World's Population Is Projected To Nearly Stop Growing By the End of the Century (usatoday.com) 263
schwit1 writes: The world's population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century due in large part to falling global fertility rates, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the United Nations. By 2100, the world's population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% -- a steep decline from current levels. Between 1950 and today, the world's population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion. The report also found the world's population is getting older, with people over the age of 65 being the fastest-growing age group. "One in four people living in Europe and Northern America could be 65 years or older by 2050," reports USA Today. "And the number of people age 80 or over is projected to triple globally, from 143 million in 2019 to 426 million in 2050."
As for the global fertility rate, it fell from 3.2 births per woman in 1990 to 2.5 in 2019 and is projected to decline even further to 2.2 in 2050.
As for the global fertility rate, it fell from 3.2 births per woman in 1990 to 2.5 in 2019 and is projected to decline even further to 2.2 in 2050.
Taxes... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's going to suck for our great-grandkids having to pay the taxes to keep all those old people happy in their retirement.
Re:Taxes... (Score:5, Interesting)
The world will be fine, but we'll have found something else to be overly concerned about by then.
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More progress has been made in increasing lifespan, than in extending true health. "Everything's fine, no need for concern" is how we end up housing rows and rows of vegetables
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More progress has been made in increasing lifespan, than in extending true health.
We actually do know how to (within limits, naturally) extend the true healthy time.
Thrice weekly exercise which includes intense cardiovascular workouts. Over your whole lifespan.
People who do that tend to be about as healthy as those 20 years their juniors. 60's with the health of 40's. 70's with the health of 50's. It's on average, so of course you'll have exceptions both ways, but it improves your odds against almost every major cause of late age mental and physical degeneration. Especially helps yo
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That is a paltry gain.
I am interested in multiple centuries of healthy time. Even that falls short of the true goal of endless healthy time.
There is no cure for murder of course, but we can and should cure aging and death by natural causes.
Bingo! (Score:3)
You hit the nail on the head. I'd ad a healthy diet and stretch workouts to that list, but by and large you're right.
Re:Taxes... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I guess there will be lots of jobs cleaning bedpans, though. Not much mental sharpness needed for that, and it doesn't easily lend itself to automation.
Smells like opportunity. Anybody want to invent the toilet bed?
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The dementia thing is true for social media users, who have fewer interactions with real people, and tend to just repeat the same shit all the time in their little filter bubbles. They are so predictable that they can be replaced by the bots running the more than 50% of fake accounts running on social media.
There are ways to ward off dementia, but first you have to get off your ass and get some exercise. Just not going to happen with this generation, where binge-watching is a significant cause of loss of sleep.
How true.
It reinforces my belief that in the not too distant future, AI and robots will be "taking care of us" because we won't be able to take care of ourselves.
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Automation will have improved significantly by that time, which goes a long way towards reducing the cost it takes to care for or support a person.
In general, sure. But elder care will be the last holdout of human labor. And it's already a huge sector, over 10% if the US GDP and growing IIRC. In places like Japan that aren't back-filling with immigrants, they could end up with over a third of the working population providing elder care.
The modern service economy is also opening up a lot of jobs that older people are able to continue working in well past the usual retirement age because as long as a person has a sharp mind, physical frailty is no real concern.
But people shouldn't have to. The more automation provides, the earlier we should be able to retire.
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And this is bad because?
I don't think it works that way (Score:5, Interesting)
People like to forget this but there was decades of poverty, wars and social strife after the Industrial Revolution before things like large scale shipping, advancements in farm tech (like using oil byproducts to replenish land), telecommunications and other technological advances meant there was enough work for everyone to do. Luddite was a movement in response to job losses before it was an insult.
We can't count on service sector jobs to save us because that requires a base of productive workers who can afford services.
And we can't count on the rich saving us because they need us to buy their products. The rich are just taking ownership of everything. The King didn't need Peasants to buy his products. He already owned everything there was to own.
I'm sorry, but this just isn't something that we can solve with laissez faire capitalism. The last time we had a large scale automation revolution it was solved by two world wars, a century of technological advancement and a whole mess of socialism. For my money I'd like to skip the wars this time (especially since we've got nukes) and the 100 years of misery waiting for new tech and skip to the socialism.
Re: I don't think it works that way (Score:3)
> laissez faire capitalism
There is no such thing. Not a single country in the world except very poor.
If you have totally new tech that changes society (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was a kid Biotech was supposed to replace the manufacturing jobs lost. Then it was coding when Biotech didn't pan out. Now it's service sector jobs, which are in the process of being automated like crazy so I don't expect that to pan out. I've yet to see a source for jobs that looks like it has chance of really replacing the jobs losses that are happening and continue to happen.
Near as I can tell there's two camps. The Democratic Socialists want to use combating Climate Change to do massive jobs programs to replace lost jobs. The Conservatives and Libertarians want to leave it up to the invisible hand of the free market because they don't trust gov't.
However when I press the latter group about what jobs will be created to replace the ones automated they list the ones I mentioned above. When I point out, as I have, why that's not going to work they eventually get flustered and say "Well, the jobs will be so High Tech you and I can't understand them". Essentially kicking the can down the road.
Honestly I think the conservatives just don't want to have to pay for it and the libertarians would rather see the world burn than risk too much power going to the government. Either way it won't end well. It didn't the last time we had an Industrial Revolution.
I've said this before but ask yourself this: When in your lifetime has the answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it sorts itself out. That's essentially what the conservatives and libertarians are asking us to do...
Re:Taxes... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unions are parasites.
The wealthy are parasites. They live off the labor of others, skimming off the top only because of their position. Unions are the only way for labor to harness the power of their numbers to counteract the power of concentrated wealth.
Re:Taxes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unions are the only way
Not at all. Regulation goes a long way, but that is the only true "dirty" word in American politics. Grab pussies all you want, but the "R" word is off limits.
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Retirement age is already rising here due to government influence. And it will rise 8 months for every one extra year of expected average life span. When I reach the upper 60s, I probably will not be able to retire before age 68. Not due to my financial situation per-se but due to law and huge fines if I would retire earlier. On the other side, a burger flipper will be able to retire at the same age as a corporate manager due to a government-designed ('50s), worker paid 'universal' pension.
'socialist'* gove
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Or just change the rules on euthanasia so that people can choose to check out of this life a little earlier rather than be force to live in agony as long as medical science (and health insurance?) can make possible.
Re:Taxes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Will the local welding gas place ask any questions when I come in looking for a 5 lb tank of nitrogen, a low-pressure regulator valve and a length of hose?
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Will the local welding gas place ask any questions when I come in looking for a 5 lb tank of nitrogen, a low-pressure regulator valve and a length of hose?
No. They are a supplier of a gas and you're literally ordering the common kit that comes with buying such a gas.
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You'd think they'd insist on cash.
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It's getting worse too, as the younger generations are less able to save for retirement so will need even more support.
Naah... Under communism it'll all be free anyway. (Score:2)
End of population growth means end of consumption growth...
Add to that the very thing you mention - increased necessity of taking care of population which can't produce income but which does have accumulated economic, political and social power... and you have a necessity of socializing a whole bunch of things long before we hit the "zero growth" year.
Combine that increase in social programs with cap on the consumption and increased automation taking over everything but the human-generated entertainment (in
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It's going to suck for our great-grandkids having to pay the taxes to keep all those old people happy in their retirement.
But much less than it would have sucked if the flat-earth lobby's predictions of population catastrophe had come to pass.
Re:Taxes... or Soylent Grey (Score:2)
Dad: "Hey, kids! Grandpa is joining us for dinner!"
Kids: "Yeah!"
Inherentance and real estate (Score:2)
They'll be more likely to inherit money as a whole, and the reduced demand for housing will make their lives easier. Also, plenty of estate sale items, classic cars, and other durable goods left behind at bargain prices.
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Laffer curve. Learn economics and don't make that particular mistake again.
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I take it that you don't consider yourself for a candidate for removal from the population, so as to move toward "fewer people"?
It's interesting the number of people who think there are too many people, but don't consider themselves part of the "too many"....
Re:How do you read title pos or neg? (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you always go for the death option as ytour first thought. Why is that?
Because all those advocating population reduction want to see it done through quite sane means - women's rights, education and healcare so they no longer need to, or forced to, have large families.
That fixes the problem - as we can see from successful western economoies where birthrates have bneen declining for some time. So much so that stupid politicians deem it necessary to increase the birth rate and kill the planet instead.
Re:How do you read title pos or neg? (Score:4, Insightful)
Subsidize vasectomies for anyone who wants one.
Make OBGYN access free to all, including IUD implantation.
Subsidize education across the globe, education level and kid count are inversely correlated.
Basically accelerate the current trends driving the reduced fertility rates.
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Also declare sterility/infertility a disability eligible for financial benefits, even when it's the result of a vasectomy or tubal ligation.
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Fewer people is a good thing. So far, though, I am unsure how to accomplish that goal without using a very unpleasant venue to get there.
You think widespread access to birth control is an unpleasant venue? We could drastically reduce the population within a generation, while continuing to fuck like rabbits. It's a win-win.
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"Water stress" - Oh look, the next imaginary apocalypse to replace the failed population apocalypse. When Chinese factories start to pump out thorium-powered desalination plants for the world's coastal cities, you people will have to search for the next imaginary fall of civilization.
It's not easy being Green.
There have been articles for years on this (Score:2)
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All the woes about overpopulation, and running out of resources can be addressed by these findings if they prove to be true.
Nature finds a way....
Interesting.... (Score:2)
I've seen a TED talk where the dude projected exactly that... 11 Billion.
Re:Interesting.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting.... (Score:5, Informative)
The UN, along with pretty much all demographers, have been projecting for a long time that the population will level off around 10 or 11 billion. Here's the 2011 forecast:
https://www.un.org/en/developm... [un.org]
Not sure why this is news. The UN gives projections for several scenarios every year. They haven't really changed much.
Wish I could get media coverage and funding by "analyzing" a graph though, like Pew Research apparently did.
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Take a look at Empty Planet, by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbison. They make the case that we could be looking at peak population by as early as 2050.
Granted, based on current restraints and problems, we should reduce the population down to around 1 to 2 billion people. The
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The UN's low fertility model has put peak population right around 2050 for quite a while (the 2011 report I linked to has it). Their projections include the extreme but possible scenario you mentioned.
If you're talking about the same Gott, his argument is essentially applying sampling theory the wrong way around, and further basing the conclusion on a single sample. Not such a great idea. Even then, he gets more like 10,000 more years of humanity given population stability at 10 billion, so probably slightl
Hans Rosling, 2010 (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans... [ted.com]
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Sure, today I have no mod points. That's what I wanted to post.
Mod up please.
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Christian Berggren, a Swedish professor of industrial management, finds that Factfulness, despite substantial merits, “presents a highly biased sample of statistics as the true perspective on global development, avoids analysis of negative trends, and refrains from discussing difficult issues”. He identifies three main problems in Rosling’s argument. First, selected and rose-tinted statistics (e.g. “Factfulness includes many graphs of 'bad things in decline' and 'good things on the rise' but not a single graph of 'bad things on the rise'.”) Second, “No discussion of the ecological consequences of the current progress”. Third, misleading statistics on world population growth, plus confused or questionable suggestions that “continued population growth is inevitable and unproblematic”.
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Industrial management hey?
Maybe we read different books. Rosling mentions environmental issues many times in Factfulness. I'm not sure what he means by the last bit about continued population growth being inevitable and unproblematic. Rosling states (correctly) that the population will continue to grow for a bit longer, then level off. That's pretty inevitable unless you start mass killings.
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Sort of "overpopulation apologists" I call them.
I would imagine that most people in the category use a Biblical rationalization that it's not only ok to rape and pillage nature for mans benefit, but sort of "Manifest Destiny" to do so. Go forth and procreate until nothing is left.
No, if anything is going to cull the herd, so to speak, it will be a pandemic, which the CDC and the WHO
Nice try... and success (Score:2)
You are replying in a story that provides fresh data that almost exactly matches the population number Hans Rosling arrived at nearly a decade ago.
So it's obvious that Rosling was right way back then, and the counter argument at your link and summary was all wrong.
Did you bring it up just so we could laugh at it? Mission Succeeded!
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You are replying in a story that provides fresh data that almost exactly matches the population number Hans Rosling arrived at nearly a decade ago.
I pasted in part of a review of his book, from his Wikipedia article. I was pointing out how people like Rosling attempt(weakly) to "paper over" the environmental disasters caused by overpopulation. I could care less about projected numbers. I know there are too many people, right now. Not in 2050, not in 2080. Now.
So it's obvious you have drank his kool aid and try to defend overpopulation. Go right ahead, that is your right. But you're wrong. I remember the comment you made a while back about w
Read this instead (Score:3, Informative)
Better article. Notice the population projection for certain areas. It will be an interesting century to say the least.
The U.N. Says World Population May Top Out at 10.9 Billion Before 2100. Other Demographers Say It'll Be Much Lower [reason.com]
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Better article. Notice the population projection for certain areas. It will be an interesting century to say the least.
The U.N. Says World Population May Top Out at 10.9 Billion Before 2100. Other Demographers Say It'll Be Much Lower [reason.com]
Africa on course to house half the world's population by some predictions. 100 years from now China might be eyeing Nigeria suspiciously, worried that Nigeria might be on course to take over the mantle of most powerful nation status.
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Hahahahaha no. That entire continent is already at capacity, they don't have the infrastructure to support more people and refuse to build it because they don't want Whitey's tech... they're waiting for Wakanda to reveal itself.
Africa has enough arable land to feed 9 billion people with today's technology (obviously Africa's population isn't on a path to be that large itself, but plenty of land for food). There are rich natural resources of all kinds and it is becoming a hotbed of investment... especially by the Chinese who are becoming much more influential with Africa than the West is.
Africa hasn't seen the growth that Asia has seen in development and infrastructure but it is beginning to pick up speed and will probably be the
Average (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a mistake to look at average birth rate. Genes that favor higher number of children will be more successful. Genes that favor low number of children will die out. That needs to be taken into account.
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You might have noticed that we replaced natural selection with civilization a long while ago.
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No, we didn't. It's just that now, natural selection favors traits that are beneficial in civilization rather than ones that are beneficial in nature.
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Selection is still going on; it never stops. It's just that it doesn't necessarily happen for traits you might consider desirable. Just because natural selection is happening doesn't mean that the species is becoming more intelligent or even stronger. It will be becoming better suited to propagate itself, whatever that takes. It is perfectly possible that it will become less intelligent because of evolutionary pressures.
natural selection and civilization (Score:2)
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It's more replacing natural selection with selective breeding.
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There's no selective breeding going on. The transition from hunter gatherer to agrarian and ultimately urban living obviously changes the environmental pressures, but it's still just natural selection. We may come to the point where we're editing the genome for large portions of the population, and then we can talk about active selection of genotypes, but for now, it's just that the environment humans are living in is significantly different than the one we evolved in over the last few million years.
But rea
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If you're being assigned a mate to optimize your offspring, that's selective breeding. If you're picking your own mate based on attributes you find attractive, that's natural selection.
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It's a mistake to look at average birth rate. Genes that favor higher number of children will be more successful. Genes that favor low number of children will die out. That needs to be taken into account.
Women don't give birth to puppies. They tend to give birth to babies, and generally one at a time. Women that give birth to twins might be more reluctant to have a second pregnancy. Society is a bigger driver of how many children one has than genetics.
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Re:Average (Score:4, Informative)
Being an elite rarely had anything to do with genetics. It had to do with luck of birth. Historically, you could have been a Leonardo da Vinci, but if you were born to indentured turnip farmers, the best you could hope to achieve was to be the best turnip farmer in the area. If you were born in Florence to a father of reasonable means during the Renaissance, well, you went on to design flying machines and paint masterpieces.
It's not like being born a prince made you any better in any particular degree. The long history of the "elites" tends to indicate that the major difference between any given "elite" and a commoner was a better diet and education. Those two things are, for almost everyone ever born, the deciding factor. Poor nutrition in childhood is probably the single biggest reason for poor cognitive ability in adulthood. It has nothing to do with genetics, and everything to do with developmental biology. That does suck for people who want to believe in the inherent superiority of their racial group, but if you want to know why certain groups perform better than others, what they ate for breakfast and the educational opportunities available to them were far more the determining factors than any marginal genetic differences with other populations.
Re:Average (Score:5, Informative)
That's just the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
There is no genetic advantage to having big families. There is an advantage to having access to modern medicine, adequate food, education and so forth, which benefits smaller families that concentrate resources on fewer children.
Take Bangladesh as an example. Current fertility rate is around 2.5, so getting fairly close to the steady state value of 2.2. Back in the early 60s it was around 9. That's the average, 9 children per woman who reaches puberty.
If there were any genetic component at all, Bangladesh would not have been able to lower the rate do dramatically and Bangladeshi people would be being replaced with some other group, neither of which is happening.
Re: Average (Score:2)
Having large number of chikdren reaching reproductive is manifestation of genetic advantage. It's the cultural deficiency that leads to genetic disadvantage in _other_ cultures that do not roll out their positive competition qualities to later generations.
Number one cultural disadvantage is female economic liberation and their liberty at using contraceptives.
You either stop lamenting about the loss of genetic material of "great white civilization" or you drop the liberties
You do not recognize your own programming (Score:2)
You have an instinct for having resources to live well. You have an instinct for looking after children. You have an instinct for sex, which reduces in bad times.
You do not have an instinct for having large families because the sex instinct is traditionally enough. We changed the rules on natural selection by allowing sex without babies.
All of your instincts are tuned for one purpose and one purpose only. And that is to maximize the number of grandchildren that you have. You exist today because your al
Re: Average (Score:2)
*Looks at Poland* *wonders what troll is talking about*
Re: Average (Score:2)
Why would the EU falling apart lead to greater immigration to Poland?
Re: Average (Score:2)
Poland is in the EU so why would they suddenly get more immigrants if it fell apart?
Re: Average (Score:2)
Replaced? Whites are still by far the majority ethnic group in all of those countries. I chose Poland because I went there recently and saw virtually no non-whites apart from some Chinese tourists. I've been hearing this song about the brown hordes replacing whites in the UK for 40 years. It still hasn't happened. Nowhere near. Especially with the influx of white Europeans in the last 15 years.
Yes and no (Score:2)
This is the trouble with science, it's very often counter intuitive. It's very likely that a small
logistic growth (Score:2)
Demographic change (Score:5, Informative)
Often the educated and affluent groups, developed countries are at or below replacement level rate of 2.1 per woman. (0.1 to account for infertile and childhood mortality among women). Even USA will be below replacement level without immigration.
But the groups that still growing are the poor and the uneducated. In India Hindus are at nearly replacement level, 2.13 and other religions Christianity, Sikh, Buddhism, are below replacement levels. Muslims are at 2.61, big drop from 3.4 a decade earlier, but still the highest now. Citation [indiatimes.com] World wide Muslims have the highest fertility rate, 3.1, followed by Christians at 2.7, Hindus at 2.4, below the world average of 2.5. Citation [pewforum.org] Given the current laws of wealth inheritance, the great wealth of currently affluent demographics will be shared by fewer and fewer of the descendants, making them even more affluent.
Re:Demographic change (Score:5, Funny)
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Rather informative comment, but not so moderated. Excuse me, but I can't help, being in a permanent state of lacking mod points. Whatever. Right now the dominant mod (and Slashdot only reveals dominance by default) is funny, and I'm not seeing the joke anywhere.
On the other hand, I suspect your handle involves a joke of some sort...
In summary (Score:2)
...fuck off Paul Ehrlich and Malthus.
Pure quess work (Score:2)
All of this is based on the assumption that fertility rates will not change.
This is a WAG.
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no, fertility rates are changing and that change is factored in. even the summary mentions that.
prosperity lowers birth rate, that's a fact.
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It's been an observation of demographic trends for a long time that the wealthier overall a population is, the fewer children they have. This could even be seen in Early Modern England, as the newly formed proto-middle class (a lot of them Non-conformists) tended to have a lot less children overall than their poorer agrarian neighbors. Even four or five hundred years ago, there were ways to control conception, whether by abstinence or by other means that reduced fertility.
The general view is that between wi
81 Years Out? (Score:3)
Bullshit. You can't make meaningful predictions about 100+ different cultures more than 80 years out.
War, advancements in many different fields, policy changes, natural events, can all drastic effect population growths or total population.
What are they smoking?
Empty Planet by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson (Score:2)
There is a book called Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Planet Decline [penguinrandomhouse.com], by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson. One is a journalist, the other is a political scientist.
What they found is very interesting. Even India's birth rate is slowing down.
See the reviews and interviews at: TVO [youtube.com], Wired [wired.com], and CBC [www.cbc.ca]
Too many Duggars (Score:2)
Another way to look at all of this (Score:2)
People used to say that every time your heart beats, three babies are born. It follows then that every time your heart beats, at least three people are having sex. There are a hell of a lot of people getting it on all the time. Of course, one can argue that there are certain times of the day when people are more likely to have sex e.g. at night. So that means that there's a wave of sex circling the globe every single day.
Re:European leaders don't encourage increased birt (Score:4, Insightful)
16 years? That's like 4 election periods, who gives a shit about a time when I'm no longer in office?
Long term thinking is rare in the USA (Score:2)
RACE is a big US obsession; it blinds and distracts from CULTURE; more than other places. That is what a lot of race actually comes down to: cultural clashes where slow people must turn it into a simple look. You can easily find simple people who will talk about acting "white" or acting "black" without any idea how stupid that sounds... That person is "one of the good ones" etc.
What defines the society you wish to maintain is it's largely static culture and resistance to change is largely good (conservati
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I never proofread... most people do NOT want to change cultures (if they do they can move.)
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Re: Wake up to climate change (Score:2)
> You have xities like Chennai running out of water
* Reverse osmosis + money + electricity solves the water problem completely and permanently.
* Chennai is coastal, with endless saltwater nearby
* India isn't "rich", but it's no longer "poor". At least, insofar as its big metro areas go.
* India has no qualms about using nuclear power.
* RO isn't cheap for end users, but it's not *that* much more expensive than the cost of transforming polluted, increasingly-scarce & rationed fresh water into drinkable
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Are you always totally wrong, or is this your first time? You may not realize it, but a significant percentage of the current population is still being fed based on farming techniques a century old. There's a staggering amount of fertile farmland that's still worked by hand that could be vastly more productive. And once we deforest all of Brazil, we'll have plenty of new farmland!
Re: Yeah, if you ignore migration. (Score:2)
Even IF (big *if*) "Muslim immigrants" have lots of kids, their own kids probably won't... and those same kids will roll their eyes when their parents go off about religion, the same way kids with hyper-Catholic, ardently-Evangelical, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents statistically tend to do.
For the most part, religious parents attempting to compete with secular society are fighting a losing battle. Actual outright atheism might be rare, but a drift towards ambivalent deism over time & generations is p
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Good point and this is actually a perfect example of how trying to use a computer simulation as a substitute for testing against reality can go wrong. I am betting that if population is even a factor in the computer simulations they weren't counting on this. One of these days I plan to find the time to actually read the code for some of those simulations. Probably all kinds of interesting assumptions buried in that code.
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Yes there are probably some parallels with the mouse utopia experiments. Here in the Philippines I think about those experiments a lot actually especially with respect to how many transsexuals and homosexuals I see here. I haven't drawn any firm conclusions though except that it doesn't apply too closely if only because a lot of people even here have at least some privacy and personal space. But with the large families living in squatter areas you can start to approach something more like the mouse utopian
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Boomers: I must have exactly 2 children. I will work hard to support my family until I die. This is how life is supposed to be. Strong gender roles.
Gen-X: Yeah I guess I will have kids even though I am not so sure I really want to be a breeder. Girls at least still pretty enthusiastic about breeding and being a mother. Much weaker gender roles.
Millennials: Climate change will kill us all soon. It would be irresponsible to bring more lives into the world. Also we are too busy with our careers and we don't ma