The World Has a Problem: Too Many Young People
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I know, or rather have heard the stories about baby girls in China, but I had no idea just how real and much of an impact this had. That is nuts.
The US 2010 census was pretty close to 50/50 http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
So, you can rearrange the semantics all you like, but he's essentially correct.
A standing army plus reserves and the population you could call up to fight is what kept enemies from wanting to invade.
So, again: "There aren't enough resources" is essentially what people mean when they say "There are too many people." Sending people to war -- win, lose or draw -- tends to get the number of people down and may have long term impact on keeping the number down by removing the potential for those who died young on the field of battle to reproduce at all.
You can claim all you like that "BUT, THAT isn't THE REASON we go to war" and, you know, it just makes me think you have no understanding of history. It doesn't convince me you are right.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire could be interpreted as Spain not having enough gold, land, and people.
The US invasions of Panama and Grenada could be interpreted as due to a lack of pro-Americans in power in nearby countries.
The Norse fights with the Dorset and Thule "skraelings" could be interpreted as due to a lack of desired cultural homogeneity.
But it's hard to make sense of anything at that level of generality. To push it a notch higher, I could say that wars are due to specific arrangements of atoms. I would be absolutely correct, but it wouldn't be helpful.
Often times wars were fought for stability. If you were stronger the weaker adversaries would be less likely to wage war against you. So your going to war was more to counteract someone else's lack of resources who might fight for them rather than your need for resources...
Anyhow it like saying we went to war because we wanted to live longer.... Ok. Yes, but that's not how we typically present the issue.
This is causing me a blue screen of death moment. You are disagreeing with me by saying "But the war could start because of someone else's lack of resources..." and I cannot fathom how that is an argument against the idea that a lack of resources is almost always the root cause.
So, I think I shall step away from this discussion now.
Thank you.
> we go to war due to "scarcity" of resources, which is the flip side of the coin of what people mean when they say "we have too many people."
> Then we go to war in order to make sure some other country can't create artificial scarcity of resources, which would reduce the number of people we have against our wishes
It is about preventing someone else from cutting off your supply lines.
Infantry assaults with men marching shoulder to shoulder has not happened since the Russo Japanese war - even Somme and the Japanese Banzai charges are significantly less dense than how they tend to be portrayed in the media.
Sufficiently well-organized places to not have robbery bands internally or raiding parties externally would, in absence of wars, often be big exporters of mercenaries.
The problem has been exacerbated in recent years because of limitations on how many children couples could have, but a lack of financial resources could also place pressures on people to have fewer children, and make as many boys as possible. But this is certainly not "just" a modern problem created by modern abortion technology.
"Son preference is traditional in Chinese Confucian patriarchal culture" ... "China implemented its one-child policy from 1979 onwards" ... "Given strict family-size limitations and a preference for sons, girls have become unwanted in China because they are considered as depriving the parents of the possibility of having a son" ... "About 37–45% of China's missing females may have been missing at birth [due to Sex-selective abortion]", and other factors include infanticide, poor nutrition leading to poor health conditions, and under-registration.
Well, China is as well (according to information above). 34 million is 2.5% of 1.34 billion (Chinese population in 2010), so China is at 47.5/52.5.
Assume the population is 47.5% female / 52.5% male.
Then, for every 525 men, there are 475 women.
This means out of every 525 men, (525-475) = 50 of them can't mate, which is 9.5%.
However, tomp is wrong that 2.5% of the population being surplus men implies that the population share is 47.5-52.5 (this split means 5% of the population are surplus men, not 2.5%). It actually implies 48.75-51.25, which means about 4.9% of men have no female counterpart in the population.
And this is intuitively correct; if 2.5% of the whole population can't find a partner, and all of those people are men, and the numbers of men and women are approximately equal, it should be the case that about 5% of men can't find a partner.
it might be 2.5% of the total population but women live longer on average than men so what happens if you look between the ages of say 20 to 30?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
34m of the total population is 2.5%, but what is 34m as a percentage of the population between, say, 15yrs and 30yrs?
But the real problem is just: too many people, period.
Why do you say that? Which resource is insufficient to support the current global population? (or even several times that)?
The problem is a lack of balance / poor management
The Earth could support perhaps 10x or even 100x more people - but by support I mean that that amount of people would survive. The real question is how does quality of life depend on population and where's the optimum. When you have a small population (e.g. 10 million), the rate of research is slow, there are not many different products on the market (i.e. you can't choose from hundreds of cars to buy like today), etc. With a large population on the other hand, you have less resources per capita - water, oil, minerals, land, wood.
But it's kind of a specific example of producing something that has fixed costs but can be "consumed" by infinitely many people. For example software, movies, music or even jokes.
It matters to the people who die early because we didn't develop a particular medical treatment. Just to pick a random example.
My point was that you need to have some kind of metric (suffering per human per year?), or otherwise the "quality of life" across different population size and time span doesn't make sense.
At the moment the limiting factor looks like it's going to be carbon emissions. But the real problem is that by the time we know for sure what the limiting factor is going to turn out to be it will be too late to do anything about it.
> The problem is a lack of balance / poor management
Balance? What kind of balance are you talking about? And what exactly would "better management" look like?
Carbon emissions can be (and have been) reduced without culling humans. Effective public transport infrastructure would do more for emissions than limiting the number of humans while still mostly commuting 1 vehicle per person. Alternative energy sources are also an effective solution which is independant on the size of the human population
> Balance? What kind of balance are you talking about?
Equitable trade and a little less nationalism & market protectionism. Farm subsidies and food donations (counter-intuitively) are destroying farming in developing countries
> And what exactly would "better management" look like?
* Less corruption by leadership, and literally "better management" there is more than enough food to feed every human on the planet, yet famines still happen.
* leaders who take a long-term view on development (rather than focussing on the duration of their terms). Sustainable development will increase the quality of life
* less corporatism/oligarchy/crony-capitalism and more people oriented governance which will lead to improved quality of life at the cost of (ill-gotten) profit. Social democracy appears to be a better way (IMO).
Really? That's news to me. When did that happen? But before you answer, take a look at:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo_2011.html
> Effective public transport infrastructure
OMG, where are you getting your information? Transportation only produces 25% of the world's carbon emissions, and most of that is industrial transport (trucking, shipping) and air travel and freight. Even if you got to 100% public transit across the globe that wouldn't make even a tiny dent.
> Equitable trade
> Less corruption
How are those going to reduce carbon emissions?
> Sustainable development
Ah, there you have hit the nail on the head. How exactly are you going to do "sustainable development" in the face of an exponentially increasing population?
Yes, really. Between the year 2007 and 2012 in the US. See [1].
> Even if you got to 100% public transit across the globe that wouldn't make even a tiny dent.
I couldn't find the statistics for the US, but this Italian research paper[2] suggests 4% of CO2 emissions from Italy are from (low-occupancy) commuting. 100% public transit might lead to a 3% drop, which I consider much bigger than "a tiny dent". The US is likely to have a larger figure in absolute terms (greater average distances commuted, larger average engine bore, larger population).
> How are those going to reduce carbon emissions?
Nothing! I was answering a specific question you asked which was unrelated to carbon emissions. You question was quoted right before my answers, you couldn't have missed it.
My overarching point is simply reducing the population will not guarantee a decrease in CO2 emissions. Have a look at [3], which shows the amount of CO2 per country. Lets' take the top 2: China emits twice the CO2 (10Gt) as the US (5Gt) with 4 times the population. (Assuming a linear correlation) if we were to half China's population and at the same time 'industrializing' it to same level as the US, then China's CO2 emissions wouldn't change
> How exactly are you going to do "sustainable development" in the face of an exponentially increasing population?
Same as always? Exponential population growth isn't a new phenomenon - take a look at the US population graph (1790-present) some time.
1. https://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&...
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281447764_Commuting...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
North American emissions are going down, but world emissions are going up. And the population of North America is growing much more slowly than the rest of the world (virtually unchanged from 2008-2013 at 530M).
> I was answering a specific question you asked which was unrelated to carbon emissions.
Well, you asked, "Which resource is insufficient to support the current global population?" and in the same message said, "The problem is a lack of balance / poor management." The answer to your first question is (at the moment) the capacity of the planet to absorb CO2. Unless we get that figured out, civilization is doomed. No amount of "balance" or "good management" is going to help.
> simply reducing the population will not guarantee a decrease in CO2 emissions
No, of course not. But it would help a lot. Total emissions are simply the product of population and per-capita emissions. You can reduce either one or both to solve the problem, but reducing per-capita emissions has a direct impact on standard of living. Yes, the planet might be able to sustainably support 20 billion people if they are all living in poverty. I don't consider that a good outcome.
> Same as always? Exponential population growth isn't a new phenomenon
Actually, it is. Exponential growth is rarely seen in nature. Most of the time you get steady-state or periodic oscillations. The current growth rates in human population -- doubling every few decades -- is unprecedented in the history of multi-celled animals. Civilization has only existed for about 10,000 years, and we've only been producing ridiculous amounts of CO2 for a few hundred. Those are the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. All this is very, very new.
That is correct, I never claimed otherwise
> the population of North America is growing much more slowly than the rest of the world (virtually unchanged from 2008-2013 at 530M).
The growth rate itself is immaterial: this proves my claim that CO2 emissions can be (and have been) reduced without any reduction in the population.
> reducing per-capita emissions has a direct impact on standard of living
This relationship is not a universal, unbreakable rule of the universe, the two can be decoupled by investment in clean energy ("good management").
What has not yet been done is reduce the total world carbon emissions. And that is the only thing that actually matters.
Barring a major technological breakthrough like fusion, you basically have three choices of end-game on this planet:
1. A large, poor population
2. A small, wealthy population
3. The end of civilization due to climate change
I vote for #2.
There is also tech on the horizon to produce food more efficiently, e.g. bacteria can produce sugar much more efficiently than sugar beets.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/12/humans-ha...
Also, resources aren't the only concern of having more people. More people means more governance. The world becomes more complex as the numbers grow. Accountability becomes harder, laws become more extensive.
Which resource is insufficient to support the current
global population?
It's very hard to take you seriously if you make a bald assertion like that with no supporting arguments. It doesn't help that it's an assertion that, to me, seems absurd on its face. Seriously, how can anyone think there are not enough people? I would really like to know.
Compare that to Central Africa, North Siberia or most of Australia. There's no way to live there at comparable density without being miserable.
So unless you live in an area that is depopulating (Syria? Japan?), I think your assertion is incorrect.
People will not get managed much better unless they are scarce.
FTFY.
Money will not get managed much better unless it is scarce.
Interestingly, there's also a certain delay - even after fertility rates (children each woman will have over her lifetime by current trends) fall, birthrates (births each year per capita) take a while to fall, and even after birthrates fall population growth takes a while after that to fall as larger cohorts of young people replace smaller dying cohorts of old people. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_momentum].
What all this means is that on the one hand, population increase can be very hard to stop on a short-term basis, but also that current fast growth rates shouldn't be extrapolated too far into the future.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/revealed-30-yea...
There, fixed it.
More education and better access to contraceptives (or forced pop control like China which for obvious reasons, less desirable). Many of the poor just don't know how control the amount of children they produce. They are ignorant about it and often don't have easy access to birth control.
Many cannot afford contraception in any case.
B) Giving out birth control and giving women power are incredibly different things. They can be intertwined, but trying to give power to an oppressed population is typically a hard uphill battle. Never mind the issues involved in trying to convince various religious groups that contraception will not have you burning in hell for all eternity.
The issues seems to be that the kind of companies that young people create will be mostly tech companies. Tech companies are by definition capital intensive not so much labour intensive.
I.e. less and less is needed for the new types of companies which are created.
A million people turning 18 every month could have been a great thing. Think the brain drain might have something to do with it?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-20/india-nabs-nearly-t...
“A demographic arbitrage between aging societies with a
shrinking work force and youthful societies would be good
thing, if the whole thing could be managed,”
"But it’s the youth bulge that stands to put greater pressure on the global economy, sow political unrest, spur mass migration and have profound consequences for everything from marriage to Internet access to the growth of cities"
That's world's problem.
People are fine - assholes insisting everyone has to pretend like they're working even though we have enough resources to go around, maybe they're the problem.
Here's a comedy bit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibb7RjFDGN0
http://www.techinsider.io/why-south-korea-is-becoming-the-ol...