China to begin two-child policy
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I do understand the one-child policy because there are too many people in China, especially in cities. The population should be under control. (However, as far as I know, one-child policy never really works in the very poor area. It's common to have 3+ children there.)
In recent decades, China becomes much richer and people have better education. Many families (in cities) get used to having only one child and don't want to have the second child because the cost of raising a child becomes very high. Two-child policy should come earlier.
Sort of. You'll still bump up against physical system constraints, at least until we're swimming in an excess of renewable, clean energy.
It would take many Earth's worth of resources to have the quality of life American's have. Clean energy goes a long way to solving that, but again, physical systems have limitations.
Earth doesn't have too many people. The people inhabiting it are just, currently, quite wasteful with resources.
What's the goal here? We could have many more people each living in misery, crowding, and poverty. Or we could have fewer people with each one being rich and free and having access to parks and open space to breathe and relax.
More people isn't somehow good in itself. Children are great but one or two is enough.
A false dichotomy. The latter experience can be given to the former's population.
More people isn't somehow "good", but it's not bad.
How? Keep in mind only a small fraction of the world's population is even capable of being a tourist. Imagine how that changes when everyone is well-off enough to travel at will. Imagine your favorite beach, favorite museum, or your favorite national park and multiply the number of visitors by 10, 20, 40, etc. Waiting-lists for years to visit the Louvre. Prices so high that only the 1% of the 1% can afford to visit Maui.
Maybe you are assuming that VR will solve these issues? Perhaps a Matrix-like future awaits us.
Our wellbeing probably does rely on technology like VR and automation, but with so many mentally ill, I would say our current situation is already unacceptable (and has been for thousands of years). Adding billions more to the equation isn't going to help.
The issue isn't whether that's true. The issue is who gets to decide what the right number is and what we all do about it. To most of us, the moral hazards (and realities!) of coercive birth control are severe.
Not only more humane, but more fair. Why should the people who provide the least resources to their children be the ones to create the most human progeny?
And again, who decides which is more humane? If you and your cohort wants to stop reproducing as a good example, nobody is stopping you.
Your elected government? Isn't that what you elected it for? Or just hold a referendum or something.
The "who decides" question is a problem here. It doesn't matter who, it only matters that the decision has to be made and then carried out. The coordination has to arise or be enforced, but happen the coordination must. What you're implying by asking this question has many names. In politics, it's "total anarchy". In biology, it's "cancer". In infrastructure projects, it's called NIMBYsm. Imagine trying to run a large company with the rule "we're all equal, who gets to decide?" - how long would it survive?
Like it or not, Earth will have to have a "top management" layer. Run it top-down, run it co-op style, whatever - but after some size, you can no longer ignore the looming coordination problems and their deadly consequences.
Yes, as with everything, there are failure modes. Coercive abortion and gender selection happen mostly because of misalignment between "one child rule" and the economics, so the people selfishly prefer to spawn an offspring that will give better economic payoff. But incentive structures we can manage. We could manage it better if we stopped just asking "who gets to decide?" and instead picked someone to decide.
Also, the only problem with "coercive abortion" is the "coercive" part; if you believe that abortion is ok, then gender selection via abortion is also ok. If you don't believe gender selection via abortion is ok, then you also must disagree with general abortion as a practice.
EDIT:
Also2, we have a "who gets to decide?" problem when it comes to inconvenience ourselves and spawn less children, but we do not have that problem when it comes to decide who to bomb the living shit out of, killing their children, along with parents, grandparents, livestock and future. Strange, isn't it?
Even this thread is hopeful to me, a decade ago there wouldn't have been near as much disagreement about whether you have the right to burden society without limit.
Not at all. The entire point of this line of discussion centers around limiting an implied personal right to reproduce for the good of society. A one-child policy might serve society's needs as a whole. A one-child policy that allows prospective parents to, say, flood the world with a supermajority of male children does not serve society's needs.
I think that gender selection via abortion is ok in the general sense, absent perverse incentives that cause society-crippling gender imbalances, but if those incentives exist and are abused, I can certainly understand a desire to make that illegal, while still allowing (and supporting) gender-blind abortion.
>And again, who decides which is more humane? If you and your cohort wants to stop reproducing as a good example, nobody is stopping you.
This argument is such a canard. If someone is blaring loud music throughout a neighborhood, the solution is to force them to stop, not to tell everyone else who finds it annoying to just be quiet.
EDIT: I can't reply to the below comment, except to question whether it is equating fines for extra children with being a murderous dictator. That is quite a hyperbolic comparison. The road to hell is already being paved by those who advocate a cancer-like approach to human population growth.
or in other words: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the terrible things a totalitarian dictator did to Jews and homosexuals in your country during the 40s. In fact this same philosophy would have been used to ban your grandparents, and mine, from breeding had they been successful.
Adopting a policy of "anything goes because it is for my perceived good of society", without regard for society's wishes, allows for any manner of evils to be 'legally' imposed on that society by the ruling classes.
PS. To address the point you made: the US does in fact ban the export of arithmetics (cryptography, software) to a number of countries ruled by dictators (not that I think this is a good policy or that it has the intended effect).
> I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the terrible things a totalitarian dictator did to Jews and homosexuals in your country during the 40s
That's my point - the philosophy may or may not be sound, but the fact that evil dictatorships used such philosophy doesn't matter. It doesn't reflect on its soundness.
There are reasons that humans shouldn't generally be allowed to go for "ends justify the means" though. Like you correctly observe, historically it ended up with people abusing the power to promote one group over another. But the philosophy is not in itself repulsive.
Technology (like GMOs) can help you make incrementally more efficient use of those resources, but not as fast as unbounded exponential population growth.
At some point, the average standard of living has to come crashing down. The biologically necessary quantity of food and water is not available for everyone. Even with unlimited labor to supply factories, there are no more raw materials to make gadgets and medicine out of.
A country in that situation has basically one reasonable course of action: kill the neighbors and take their resources.
China is arguably being a good world citizen by trying not to put itself in that position.
You may find this statist interference with a natural process distasteful, but consider the alternative: only the fittest get to survive.
That said, past experience has demonstrated the Human population can easily grow at 5% per year. At that rate it's doubling every 15 years. Trying to double the universes food supply every 15 years is just not possible indefinitely.
PS: 2^n is crazy. It takes less time than you might think before the mass of humanity is growing faster than a sphere expanding at the speed of light could support.
We've got a lot of efficiency left in terms of agriculture as well, so there isn't much reason to think reaching the carrying capacity of the planet is a particularly pressing issue. The amount of food that we already grow that we don't eat roughly 1/3 already, and the vast majority of land doesn't contribute to agriculture.
The counter argument goes something like this. Let's double every 1,000 years for the next 1,000,000 years that sounds easy.
Let's see that's only 7billion * 2^1,000 or err ~7 * 10 ^ 310 people. Hmm, there are only ~10^83 atoms in the observable universe. I guess they must be really tiny people.
So, yea it's not a problem in right now and probably not for a long time yet. But, as soon as you start doubling something has to give.
The worst is when population goes past carrying capacity and then crashes. That's when you get mass die-offs.
Population can settle down at carrying capacity simply through reduced birth rates matching up with death rates. That's the situation we see in much of the western world, with better availability of birth control etc.
With humanity, "carrying capacity" is unlikely to be food-limited.
The top of the curve removes that as we can't pay for the inefficiency's of livestock or the extra daily calories to be overweight and feed 50+ billion people.
Human population is expected to level off at 10-13 billion based on factors relating to social organization, not the 50+ billion that could theoretically be fed.
[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve-proble...
I think you mean under the Kaiser, not the Third Reich.
Hitler was made Chancellor on January 30th, 1933. Fritz Haber died on January 29, 1934 in Switzerland. Carl Bosch was not Jewish.
Here is a quick intro to Fritz Haber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdEE5uvFhOM
We could have 10 billion people on this planet and we'd be fine, so long as we were resource-efficient.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+population+1900+t...
[1] http://www.travelchinaguide.com/essential/country.htm
[2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/shanghai-popul...
Its not current population so much as the growth rate. China is 2/11 of the World. That's between 1/5 and 1/6, so small changes they make have dramatic effects decades down the road. Our current population is almost certainly not sustainable doing things the way we are now, but we are changing that. Population growth is only sustainable with dramatic changes in the way we live, yet we are adding people by the billion.
only someone who's never been to china would ask about the 'standard' for determining overpopulation. it's abundantly clear as soon as you step off the airplane and take a look around. it's just too damn crowded.
what is the standard for determining that water is wet?
The thing is that in developed countries this kind of laws are not necessary because people just don't have children because they are too expensive.
The scary part was learning later on that the policy pushed many Chinese families to discard their female offspring since boys could earn better.
So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.
Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.
Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
Larger creatures, and those higher on the food chain, having greater access to resources and higher survival rates, invest more in fewer children. Smaller creatures, with lesser access to resources and higher mortality rates, invest less in more children.
A rabbit doe can theoretically have 480 offspring, at 12 per litter, 10 times per year, over 4 years. That's the kind of thing you might do if 98% of your kids get eaten, because you will still have 10 left. Rabbits can also abort their litters when stressed.
An elephant might have one calf every four years, over 55 years, or a maximum of 14 children. That's what you might do if only one other species can reliably kill any of you, and you expect all of your babies to survive to adulthood.
With humans, the observed historical behavior is that poor or uneducated humans are relatively fecund, producing 8-30 children per pair, occasionally with multiple births. As wealth and education increase, and particularly when child mortality drops and elder care becomes socialized, birth rate drops down to the population replacement rate (or below). Middle-class first-worlders usually have 0-4 kids.
I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing. Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
Example:
> In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million
The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil.
These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
What will need to change is the efficiency of how we as a species make use of the earth. We can feed many times the current world population easily. We can house many times the current world population easily. What we can't accomplish is doing those things the same way we do things now.
Advances in agriculture, energy and housing are needed. Advances which are happening as we furiously type at each other.
Either we all die horribly or we'll all be fine.
Inequality seems to be deeply encoded in the system. Capacity, in my opinion, only makes sense if you extrapolate from an average human, but there is no such thing as an average human being. However, I don't think it is an exaggeration that our western way of life is not sustainable on a global scale. I wish the fruits of human ingenuity could be enjoyed by every single one of us, but unfortunately it seems utopian.
Even the poorest in our society have incredible access to goods.
Just to list a few:
Wikipedia
Ability to talk to relatives from across the world to little or no cost (Skype and alternatives)
Ability to send money and store wealth cheaply (low cost ETFs, bitcoin, free checking)
Social acceptance of previously marginalized lifestyles
Access to wide variety of foods and entertainment
There has never been a better time to be alive, and I expect that to continue, despite greater inequality.
Some believe we should limit growth now, thus potentially preventing the problem before it becomes, well, a problem.
Nobody is suggesting nobody has children. People will still be born, discoveries made etc.
I've noticed here in the USA young girls getting pregnant and not being able to pursue higher education. I've also met some of my family in the Philippines who had many children by age 14. The husband's salary would pretty much all go to the children, and the wife would spend all day taking care of them. They are just trying to survive day to day-- little thought was given to trying to reach for anything higher.
Most people with access to birth control have children-- just when they're more ready for it. Not only does this make them more financially steady, but they are happier, and the same goes for their children.
"I find suggestive evidence that individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later." - Martha J. Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. Here's the article and link to her work. http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/09/the-long-term-effects-of-...
Brutal and cruel acts include:
* Killing of child immediately after birth
* Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth
* Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months
* Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault)
All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" policy in China and have been widely reported on by human rights organisations. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_...
The policy has also encouraged infanticide/gendercide, corruption, child abandonment, neglect, and abuse.
you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications.
it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff.
did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?
The main contention is that people who work in the public sector (which is giant in China) does not have the option because it is still, technically, illegal and will ruin your chances of promotion within the party or any state-owned enterprises. The law change merely levels the playing field for public sector workers so they have one less incentive to leave.
Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people.
Back up your statement with a citation please. Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
The officials are not dumb, they probably saw the incentives structure and decided to ban this proactively.
GP has a good point. Singular events in few decades in a population of over a billion? That's either bullshit or random fluke, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the report, but it's definitely not something a reasonable person should care about.
I spent a summer in Beijing in 1998 and knew a young lady whose unborn baby was forcibly killed. So I don't buy "in some rural area".
Most of the brutal and cruel acts you listed are a result of carrying a child to birth. Surely they would have noticed that they were pregnant and had the opportunity to abort at an earlier time. Better yet, why couldn't they just... not have children? Do they not have access to contraception?
It's a terrible thing to let economic concerns so dominant the public arena and politics that people let the gov't decide how many kids they have.
You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.
Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.
But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...
China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.
...from a list of candidates approved by the Communist Party.
In the US you generally get one Democrat and one Republican.
When you have only one party, it's as though you have no parties, you get to elect from many different candidates.
By the same token, in the States we get say in the president. The same is not true for places under the control of The Office of Insular Affairs & Puerto Rico.
At least the citizens of Hong Kong get to vote.
I'm not saying Chinese government is perfect, it absolutely has massive hurdles before it could be described as modern, but it's not nearly as bad as most Westerners make it out to be. A lot has changed in the last 30 years.
I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.
The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.
The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.
Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.
Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.
Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it.
For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.
Just to get a real feel for it, I recommend reading through this[0] book review, it may scare one shitless. Also, that belief went for longer than just I WW, it went through the II WW and finally dwindled down when the Cold War started. But imagine this - western newspapers were literally refusing to print bad news about Soviet Union, because it would offend their readers.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...
As has barefaced lying to the populace about their own dislike for democracy.
It seems particularly common in Egypt where the idea that "the people just aren't ready for Democracy yet like they are in the west" is commonplace among the country's elite.
>It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend.
Nobody's ever voted democracy away and it's not fashion that causes it to end, it's violence.
Now, it's debatable if a "representative democracy" would seem to offer that, but I wonder that myself from time to time...
The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
In Libia for example most people loved Kadaffi. Yet, he was removed by revolution that would surely fail if not for major help from west. Kadaffi while violent man, managed to make Libia in to blooming example of African country that can distribute prosperity to majority of people.
Let us check Singapore - did it work? Sure. Was it bad for people? Not really. Obviously there will be some affected by strong power, but devastating majority seen their lives skyrocketing comparing to Malasia.
The issue is that majority of strong Leaders are either military man, or democratically chosen governments that refuse to give power away - and they are often bad news.
Exactly this. And isn't it the reason so many people here are into startups? Technology is inherently undemocratic, and so are tech startups that succeed - but we don't call it that because this is "private land", not "politics land". And even ignoring the profit motive, that's why technology is appealing - a few smart people (backed by enough money) with one good design can force a change on the entire world that would never fly if you've asked people themselves.
And frankly, this might be something that we desperately need for the coming decades. Democratic countries have proven themselves unable to tackle the serious issuses of energy and climate change. They don't even bother making token gestures. On the other hand, if a decade ago they'd just said "fuck it, we're building those nuclear power plants whether you like them or not", we'd all be running on green energy now.
The point though, is that nobody can choose to not have the freedom to choose. And as such, we all wish to choose the best government for us - whatever form that may appear. But when it stops serving us...
If anything we have a conflict between people who want the country to be more Catholic and the ones who want it to be less Catholic, and a secondary push against any government because people seem to believe that entrepreneurs are force of good that is being murdered by the Evil Government through means like taxation.
Democracy is strong here - people are being indoctrinated in it since early childhood, and it's especially effective since we have the boogeyman of comunist USSR to scare them with.
That is highly contentious statement.
We could go in to the detail but I assumed my point was clear on this one.
Not saying the law is just, but the parents did it to themselves.
No, it couldn't. The person responsible for killing the child is the person that enforces the law and the person that created the law.
It follows then the person that kills a death row inmate is responsible for their death, not the inmate for committing a crime in the first place.
Anyway, it's not interesting, the only thing the parents are responsible for is having a second child and breaking the law. What people do to enforce the law is their responsibility not the responsibility of the parents that broke it, the same applies for the murderer on death row.
Just because something is legal doesn't absolve you of responsibility. The same way soldiers "just following orders" are responsible for the actions they commit at the behest of their superiors. Both the superiors and the soldiers are responsible
The criminal is only responsible for breaking the law, the only thing he had control over before he was caught (assuming he was caught for the sake of argument). We as society are responsible for dealing out the punishment.
How could the criminal be responsible for the punishment when he is not the one inflicting it on him/herself.
edit: To make my argument slightly easier to understand I'm going to give an extreme example
Let's say it's illegal to be a certain religion. Is it the insert religion here person's responsibility that he is punished and sent to a death camp?
As it turns out, responsibility for statutory laws is only transitive when applied to a party to the statute (e.g. a lawmaker or the enforcer).
A thief is responsible for restitution because depriving someone of their property is violation of natural law. A party who breaks a contract is responsible for fulfilling the terms they agreed to, because they made that agreement.
A thief, or a party who breaks a contract, is not responsible for a _statutory law_ enforced against them (unless they are a law maker or the law enforcer).
The creators and enforcers of the statue are responsible for creating it and enforcing it. They are responsible for its outcome, whether that is a dead murderer or a dead baby.
Your "need" to kill them because they crossed some line is your need, and you're the killer. (For better or worse...)
It's really similar to jumping out of the 10th floor window. It's the dv/dt that actually kills you, but it's you who is responsible for your own death.
Why won't you stop hitting yourself?
http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-04-15/china-past-due-one-chi...
tl;dr Couple had the legal right and license to have a second child, but the local family planning officials were over quota so they made up some bullshit about her license being expired and forced her to abort her 8-month old fetus.
If you can accept these as being OK because they are occurring in a different culture, then my only response is "God help you".
Well for one thing, you'd have a billion more potential farmers...
Population growth is a pretty old problem, and if recent developed nations' demographic reports show, it solves itself once you reach a certain level of development.
China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government. It could very well be in spite of them.
We have more than enough land and water to feed everyone, but the (simplified) problem is that when one person does all the farming for the whole world, nobody else can afford to trade for any of it from them.
Please enlight us then; Knowing that in china government is present in EVERY aspect of a life (religion, state, education, internet) I cannot see how their success is not because of the policies of the government. Any place that has an exploding growth is in deep shit just look at the whole africa. better off countries with exploding growth, turkey or maghreb countries are also in deep shit with big parts of the population immigrating to europe to survive this.
China already has an average of ~1.7 children per family [0] if you factor into account that the policy is enforced at a provincial level, and depending on that province, it may be the case that (0) people of certain backgrounds (e.g. farmers, minorities, parents with disabilities or medical conditions) can be exempt in some areas, (1) affluent people sometimes just pay the fine and have a second child, (2) in the most recent version of the law, if one parent is an only child, they were permitted have 2 children, (3) Chinese citizens who have resided overseas for some period of time may be permitted to have 2 children.
A lot of people may go from 1 to 2 children. Not that many people will go from 2 to 3 children. Children are very expensive for most families.
Population growth at China's scale is not a "pretty old problem". It's literally the largest population in the history of the world. No one, not even the U.S. government has an idea of what to do there. Then, add in the fact that when these policies were made, China had not even been through an industrial revolution and just had a MASSIVE famine (20-40 million deaths), I think the decision to have a one-child policy made a lot of sense.
A mistake was made. It was not understood that people in war-torn countries want peace and stability above all else, and are willing to hand in their liberties for it. It was also not understood that among people who don't trust news or words of any kind (justified in this case) it is rational to support the candidate that's closest to yourself genetically.
The link between democracy and wealth, stability and trust flow both ways, and it's easier to start with wealth, stability and trust than with democracy.
As I understand it (probably needs some correction):
This is a cold war being fought over who will supply Europe with natural gas. Russia, the current supplier, makes a ton of money off the current arrangement and it gives Russia influence over Europe. Europe has largely stayed out of the fracas publicly, to avoid antagonizing Russia, but supports the US's efforts to get the pipeline built to have an alternate source for the energy they need. I'm unclear as the role of the US in all this, but we're tightly allied with Western Europe, so I imagine we're representing Europe's interests by proxy. But what is clear is that it's no coincidence that the countries where all this craziness is happening are the countries along the planned route for the pipeline. Seen through this lens, everything starts to make sense, including Russia's endeavors to support Assad, an opponent of the pipeline.
Expecting stability in a region where one superpower wants a pipeline built and another doesn't isn't reasonable, no matter how ready the population is for democracy. Add in that the region has a ton of people who believe in a medieval religion that advocates violence against non-adherents, and what little hope there was vanishes.
To be clear, do you think that killing children or forced abortions were major contributors to that? Or does it just so happen that the two happened at the same time?
It seems like a bit of a logical stretch to me to say, "America installing democracy didn't work in Iraq, so we shouldn't be worried if China kills or forcefully aborts children."
Your assumption is a stretch. You are putting words in my mouth and that's just below level of conversation one should expect from HN community.
I still disagree with your overall point, but I was responded to what you wrote, not what you had in mind.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's hard enough in a vacuum to overthrow a dictatorship and start a free and functional democracy. It's even harder when there are a multitude of foreign powers interfering in your country preventing this from happening. Democracy is failing in the middle east because there are a lot of powerful people and nations who don't want it to succeed, want the region to remain unstable, and want the region to remain within their respective spheres of influence.
And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
It's not even that easy. Ask the entire country in a free and fair manner and you'll quickly discover that people's opinions are not independent and do not exist in a vacuum. They may say to you they prefer living in a dictatorship because of a combination of not knowing anything else and pro-dictatorship propaganda. Or they may say "democracy!" because they drank the kool-aid.
I'm starting to believe that the only way to reach democracy as a stable state is for a society to naturally evolve towards it. Just leave it alone, let them figure things out; after a few generations they will probably sort out their culture and then they'll have a democracy that's sustainable because it'll be backed by decades of cultural growth. Trying to speed this transformation up is a dangerous game. Trying to speed it up with tanks and guns is just crazy.
No, that's dictating.
Does the presence of terrorists in developed countries prove "we" don't want democracy either?
Because I didn't see the people (of the middle east) choosing, I saw the same thugs and warlords of the past continuing to make the decision for them.
As for Africa, isn't most of the mess the result of Europe coming there, destroying their local governance, abusing them for a while and then withdrawing, leaving a huge power vacuum behind?
_The Prince of the Marshes_ is a good book to read on this subject.
But more seriously, thanks for the recommendation :).
And theocracies and kingdoms are slave states by definition, so most of what was around them is the same or worse.
You have a lot of exciting history reading ahead of you if you have the will to learn.
Is that what they teach in American schools? Let's see how you cope with this:
The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before.
And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.
People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.
If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets.
But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.
"China - total fertility rate (graph)"[1]
"List of famines in China."[2]
"China - Population 1950 - 2015" [3]
In 1970, the fertility rate (babies born per woman) was 6. That's huge but not untypical for an undeveloped country, where a lot of people die young. Once some basic modern medicine was deployed, the number of people surviving went way up, and the population doubled in 50 years, even with the one-child policy. It would have been much, much worse without it. Something had to be done. China has a history of famines, and the last big one was in 1962, and 20 million to 40 million people starved to death. Keeping that from happening again is a major goal of policy in China.
The one-child policy worked. The population is leveling off. The fertility rate is now around 1.55, which is about typical for a developed country. Once a country develops, the fertility rate drops off without coercion. China has reached that point, and no longer needs a mandatory one-child policy.
India's population grew by a factor of 3.4 during that period, but India has more arable land. China is a big country, but most of it is desert, tundra, or mountains. The US has six times the arable land per capita as China. China has nothing like the Midwestern US.
Actually, the one-child policy was relaxed years ago. Only some provinces require it.
[1] http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_WPP2010_TFR_1.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China [3] http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_Pop_WPP2006.htm
If you ignore the invasive health monitoring, gender selective abortions, forced abortions, and other human rights violations, sure.
But I'm not sure this cure wasn't worse than the disease. Especially, as you point out, since fertility rates seem to regulate themselves in developed countries.
I guess if you're a pure utilitarian, you could try to make the case that it all was a net benefit, but I don't see many utilitarians around these days.
Compare the mainland's One-Child Policy with the similar "Two is Enough" and "Stop at Two" campaigns in Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively. Those campaigns were successful in reducing the birth rate (too successful, in Singapore's case) without the abuses and demographic issues that plagued China's implementation of the one-child policy.
Fortunately, future decisionmakers now have competing examples of China, Hong Kong and Singapore to learn from.
A lot of the negative effects of the one-child policy were due to uneven enforcement and perverse incentives. Though female infanticide, forced abortions, and gender-based abortions were made illegal, they still happened in rural or poorer urban areas where there was less scrutiny from the central government.
> Though female infanticide, forced abortions, and gender-based abortions were made illegal, they still happened in rural or poorer urban areas where there was less scrutiny from the central government.
From the subthread under [0]:
"Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people."
It's a good point. Makes me wonder how much the negative opinion about China's one-child policy is just overblown and/or pure propaganda.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in...
and
> It would have been much, much worse without it.
I have my own graph that questions these two (widely made) assertions. It shows the decline in total fertility rates for two countries over the last 50 years. Those countries are China and Thailand [1]. You can see that both countries had almost exactly the same TFR in 1965 (just over 6.0) when both countries were still mainly agrarian societies. Since 1965 both countries' fertility rates have declined remarkably but Thailand did it without the authoritarian policy that caused such a lot of suffering in China. You can also see from the graph that the introduction of the One Child Policy in China in 1980 caused an interruption in the decline, while Thailand's rate continued to decline smoothly. And Thailand's TFR is now slightly lower than China's.
So why was it necessary to introduce the One Child Policy in China when the fertility rate had already been rapidly declining over the previous 15 years and when a country that was in exactly the same position as China in 1965, and whose fertility rate decline between 1965 and 1980 was less steep than China's, then brought their TFR down to below China's in 1985 and in 1990 brought it down below replacement level and now has a TFR slightly below China's, all without implementing such a drastic policy?
[1] https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...
world won't be able to feed infinite humans so a restriction policy will eventually be needed (or systematic culling, depending on whichever comes first between enlightenment and desperation)
an interesting resulting problem of which is that population will keep aging. solutions will need to take into account non productive member in their older age, either balancing with equal amount of younger or culling from the top instead of the bottom of the age bracket
we won't likely see that in our lifespan, with some luck.
Overpopulation causes many problems, being able to feed them is not one of them.
Most western countries populations grow only because of immigration - fertility is below the replacement rate.
Overpopulation is the "problem" people trot out so they don't have to talk about things they might actually have to do something about, like switching to renewable energy sources, or improving women's education in developing countries.
Which highlights the other reason people talking about overpopulation are unsettling: suddenly everyone's playing psychopath.
Exit programs for the kids of the local religious nuts starting from pre-school?
A nice talk from Hans Rosling on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5BM7CE5-8
We are already at more than twice a sustainable population level. Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people. But most estimates say that the Earth can support 2-3 billion people at modest levels of first-world consumption. The more our planet will be stripped of its resources now (whether through overfishing, destruction of forests, or climate change), the lower the sustainable planet population will become.
Put differently, we need to lose at least 5 billion people in the next decades without replacing them with a younger generation to be able to sustain the emancipation of emerging countries. It's not about population growth stabilizing, we need both massive negative population growth and halving of current energy use in developed countries. The only "natural" means through which I can see that happening is massive food shortages or horrific wars, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that the former will trigger the latter. It's also a pretty safe bet that our global society will disappear in that scenario, so I'd rather we have better solutions before that happens.
As soon as anyone frames sustainability challenges in terms of the earths "carrying capacity" they are revealing a bias that is unhelpful. Even if you accept the premise that the earth does have some 'maximum population' then so what? It's a useless proposition -- what are you going to do, force everyone to only have one child, that is unsustainable as China discovered.
Luckily, as the parent pointed out, overpopulation is not a problem. The rate of growth continues to decrease, and global populations will peak in my lifetime.
It gives me an idea for a sci-fi story, where a stable civilization of smart beings faces a threat of the sphere of all-consuming humans expanding at the speed of light.
In the interest of (scientific) discourse, it is generally unhelpful to redefine or ignore generic definitions. Are you asserting that the earth doesn't support any species, or that is perfectly possible to have googolplex people living on earth without reducing earth's ability to support googolplex people in the future?
In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)
My use of that population number was simply that: a refutation of the assertion that the earth has no population limit, as it will be hard to argue that our planet can support 10^9980 humans per square millimeter of land area. A genuine "argumentum ad absurdum", to counter the GP's completely nonsensical opening statement.
But instead of that, the initial reply:
- refused the basic premise that would have allowed that discussion, by indirectly positing that space on earth is infinite
- followed it up with a very questionable assertion that earth's resources are used "more or less sustainably" (which is already at odds with the previous assertion that resources are infinite, and ignores the many species we've already hunted to extinction)
- added a non-sequitur that we would have run out of resources as hunter-gatherers (again at odds with the initial statement)
- justified the plain refusal of the basic premise with an ad-hominem about bias
- continued on with the apathetic rationalization that nothing can be done anyway
- concluded by reiterating the initial statement without further substantiation
Now, you may argue that my refusal to engage in that discussion is my weakness and it would still have been possible to salvage something positive, however my time is finite and there's better, less taxing discussions to be had.
(/me out, accepting that meta-justification is considered offtopic and will be downmodded).
And, of course, we should be striving in our generation to solve these existential challenges, rather than squandering our time optimizing sales funnels and click-through-rates.
This has a survey of capacity estimates on page 10. I took the median of those, which more or less matched the sources I've encountered over the past year.
Can you show me these estimates? Do they take into account ways we could live with a smaller footprint (e.g. vegetarian/vegan diet) and/or advances in eco-friendly technology?
The whole argument sounds to me like "we don't have to force people to change their lifestyle to adjust for Earth's capacity - we can always force people to change their lifestyle".
Which is pretty visible in the West; every time the government tries to limit access to something, you get a stream of arguments that look exactly the same as those against one child policy that are posted here.
As for your question, I doubt that they would include an all-vegan world scenario, as it's considered unattainable, regardless of whether it would theoretically help. Technological advances are generally included, but with very conservative gain estimates.
Quite frankly, it doesn't matter to me whether the "real" capacity is 1 billion or 20 billion or 100 billion, as I don't believe we (as a species) have any chance of moderation in the face of opulence. As long as there's any surplus capacity left on this planet, we will find a way to use it. As fast and as wasteful as we can, until it all comes crashing down.
What do you expect is causing this? Isn't a large part of the reason for this due to changes in society rather than a synchronised biological trend? For example, couples choosing to have children later, if at all.
If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates (I'm using the term birth rates as it's a more general term for what we're considering) can't increase in the future. The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
- enormous reduction in child mortality - increased female emancipation and economic opportunities - (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself
> If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates can't increase in the future.
Sure, and there's no reason why the worldwide decrease cant' accelerate further either. The only question is, why do you think some scenario is more likely than the other?
> The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
To me the view that population increase is/will be some huge problem seems to be continuously redressing the Malthusian nonsense that's been wrong for over 2 centuries
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself"
Those aren't the only trends that matter. How about:
* Reduction in working hours/increased leisure time.
* Possibility for development of life extension technology (so long as this comes with an increased window of opportunity for raising kids).
* Changes to family structures (for example, an increase in popularity in tribe-like family structures, which reduces the burden on individual carers).
The point is if birth rate is only slowing down because of how our society currently is, then birth rate predictions are based on that society staying the same, and we have no guarantee of that being the case. Even if you think it's unlikely to change in the near future, humans will hopefully be living on Earth for thousands of years to come. If you were born 1000 years ago, do you believe you could predict how society would turn out in 2015?
If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding.
The licensing proposal is odious even if we were to (naively) discount conventional eugenics. Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class.
What if the priorities of the eugenicists and other life licensers clash? For example, what if a known criminal was also the holder of some rare genes that would link up well with someone from the ruling class?
> "Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class."
So someone who is poor is of less "merit"?
With the word in quotes like that? Absolutely yes.
So they have merit in an absolute sense, but not in a societal opinion sense.
Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
We're discussing limits on reproduction because this "fundamental right" is most likely going to fuck up the planet. Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
> Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
Yeah, I'd like to exclude Bolsheviks from arguments against communism too. It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
Nazis are
Malthusian fallacy. The idea of a "population bomb" has been indoctrinated into the modern mind of certain political orthodoxies since the late 1960's. It has yet to pass, because it is wrong. The jeremiads of Malthus and Ehrlich are myopic and dangerously lacking in imagination.
We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
> Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
What does that even mean?
The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
> It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
Here's an "actual argument": modern history. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics. Arguments that an idea is grievously misguided based on broad appeals to disastrous periods in recent history brought about by that idea are valid in matters of social policy debate, which this is.
We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
You're doing this again. Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.
> We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
You say that like you had any proof for it. Taken at face value, Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
> What does that even mean?
It means: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
> The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
I don't flip any switch because I personally don't fight for privacy. I see the current levels of it as a historical anomaly, and generally something we need to outgrow as a society in order to progress.
> We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
No, this is dangerously irrational way of thinking. A hundred years ago you would taboo women voting. Two hundred years earlier you would taboo the concept of freedom of black men. What you're doing is just selectively tabooing your cherished belief out of fear your rejection may be wrong. If the belief is valid, it can stand on its own strength, it does not need protection from being discussed.
Malthus premised his hypothesis on an assertion that there were obvious limits to growth. Both the premise of obvious limits to growth and the conclusion of catastrophic resource scarcity due to population growth were wrong.
Our food supply is an obvious limit to population growth like an unlocked door is an obvious limit to leaving a room. Yes, if you do nothing, then you will be limited. That should not instill hand-wringing, existential dread.
> Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
History has proven Malthus and his modern incarnation Ehrlich to be wrong time and time again, which doesn't bode well for that probability of yours.
Again, "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it" is a strawman. Pithy, but vapid. Firstly, I said we will engineer ways to overcome limitations. Our current generation is, and will continue to, engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, thrive, and grow our population.
Do I have proof that the engineers of future generations won't all squander their life and do nothing more than optimize sales funnels and click-through-rates? No. But I think it is much more probable that our society will continue to produce some engineers that have not only the talent but the focus we need to break through our current brittle limitations to population growth -- just like their parents, grandparents, and every generation before them did.
That sort of licensing is ripe for abuse. What would happen if someone in power took that license away from you just because they didn't agree with your political views?
I.e. If the license becomes a problem, it's because you've got bigger problems.
The license will still be administered by someone / some group. Whether you call those with the administrative powers a 'government' or not isn't really important.
Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
But what constitutes mentally ill? The line is fuzzy - perhaps someone is just a bit "quirky", but still could be a good parent?
In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance).
It is vastly oversimplifying, and prejudicial, to say something like that.
Many more people than you seem to think have experienced, or will experience mental illness in their life.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/any-men...
> Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
Turns out the definition of mental illness covers far more than the most extreme/visible cases so it will be unclear where to draw the line since "mental illness" is too broad a set
Yes, not just political views. As you say, the mentally ill would be one targeted group, former criminals would be another, etc... The most divisive issue would probably be whether those living in poverty would be given the license.
> "In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance)."
At most, I could imagine the benefits of taking precautions against accidental pregnancies (vasectomies, etc...), but only as long as those measures would be reversible at any time. I could also see the need for encouraging single child families as the least draconian method of population control (should overpopulation ever become a big issue). Anything beyond that strikes me as a step too far.
Huh? They would? Are you sure about that?
Labels: Slippery slope.
Up until the 1990s in Spain, many thousands of children were systematically stolen from political activists and others with the wrong politics or wrong lifestyle. Parents were told that their newborn had died. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899
This will only mean the most vulnerable (who need the most support) will be unsupported. You're creating an underclass.
You'd be surprised
The traditional "license" to have children used to be marriage, and children born without such a license were called illegitimate - i.e. outside the law. It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children, and we've moved away from it for a reason.
If the current system (where marriage and procreation are notionally separate) were found to hurt a lot of innocent children, would we call our system unjust and abandon it?
I suspect not. The current culture around marriage and parenting didn't evolve from pragmatism as much as (various takes on) ethics, morality, and self-determinism.
That alone will prevent many unplanned and unwanted babies in a population without any force, political, eugenics or racist overtones.
I don't know the long term effects of these implants so it's a tentative idea.
In the context of America this was already tried
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...
Sterilization and licensing are the exactly same mechanism - the state holds veto right over who gets to procreate.
> "increase to 11.2 billion in the year 2100"
> "may rise to 16 billion by 2100"
> "forecasts between 9.3 and 12.6 billion in 2100, and continued growth thereafter"
> "World population to hit 11bn in 2100 – with 70% chance of continuous rise"
China vs. India: GDP per capita versus fertility rate
http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ct...
Citation needed; correlation does not equal causation. Other East Asian countries showed similar reductions in fertility in spite of no similar policies, and much greater reductions in poverty.
China vs. India vs. Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea): GDP per capita versus fertility rate
http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ct...
Taiwan excluded because it seems to be missing from that dataset.
I have a number of friends who are teachers, all of whom say that you can spot a single child within about 5 minutes of observing them. They just act differently.
Watching the difference in my oldest child when the second came along and was old enough for them to play together - it was astounding.
There must be some optimal number of siblings for mental health. More than 1 less than 4 ?
Differently how?
Whenever a student comes late to class, I've always imagined that those students who look up from their work are more likely to come from rural areas in Norway, and that those who don't look up to see who is coming are more likely to come from the city.
But I don't really know what the difference in behavior would be for a sibling vs only child.
Their main finding: "[We find that the one-child policy] has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals."
edit: This seems to be the paper that's not behind a paywall http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234104566_Little_Emp...
> less trusting, less trustworthy (...) less competitive
I wonder how it goes together. "Less trusting" and "less trustworthy" should mean "less cooperating" and thus more competitive. Adding "more risk-averse", does this mean they just sit around doing nothing? I'd be interesting to read an additional analysis, as I notice I'm confused by those findings. But:
> less competitive
That's actually a good thing, isn't it?
Hopefully it can help address the increasing gender imbalance. It has reached 6:5 male to female births, resulting in huge numbers of Chinese men who cannot find marriage partners.
Interesting turn of phrase there...
I say "girls" because I strongly suspect those are fake accounts run by some agency that will dispatch actual workers to you when you agree for the service. I think so, because otherwise China has a really big evening employment and entertainment problem.
(That is, if you're not interested in the serivces. If you are, then I guess WeChat is paradise on Earth for the Laowai.)
[0] http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/china-polyand...
The 2011 projection says 19 million more boys than girls (Age 0-14).
And 34 million more males than females if you look at the whole population.
(Yes, it's from a couple of years ago, but it describes China's thinking).
So there are still rules, just not as stringent.
> To ensure coordinated economic and social development, the population size for China should be kept at about 1.5 billion, said Guo, citing the results of a study sponsored by the State Council, China's cabinet.
> China should keep its total fertility rate at around 1.8, and the current rate is between 1.5 to 1.6, allowing the country to maneuver its population policy, according to Guo.
It seems like the aim is for a long-term stable demography. Ensuring the working population doesn't fall too much, for example.
> there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Sex-based_bir...
It was against the law to find the gender of your child in China because if given the option many people wanted boys and would abort.
Look at the timestamp. The article you linked was from two years ago.
The "parents can have two kids if at least one parent is an only child" policy described in that article was overturned today. Now everyone can have two kids.
Of course this illustration is a simplification but it brings the world population back to perspective.
If there is a problem, it's water. On the plus side, water is the easiest to recycle by far, the only limit we're close to hitting in some locations is the amount of water that's recycled for free by the weather.
Also, we have skyscrapers. The 11m2 area per person is ground-level area. If you have 10-storey skyscrapers on average, 120m2 for every family on average should be easy, and allow for population to increase 5 fold without exceeding available space in Austria.
It's a complete speculation, because I can't cite this, but isn't Earth not capable of sustaining 7+ billion people? Exponential population growth brings even greater exponential rise of greenhouse effect, oil consumption, deforestation, etc. IMHO it is the main problem of overpopulation.
That's an Malthusianism[0] right here. Why recycling and increased efficiency themselves aren't a solution? Because people will increase their consumption to offset all the gains.
C.f.:
"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were."
It's not so much that overpopulation isn't an issue, of course it is (that's why it's called 'over' population), but rather that the trend line is that population growth is very rapidly slowing, that people tend to overestimate population growth, are unaware of big population centres that are shrinking, that the average worldwide children per woman rate is < 2.5 (used to be > 5 just 50 years ago) and that population will likely decline after we add a few billion more.
That's not to say that it isn't an issue, but traditionally we held some really weird views about overpopulation. Basically we looked at this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Po...
and extrapolated the exponential growth, and ended up with scenarios of doom, war etc. Food shortages for example are consistently predicted, but food production growth has outstripped population growth substantially and food security is better than any time in the past (yet far from perfect).
Obviously there are huge sustainability concerns, but the biggest source is our level of consumption levels and patterns, not our population numbers, which comes in second.
Numbers of fanatically religious people will double, relatively speaking. Mostly Catholics and Muslims. This is under the assumption that the current rates of conversions remain roughly the same. Trouble is, people turn atheist, don't have kids, and die out, the number of atheists we have today is a historical anomaly resulting from the baby boom. In other words, that effect will stop. This likely will have policy implications.
People in cities are growing FAR slower than people in rural settings. That means that it isn't just atheists that will drop, but everything you associate with city living will lessen. Most city populations are essentially replaced with fresh people from rural settings every 60 years or so (meaning that the number of new rural people in the city at year+60 is larger than the number of people in the city).
Numbers of black people and asian people (not Chinese) will grow a hell of a lot more than the other groups. Africa should have 3-4 times more people than today at least before it stabilizes. Same goes for some countries in Asia. This of course also means that Europe is going to look back to today's Syrian "refugee crisis" and wonder why people were worried about a mere 1 million people per year.
Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do. So it doesn't even really matter.
As for an increase in non-white population, absolutely. But you seem to say it as some kind of issue. I don't care about skin color. A concern may be preserving a western culture, absolutely, but there the world has indeed westernised tremendously and shows few signs of slowing down.
I don't really share the sense of concern I interpreted (perhaps wrongfully) in your post.
> Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do.
The answer has always been obvious. It's a long-term answer, one not chosen for centuries. And it's called genuine cooperation and the desire for the rest of the world to rise up, become wealthy, prosperous and sensible, for us to yield some so the rest of the world can rise. Migrants have no interest in moving to where you do, if their own country is great. They have no interest in attacking you, if they're not oppressed or exploited by you. They've no interest in fanaticism if they have something to lose, and no enemy in sight, and an open hand shown to them. They have no need to bear 5 or 6 children if their healthcare system ensures all of them live. The world needs to do everything in its power to help developing countries if you ask me. Every country that has raised living standards has seen population growth decline. And the correlation between living standards and war/religiosity/fanaticism is negative, too. It's a moral imperative to help others, and research shows it helps ourselves, too. It's exactly the same principle why it makes sense for rich people to pay taxes to help the poor in their own country, because it improves their lives when the poor do better, when crime is reduced, and schools improve and roads are safe to drive on and homelessness is reduced and teenage pregnancies drop and schools get better etc etc. Imagine the rich in the US got private armies and lived in gated communities like in some areas in Brazil and walled off their tiny society, the US'd be a terrible country for all, same applies to Europe. Instead we build social democracies. Somehow we don't apply that beyond our borders much, at least not in the past few centuries, instead close our borders, sometimes exploit others beyond our borders, and when we see populations boom and signs of ill will towards us and see populations cling to a different culture than our own, we act surprised. We shouldn't be, it's the logical outcome of our foreign policy.
Protestants are the minority and they're viewed as the "fanatically religious people", people would say they're always talking about their religion, they don't party a lot, they don't drink alcohol and usually they have a lot of children, Mexico is a Catholic country and the average family has 2.2 children, but protestant minorities usually have more than 4-5 children.
I've noticed Americans apply some stereotypes to Catholics that would fit pretty well to the stereotypes protestants have in Mexico.
Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.
It probably doesn't need to be interpreted as "radical" or even "fanatic", it actually is radical and fanatic.
I grew up in a country of 90+% Catholics, but I was raised in a minority Christian religion. Yes, we always talked about the religion, didn't party (that) much, etc. - that was because we actually cared about following our beliefs, which can't be said about Catholics in my country.
Thinking more about it led me to the following conclusion: any religion that grows so big that it becomes mainstream has to relax a lot. Religious life becomes intertwined with day-to-day problems of employment, managing the economy, etc. Meanwhile you stop having small communities that can push all unconvenient issues to outside with "us vs. them" attitude. Professional specialization starts, people are delegating their religious issues to their priests (compare the way Catholicism looks in big cities vs. small villages). And then one day you wake up and can't ignore politics anymore, because suddenly your religion is the society, and thus is the politics.
TL;DR: Going from "more fanatic / more real" to "less fanatic / less real" seems to me to be a natural course of evolution of a religion as it grows.
This is the video. It has some nice visualizations of population related statistics.
Other than water, I think the only real problem with the current and projected populations is energy. It's not cheap to get oil. And we use it in everything. So, it's really a matter of time before the question of energy makes the rest of the abundance we have useless. No cheap oil means no cheap way to ship food to markets.
So, I'm split on how to see the problem as it is. I think Malthus is going to get the last laugh on all of us.
That's not the way you control birth rates.
You control birth rates by controlling FEMALE fertility... not male fertility.
There are mathematical reasons behind this, but for the purposes of simplicity I'll give the lay explanation. ie - A female can only have one (or so) child every 9 months. A single human male can produce one every day. So having a population with only one male, but 100 females, allows for a FAR higher reproduction rate than a population with 100 males, but only one female.
I'm only saying that you ascribe certain properties to the populations you are dealing with. And there are definitely places in the world where your assumptions fail to hold up. But biology ALWAYS holds up.
By the way... I was being kind. Rape is only ONE whole in your plan. There are many. For instance, your plan also assumes women will never simply get horny. Or that they will only "get off" in certain predetermined ways that your plan deems acceptable. Your plan assumes a lot ... and all of it from your own perspective and belief system. If we work within biological limits... we achieve our goals regardless of the local belief system.
This is the point I'm making... you are asking that human females satisfy themselves with that which YOU deem it acceptable to provide them. What happens if a human female, indeed many human females, decide they want something different???
But it's a well documented effect. Seems to me the easiest way to cut reproduction is to simply develop countries.
Talk about good things about China -> Get downvotes and people rebutting you with clearly one-sided sources.
Am I surprised? No.
Am I pissed? No.
I believe time will tell.
1. Multiple children has previously been reserved to those with political connections or money. Now that everyone can have two they will jump at the opportunity.
or
2. Almost every young person in China has grown up in a single child family and sees it as the normal family. Social norms are also based around parents dedicating a lot of resources to one child. So they continue to have only one child. In about a decade China may have to start encouraging people to have more children, like Japan.
Most I've met who already have a child and could feasibly have a second, don't plan to. I suspect they've already gone through the decision to only have one and don't want to revisit it.
However, I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside.
I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's, with a shortage of young people:
Rural families have largely been exempted from the one-child policy for a while now. This new development won't change anything for people living in the countryside.
> I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's
Yeah, China already has an issue with a rapidly aging population. It's called the 4-2-1 problem (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child). But this happens in most developed countries. For instance, the average age in the US would be much higher if it weren't for immigration. The native birth rate isn't very high.
On one hand, "population crisis" is something a lot of people are concerned about^ and the policy was a direct and practical way of tackling it. On the other, it is unmistakably totalitarian.
Going to 2 is a strange choice. It's just as totalitarian, but probably has a fairly negligible effect on average fertility rate. I guess they don't see
^On a tangent, I don't totally buy population crisis and judging from how rarely I hear it mentioned these days I think I'm not alone. There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. I think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever. At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years. I can certainly see us absorbing doubling population density in that time considering all the empty oceans, deserts, the potential for landless food productions, megacities and all that jazz. I mean, If the US & Australia went to the population densities of Germany and France (moderately dense with quite a lot of open spaces), we would be good for another 100 years.
Basically, I think we have the space.
Its not really a strange choice, its been "1 with lots of exceptions that mostly make it 2" for some time (there were exceptions with a limit of 2 instead of 1 for many rural areas, for families where at least one parent was an only child, etc.) Going to 2 is a pretty obvious simplification that doesn't really change much except the degree of administrative overhead, plus the policy has hurt perception of China in the developed world, and changing it to two from one along with well-managed press relations get you lots of "China to end one-child policy" headlines around the world, and with most people not reading below the headline, that's a huge propaganda win for doing essentially nothing but making a totalitarian policy administratively simpler.
And, really, it was always the plan: the OCP was originally conceived of as a single generation policy to bring the population down, which would be replaced with a stable population policy; it didn't exactly work out that way in a crisp sense, but a going from a one-child policy with very limited exceptions, to a growing set of exceptions, to finally a two-child policy is, in outline, generally consistent with the original blueprint.
> There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The practical limit is going to be dependent on pre-existing environmental conditions, technology and distribution of lifestyles and other factors; its a moving target. (And not necessarily moving consistently in one direction.)
> The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever.
I don't think that's the issue. I think that the fact that Gen X and the Millenials have been less economically secure than preceding generations (reversing the trend toward greater security) means that increasingly, people are focused on more immediate, personal concerns. Plus, to the extent that there is a concern for broader, global environmental issues, the focus has been climate change rather than overpopulation (the two concerns overlap considerably, but climate change is more specific and concrete than generalized carrying capacity concerns.)
> At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years.
And, IIRC, in the mid-1960s, that was about 32 years. Which difference also contributes to the reduction in concern for overpopulation since then: we may be closer to whatever limit exists, but we're approaching it much more slowly now and that rate is still dropping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
-Buckminster Fuller, Foreword to Grunch of Giants
It's often too expensive to have multiple children in a large city, and when infant and child mortality is reduced there's less incentive to have lots of kids (so people use birth control).
With growth and technology, fertility rates goes down and emerging markets,specially BRIC nations, will be severely affected by this.
bye bye green Earth, hello surpopulation and pollution...
Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly.
The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.
America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.
Fixed that for you.
> The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.
lulz
Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.
Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make.
On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is.
> Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism.
Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
You're adorable.
If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
And you're bad at this.
> If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
> Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules.
> I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is.
Absurd. Knowledge is impossible if both are right. You're bad at this.
> but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
Says who? Your conventions? What if my "conventions" of logic say the can be compared if they're different systems of logic? You're imposing a "law" of "you can't compare when I say so."
Silly reasoning is silly.
I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
I'm also pointing out your treating laws of logic like laws (yay! I commend you for treating them like laws), but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
Stawman, that point is not in dispute.
> but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
No I'm not. Your notion that materialism doesn't allow logic is simply wrong. You don't know what materialism is and I'm tired of repeating myself on that point why you continue to skirt the issue and ignore that.
> This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
No, they bow out because you're clearly irrational and unable to engage in meaningful conversation because you don't address points being made to you. You just ignore them and keep saying the same non-sense that's being challenged.
Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization.
You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom.
"America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms."
At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.
These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this.
John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it.
I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away.
This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top. Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that.
Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
I can give several counterexamples to that claim.
Racial segregation "ended" in the United States in 1964. I would claim the country was - at least from a legislative standpoint - more free after than before it. So starting from 1900 I would claim there is a trend towards more freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
The recent years have seen the acceptance of more people as they are. Gay marriages are now legal which I think is a fantastic achievement in the history of human rights - no matter how long it took to get there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_Unite...
So, at least from the point of view of several minorities, United States seems to be more free now than ever. I don't know what the totality of the situation is, though (not an american).
I would state that the behavior occurring was already unconstitutional, as we are all created equal and we all have equal rights. This was a founding principle.
The question is, do you have equal rights on my private property? The law says yes. It's disappointing we need a law to get us that far. We had to give up individual liberty, by allowing laws to move into our personal lives, in order to give equal rights to others?
I don't respect people of other nationalities because there is a law to do so. What new impact did the law have on people's hearts? What impact does the Bible have on a persons heart when it says to "love thy neighbor like thyself".
Even with the Civil Rights acts, we have a heightened sense of urgency in the united states, where the media reports violence between white and black people frequently. A new law won't stop this, but a change of heart just might.
We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.
Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible".
Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom.
Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.)
> During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language
I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.)
So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link):
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lp...
"To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."
Next it will move to Vietnam
However if the process can be completely automated then why not do the manufacturing right where the bulk of consumption is going to happen to reduce shipping costs which are always growing.
(four times the entire population of the USA for perspective)
I guess the logic is it will help their economy?