortages of topsoil and phosphates. (Exceptions: Food wastage is a problem worse in rich countries than in poor. Meat consumption takes a huge toll on land resources compared with a vegetable diet: we can squeeze in another 2 or 3 billion humans if we all become vegetarians.)

 

[bilby]

To state the obvious, the issue appears to be overconsumption of resources/consumerism....who or what is responsible is the question.

Agriculture for food is perhaps the biggest factor in unsustainable growth; this is largely a matter of human numbers, not elite consumption vs consumption by the poor. Food production has led to over-fishing, destruction of habitats, depletion of water aquifers, and shortages of topsoil and phosphates. (Exceptions: Food wastage is a problem worse in rich countries than in poor. Meat consumption takes a huge toll on land resources compared with a vegetable diet: we can squeeze in another 2 or 3 billion humans if we all become vegetarians.)

The world produces considerably more food than we require to feed the entire population.

Famine has been absent for four decades; Vastly more people suffer ill effects due to too much food than suffer ill effects due to too little.

There's absolutely bugger all good evidence that food supplies are at risk of failing to sustain projected world population indefinitely; There's a mountain of good evidence that food supplies are adequate and sustainable.

And there are a large number of wealthy people with a quasi-religious belief that all that evidence must be wrong, because they know that there's an "overpopulation problem". So they develop elaborate stories about how the apparent absence of a problem must be due to the problem being hidden - we have plenty of food, therefore we must be in imminent danger of running out of topsoil or fertiliser or irrigation water. Because if we have plenty of food, 'overpopulation' must be doing something unsustainable that's difficult to see.

Never mind that food supplies have never in human history been so secure and abundant.

Whenever humans get comfortable and safe, they seem to have an insatiable need for an existential threat, and will invent and wholeheartedly believe in a doomsday scenario in the face of all evidence. Doomsday cults are two a penny, and "overpopulation" is slightly less obviously stupid than "The Rapture", I guess.

 

[Bomb#20]

"Pronatalist propaganda"?

Dude, you're the one who accused Swami of wanting to kill poor people.

I do have an objection to people who avoid addressing true threats to global ecology by implausibly blaming everything on the urban poor. It's a dangerous red herring, that prevents meaningful action on ecological issues,

Unless you're in a position to order the shutdown of a coal-fired power plant, the high-order term in the formula for your carbon footprint is the number of children you have. Everything else the average citizen can do is a second-order effect. And awareness of this is not what's preventing meaningful action on ecological issues. What's preventing meaningful action on ecological issues is, first and foremost, anti-nuclear hysteria, and secondarily, political opposition to a carbon tax.

and worse, one that has been used to justify periodic genocidal acts throughout the past 170 years of world history. Anyone who can read knows that overpopulation hysteria and mass eugenics projects are historically joined at the hip.

I'm sorry, m'lord, I never learned to read. Help me out. Here's a list of periodic genocidal acts, mostly in the past 170 years. Kindly point out which ones were caused by fear that overpopulation of the urban poor was a threat to global ecology.

 

[Politesse]

Dude, you're the one who accused Swami of wanting to kill poor people.

Not Swammerdami, specifically. All Malthusians. If someone were interested in population studies for reasons other than class aggression, it would never occur to them to start with discredited Victorian theories of population growth.

Unless you're in a position to order the shutdown of a coal-fired power plant, the high-order term in the formula for your carbon footprint is the number of children you have. Everything else the average citizen can do is a second-order effect. And awareness of this is not what's preventing meaningful action on ecological issues. What's preventing meaningful action on ecological issues is, first and foremost, anti-nuclear hysteria, and secondarily, political opposition to a carbon tax.

Happily, I live in a democratic state and am therefore in a pretty good position to make my positions on communal power production clear. I can and have advocated for the adoption of ecologically cognizant power gerneation, even participated in successful civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal facilities on the Dinetah. I feel that this action was much more effective in the long run than haranguing people on the internet for having children.

I'm sorry, m'lord, I never learned to read. Help me out. Here's a list of periodic genocidal acts, mostly in the past 170 years. Kindly point out which ones were caused by fear that overpopulation of the urban poor was a threat to global ecology.

Ecology was not the primary target in most of those cases (nor do I believe for a second that modern-day eugenicists genuinely care about ecology) but Malthusian ideology was routinely cited as an "objective" justification for most the events you listed. While I acknowledge it might be a little more diffficult for you as a non-reader, if you can find a digital screen-reader or literate friend to read them aloud to you, you can find out more at the following links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-population-control-holocaust

 

[DBT]

What's wrong with a voluntary, informed, two child choice? Nobody has to be killed, it could be just a matter of keeping people informed.

 

[skepticalbip]

It is an unfortunate reality but for people driven by their particular ideology, "keeping people informed" means "make people accept and believe what I believe".

 

[DBT]

It is an unfortunate reality but for people driven by their particular ideology, "keeping people informed" means "make people accept and believe what I believe".

Not necessarily. Not if the issues raised are well supported by evidence; ecosystems, habitat loss, water, etc. Not to mention sheer congestion because people prefer or need to live in a city for work, lifestyle.....

 

[skepticalbip]

It is an unfortunate reality but for people driven by their particular ideology, "keeping people informed" means "make people accept and believe what I believe".

Not necessarily. Not if the issues raised are well supported by evidence; ecosystems, habitat loss, water, etc. Not to mention sheer congestion because people prefer or need to live in a city for work, lifestyle.....

You just presented a good example of my post.

 

[DBT]

It is an unfortunate reality but for people driven by their particular ideology, "keeping people informed" means "make people accept and believe what I believe".

Not necessarily. Not if the issues raised are well supported by evidence; ecosystems, habitat loss, water, etc. Not to mention sheer congestion because people prefer or need to live in a city for work, lifestyle.....

You just presented a good example of my post.

How so? Is presenting science based information a case of ideology or pushing a belief?

 

[Politesse]

What's wrong with a voluntary, informed, two child choice? Nobody has to be killed, it could be just a matter of keeping people informed.

Nothing is remotely wrong with that. You don't have to believe in a bunch of hyperbolic conspiracy theories to see the benefit of family planning. But mindlessly pushing the ideological project lends more legitimacy to those parties more willing to turn "academic truths" into authoritarian policies aimed at their perceived political foes.

 

[skepticalbip]

You just presented a good example of my post.

How so? Is presenting science based information a case of ideology or pushing a belief?

Calling something "science based" does not make it science. And, even if you are talking about some particular scientific finding, science does not make value judgements of "good" or "bad" much less personal preferences. Even at that, I would question the "science" you are claiming support some of items in your list.

 

[Politesse]

It is an unfortunate reality but for people driven by their particular ideology, "keeping people informed" means "make people accept and believe what I believe".

Not necessarily. Not if the issues raised are well supported by evidence; ecosystems, habitat loss, water, etc. Not to mention sheer congestion because people prefer or need to live in a city for work, lifestyle.....

If they were, we wouldn't be having this conversation. At least, not with me. I've yet to see any concrete evidence to support the notion that the past two centuries of various population control mechanisms have actually reduced the most significant ecological stressors in any meaningful way.