If the problem is that we don’t have enough young people to pay for old folks on Social Security, I have some smart, hard-working cousins in India who’d be very happy to come over and help.

Allowing eager talented young foreigners to immigrate (rather than barring them from entry) would solve the US problem as well as the global poverty problems.  Not only is it a demographic solution for us, but it’s a poverty solution for them, as immigrants who come in to work often send money back.  It’s supposed to be one of the most effective forms of foreign aid.

Yeah, I thought that was the weakest part of Goldberg’s book.  She tried to lend credence to the panic by suggesting we’ll need more immigrants than can assimilate. Since when?  This country was built on immigration, which, while it causes strife also brings dramatic cultural innovation, an influx of skills and talent, and, as you said, is good for people who benefit from the money.

Also, the reason that some countries have issues with immigrants who don’t assimilate is that those immigrants are shunted off into ghettos, where poverty exacerbates the situation.  Given equal access, you see far fewer conflicts between the newcomers and the people who were already there.

According to those peoples’ logic, countries with the highest birth rates should be havens of prosperity, but look at what we have here, the ten countries with the highest birth rates:  “Democratic” “Republic” of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger, Afghanistan, Mali, Angola, Burundi, Uganda, and Sierra Leone.

Certainly prosperity leads to lower birth rates, but it also seems to be self-perpetuating.  When you have fewer young people to provide for, you can devote more resources to each individual child.  That would hopefully mean better education, better health care, and greater access to all the other things that are necessary to produce a well-rounded and productive individual.  There might be short-term pain, especially with pensions and Social Security, but if our smaller and better-cared-for younger generations turn out to be more productive, they’ll wind up generating plenty of economic growth and tax revenue.

There’s also the ridiculous assertion that there won’t be enough health care workers to take care of the elderly in nursing homes.  First, immigrants.  Second, technology.  Are we really to expect that in the face of a labor crunch hospitals and nursing homes cannot under any circumstances figure out how to administer care more efficiently?  Or that improvements in medicine won’t enable the elderly to live without assistance for a longer period of time?

Also, the reason that some countries have issues with immigrants who don’t assimilate is that those immigrants are shunted off into ghettos, where poverty exacerbates the situation.

Not necessarily true.  I can name some problems that Pacific and Asian countries have had with the Indian and Chinese diaspora communities. Fiji certainly springs to mind.

The problem typically isn’t immigrants who can’t assimilate, it’s natives who can’t adapt. And of course our current immigration policies are so screwed that you’d think we were trying to make it as hard to assimilate as possible.

The other thing is, of course, that the “fewer people to support our aging population” whine only works if you don’t look at predictions for productivity, or if you assume that (as with the past 8 years) productivity increases won’t be reflected in increasing wages because the richest 1% is capturing all the gains (and then pissing them away).

I’ve never come to a solid opinion on birthrate issues. For me there’s three conflicting points—risk of declining population, too much population in the first place, and the right of women to decide one way or another. While I do believe replacement-level birthrates are overall a good thing, we certainly don’t need to keep building ever faster towards the 7G mark when it’s difficult enough to feed everyone. And we certainly can’t order half the population to “do their duty”—that’s not what civilized populations do. Finally, it seems reasonable to say that as long as someone is having babies, we probably won’t ever dip to any kind of critical population crash level.

Piator:

Those problems will exist anywhere that people try to enforce some kind of separation between proximate populations. The truth of the matter is that as much as people try to keep their cultures “pure”, there’s really only one way to preserve a culture in a “pure” form, and that’s through recordkeeping.

I blogged several months ago on how a group of French chefs are trying to gain UNESCO protection for French cuisine. This idea is completely nonsensical because, let’s be honest—if a sudden catastrophe somehow led to the entire world being reduced to eating Lean Cuisine for a decade, the first cookbook someone would pick up as soon as it was safe to eat something unfrozen would probably be a French one. In fact there was really only one possible explanation for such a silly request—nativist fears of foreign (especially north African) influence changing the French cuisine to something they don’t recognize. It’s no different than, say, an Irish Bostonian complaining about the noise from an Italian festival in the North End or East Boston or a Caribbean festival in Dorchester, even though they’d be far better served to actually go and enjoy themselves with a beef patty or cannoli.

Nativism is about convincing yourself that what other people do is just wrong, and that to enjoy it and learn from it is corruption. If you want cultural purity, find an anthropologist; there’s no room left for it in the real world, and ghettoizing populations around the world (whether the ones creating the ghettos or living in them) would do well to learn that.

Piator, and they aren’t living in ghettoized circumstances?

The fact of the matter is that demographic panickers cite the relatively small percentages of Europe’s population that are newly-arrived immigrants from Muslim countries as evidence that “some” people can’t assimilate.  But the U.S. is actually relatively okay in that department, and the major reason is that immigrants from Muslim countries aren’t shunted off into ghettos.

Our local forced-birth whacko is always going on about this in our local newspaper.  She’s quite concerned about the dangers of low birth rates and made this same assertion about some immigrants not “assimilating”.  I wrote it off as her usual racist crap but her statements sounded like she’d just read some wing-nut book or article.  Anyone know where this theme is originating?

Yeah, the Europeans really are doing it wrong.

Apparently back in the 1960s the Germans thought they’d be getting a transient population that would come over when there were jobs and then go back to Turkey or wherever when the need for their work went away.  So they just set up guest worker programs with no path to citizenship and no help assimilating.  The Turks ended up staying and didn’t assimilate.

One of the great things about America is that we’re not a culture based on a single ethnicity in the way that say, England and Germany and France are.  There may be a dominant racial group, but a big part of the mythos of America broad enough to include anybody who comes here seeking a better life.  You don’t have to be of the same ethnicity as some king 500 years ago.  Not that we’ve always been nice to immigrants, but exclusionary policies can be made to look extra ridiculous here in a way that doesn’t really have a parallel in other countries.

Neil, that’s why I would like to see a couple of levels of entry to the US.  One would be a two year guest pass.  The other would be a citizenship track with indefinite stay ... the catch would be that you would have to make consistent progress toward citizenship e.g. learn the dominant language of government and commerce, keep and hold a job, make educational progress toward a GED, etc.  This track could be open to two-year guest workers who decided to stay for good at the end of their stay.

This would turn the immigration services of this country into a much more social-work oriented situation rather than a punitive one.  It would also make it easier to keep up with those who really were not going to make it in this country - including the few who make life difficult for the many with criminal behavior.  It would also make immigrants less exploitable, as lack of english skills and educational attainment are barriers to a better life and invitations to exploitation.

“If the problem is that we don’t have enough young people to pay for old folks on Social Security, I have some smart, hard-working cousins in India who’d be very happy to come over and help.”

It also avoids the pyramid scheme that the “We all need to drop what we’re doing right now and fuck a new generation of wage slaves into existence” solution turns into.  If you have a demographic flux point where the last generation to pop kids out like they were trying to beat a high child mortality rate that was already being dramatically reduced has retired and is now overburdening a system being paid into by generations with lower numbers, trying to deliberately breed a bigger labor pool than your citizens want to provide simply in order to support that retired generation is going to cause no end of trouble because you can’t keep it up.  Either you maintain the standard of living that got you into temporary trouble, thus creating a permanent problem, until the whole thing collapses from a lack of resources, or you pick a generation to get stuck holding the bag with a dramatically underfunded retirement.  Immigration, on the other hand, solves the problem by absorbing excess workers from other countries in more or less the number needed without the extra outlay involved in raising them from infancy.

“Believing that women have the right to choose whether or not to have a baby doesn’t automatically mean you think the birth rate will go down, because it’s always possible that women will choose large families.”

So long as men are shirking their fair share of child-rearing duties, it’s unlikely that enough women are going to volunteer for mind-boggling amounts of extra unpaid labor to really throw the balance off.  The birth rate probably isn’t the best measurement of things outside developed countries, though, since a lot of women in developing countries still have to worry about high rates of infant mortality and child death.

Piator, and they aren’t living in ghettoized circumstances?

I’m trying to wonder whether South Auckland could be considered a ghetto.  A wasteland, maybe…

Short answer - I’m not sure.  I get the impression that the Fijian Indians and the Chinese in other places do not live in anything that might be described as “ghettos”, but I’ve never been there.  The problem is that they tend to be richer, and the native populations resent that.

As regards South Auckland - you tell me.

The rich immigrant thing in the U.S. tends only to be an issue with die hard racists and people who are, in fact, ghettoized and think it’s unfair that others aren’t.

preying, there’s a lot of reasons women choose not to have a lot of children, due to the “women aren’t abnormally stupid” principle.  That’s one, the expense is another, etc.  In theory, however, there’s nothing about being pro-choice that automatically means supporting fewer births.  It’s always possible that women are better supported, which could result in having more children, in theory.

Can anyone suggest any reading for me?

I’m writing a term paper close to this topic - about how discourses around population have been utilized by racist or anti-immigrant political elements.

thanx

For Tuff Ghost and anyone else who wants to know more about demography, here’s a cool blog…

http://demographymatters.blogspot.com/

I *always* go apeshit when Amanda talks about this sort of stuff.  Can’t help it, since I think she’s really wrong, in a way that reflect a lack of imagination…

1)  We fix the fucking environment by fucking fixing the environment, not by reducing population.  A population’s relationship with nature is outlined by its perspective, and not by its needs.  If I could just…press…this…idea…in—The Earth Is Very Big, and People (And Their Needs) Are Very Small.  Small numbers of people have been hugely distructive of biomes before while there have been tropical cities with teeming millions that have done well for more than 2 or three centuries just from the careful and enlightened maintenance of its hinterland.  Land use, resource use, resource sinks, they ALL matter so damn much more than how many people there are.

2)  Trust me, you would *rather* Nature do the work of killing off people.  This stupid Protestant Erlichian attitude was quite present in the British Raj even as tens of millions of Indians died from British neglect and cruelty.  Nature gives you a fair shot, and you can actually prepare and “save” for when Nature goes bad.  When *humans* go bad, you are soooo damned screwed.  Nobody can be familiar with the work of Amartya Sen or have read any number of geo-politico-ecological studies/books like Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts and view Amanda’s attitudes in any other way but dim.

3)  Demographics is actually tricky!  I can tell you right now, that if you were to increase Japanese women’s economic and social rights, more babies would be born.  This is because the major reason Japanese women don’t have more kids is because of the state’s malign neglect of mothers + the ineligibility of moms for further promotions in companies + the generally terrible prospect for stable incomes.  In Russia, more empowered women + less vodka would also increase the population growth rate.  The decision making changes from region to region and from class to class, and generally, and you’ll find out if you read the blog above, people trying to control population by dictat usually create greater problems.  Iran empowered women, not told them how many children to have.  China tried to do so, but it only a) conformed to the present interest in few children in the cities b)created quite a few issues in the countryside with overall very muddled results.

Now, I actually agree with most of what has been said in this post.  I just bang my head on the desk for the whole “oh! if we just lower our population…” part.

Amanda - the thing you are overlooking is the fantastic economic benefits of forced child labour. As soon as they turn five or six years old, you stop spending on them and send them out working. You can even sell them. It obviously works for India - look at their economic growth rate!

Allowing eager talented young foreigners to immigrate (rather than barring them from entry) would solve the US problem as well as the global poverty problems.

The real problem with is that they’re not white.  It has very little to do with assimilation; that’s just a rationalization for racism.  Generally, the people that are all worried about low birth rates only want white people to have more kids, and the rest to have only enough to replace themselves as servants when they die.  The reason they think high birth rates don’t work for other countries is simply because the people in those countries aren’t white, and so they all act completely differently.  It’s ironic (or hypocritical) that often the same people who say we need more babies for a workforce are also complaining that immigration is causing too much competition in the workforce.

Since that woman in California had octuplets (and 6 other kids), and that woman in the south somewhere has over 15, I personally don’t need to have any children unless I want to.  Inevitably, people will always have sex and birth control will occasionally fail and some women will get pregnant unintentionally.  Abstinence-only education helps to speed up this process.  Even if abortion were a completely acceptable choice in all cultures throughout the United States, some women would still choose to continue the pregnancy.  We’re certainly not at risk for extinction.  And I don’t like the idea of having kids just to support you later in life.  I think a retirement fund and responsible financial planning are the better way to go.

Here is the important distinction between OMFG make babies NOW and “just let people come in”:

Do you believe that America is a White Christian Nation
or
Do you believe that the United States is a system of laws and cultural institutions that preserve certain human rights and freedoms.

If you believe the former, breeding is what you see as “saving america”.  If you believe the latter, then you can get onto the idea that people can come and enjoy what it is that is the United States, preserve and perpetuate it, so long as they learn the whys and the whats that we stand for and practice them and teach them to their own children.

A race or an idea - you decide.  Not surprisingly, it is the people in the first camp - the Christian White Breeder camp - that put up some of the biggest barriers to assimilation of our immigrants into the American way - they want fences and punitive immigration laws and policies, rather than policies that welcome all who are willing to learn and share and continue the American way of life and rule of law.

shah8, there are two forms of population control, birth control and death control.  I don’t think anyone here was advocating the type of manufactured starvation that the British caused in India, but rather for birth control.  Now it is absolutely true that the earth can sustain many more humans than currently live here, but convincing people to voluntarily lower their consumption appears to be more difficult than convincing them to lower their birth rates, a feat which has so far been accomplished by allowing women more control of their lives and bodies.

Now it is absolutely true that the earth can sustain many more humans than currently live here

Maybe, though it’s considerably less clear that that would be a planet you’d actually want to live on.

Amanda - the thing you are overlooking is the fantastic economic benefits of forced child labour. As soon as they turn five or six years old, you stop spending on them and send them out working. You can even sell them. It obviously works for India - look at their economic growth rate!

Some of them can be allowed to grow into child slaves, but others can serve to augment the food supply. See Swift, J. (1729).

The main problem I’ve always had with this argument, such that I rant instead of letting it go, is that this sort of concern is always more mobilizable by evil people than by well-meaning people.

It’s just too close to, “well, if too many people is the problem…let’s just kill ‘em”, and doing so by neglect (like Katrina and other natural disasters), or any other way that is coverable by doctrine and suitable hypocrisy.

This topic is like eugenics, racial profiling and a multitude of other profitable activities that we can’t do because bad/maniacal people hijacking this stuff to suit their own warped purposes to the detriment of many, are *likely* outcomes.

I’m okay with lowering birthrate itself (as long as you all realize that Ross Douthat is warping *genuine* concerns into his own racial/sexual shibboleths), but for the love of all that’s holy, and for all of our sakes, do this indirectly.  Don’t worry about population, just worry about getting more power to each and every woman.  Some places will have higher birthrates and some places will have lower birthrates, but in general resource intensity should go down.

No, people will hold onto their standard of living with grim determination.  That makes it politically impossible to reduce them outside of war and other recognizable crisises.  Which makes it better if Nature does it for them (because otherwise, what usually happens is that some of the people start thinking in terms of genocide in whatever fashion that makes it politically acceptable).

Steve LaBonne, you will get no argument from me.  I hope to be dead long before the human population reaches the environmental carrying capacity, and as I am child-free and sterilized, I will not be the cause of any being who will have to experience the die off.

And I don’t like the idea of having kids just to support you later in life.  I think a retirement fund and responsible financial planning are the better way to go.

I’ve spent enough time in nursing homes to know that having kids doesn’t mean they’ll take care of you, or even visit when you’re old.

China tried to do so, but it only a) conformed to the present interest in few children in the cities b)created quite a few issues in the countryside with overall very muddled results.

Going along with your point, China’s implementation of the one child policy in the late 1970’s/early1980’s was really a clumsy attempt to counteract the backfiring of Maoist policies of the 1950’s and early 60’s when Mao Zedong and the CCP were providing strong encouragement and incentives to women and families to have as many kids as possible. 

This was, in part, to build a population to protect Maoist China from external threats/export Maoist revolution throughout the world as well as a ill-conceived way to replace severe losses China sustained from decades of colonialism and wars…including the Second Sino-Japanese War/WWII and the Korean War. 

If this policy was not enacted in the way it was during the ‘50’s and early ‘60s, it is quite possible China would not be having the severe overpopulation problem it has been having since the late 1970s and thus, the need for a one-child policy diktat may very well not have existed.

We fix the fucking environment by fucking fixing the environment, not by reducing population…Land use, resource use, resource sinks, they ALL matter so damn much more than how many people there are.

But how many people there are has a direct relationship to land use and resource use.  You can only cram so many people into a specific area; every person requires some minimum amount of resources to support them.  And while it is true that the Earth is relatively big in terms of land area (compared to the needs of one individual human), not all of that land area is usable for supporting humans; and the distribution of humans over that land area is uneven.  (And what about the animals?  Don’t they get some land too?)  There is an upper limit, and while Ehrlich and Malthus may have been wrong in predicting precisely when and where that limit would be reached, nevertheless it is not infinitely adjustable.  I certainly would not want to go on blithely assuming that we will forever find new and better means of squeezing more and more productivity out of our limited resources.  That’s functionally equivalent to claiming that deficits don’t matter.

Phew, a lot to think about.  It’s a fair point to make that most of the people who push the demographic angle are religious conservatives who want to scale back women’s rights.  But not all people who think about demographics are conservatives.

My biggest question is: Is there a way to encourage or promote a higher birth rate that is consistent with respect for women’s rights.  For example: baby bonuses.  Or other forms of subsidy such as free daycare.  Both would rob women who choose not to have children of wealth in order to subsidize those women who do.  But it could go a ways towards lowering the wage gap between men and women, because a lot of it seems to be the result of women taking the time off their careers in order to have and raise children.

Or, can men be influenced in some positive way?  I think the eternal adolescent nature of this hyper-masculine “dude culture” goes a long way to discourage women from having children.  Who wants to have kids with some asshole who spends 12 hours a day on World of Warcaft?  I think society should push and encourage a pro-feminist, positive model for fatherhood.  Sort of venerate men who choose to take time off of their careers or stay at home altogether, in a subversion of the way women once were venerated for being mothers.

Now to comment on posts above:
” I think a retirement fund and responsible financial planning are the better way to go. “
Finance works like this: old people with money lend to young people with ideas and energy.  If you have no young people, it doesn’t matter how much money you saved.

“Allowing eager talented young foreigners to immigrate (rather than barring them from entry) would solve the US problem as well as the global poverty problems. “
There must be a certain point beyond which immigration causes more problems than it solves.  It takes quite a bit of time for immigrants to become contributing taxpayers.  Believe me, I know; my family came to Canada and it was 10 years before my mom got her credentials recognized and was able to work as a teacher.  Plus, I and many other immigrants feel alienated from our adopted country.  Finally, huge numbers of immigrants from traditional (heavily patriarchal) backgrounds will inevitably have an effect on political discourse in a society.

“Anyone know where this theme is originating? “
His name is Mark Steyn, a very conservative commentator for National Review, among others.  He writes constantly about demographics, especially in Europe.

Either you maintain the standard of living that got you into temporary trouble, thus creating a permanent problem, until the whole thing collapses from a lack of resources, or you pick a generation to get stuck holding the bag with a dramatically underfunded retirement.

Somehow I suspect it’s my generation (Gen X) that’s been selected for the honor…

“I’m okay with lowering birthrate itself (as long as you all realize that Ross Douthat is warping *genuine* concerns into his own racial/sexual shibboleths), but for the love of all that’s holy, and for all of our sakes, do this indirectly.  Don’t worry about population, just worry about getting more power to each and every woman.  Some places will have higher birthrates and some places will have lower birthrates, but in general resource intensity should go down.”

I don’t see this to be in disagreement with anything Amanda said.

I would tend to agree with everything you wrote here, but I guess I’m not seeing the linkages you do.

If I’m understanding, I don’t agree because I don’t believe people in the U.S. ignore massacres and poverty overseas because they have a general notion that reducing the population is good. I think people generally ignore those things because they don’t really care what happens in the Congo one way or the other. (And I include myself in this, my concern and empathy for people being victimized by civil war being worth their weight in gold)

And I don’t like the idea of having kids just to support you later in life.  I think a retirement fund and responsible financial planning are the better way to go.

I’ve spent enough time in nursing homes to know that having kids doesn’t mean they’ll take care of you, or even visit when you’re old.

Both of these statements are true, but in many cultures, there is a strong appeal of a senior citizen being able to spend his/her last years in the company of their family where they will ideally get tender loving care that cannot be in their mind, substituted by nursing homes and/or a burgeoning retirement funds/accounts. 

There’s also a strong societal pressures that children and grandchildren have a duty in many of those cultures to support their elderly parents….and that failing to do so will invite social shaming and in some cases even punitive measures as the Singaporean practice of fining middle/higher income adult children when they are found to have neglected to provide/care for them and thus, forcing the state to pick up the slack.

Liberalrob...
No…just…no.

There *isn’t* a direct linnear relationship between the number of people and land/resource use, not until you’re talking about 10 billion or so people.  There is far more of a relationship between extractatory/imperialistic international commodity markets and land/resource use/abuse, which is a different thing altogether.

The world can’t handle the Western style of life, i.e. you, and not your (possible) babies!  Don’t bring them into it.

Indeed, the entire notion that our economy would do better if we took a great deal of women out of the workforce so they could work for free as housewives is another way of saying that women’s work has no value

I don’t know that that’s the rationale.  I suspect that it’s more like we need to take women out of the workforce so we can make them do the scutwork that men hate doing, and which therefore doesn’t get done when the women are working.  And it would also free up a lot of “real jobs” for men to take.

It’s all about preservation of privileged status and reduction of competition for that status.  It’s not patriarchy, it’s aristocracy and perpetuation of a servant class.  Either way it’s ethically wrong.

Is there a way to encourage or promote a higher birth rate that is consistent with respect for women’s rights.  For example: baby bonuses.

Public policies directly influencing population one way or another like baby bonuses are precisely the policies which got China its population/demographic problem that it has been having since the late 1970’s. 

Daycare and generally providing an environment for women and families to decide how many children to have naturally(without hamfisted governmental or societal policies directly encouraging/discouraging having children) tend to work far better….and not infringe on individual human rights.

PeterOneZero, the demographic tactics of Sweden would certainly fascinate you, as it does me.

Now it is absolutely true that the earth can sustain many more humans than currently live here,

How?  I’m really curious, because I’m fairly certain we have to eat.  Right now, a huge amount of our food is only there because we have an oil-based agricultural system.  The less oil we have—-and remember, because people often forget, it’s a non-renewable resource—-the higher the prices will go and the less feasible that form of agriculture will be.  We’re already about a billion people over what we could feasibly feed with non-oil-based agricultural methods.  I highly recommend reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, where Michael Pollan explains that the human population sell-by point for sustainability was passed about a billion people ago. 

It’s always possible that as oil prices and therefore food prices go up—-and we start seeing more food riots—-we’ll innovate a new way to survive at the current population levels.  Or not.  I wouldn’t gamble on it. 

But fuck it!  We’re Americans.  We don’t have high population density and we have plenty of arable land.  We’ll actually be okay if we have to switch to different farming methods. Too bad the rest of the world doesn’t have our advantages, and certainly there’s no reason to think that places like China, which have both real overpopulation problems and a bunch of weapons, would toy with the idea of attacking us to get our resources should the oil-based agricultural system stop paying out dividends that make feeding so many people easy.

liberalrob, I was being sarcastic.  They just ignore the fact that they fully intend to deplete the workforce of every middle class woman in her fertile years, and probably beyond.

There *isn’t* a direct linnear relationship between the number of people and land/resource use, not until you’re talking about 10 billion or so people.

This statement just doesn’t make rational sense.  A linear relationship is the *best* case (+1 human=+1 basket of minimal resources used); when there is no pressure from resource limitations, I suspect the relationship would be almost exponential, as the natural human tendency is to appropriate as much as they can not just what they need.

And I hate to break the news, but we’re getting mighty close to talking about 10 billion people or so.

There is far more of a relationship between extractatory/imperialistic international commodity markets and land/resource use/abuse, which is a different thing altogether.

True, yet that also has to factor into your analysis.  I don’t think you’re going to get much traction with the argument “the world can support higher population iif the rich nations just reduced their resource use and spread the savings equitably.”  It may be literally, scientifically true that that’s the case, I’m not arguing that.  It’s just that it requires such a radical transformation of our philosophical framework (I can’t think of a better way to put it than that) that people are just generally going to resist it.

The world can’t handle the Western style of life

Now you’re talking ideology and politics.  Good luck getting the West to give up its lifestyle.

One of the things I found interesting in Michelle Goldberg’s book is that the legalization of abortion in Japan in 1948 is linked with the economic growth of that country, precisely because it lowered the percentage of the population that was dependent.

Some extreme members of the Japanese right-wing have pointed to policies such as this to denounce how the US imposed postwar constitution and the diffusion of American political, cultural, and social practices in Japanese society has emasculated Japan into becoming an “American colony” not only politically, but also culturally as younger generations of Japanese, including women have seen fit to ignore/rebel against the conservative pre-war social and political mores which still hold some currency among many members of its political establishment. 

In fact, many prominent Japanese politicians and social commentators have been lambasting Japanese youth, especially women since the mid-1990s for choosing to extend their singleton lifestyles, not getting married/starting families, and even eschewing “good careers” for part-time odd jobs.  Just look up the phrase “parasitic singles” to see this very discourse in the Japanese MSM and society.

Amanda, we produce a huge amount of grain for twinkies and ribeye steaks.  We subsidize huge amount of money for hugely inappropriate usages, from rice in California to high tariffs to foreign sugar.  As I’m sure you know.

Farming, properly done, doesn’t take up all *that* much oil, and it should be one of those industries with a priority on oil, anyways.  Even as a declining resource, we have vast amounts of oil—the problem has always been how (and why) we use it rather than that it is being used up.

The “Can’t Take No Risks UnUh” is just plain FUD.

Not only that, the US’s resources are more precarious than you think, and the world’s resources more bountiful.  The primary feature of the US’s bountifulness has everything to do with water.  Large areas get regular rainfall, and we are not nearly as dependent on seasonal rains.  The rest of the world can deal, if they can get water to their fields.  We have different problems.

Global Warming is a problem…Peak Oil is a problem…Usury and Capitalist Excesses is a problem…Social ‘Isms is a problem…

Population pressure is…well…an engineering issue.  It has always been an engineering issue, from the first granaries and dams to sophisticated transportation networks.  The vast majority of the time, a little hydo, a little social, and a little transportation will always be good enough to fix the problem.

To put it baldly, we will be dead long before we reach any carrying capacity—from accumulated stupidity and malice rather than the lack of food and medicine and shelter.

Population has always been the answer for smart alecky kids.

They just ignore the fact that they fully intend to deplete the workforce of every middle class woman in her fertile years, and probably beyond.

Agreed.  My sarcasm detector is often faulty.

But fuck it!  We’re Americans.  We don’t have high population density and we have plenty of arable land.

We also have lots of guns and lots of experience at shooting them at foreigners.  Don’t forget that part.

Amanda, when I said “Now it is absolutely true that the earth can sustain many more humans than currently live here”  I was not advocating this.  We could sustain more people if political realities were ignored.  The capacity to sustain the minimal function of human life at a pre-industrial level with life expectancy below 45 years exists.  We could, if we gave up on the idea of humans having enjoyable lives of any sort and just focused on packing us in, do it.  Of course politically this is impossible, nor is it at all desirable.  My point was that just because we could, by risking a population based die-off, increase the population beyond current levels, doesn’t mean that we should do so.  In fact the horrors of die off should cause us to want to avoid such a situation.

we produce a huge amount of grain for twinkies and ribeye steaks.

But we love our twinkies and ribeye steaks!  Are you saying we can’t have those anymore?  Because people in the desert in Ethiopia need the grain to survive?

Do you see how this argument from science is doomed to failure in a world of politics and special interests?

The vast majority of the time, a little hydo, a little social, and a little transportation will always be good enough to fix the problem.

I’m sure this is very comforting to the people of Bangladesh who are soon to have the Indian Ocean covering 99% of their country.

shah8, you are operating under the assumption that war and genocide are unnatural.  When other species reach their carrying capacity, they often turn to killing and sometimes cannibalizing their own species.  Why would our species be different?  Just because you and I will likely be dead by the time of the die off, why should we contribute to it by producing people who, or who’s decedents, will have to experience it. 

Population pressure is real.  We cannot sustain our current level of people at our current level of consumption.  Reducing consumption will extend carrying capacity, but not infinitely.  Thus to postpone, and hopefully forestall die off, we will need to control population.  Since reducing population growth has heretofore been more successful than reducing consumption, it is a good idea to continue along these lines.  Especially since the means of reducing population growth (increased economic and personal liberty for women) are desirable in their own rights.

“Since reducing population growth has heretofore been more successful than reducing consumption, it is a good idea to continue along these lines.  Especially since the means of reducing population growth (increased economic and personal liberty for women) are desirable in their own rights. “

I guess then we’ll just have to accept the abandonment of social programs, such as universal health care and social security.  I’m not being sarcastic, maybe that’s the reality.  Since both programs disproportianately are used by older people, you need a growing population of the young to sustain this.  By leaving the old to their fate, we’ll also reduce their consumption of resources.  Of course, this could have the effect of people losing faith in the state to provide for them in their old age, and returning to the developing country model of having many children in order to have them take care of you when you get old.

And what about population growth?  Can we really go into developing, conservative countries and demand that they respect women’s rights and lower their birthrate?  Is that politically viable? 

“PeterOneZero, the demographic tactics of Sweden would certainly fascinate you, as it does me. “

Total fertility rate: 1.85 children born/woman (2006 est.)  Wow, that’s pretty impressive for an advanced Western economy.  Makes me wonder what they’re doing.

I would rather live in the Tri-City area of the Yangtze during Sung times, or Edo during the Shogunate, or any number of super-dense, high population stress areas rather than any place in Europe for the vast majority of it’s history when it had much lower population density.  Know why?  They have sane management.  They have a clue about sanitation.  About sustainably farming the best land.  They had books and games and widespread literacy and other bonuses that comes with lots of people.

liberalrob, I am, in fact, saying that I know more and understand more about the intersection of food, agriculture, and politics than you do.  In fact, I apparently know more about graphs than you do, knowing the difference between linnear and geometric lines/growths.  I actually know something about Bangladesh’s issues.  Therefore, I know something about Bangladesh’s various crisises.  For instance, that you can’t seperate much of the present from what was pretty criminal attitudes by the British, facilitated by the “all those brown people breed too much and then get into trouble” sentiment.  Thus I snicker when you talk about *global warming* and *Indian Ocean covering 99% of their country.  That has nothing to do with their population, and really, it has nothing to do with our population.  It has everything to do with Western Society’s willing to push people to assume and internalize costs, which is very little at all. And yeah, a little engineering, like what the Dutch get, would be of immense benefit to the average Bangladeshi.  Say, couldn’t New Orleans use some of that engineering thing?

Yes, I am saying that we can’t have cheap twinkies and cheap steaks anymores.  Not because some starving brown nobody lost the grain needed to feed her family.  But because these subsidies are killing *us* and undermining *our* future capability to grow our *own* damn food.  It’s an argument from science (from someone who, OMG! knows plenty of it!)with the full awareness of how politics and special interests are driving the problem into existence.  In other words, if this “argument from science” is doomed to failure, then We.Will.Die.Do.Not.Collect.$200.Do.Not.Pass.Go.  If you wanna be a science denier like the anti-vaccination people, be my guest, but don’t expect respect from people who’ve read their Tainter.

and Fatman, I can’t understand how you can possibly think that I think war and genocide is unnatural.  My entire point is that Amanda is critically discounting natural tendencies and human nature, when I say that we should advocate plans that don’t involve war and genocide as a failure mode!

Furthermore, you’re taking the life expectancy numbers out of your ass.  Even at 7 or 8 billion, and probably all the way to 10-12 billion, we’d be capable of providing for everyone to a high life expectancy with food, housing, medical care, the works, and if the basics are taken care of, then we’d probably have *advantages* and *live better* than we do at 6.5 billion because we have more minds and more hands.  Life sucks for 2-3-4 billion peoples because the people living in the 1-2 billion are sucking the lifeblood out of everyone else and polluting to an ungodly degree.  You can say that population pressure is real all you want, it’s not actually based in any evidence that people with expertise will accept.  The fundamental realization is that you can have “population pressure” with just one person, and not have population pressure with a million.  It matters alot more what the population is *doing*.

shah8, I must have missunderstood your statement “Trust me, you would *rather* Nature do the work of killing off people.”  However since we agree that nature includes genocide, I don’t see why I would rather this occur than birth control.

I agree that the carrying capacity of the earth is beyond 12 billion.  You are very well versed in this topic, could you let us know what the absolute limit is?  Or do you maintain that there is no limit to the number of humans on earth.  Yes the wealthiest 30% of humans should consume less, but there are not limitless resources on this planet.

Population pressure exists in other species.  White tail deer will breed until there are too many in a region to survive, a die off will follow.  Rats will do the same.  Could you share your evidence that humans will not follow this pattern? 

Is there any indication from past human behavior that humans are more likely to voluntarily reduce their individual consumption rates rather than there fertility rates?

I guess what I am asking is, if you agree that humans can not both consume and breed at our current levels, why is only our consumption worthy reducing, why not both?

For example: baby bonuses.  Or other forms of subsidy such as free daycare.  Both would rob women who choose not to have children of wealth in order to subsidize those women who do.  But it could go a ways towards lowering the wage gap between men and women,

This essentially boils down to paying women to have babies.  I don’t really think that baby-manufacturing should be a commodity.  If women end up making as much as men because they get paid to have babies, it’s not really pay equity at all because they still wouldn’t be making as much for doing exactly the same work as men do.  Free, high-quality childcare (a great idea by itself), will also not do much to lower the wage gap.  Women who have no children at all (and therefore don’t face the pressure to take off work) also get paid less than men.  And even with free childcare, and extra child is still a huge burden on a family, especially if the woman is still expected to do more of the childcare work.

Who wants to have kids with some asshole who spends 12 hours a day on World of Warcaft?  I think society should push and encourage a pro-feminist, positive model for fatherhood.

While I strongly support the idea of fathers doing more childcare work, I have to point out that it’s not just men who enjoy World of Warcraft. 

It takes quite a bit of time for immigrants to become contributing taxpayers.

It takes just as long or longer for a kid to become a contributing taxpayer, often about 22 years.  In the meantime, they are using resources like public schools which many adult immigrants don’t need.  Most immigrants come here with at least and elementary school education, and usually more.  Babies don’t come with that.

Oh, and you are correct I was pulling the 45 years out of my ass.  I was taking the 30 years from pre-agrarian humans and throwing in a bull shit error factor.  I am sorry, I should not have guessed, it just muddies the waters.  Could you share your expertise on the human life expectancy at the upper limits of global carrying capacity?

But fuck it!  We’re Americans.  We don’t have high population density and we have plenty of arable land.  We’ll actually be okay if we have to switch to different farming methods.

Nope.

Please disregard this comment “shah8, I must have misunderstood your statement “Trust me, you would *rather* Nature do the work of killing off people.” However since we agree that nature includes genocide, I don’t see why I would rather this occur than birth control. ”  I did not understand what you were saying.  I think my emotions were getting the better of me.

Shah8, I guess that because you are arguing from a position so fundamentally different from my understanding of the world that I am becoming confused.  I have for my entire life been taught that there are a limited amount of resources in the world.  It seems that weather we share the resources fairly or unfairly there will come a point when there are no more to share.  If we keep increasing our demand for these resources, either by increasing the demand of existing individuals or by increasing the number of individuals faster than we decrease the individuals resource demands we will need to consume more resources than exist.  If there is a lower limit of resource consumption, below which a human can not survive it would seem that there is a carrying capacity for the earth.  If the number of humans in existence will be limited by both this carrying capacity and the over consumption of the individuals on earth how is that not population pressure?

I think I must be misunderstanding you.

Fatman, I am, in general, confused by your later comments.  In fact, comments that I suspect are sarcasm, I am reading as true, because yeah, I do think emotions were getting the better of you (I don’t believe people would say that normally, so I’m taking it as a bit of Freudian sarcasm) among other claims.

1)  Nobody knows what the carrying capacity is.  Best guess that I’ve ever read was something like 10-12 billion from, you know, demographic people.  It could be as low as a billion or a few hundred million, taking numbers out of my ass.  Nobody really knows, given that this is an even less mature field the global climatology.  If you’re going to actually talk all that smack about how we need to reduce population, do us all the large favors of actually reading the papers by people you’d reasonably expect to have expertise.

2)  Famines, flood disasters, and other megadeath disasters are typically manmade with only an assistance from Mother Nature.  According to Man’s Nature, natch.  Disease is the traditional lottery though.  A few of the times, the survivors are better off.

3)  And yeah, take a closer look at stone aged life expectancy.  It was pretty low, but that was because of extremely high rates of infant mortality.  And most died from accidents.  The ones that didn’t die grow to pretty old ages.  With such a close inspection, you’d realize that bringing up the spector of preag life-expectancy, whatever the additional bullshit number, is just wrong.  We won’t actually suffer those kinds of circumstances.  The more genuine nightmare is Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.  We can wind up like that, with all of our best years being preadolescent because they don’t eat so much, and then being malnurished and stunted for the rest of our lives.  That’s what a stable dystopia is like.

One thing I am impressed by…

Is the thought that people are soooooOOOOoo irrational that they will keep breeding even when it’s obviously detrimental.

Because d00d, people do thing in the direction they are pushed to do.  You *might* want to understand *why* something happens and then alleviate *that*, than say, OMG!  People are breeding Out Of Control!!!!!!111!!

Poor people, by and large, know when they are doing things detrimental to their long term welfare, you know.  The ones that don’t, because they are invested in male supremacy or whatnot, well, those are easy to identify and then create workarounds to empower women.  However, it’s a lot harder when people don’t have access to condoms and family planning resources, or when you have to obey The Market or you don’t get to eat today, let alone worry about tomorrow.

Rich people and people in rich societies, on the other hand, are typically insulated from the costs of their actions—and they like it like that.  And they have the political and economic power to keep it that way.

If everyone were exposed to the costs of their actions, and had access to knowlege and materials to complement their decisionmaking (along with anti-gaming and anti-hata regulations), then most people are quite capable of creating a responsible cumulative result.

Lastly, as I keep saying with different words, I hate population control ideas because the ends (in light of human nature) fundamentally subvert the means.  As in, doing it right and ethically will always be hard, and just going out and killing people will always be a thought-viable and easy and preferable alternative by a large fraction of the people Orcinus reports on.

No, I was being serious, emotions were getting the better of me. 

And again, I apologize for adding a bullshit number to this conversation.  If I could go back in time and not do that, I would. 

I had read 10-16 billion as expected carrying capacity (of course this was back in the 90s, better models have probably been developed), but 10-12 makes sense to me as well.  What is wrong with trying to delay the rate at which we reach that capacity via lowered fertility rates along with decreased consumption by individuals.

I am, in fact, saying that I know more and understand more about the intersection of food, agriculture, and politics than you do.

I had no idea you were such an authority figure.

Yes, I am saying that we can’t have cheap twinkies and cheap steaks anymores.

Well, as I said, good luck with that.

How, other than violence or the threat of violence can we compel individuals in the over consuming population to stop over consuming? 

The beauty of birth control is that it appears to work voluntarily.  When women were given greater access to female controlled birth control in northern India, birth rates fell.  When women in America were given greater access to female controlled birth control birth rates fell.  You are correct that this will not happen every where, but greater access to birth control has, over the last 100 years appeared to coincide with a decrease in birth rate.

If there is a carrying capacity for our environment, based on

human resource needs + average human over consumption X total human population,

why not reduce the part of the equation that appears to have a nonviolent means of doing so.  Sure we can convince some over consumers to reduce the level of their over consumption voluntarily, but why not also reduce the birth rate? 

It seems that if the world population were to be slowly reduced vial birth control to the point that each of us could over consume on an absolute scale (relative to our fair share of 1/12,000,000,000 of the human usable resources) that each human could lead a happier life.

Fatman, I am saying that birth control and its like should *always* be pursued for its own sake.  I don’t even have trouble with the idea of shrinking the population, except that even when it’s done right, there are real and hidden costs that people might not accept.  Overt, direct promotion of population control is my big bugabear.

Yeah, I shoud calm down some more, given that I already knew Amanda had these ideas and are committed to them, but it just flips a switch in me and there I go.

liberalrob, when you stop the DanDriebergSuperSolipsic juice, then I just might pay attention to you.  But as I see, you’re just left with zingers, like a republican trying to promote his budget.

The few points that should be mentioned are that

the total dependency ratio predicted in the future is less than it was in 1960 (since the number of young is down—here’s a graph.) and it’s lower than many of the poor countries.

when people are given a good standard of living and access to contraception, the population growth tends to go down. That’s why the population of the world is now estimated to stabalize at 9 billion and then start to go down.

The biggest problem for future generations is not space or food, but water. There are already problems with water in many parts of the world and the melting of mountain glaciers will make this worse.

shah8, it might be that population isn’t the big problem now but the increases of the recent past obviously could not continue (the population doubling every 30 years or so). If it did, there would be a population over 50 billion in 90 years or so. Do you think this is sustainable?

Shah8, I think we basically agree but both get our backs up easily.  Sorry for barking at you. 

For some reason I find myself arguing much more with those ideologically similar to me than those that are vastly different.

Well, shah8, the problem is that I don’t accept your credentials as an authority just on your say-so.  Since your argument against me boils down to “I’m an authority and you’re not so STFU,” there’s nowhere to go.  Even if you had Ph.D.‘s in Population Dynamics and Political Economy, I’d still be challenging you to back up your contention that there’s no relationship between population and resource scarcity, which strikes me as complete baloney.  And your theory about resource redistibution is all well and good in the abstract, but it is doomed to failure in the real world (which you even halfway admit) so I don’t see the point of pushing it as the answer to the problem of unequal global resource allocation.

Basically, Mr. I-know-more-than-you-do-about-everything, I think you’re wrong.

Also, real authorities don’t generally use terms like “d00d.”  Just a friendly tip.

/me toying with a fool…

eh, perhaps I’ll be just a bit nicer.  liberalrob, I don’t respect what you are saying because 1)  You show absolutely no signs of genuine reading comprehension.  Which resulted in ludicrous statements that obviously was failed snark.  Educated layman beats idiots every time, and no, said idiots do not get to use the “you aren’t the knowlegable doctor of so and so” card.  It’s who has better knowledge, period.  So what if I’m the one-eyed outcast?

because

2)  I laugh at and taunt people who attempt to use relatavistic solipsim (it isn’t just the theocrats that love this game) as a way to hide ignorance and still “compete” for social markers and status.  I really don’t care if I’m the one eyed man…This is the mallaeble internet, and reality is a valued currency here.  I automatically assume that any stranger I meet on the tubes is as smart or smarter than me, until proven otherwise.  But you?  I know I can wiki-slap you into oblivion and you’d still play the square circle game.  There isn’t much value other than mocking when I interact with you on this topic at least.  So give it up, I got money to make, so I can get old bush dancong tea.

In other words, I have a history of being absolutely brutal and unsympathetic to people that I don’t believe are arguing in good faith.  I have philosophical reasons for acting such, and I expect those reasons are transparent to anyone experienced in discussions among a crowd.

Shah8, the fact that this discussion is taking place on a public forum means that many more people are reading than are taking part in it.  I think that it would be helpful for the rest of us if you were to give the wikipedia articles that you are refraining from slapping liberalrob with regarding the relationship between population and resource scarcity.

Thank you ever so much for being just a bit nicer (the very tiniest bit, I guess, because your comment still seemed to be very snide and dismissive).  While you’re at it, could you toss out a definition of “relatavistic [sic] solipsism.”  I’d go look it up myself, but I too have money to make.

In other words, I have a history of being absolutely brutal and unsympathetic to people that I don’t believe are arguing in good faith.  I have philosophical reasons for acting such, and I expect those reasons are transparent to anyone experienced in discussions among a crowd.

You are an adherent of Arrogant Assholeism?

hey shah - a belated thanks for the demography matters link