I’m not sure about where you live but I know a lot more people in my generation (early 40s) who have 0-1 kids than 3 or more kids. Most places in the United States follow that same trend; we would have been experiencing negative population growth for years now if we suddenly cut off all immigration.
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And yet our fertility rate is one of the highest in the industrialized world. Europe’s average is far below ours.
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Where are you getting that number? The current worldwide population is approximately 7.6 billion, so you think it’s necessary to reduce the number of humans by about 87%. Seems a bit extreme. Even Thanos was only going for a 50% reduction.
E.T.A.: Thanos wasn’t right.
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It probably should be under 1/2 billion.
Still well below the replacement rate; the US fertility rate was about 1.84 births per woman and dropping as of 2015. So we got pretty much exactly what the population growth alarmists were hoping for a generation ago, yet a lot of people are still acting like “Americans having too many babies!” is still the most pressing issue facing our planet.
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No it isn’t.
The problem is not too many people. The problem is inequality, greed and waste. We have enough for everyone.
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Regardless, population growth is already levelling off. We appear likely to settle on an equilibrium of about nine billion. Which is sustainable, if we choose to make it so.
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As I’ve said many times before, framing the issue as “poor people having too many babies” rather than “rich people using too many resources” is a handy way of shifting the blame for trashing the planet to those who have the least amount of influence over it.
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Pull my finger!
Well, if Trump gets his way, all those legal immigrants from Norway will really turn things around. “Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the best immigrants, just unbelievable ratings on the immigrant show, our numbers… really shore up our numbers. The best numbers, you’ll get tired of how incredible our numbers are.” /s
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I still think it would have been a way better movie if Thanos’ plan had simply been to use the power of the Infinity Stones to reduce everyone in the universe to half their normal size. Imagine how hilarious it would be to see Bruce Banner have to get angry just to wear normal-size pants.
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Put that in your pipe and smoke it, evo-psych hucksters.
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Who said I’m not concerned or lack the appropriate level of concern?
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Sounds like they voluntarily limited their number of children.
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Hard to believe that the White House communications team isn’t trumpeting this news from the ramparts. At long last, something truly superlative about Trump’s time in office can be said- the Donald is positively the best contraceptive ever.
From Planned Parenthood:
- withdrawal - 78% effective at preventing pregnancy
- condoms - 85% effective at preventing pregnancy
- birth control pill - 91% effective at preventing pregnancy
- abstinence caused by revulsion after viewing a picture of Donald Trump - 125% effective *
* there appears to be a field effect at work here. The radius of contraception after viewing a picture of Donald Trump varies, but the average distance is 90 yards. This means that if even one person in an apartment building chooses this method of contraception, many potential pregnancies are prevented.
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So if I understand this story correctly, the nationalist anti-immigration people are actively working to collapse the U.S. economy. Is that right?
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I rather suspect that though the wealthy use more resources per capita than the poor, if the wealth was evenly distributed, damaging resource consumption would go up.
It really is.
Inequality makes the problem far worse But tackling inequality alone won’t fix it. BOTH need to be tackled.
As an aside, i wonder where the meme that quantity of life is preferable to quality of life came from.
I imagine we could cook up a long-term world emphasizing maximum population and minimal quality of life, but why would anyone want that? It sounds like a bad dystopian novel, not a long-term goal…
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This is why the derpy white supremacist/nativist lobby is inherently self-destructive. The primary way developed countries make up for reduced birthrates is through immigration. Especially from those countries with rather high birth rates.
Bear in mind these people are not just complaining about illegal immigration, these fools want to drastically cut legal immigration as well.
https://rewire.news/article/2017/08/03/immigration-advocates-raise-act-inherently-racist/
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Give the poorest people more resources and they’ll probably just fritter them away on things like clean drinking water and food and shelter and medicine.
Give the richest people more resources and they’ll use them for environmentally responsible endeavors like chartering a private jet to go trophy hunting in Africa or maybe a weekend of space tourism.
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