Assuming that’s not a joke with me not in on it … Children of Men.
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Never bought this retort. We’re running out of phosphorous(see: mass starvation), helium, various othe rare metals. Continuous damage is being done to our atmosphere and oceans. While we would certainly be able to reign ourselves in with changes to the way we use our resources, I just don’t see any downside to there being WAY less humans than there are now.
I’m not saying the population should be forcefully reduced. Just that I have no problem with the idea that we should all have less babies.
I agree with you in part though. I’m all for prying the recourses out of the hands of the 1%z.
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That’s the soylent grey contingency. Totally doable.
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Planet of the Aged?
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and yet that is exactly the plan the us government has enacted.
encourage instability in near-by countries, stop the people fleeing those conditions from getting legal entry, work them to the bone below minimum wage once they’re here, arrest and deport some percentage, rinse hands of responsibility, repeat.
yes indeed.
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That’s the developing world. In the US, the relationship is less clear. (But women with graduate and professional degrees are the most fertile.)
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By the 90s, there were folk calling for negative population growth.
“the number of people neither grows nor declines’ is that births plus in-migrants equal deaths plus out-migrants.”
They couldn’t just use the words immigrant and emigrant?
“the average number of children per woman which would hold the population constant”
I get that women give birth but it takes two, baby. Could the demographers update this definition to include men in procreation?
“there is large time lag between the point at which the fertility rate (mean total number of children each woman has during her childbearing years) falls to the replacement level (the fertility rate which would result in equal birth and death rates for a population at equilibrium) and the point at which the population stops rising.”
Maybe we’ve been living in the gap between the post WW II baby boom and the time when falling back to replacement levels?
No, let me paste part of that link for you:
“Albert Bartlett, an emeritus professor of physics at University of Colorado at Boulder in his lifetime, suggested that the population have following choices to be at ZPG:
Voluntarily limit births and immigration to achieve zero population growth;
Continue on the present path until our population is so large that draconian measures become necessary to stop the growth of population;
Do nothing and let nature stop the growth through disease, starvation, war and pestilence. If humans do not solve the problem, nature will.[14]”
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You can’t eat money.
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You can farm land that would otherwise go to golf course construction or obnoxiously large estates, and eat grain that would otherwise go to feeding livestock or creating ethanol for fueling gas-guzzling luxury cars or airplanes.
There’s really no question that the ultra rich consume far more useful resources per-capita than average folks or even the moderately rich.
Also: we don’t currently have mass famine anywhere in the world that’s caused primarily by the world collectively being unable to produce enough food to meet the demand of the population, and the world population is not projected to peak at a level that could not be fed without inventing radical new food production techniques, so focusing our efforts on fairly distributing existing resources is a strategy that makes sense.
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I’m very interested in learning about a functional, stable system that allows some kind of social mobility and opportunity for individuals to follow their own path. Equality of opportunity and at least some equality of minimal outcome (i.e. no matter how badly you screw up you get healthcare and a home, and your kids get fair opportunities themselves).
Most concepts of stability I’ve seen are blueprints for totalitarianism of some kind or other, or some fantastical utopian dreamstate.
Though Cory’s Walkaways isn’t the worst concept I’ve ever heard.
No, but we can eat the rich people when the time comes.
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Because… there is? It’s not like the number of children needing an education has been on a downward trend. A lowering birth rate was made up for with immigration. (Right at this moment, not so much.) Many states have seen actual cuts to education budgets in recent years, despite this.
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That will satisfy 1% of your nutritional needs.
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The causes are unfortunate per se, but I can’t say I’m unhappy about the results. We don’t need more people in this world. And it seems I’m surrounded with people having kids who really shouldn’t even be allowed to have a dog. But given how we still idolize the act of procreation in this society, maybe this will get someone to address some of the causes, which will help everyone.
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That is fascinating. I never would have thought that.
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The idea of a trump burger somehow puts me closer to becoming a vegetarian than anything else.
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We need to get the world human population under a billion. Economics is a game. Just cancel the debt and let the bond holders eat it all. Make sure anything with a uniform and a gun is locked up. We can’t have anyone starting a war while world and national economics is reorganized.
If someone could tell me what a sane economic system looks like that would be a good start.
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What does it mean to “voluntarily” limit births and immigration? Impose penalties on people who have more than two children? Seal the borders so one American must die for every immigrant allowed to enter?
Population growth in first-world countries like the US isn’t what’s killing the planet anyway—that’s been dropping steadily for generations and is showing every sign of plateauing all on its own. If you want to make a real difference for the planet you should be more concerned about reigning in the growth of per-capita consumption in countries like the United States.
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