Debt Rattle Apr 16 2014: Overpopulation Is Not A Problem For Us
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Esther Bubley Room at war duration residence halls, Arlington Farms June 1943 On a day like this, when Bloomberg runs the hilarious and preposterous h
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle Apr 16 2014: Overpopulation Is Not A Problem For Us]The word “tragedy” in the Greek sense was the “inexorable workings of things.” I believe the Greeks were well aware of the difficulties in trying to outsmart the forces of life.
A problem that can’t be fixed is called a “predicament” or, my favorite, a “pickle.” Long term emergencies are called “exigencies.”
Love this: “If that collapse is then inevitable, you might ask, what is it that we have to live for? Well, today’s a beautiful day.”
You may want to check world-wide birth rates, fertility rates, and human sperm counts
over the last 60 years. Also growth in fertility clinics.
Mahalo , Terrymchilo07Hemingway! It’s been ages. How’s ma ville? Very true, what you picked out. We’ve gotten stuck in and fooled by planning 50-odd years ahead through pension plans and the like, but that’s such an aberration from anything and everything all our 1000s of generations of ancestors thought of, there was never any way that would work. It’s like some kind of delusionary time travel that don’t mean no-one no good. Living for today, and the fulfillment that day can bring, and making it so, is what we do best. So why did we stop?
A massive fall in the human population is implicit in AE’s analysis, taken to it’s logical conclusion. It actually is so obvious a conclusion it seems explicit to me but obviously saying it out loud takes many people aback. Such a conclusion, massive depopulation, to use a crafty sort of neutral term, is outside most known history and outside virtually all stories one is told about the future and so outside peoples imaginations.
The only exception in recent history were the stories that arose from fear of nuclear war. Fiction in the 50’s through the 80’s provided stories of a nuclear weapons route to depopulation but they pretty much ended when the USSR did. McCarthy’s The Road revisited it but the how is invisible. Actually I think nuclear weapons could play a part going forward. The crisis in financial, energy and environment played out as a clashes of nations. Come to think of it the asteroid is popular as the destroyer.
Let’s not forget the Biblical End Times and Jesus coming down somewhere near the Texas Oklahoma border. Certainly a third of Americans believe God is going to put an end to the world sooner rather than later and many think they are looking forward to it. If it plays out as some combination of economic dislocation on a grand scale with environmental problems and wars too they will just see the hand of God. This is an important point because it exactly requires people to do nothing to stop it. This sort of meta view infuses huge portions of even our elites who are barely Christian at all.
How can you imagine 2 billion or 4 billion or 5 billion people dying off from want of human basics or violence in the course of a decade or three? I can’t and I accept the probably correctness of Nicole’s analysis.
“Come to think of it the asteroid is popular as the destroyer.”
Yep, because it’s really quick and convenient. Split second. Wish it was that easy, but I’m sure it won’t be.Human population rose exponentially on a logarithmic scale. That can easily be explained by the fact that food was produced for profit from pure-debt (promises) money, by the people doing G-d’s work on planet Earth. Food=people. People=consumers=more profit. Case closed. We were bred for profit, from promises, with promises, simply put.
Thank you Ilargi, for stressing nature’s laws above the new breed of G-d’s little helpers who start getting all overpopulation-controles-que these days, all about the age of 50 or more. I don’t agree with many thing you say here, and I’m also not naive in knowing they are things some want to hear, but this is one of the BIG fundamentals, and I applaud you for saying it out loud.
Nature had laws for this. It is not “our” problem.
It seems many women do not want to have more children, but they either cannot afford contraceptives or there aren’t any available.
“In neighboring Bihar, India’s poorest state, Gopalakrishnan recalled that he once helped transport doctors, nurses and equipment to a tent clinic, prepared to surgically sterilize 200 women. Ten times that many showed up.
“When it became clear we couldn’t register them all, they broke all of the furniture and chased the doctors away,” he said. “These were all women. Muslim women — with a desperate need.”
“They are members of the largest generation in history — more than 3 billion people worldwide under the age of 25. About 1.2 billion of them are adolescents just entering their reproductive years.”
With that much testosterone flying around, who knows where we’ll end up.
“According to United Nations projections, the number will rise to 9.3 billion by 2050 — the equivalent of adding another India and China to the world.
That’s an optimistic scenario, one that assumes the worldwide average birthrate, now 2.5 children per woman, will decline to 2.1.If birthrates stay where they are, the population is expected to reach 11 billion by midcentury — akin to adding three Chinas.”
Oh, man.
* Tragedies work themselves out; One cannot outsmart the goat; Some problems can’t be fixed; Some pickles can’t be sliced; We will deal with the postdicament when it arrives
* Particles denote energy; Energy begets life; Multiplication leads to exponentiation; Women no longer want to have kids
* Today is beautiful; Planning for retirement is delusional; Humans do instant gratification best; Why fight nature? Sufficient is the day unto the exigency thereof
* What convinced us to leave the garden? Adam: “Fertility rates”; Eve: “Human sperm counts”
* TAE posits population implosion; No one living has experienced die off; Nature will deal with overpopulation so we won’t have to; God will get the credit;
* The world banged by an asteroid would be more convenient than the whimper of collapse
* Feeding an exploding population is God’s work; One part sunshine, two parts water, three parts debt
* One death is a tragedy; A million deaths is a statistic; A billion deaths is a certainty; Ease on down the road, dude
TAE Summary,
Good to see you back. Been far too long. As always.
You sure that God will get the credit, though? Why not the blame?
And doesn’t life beget energy, instead of vice versa? Or is that the chicken and the egg all over again for Easter?
My only comments to overpopulation are “that is why I became a farmer”.
Sure, Nicole believes that fossil fuels and credit may destroy me, but my farming plans included buying land that will support cattle under natural rainfall if I cannot grow soy and wheat and whatnot.
I suggest the same to everyone else — buy enough land, even if it is only a couple of acres, that will allow you to plant a garden, or keep some chickens, or whatever, and learn to work it before TSHTF.
While not fully in agreement with Nicole that the credit collapse will come sometime soon, and while I believe we will be able to kick that can down the road for at least another 5-10 years, I also know that oil will be the defining issue, and land has stood the test of centuries as a means to stay fed and alive.
So get some quality land for you and your kids. You may not be around by the time they need it, but they will surely thank you for it!
Mr. Meijer asserts that humans are like bacteria in a petri dish, set on the maximal population growth only kept in check by the harshest resource constraints. But are we? Let me make a different case.
I don’t know about other TAE readers, personally, I have no kids. Beyond personal anecdote, we can look at the numbers from the real world, and what we actually see is not quite the picture of yeast in a vat. The fertility rate in the developed world is significantly below the 2.1 marker for population stability. The highest ones are at about 2, and in many cases, markedly below. According to the CIA 2014 factbook, the US is below replacement, the European Union as a whole is at 1.55 and so is China; Eastern Europe is lower and Japan and South Korea stand at 1.4 and 1.25. Some surprising countries are below too, for instance Iran (1.9 today, 6.9 in 1960!), Vietnam, Brazil, Thailand. Population in all of those countries will start to drop if it has not already, with no need for a massive die-off.
Even in countries that are currently above the threshold, fertility is generally dropping like a stone. See India (5.87 in 1960, 4.28 in 1985 down to 2.53 in 2011). Mexico (from 5.7 children per woman in 1976 to 2.2 in 2006). Indonesia (5.67 in 1960, 3.75 in 1985 and 2.4 in 2011).
Basically, in the real world even though population has been going up, fertility has been going down for the last 50 years and this even though the world population has never been so well fed.
Tabernac,
You made me wonder whether anyone has ever checked if all individual bacteria and yeast maintain their fertility rates throughout the tragic cycle of the consumption of surplus energy. I don’t know of any such research, but neither do I see any reason to assume falling fertility rates are not a ‘natural’ part of any such cycle in any organism, be it yeast, mice, or people.
The underlying question would be if any such falling rate in any of these cases could arrest the drive towards more consumption, for the group, not the individual, until the inevitable.
Tabernac: “in the real world even though population has been going up, fertility has been going down for the last 50 years and this even though the world population has never been so well fed.”
I was wondering when someone was going to say that! Malthus continues to be proven wrong, century after century, and yet he still has his fans.
Ilargi: “I [do not] see any reason to assume falling fertility rates are not a ‘natural’ part of any such cycle in any organism, be it yeast, mice, or people.”
Did anyone say anything about what is or isn’t “natural”? (Whatever “natural” means)
In any case, falling fertility rates do seem to have causes (does that make the phenom “unnatural”?).
Ilargi: “The underlying question would be if any such falling rate in any of these cases could arrest the drive towards more consumption, for the group”
Well, of course it modifies (not “arrests”) that drive, insofar as resource use figures are always the products of a numerator as well as denominator. Smaller numerator = smaller product.
What’s interesting is to contemplate what would have happened if fertility had NOT begun falling off a cliff in the 1970s. In that case, instead of being at 7 billion, we would be far above that by now, maybe 15 billion, headed for 25 billion or more by mid-21st-century. Such numbers (high numerators) would have put a lot of stress on the resource base, much more stress than exists today. So, given that angle of view, yes we have been successful at “arresting the drive towards more consumption, for the group”. Our net level of consumption is certainly much smaller than it would have been at a population of 15 billion, or whatever. I say that knowing full well that consumption has not been controlled nearly as well as it could have been, if the denominators had been checked just as the numerators were. The denominators have been out of control, in fact, and this is mostly the fault of the rich:
book:
How the Rich are Destroying the Earth
by: HervΘ Kempf
https://www.forewordmagazine.com/reviews/viewreviews.aspx?reviewid=4337&rssref=20080927
https://thepanelist.com/Opinions/Opinions/Book_Review:_How_the_Rich_Are_Destroying_the_Earth_200809151182/
https://www.truthout.org/article/how-rich-are-destroying-planet
[hopefully those book review links are still good; they’re from 2008, when the book came out]Mr Meijer,
TAE claims that humans are about to hit a wall regarding resources. That may well be true, but I don’t think we have actually hit that limit, yet. By and large in the last generations human beings pretty much all over the planet have been getting a better suppply of calories and proteins (in many countries obesity is more of a health concern than malnutrition), live longer, consume more energy, get more cars, iphones, etc. And yet they have had fewer and fewer babies, instead of having more and more as the malthusian theory would have them behave. That seems a clear sign there is more to human population growth than availability of resources.
We may have problems, but to me overpopulation is a problem that is taking care of itself without drama, and evoking mass suicides or die-offs is completely unwarranted. Mankind has managed to cope with a more than doubling of the world population since 1960 with the technology and brain resources of the day, with a fertility then much higher. Now you would have us believe that it could not handle a growth of a third in the next 30-some years without going through a cataclysmic collapse. Sorry, to me this is doomster porn.
Tabarnick
Very well said, Tabarnick. And telling that no one replied.
“….And yet they have had fewer and fewer babies, instead of having more and more as the malthusian theory would have them behave. That seems a clear sign there is more to human population growth than availability of resources.”
Heh. Yes, far more. In fact, it works the reverse way: more resources, LESS babies. Being a Malthusian means remaining persistently blind to plain facts, directly in front of your nose. It means getting VERY creative with the rationalizations…. like claiming that the reason things have not collapsed into a Malthusian black hole is that technology keeps coming up with “temporary” fixes. And of course that is true. The problem is with the underlying assumption: that permanence (of technology) is possible and desirable. But it isn’t. Every single thing that technology does — and indeed that any of us do, ever — is temporary in nature. There is no such thing as permanent, and most certainly not in a highly-dynamic, rapidly-changing area like modern technology. It is ALL temporary… until the next generation of (vastly better) stuff comes along. It is all temporary, and that is as it should be. Some old technologies will continue to exist for various reasons (tradition, habit, aesthetic value, and sometimes real practical superiority/unbeatability), but that continuation will be in the context of waves of newer technologies with great advantages.
Back to tabarnick:
“We may have problems, but to me overpopulation is a problem that is taking care of itself without drama”Indeed it is, and it is wonderful! You would think it would be cause for celebration, amongst those of us (and I count myself among them) who are aware of environmental issues, resource limits and population pressures on resources. But instead, those who should be celebrating seem to be regressing in incomprehension of what is happening right in front of their faces. Incomprehension, followed by further neo-Malthusian ranting. It is a strange spectacle.
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