The underpopulation crisis

[Simulist]

Of course I'm pro-life, but that's hardly relevant.

No. It's relevant — as ideologies always are.

[chiggerbit]

[wintler2]

.. maybe you're prolife?

Of course I'm pro-life, but that's hardly relevant.

Then why is it relevant that i am, in your words, antihuman?

Now, take your anti-human agenda and shove it up your pim-hole.

Technically it's the silt itself which acts as a kind of marine fertiliser.

A little silt does, but 6.6 billion humans don't do 'a little'. The enormous scale of human-caused soil erosion and eutrophication have a massively negative effect on fish stocks, and its an open question whether they or overfishing are responsible for global crash in fish stocks. Australias Great Barrier Reef is half dead thanks to runoff from the sugarcane and cattle and McMansions onshore. In your example of the Nile you might have found a case where less silt is bad, but who do you think built the Aswan dam that cut silt passage to the Mediterranean, except people, again inadvertantly reducing natural productivity?

trees are not buildings "shaped entirely by mans efforts",

Not all of them, of course. I'm talking specifically about those which are, in the traditions of pollarding and coppicing, and the tradition of shaping wood (for example the now defunct continental practice of bracing trees to produce L shaped bits of wood as the corners of ships).

So relevant to todays mechanised ag, cloned orchards, and steel ships.

Really i'd love to keep rapping about your crusade, but i think they're proven to be a poor investment of peasants time; i'll be redistributing the loot from the sacristy while your priest is directing his holy warriors.

[Stephen Morgan]

This cries out for a picture. Does anyone have one of the above?

Just looks like trees.

[beeline]

Link

About That Overpopulation Problem
Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.


The world’s seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.

Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”

A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.
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And then it will fall.

This is a counterintuitive notion in the United States, where we’ve heard often and loudly that world population growth is a perilous and perhaps unavoidable threat to our future as a species. But population decline is a very familiar concept in the rest of the developed world, where fertility has long since fallen far below the 2.1 live births per woman required to maintain population equilibrium. In Germany, the birthrate has sunk to just 1.36, worse even than its low-fertility neighbors Spain (1.48) and Italy (1.4). The way things are going, Western Europe as a whole will most likely shrink from 460 million to just 350 million by the end of the century. That’s not so bad compared with Russia and China, each of whose populations could fall by half. As you may not be surprised to learn, the Germans have coined a polysyllabic word for this quandary: Schrumpf-Gessellschaft, or “shrinking society.”

American media have largely ignored the issue of population decline for the simple reason that it hasn’t happened here yet. Unlike Europe, the United States has long been the beneficiary of robust immigration. This has helped us not only by directly bolstering the number of people calling the United States home but also by propping up the birthrate, since immigrant women tend to produce far more children than the native-born do.

But both those advantages look to diminish in years to come. A report issued last month by the Pew Research Center found that immigrant births fell from 102 per 1,000 women in 2007 to 87.8 per 1,000 in 2012. That helped bring the overall U.S. birthrate to a mere 64 per 1,000 women—not enough to sustain our current population.

Moreover, the poor, highly fertile countries that once churned out immigrants by the boatload are now experiencing birthrate declines of their own. From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s. This change in developing countries will affect not only the U.S. population, of course, but eventually the world’s.

Why is this happening? Scientists who study population dynamics point to a phenomenon called “demographic transition.”

“For hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Warren Sanderson, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University, “in order for humanity to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to be very high.” Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out. The same pattern has repeated in countries around the world. Demographic transition, Sanderson says, “is a shift between two very different long-run states: from high death rates and high birthrates to low death rates and low birthrates.” Not only is the pattern well-documented, it’s well under way: Already, more than half the world’s population is reproducing at below the replacement rate.

If the Germany of today is the rest of the world tomorrow, then the future is going to look a lot different than we thought. Instead of skyrocketing toward uncountable Malthusian multitudes, researchers at Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis foresee the global population maxing out at 9 billion some time around 2070. On the bright side, the long-dreaded resource shortage may turn out not to be a problem at all. On the not-so-bright side, the demographic shift toward more retirees and fewer workers could throw the rest of the world into the kind of interminable economic stagnation that Japan is experiencing right now.

And in the long term—on the order of centuries—we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity.

That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

It’s far from certain that any of this will come to pass. IIASA’s numbers are based on probabilistic projections, meaning that demographers try to identify the key factors affecting population growth and then try to assess the likelihood that each will occur. The several layers of guesswork magnify potential errors. “We simply don’t know for sure what will be the population size at a certain time in the future,” demographer Wolfgang Lutz told IIASA conference-goers earlier this year. “There are huge uncertainties involved.” Still, it’s worth discussing, because focusing too single-mindedly on the problem of overpopulation could have disastrous consequences—see China’s one-child policy.

One of the most contentious issues is the question of whether birthrates in developed countries will remain low. The United Nation’s most recent forecast, released in 2010, assumes that low-fertility countries will eventually revert to a birthrate of around 2.0. In that scenario, the world population tops out at about 10 billion and stays there. But there’s no reason to believe that that birthrates will behave in that way—no one has every observed an inherent human tendency to have a nice, arithmetically stable 2.1 children per couple. On the contrary, people either tend to have an enormous number of kids (as they did throughout most of human history and still do in the most impoverished, war-torn parts of Africa) or far too few. We know how to dampen excessive population growth—just educate girls. The other problem has proved much more intractable: No one’s figured out how to boost fertility in countries where it has imploded. Singapore has been encouraging parenthood for nearly 30 years, with cash incentives of up to $18,000 per child. Its birthrate? A gasping-for-air 1.2. When Sweden started offering parents generous support, the birthrate soared but then fell back again, and after years of fluctuating, it now stands at 1.9—very high for Europe but still below replacement level.

The reason for the implacability of demographic transition can be expressed in one word: education. One of the first things that countries do when they start to develop is educate their young people, including girls. That dramatically improves the size and quality of the workforce. But it also introduces an opportunity cost for having babies. “Women with more schooling tend to have fewer children,” says William Butz, a senior research scholar at IIASA.

In developed countries, childrearing has become a lifestyle option tailored to each couple’s preferences. Maximizing fertility is rarely a priority. My wife and I are a case in point. I’m 46, she’s 39, and we have two toddlers. We waited about as long to have kids as we feasibly could because we were invested in building our careers and, frankly, enjoying all the experiences that those careers let us have. If wanted to pop out another ankle-biter right now, our ageing bodies might just allow us to do so. But we have no intention of trying. As much as we adore our little guys, they’re a lot of work and frighteningly expensive. Most of our friends have just one or two kids, too, and like us they regard the prospect of having three or four kids the way most people look at ultramarathoning or transoceanic sailing—admirable pursuits, but only for the very committed.

That attitude could do for Homo sapiens what that giant asteroid did for the dinosaurs. If humanity is going to sustain itself, then the number of couples deciding to have three or four kids will consistently have to exceed the number opting to raise one or zero. The 2.0 that my wife and I have settled for is a decent effort, but we’re not quite pulling our weight. Are we being selfish? Or merely rational? Our decision is one that I’m sure future generations will judge us on. Assuming there are any.

[Wombaticus Rex]

The state I live in has a truly amazing underpopulation problem.

That's one reason I love it here, though. Still, there are serious and undeniable long-term economic and structural consequences to this process and pretty much all of them are, at best, sub-optimal.

Vermont's primary problem is Youths, Disappearing - some raw datum for anyone truly interested: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/jfo/educatio ... ctions.pdf

Considering how well Vermont fares on quality of life indexes it is rather a miracle we don't have the opposite problem. Then again, we also have winter for like 8 months...that's changing too, though.

[JackRiddler]

That Slate article turns aggressively stupid in trying to create an exaggerated version of the usual right-wing fear scenario. Japan is an absolute hell, it seems. And if population keeps dropping, extinction will follow. Breed, white people! Breed!

[JackRiddler]

The state I live in has a truly amazing underpopulation problem.

Really. I often daydream about moving there. What self-respecting leftist intellectual with an appreciation for small mountains and fall colors does not?

[beeline]

The state I live in has a truly amazing underpopulation problem.

Really. I often daydream about moving there. What self-respecting leftist intellectual with an appreciation for small mountains and fall colors does not?

Yeah, if only there was more jobs in upstate NY and VT, I could live in either area. But it's damn hard for locals to get by, let alone transplants.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Indeed, you'd think we'd all be rich but that is far from the case. Rural povery is a whole different animal from the urban variety -- a lot more crazy-making because there is a lot less community. Vermont state government and labor organizers have made a lot of noise about "livable wage" but noise it remains, although I guess it does count for something that State Gov does at least issue guidelines and annual research on what a "livable wage" should be, but it's not mandated and as a bureaucracy has fallen into sorry disrepair as college interns try to make sense of the wreckage left behind by actual economists who either burned out or moved on. They can't even get accurate figures on how many Vermonters earn a livable wage (which by my own calculation is more than half the state's population, but I am still pretty uncertain of my data sources and quality.)

An excellent summation of the math behind the "Poverty Trap" in Vermont, via: http://vtdigger.org/2012/12/26/part-5-t ... c-opinion/

“Work doesn’t pay”

For Paul Dragon, Reach Up director, the reason the poor don’t get off welfare is because if they work, they suffer economically.

“Work doesn’t pay,” he says. “People are working hard, trying to do the best they can. Vermont has decent benefits and a high cost of living. When someone goes off benefits and starts climbing up a bit, work doesn’t pay at $15 or $16 an hour.”

A 2008 study commissioned by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) concluded that unless a Reach Up recipient in the Northeast Kingdom earns at least $17 an hour or $35,726 a year, benefits must continue.

If a single mother of two starts working a 20-hour-a-week job at a minimum wage, she still receives more than $20,000 a year in benefits, plus some help with child care. When she works 40 hours, she still receives $1,900 a month in benefits, plus child-care assistance. In both scenarios, she pays no income taxes.

“As family income rises from approximately 100 to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, significant losses across multiple benefits — combined with increases in payroll and income taxes — actually exceed the parent’s substantial gains in earnings,” was the finding of the 2008 analysis prepared for DCF by Columbia University’s public health researchers.

When her children start school, reducing child care expenses, “The family’s net resources hover around the break-even point. There are no significant changes in the family’s financial situation until annual earnings reach about $31,000,” the analysts conclude, “At this point, the loss of fuel assistance and child care assistance trigger a decline in net resources that leaves the family unable to make ends meet.” In other words, work doesn’t pay. For single mothers, it is better economically to remain dependent on state aid.

^^Scale that up to a growing population and let me know which is a bigger problem: over- or under- population. See? I can keep it on topic. I swear.

[JackRiddler]

Scale that up to a growing population and let me know which is a bigger problem: over- or under- population. See? I can keep it on topic. I swear.

Clearly, the economic system is the problem. All the more so if it can't deal with a stable or declining population, and on the macro scale incentivizes or requires population growth.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I see the economic landscape as shaping the reproductive choices people make, and the consequences of those choices reshaping the economic landscape. Rinse, lather, but mostly repeat. I don't know if I'd say the economic system is the problem, so much as: nobody really understands how to set up an economy to balance this shit out. Mostly because all human civilization has been a huge Rene Thom chaotic wobbling explosion, probably.

I would definitely agree that our economic priesthood and what they consider to be critical measurements are part of "the problem," in terms of being obviously wrong-headed approaches that do at least have a proven track record of failure. We may not know what works, but we can conclusively say some ideas are shit-stupid. I'M LOOKING AT YOU, BEN.

[JackRiddler]

"Extend the trend line" should be the new motto of How To Be Stupid While Looking Smart. Hey, I've projected it out to the year 2300, now just extend the trend line...

[semper occultus]

...could merge these threads....

The Over Population Myth - Fred Pearce

[Wombaticus Rex]

Demography has been a big interest of mine (this week) and I found this to be a good accessible primer:

Via: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... owded.html

The global Muslim population will grow twice as fast as the non-Muslim population over the next 20 years, according to a report from the Pew Research Center and the John Templeton Foundation published on Thursday. During the same time period, the American Muslim population will more than double. How do demographers come up with these numbers?

Using the "cohort-component" method. In almost every serious population forecast, demographers first slice a given population into tranches, such as women ages 20 to 24 and men ages 65 to 69. Then they issue separate forecasts for each, typically using just three variables: fertility rate (how many children women have), mortality rate (what proportion of the population dies per year), and migration. Usually, demographers will calculate a range of scenarios for each variable—for instance, the highest and lowest plausible fertility rates over the next, say, 20 years. Finally, they synthesize the sub-forecasts into a range of likely trends, which they often present as "high," "medium," and "low" estimates.

Population forecasts are generally quite accurate. Country-level forecasts, such as those made by the United Nations and the World Bank, miss the mark by about 6 percent on average. (The U.N. has been projecting population growth at a global and regional level since the 1950s, and for most individual countries since shortly thereafter.) There's been remarkably little change in most demographers' techniques over the past century, so accuracy is mostly a function of how good (and how current) the underlying fertility, mortality, and migration data are. A study from 1983 found that while neither U.N. predictions for developed countries nor the Census Bureau's predictions for the U.S. population had improved, those in developing countries had become more accurate—likely because of more-detailed recordkeeping. A 2001 study found little change in the U.N.'s overall forecasting accuracy since 1950s; if anything, accuracy peaked in the 1970s and late 1980s. (In general, the most difficult continent to make predictions for has been Africa, while Europe has been the easiest.)

Population forecasting has been caught off-guard by a few big trends. The baby boom made demographers' population projections look foolishly low in the wake of World War II. Then, they predicted the boom would last longer than it did; the so-called "baby bust" made forecasts from the mid-1950s look much too high. Demographers also didn't anticipate how severely the spread of HIV through the developing world would increase mortality rates.

It's hard to say whether the Pew and Templeton forecast of the Muslim population will bear out, but the forecast does have a few things going for it, including the fact that fertility, mortality, and migration rates in the U.S. have been well-studied. The Muslim fertility rate is fairly low and has not been very volatile, another factor that should improve accuracy. On the other hand, as the population in question gets smaller—from global to regional to national to religious sub-samples—accuracy tends to decrease. And while the U.S. has a long history of population-counting, our census doesn't ask about religion. (South Africa's census, on the other hand distinguishes among more than 60 faiths.) Instead, the American projections are based on private surveys that institutions like Pew regularly undertake.

In other words, near as I can tell: our models are still fundamentally unexamined but we're satisfied with our margin of error and haven't stumbled across anything better. Not the most inspiring scientific stance, but hey, at least it actually sort of works!