India Defuses Its Population Bomb (science.org) 156
The world's second most populous nation uses sterilization, contraceptives to reach fertility milestone. From a report: Back in the 1960s, India faced an exploding population, with a fertility rate of nearly six children per woman. When famine struck, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially refused to deliver food aid, citing the country's high birth rate. In response, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dramatically expanded the first national family planning program in a major developing country, offering cash incentives for both men and women to be sterilized. The city of Madras, now called Chennai, paid men $6 a snip. For the next 60 years, India continued to focus on sterilization as well as contraceptives and education for girls. Now, Indian health officials say the task of defusing their population bomb is finally done. Late last month, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a periodic investigation of half a million households, announced a milestone: The country's fertility rate had for the first time fallen below the widely accepted "replacement level" of 2.1 children per woman. (The U.S. rate is 1.8.) "Women are seeing the wisdom in having fewer children," says Poonam Muttreja, director of the nonprofit Population Foundation of India.
India's population growth is not over yet, however. Thanks to past high fertility rates, two-thirds of the population is under 35 years old, and a large cohort of people is now entering childbearing age. Even at replacement fertility rates, the children of these young people will continue to push up numbers, and India may exceed China as the world's most populous nation as early as next year. Still, India's population is set to decline in about 3 decades, putting the country on the same track as a growing number of developing nations, such as its neighbor Bangladesh and Indonesia. India remains well behind China in falling fertility. In China, where the population may be at its peak, official figures put the fertility rate at 1.7 children per woman. State-sponsored family planning remains "the single most important driver" of India's drop in fertility, says Srinivas Goli, a demographer at Jawaharlal Nehru University. More than 55% of couples use modern contraceptives, the latest NFHS survey found. Of these, one-fifth use condoms and one-tenth the pill. But sterilization of women, generally in government-run clinics, accounts for two-thirds of all contraception. Sterilization has a checkered past in India. During the mid-1970s, Gandhi allowed states to operate compulsory sterilization camps. An estimated 19 million people were sterilized, three-quarters of them men. The program's unpopularity helped bring down Gandhi's government in 1977, says Monica Das Gupta of the Maryland Population Research Center.
India's population growth is not over yet, however. Thanks to past high fertility rates, two-thirds of the population is under 35 years old, and a large cohort of people is now entering childbearing age. Even at replacement fertility rates, the children of these young people will continue to push up numbers, and India may exceed China as the world's most populous nation as early as next year. Still, India's population is set to decline in about 3 decades, putting the country on the same track as a growing number of developing nations, such as its neighbor Bangladesh and Indonesia. India remains well behind China in falling fertility. In China, where the population may be at its peak, official figures put the fertility rate at 1.7 children per woman. State-sponsored family planning remains "the single most important driver" of India's drop in fertility, says Srinivas Goli, a demographer at Jawaharlal Nehru University. More than 55% of couples use modern contraceptives, the latest NFHS survey found. Of these, one-fifth use condoms and one-tenth the pill. But sterilization of women, generally in government-run clinics, accounts for two-thirds of all contraception. Sterilization has a checkered past in India. During the mid-1970s, Gandhi allowed states to operate compulsory sterilization camps. An estimated 19 million people were sterilized, three-quarters of them men. The program's unpopularity helped bring down Gandhi's government in 1977, says Monica Das Gupta of the Maryland Population Research Center.
This is the answer and more of it please (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is our economic system (Score:5, Interesting)
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We will need wealth redistribution to prevent retirees from falling into grinding poverty and dying in the streets. Retirement as we know it has been working as a long-running intergenerational ponzi scheme instead of an actual sustainable savings scheme. With the current system the jig is up when the population hits ecological limits or when the system impoverishes one or more generations too hard (as is currently happening with Millennials/GenZ).
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We will need wealth redistribution to prevent retirees from falling into grinding poverty and dying in the streets.
I don't know who "we" is. Maybe you're still talking about India.
Here in the US, retirees as a group have much more accumulated wealth than workers. Sure, it's a statistical distribution, but retirees aren't where you can redistribute wealth to.
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For now, sure, boomers have healthy retirement funds, but when GenX retires things won't look so healthy, and if GenY were to retire with affairs on their current trajectory, you could have retirees dying in the streets. The same problem exists in most countries around the world. You also wouldn't necessarily need to redistribute wealth to retirees, you could redistribute it to workers through incomes so that they can save for retirement on their own before the shit hits the fan.
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Unless those younger generations are all self-employed hospice care providers, they'll only get a sliver of that wealth while most goes upper management and above in the healthcare sector.
The real problem isn't retirees dying in streets (Score:2)
The problem with that is that about 90% of the wealth goes to the top 10%. This means that in order for the bottom 90 to be functional you need the economy to remain strong.
If the ec
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Investment is the only part that requires never-ending growth, an economy without investment would happily hum along in a zero-growth scenario, and even contraction would only be as much of an issue as slowing growth is today. The desire to make money by owning instead of working is the central problem. An economy without investment would be totally alien to anything we've seen before but it could be possible.
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Gen-Xers are not going to retire like our parents did. We are either wealthy enough to not be reliant on social security, or we are planning to work until we die.
Not just retirees (Score:3)
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If all economic output is determined by having a large number of young hardworking people and you don't then economic output collapses.
In the past, you have advocated UBI because there won't be enough jobs for workers.
Now you are claiming that there won't be enough workers for the jobs.
As that happens there's a real risk of entering a deflationary spiral that leads to massive unemployment.
I see. So the shortage of workers will lead to the workers losing their jobs. So we will simultaneously have not enough workers and too many. Sure. Whatever.
Both are correct (Score:2)
There's 2 different forces at play here:
a. total # of jobs
b. total # of employees providing economic output.
Emphasis added on the important part.
Automation & process improvement will continue to eat away at jobs, as it has for over 40 years [businessinsider.com].
But at the same time fewer productive or high productive citizens means less overall economic output, meaning a smaller pie to divvy up [youtube.com].
These are two separate processes.
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Re:The problem is our economic system (Score:4, Insightful)
In this system I don't own anything, I just rent everything. I want to go for a ride in a fancy car for the day. 1% * $0 = I pay $0.
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You are right, but we still need to change it.
Eternally increasing growth rates are not sustainable -or survivable.
Re:This is the answer and more of it please (Score:5, Interesting)
Far from our only hope, it's only just slightly helpful. Remember that the world mostly got itself into this mess with about half of its current population, we need to look at total CO2 emissions and per-capital food and water availability, which are completely divorced from population numbers now.
Population reductions can also create challenges with a highly aged population, ask Japan.
See also: https://www.wired.com/story/op... [wired.com]
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> Far from our only hope, it's only just slightly helpful.
On the contrary, it's necessary, just not sufficient.
Your evidence that we got into this mess with half our population suggests that half our population is already overpopulated, at least for that rate of consumption. Plenty of research agrees.
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Yes, sterilizing the lower castes for which $6 is life or death while the higher castes can procreate.
What's not to like, really.
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>This is our only hope of slowing down climate change, food shortages, water shortages, and [list favorite resource here] shortages.
Nonsense, there's lots of options.
A nice big WWIII would solve things nicely - none of those little sandbox fights like WWI and II. Once the first global nuclear volley is done with the *real* fighting over the remaining scraps can begin.
So would a truly devastating plague. Maybe we'll get lucky and Omicron or some later mild and contagious variant will turn out to have lo
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Maxism predates the whole LGBTQ+ movement by a very long time. These two things are not related.
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This is a good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was under the impression that the health of our economies are largely dependent on increasing populations; is that not the case?
Re:This is a good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
> under the impression that the health of our economies are largely dependent on increasing populations
It's not so much the economies themselves that depend on it, but rather gov't and political budgeting. You can run up more debt if you believe the future population will be larger because that shrinks the relative size of debt. If not, you're hosed. Many of the politicians handing out lucrative benefits & retirements will likely not be in office when bleep hits the fan. It's one reason why I am against term-limits: you want politicians to think and care about what happens 20 or so years down the road rather than hand out hit-and-run goodies.
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No, it's the economy, fundamentally. Any society with a bunch of consumers and a few producers is going to have a very tough time, regardless of how the books are juggled.
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Cool, as long as you wait till I'm done with it.
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Well then, I guess we'll have to accept a lower standard of living for the sake of Earth
No, we don't. Forget about economic theory and look at reality:
Here are the three countries with the highest fertility (BPW), along with per capita GDP:
Niger 6.824, $633
Somalia 5.978, $347
DR Congo 5.819, $588
Here are the 3 countries with the lowest:
Singapore 1.1, $64,103
Taiwan 1.0, $32,787
Korea 0.8, $34,866
Low population growth does not lead to poverty.
It's complicated. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the one hand, yes, many aspects of the economy depend on constant population growth, and so population shrinkage causes all kinds of economic fallout. Japan is dealing with such problems right not, in fact.
On the other hand, overpopulation causes a host of problems of its own, including environmental problems.
So, the solution to either of these problems tends to be the cause of he other. Finding the exact right balance is tricky, to say the least.
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True. The current economic system is based on perpetual growth. Figuring out what a steady state economy will look like has not really been explored. That last steady state economy was when, before the Reformation? Late Dark Ages? Some dynasty in China?
Only for irresponsible nations (Score:5, Insightful)
The national economy is of course just the sum of all the families. In general a person doesn't need their family to get bigger in order to pay their bills and be financially comfortable.
There ARE some countries that have put themselves in a bad position, though. While Ireland, China, Iran, Switzerland, and Zambia put about half of their money into savings, the trend in some countries is to get deep into debt. In Switzerland or Netherlands, you work, you save, you stop working and live off your savings.
In dumber, more self-centered countries, people go deep into debt and are relying on their kids to support them when they are older. That's when not having kids is a problem - when you aren't saving anything because you're planning to sponge off your kids.
Re:Only for irresponsible nations (Score:5, Interesting)
There's little difference between your two scenarios at the macro level, unless people are saving food and water. In both cases, the retired folks require younger folks to be productive in order to eat.
An extreme thought experiment: Suppose I had saved one million dollars, but at the time I retire there's only one farmer actually working the land. It doesn't matter how many dollars I have, there's only so much food to go around.
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That kind of depends on how much land that one farmer is farming, how productive it is, how many other people there are, and how much money the other people have. Also, I know it's a thought experiment, but it really only works if there are additional constraints preventing supply of food from being elastic. Was there a disaster that left an intact population but only enough land and resources to farm a tiny patch (I mean, that's sort of happening at a slow pace in real life, but we need to be specific for
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You're missing the bigger point, which is that regardless of what the financial savings situation is, an older retired generation relies on the productivity of the younger generations. Whether that's accounted for by savings or some other mechanism doesn't change the basic fact.
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You're missing the bigger point, which is that regardless of what the financial savings situation is, an older retired generation relies on the productivity of the younger generations.
I was specifically addressing the thought experiment, not the general point. I did actually address it regardless when I wrote: "That kind of depends on how much land that one farmer is farming, how productive it is, how many other people there are..." I mean agriculture is basically _the_ example of of a massive shift in the required ratio of craft/service people to customers in history. The world went from virtually everyone working in agriculture to just a few percent working in agriculture and, bit by b
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You don't need an ever-increasing amount of farmers to feed the same number of people. In fact, as things get more efficient, you need FEWER workers to produce the same goods.
You only need MORE people if they are both supporting themselves AND paying off the debt their parents' handed them.
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I never said you needed more. Just pointing out a flaw in your analysis.
In your new scenario, to whom do they owe this debt that was handed to them?
China and Japan. $10,833 each to Japan (Score:2)
> In your new scenario, to whom do they owe this debt that was handed to them?
Japan and China, mostly. That, and those countries own the companies that the USians work for, so the US citizens are literally working for China and Japan. Because they Japanese save and invest - buying factories and things in the US. The Americans don't save, so they quite literally work for the Japanese.
There are 120 million households in the US. Just in federal government debt alone, those 120 million household owe Japan
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I thought we were speaking more generally, about the earth as a whole, in terms of older generations and younger generations.
Federal government debt, denominated in our own currency, is not something that needs to be repaid. But that's another topic.
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Ah, so you didn't read the subject line "only irresponsible nations", or the post, before replying. Gotcha.
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> In your new scenario, to whom do they owe this debt that was handed to them?
Japan and China, mostly. That, and those countries own the companies that the USians work for, so the US citizens are literally working for China and Japan.
Only 28% of U.S. Federal debt is held by any foreign country. Japan and China together hold 10.5% so that debt is mostly owed to the U.S. itself, and those big lenders Japan and China are together only a small part of the picture.
U.S foreign direct investment in China is larger than the Chinese investment in the U.S. Maybe the U.S. actually has China working for it?
This is all scaremongering with a negligible supply of facts.
Only if you're investment is stuffing cash in a ma (Score:2)
It's true that if a generation stuffed their mattresses full of cash, that wouldn't work so well. That's not what happens.
first let's look at your dumbed-down farmer example, then we can broaden it to better reflect reality.
In country C, a generation starts out working on the farm. They save half their wages and buy the farm. They own the combine, the fences, the barn, and the other agricultural buildings. They pass those things along to the next generation. It's a lot easier to do well for the generation
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You still need people to run these factories and actually make things. I'll say it again: an older retired generation relies on the productivity of the younger generation, regardless of the financial mechanisms involved.
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> n older retired generation relies on the productivity of the younger generation
Do you think they can produce and have more if:
A) They own a factory full of modern machinery and use that to produce goods
B) The work on an assembly line at a factory owned by a foreign company, such as Toyota or GE?
After having been around a while, both working at at owning a number of companies, it's been my experience that owning a factory full of modern equipment is better than working the assembly line at factory someo
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Savings without worthy investment vehicles deserving investment leads to problems. Capital markets should do the allocations right, but when governments interfere with "too big to fail" "too big to jail" policies, or use it for geopolitics, problem for everyone
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A SUDDEN INCREASE in saving due to fear about the future does indeed create a "glut" of available investment dollars that the markets aren't ready to use.
I don't think you want to argue that countries with high savings rates over the last 50 years, such as Japan, Singapore and China, have seen their economies get much WORSE in the last few decades. Nor that countries with low savings rates, like Somalia, El Salvador, and Kosovo are booming.
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Savings, loans, consumption etc have an adverse effect above a certain level.
Easily explained for loans. If I borrow 1000$ is my responsibility to pay to back. If I borrow 100 billion dollars, it is the lender's problem to collect the money back. Right?
If a country consumes more than it exports, it is going to have trade deficit and lead all sorts of issues. But if it consumes more than half
Linear (Score:3)
You want linear growth, not exponential growth. An average of one or two kids per family is fine. An average of four or five kids is not.
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Fewer kids than that, on average, means population shrinkage - which brings about its own problems...
Solution : population shrinkage (Score:2)
Population shrinkage is a solution, not a problem.
All of our actual ressource problems can be managed very well in a mildly shrinking population.
Better to do it early, by soft means, than too late, by wars or climate-related massive starvations.
Yeah, economist will have to re-think and eliminate growth ponzi schemes. And that is actually a very good thing.
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It is not *the* case that an economy's health depends on population; it's *part of* the case. There are broadly speaking three ways to increase the wealth of a country: (1) put more labor to work; (2) attract more capital investment; and (3) use labor and capital more efficiently.
This suggests there are ways to transition from a high-birthrate, low-wealth economy to a low-birthrate, high-wealth economy, initially leveraging the large underemployed population but eventually increasing the productivity of th
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Not really. The richest countries in the world have populations that increase much more slowly than the poorest, and increase only because of immigration at that.
Our economic system is based on increasing production and consumption, but people are generally happy to consume more, and we've gotten so good at producing things with fewer people that we actually have people whose job it is to get in the way.
That dependence on increasing production will get us in trouble, but not because there aren't enough peop
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Link to the referenced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Recipe for population control is simple: (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy access to birth control and porn.
Re:Recipe for population control is simple: (Score:5, Insightful)
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I avoided mentioning that because I don't want to trigger yet another red-vs-blue battle. Believe it or not, I do like to take breaks from triggering common politicos.
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And abortion. Yes. Abortion should be free and available to all without questions asked.
As a Conservative, I don't want to pay (via my taxes) so that others can have free, no questions asked induced abortions. You will find me arguing about optional abortions, but never would I propose a blanket ban. I believe optional abortions are morally wrong. I see how hard it would be to distinguish between spontaneous abortion (aka miscarriage) and induced abortion. I also fail to see how to empirically prove that an abortion was elective. I refuse to start a witch hunt every time a woman has a miscarri
Re:Recipe for population control is simple: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're an amoral piece of shit, sure.
The only thing truly making someone an amoral piece of shit is deciding what another person can and can't do with their own body.
On behalf of women everywhere, fuck you.
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The only thing truly making someone an amoral piece of shit is deciding what another person can and can't do with their own body.
On behalf of women everywhere, fuck you.
It's not just "their body", asshole. There's another one in there to consider.
"On behalf of women everywhere..." you'll continue to white knight on the Internet. And they still won't have sex with you, junior.
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There's another one in there to consider.
Do you have both of your kidneys? Why? There are other people dying because they need a kidney transplant.
Clearly, we need to have the government forcefully remove one of your kidneys so that someone else can live.
Oh wait, that would be horrible...almost like forcing women to give up their body so that someone else can live.
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It's not just "their body", asshole. There's another one in there to consider.
I hope you apply that same logic when you get cancer. That is after all a biological process happening in your body. It would be a shame to kill that mass of cells, especially considering all the good it can do for the rest of the world.
On behalf of women everywhere, fuck you.
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Why? Which religion are you wanting to be a bigot for or against on this hard question? I can see arguments for anything from conception till they can talk based on religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As for eating meat I would kind of like to know the connection you are drawing there. Do you eat fetuses or wear them? I mean to each their own but that seems rather unsanitary.
However, personally being agnostic, it seems that just like in other endeavors I have signed up to not kill people without quite
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And abortion. Yes. Abortion should be free and available to all without questions asked.
If you're an amoral piece of shit, sure.
Are you sure you mean amoral? Perhaps immoral would be better suited to the situation.
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And abortion. Yes. Abortion should be free and available to all without questions asked.
If you're an amoral piece of shit, sure.
Are you sure you mean amoral? Perhaps immoral would be better suited to the situation.
Nah, I used amoral because I think it fits their attitudes; it's not that they're going "Hrrr Drrr Satan sacrifice babies Grrrr!". They just don't give a shit that it's a baby at all. It bothers them about as much as swatting a fly.
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Abortion is safer than several forms of birth control and pregnancy.
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Easy access to birth control and porn.
The only thing you need to destroy your birthrate is to westernize. The rising standard of living will eventually make your young more worried about the next Xbox or iPhone than buying a house and having kids. And pretty soon, your family tree will be upside down.
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It's not so much "westernize" as much as it's increased economic prosperity that does it but regardless that's easier said than done. Since colonialism has ended almost every former colony has been trying to create first world wealth and they've mostly failed to some degree or another.
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On the contrary, virtually all of them are succeeding far more quickly than any of the "western" countries did.
Re: Recipe for population control is simple: (Score:2)
their solution (Score:2)
Their solution: send excess population to the US. Mainly to be CEOs of US (?) corporations.
Another way (Score:4, Informative)
And this doesn't take into account the number of women murdered each day by men, sometimes after the [go.com] woman has [cnn.com] been raped [cnn.com].
Kill off your women and you'll definitely get your population under control
Re:Another way (Score:5)
Is for Indian women to kill themselves. Every 25 minutes an Indian housewife commits suicide [bbc.com] due to domestic violence as well as being forced into marriage and lack of personal freedoms.
While the social problems are real it is worth noting that the number isn't actually high. 1 every 25minutes sounds impressive, but it results in a suicide rate less than half of the American male, only marginally less than American in general and 1.7x that of American females.
Number per unit of time doesn't make sense when comparing countries with different populations. The Indian female suicide rate is not actually alarming compared to suicide rates across the world. If anything it's alarming that it isn't higher given the social issues you mentioned.
But then India does have a lower rate of rape than the USA (even corrected for estimates of unreported cases), and a lower level of homicide too.
Re:Another way (Score:5, Informative)
Would anyone care to speculate adjusting the stats for poverty and lack of education?
In some sense, despite all that grinding abject poverty, lack of trust in the government, corrupt governance, division along caste, religion, language, India is doing well in social parameters. And it is a democracy. However badly its elections are run, the transfer of power has been smooth. No gang of fanatics of a losing party stormed its parliament voting of peaceful transfer of powers.
So if Indians start lecturing USA on democracy or China teaching free market, "no one too big to fail in China" to USA, the correct response should be to show some humility.
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I don't know why you're focusing so much on gender for suicide in India. According to the latest stats I could find (2019), India had 14.7 male suicides versus 11.1 female suicides, per 100,000 people.
FTFY.
Re: Another way (Score:2)
Oh shut the fuck up. Indian men commit suicide at a far higher ratio. The typical western idea that dark men mistreat women is the only reason you hear this kind of shit in western media because it generates funding. Seriously go fuck yourself. Domestic violence laws are the most misused laws in India. There is no way you didn't know this.
Not uniform across all demographics. (Score:5, Informative)
The most endangered demographics are the Parsis. One of the most successful, educated and affluent demographics of India. Tata family that started the India's first steel mill, that owns TATA group of companies, it owns some well known international brans like Jaguar, Land Rover, Lipton tea, belongs to that group. India's first Field Marashal Manekshaw was from that group. They are dying off. Their fertility rate is 0.6 per woman, with exogamous marriages with wealthy families of Europe and America, they are not expected to last into the next century.
Traditionally well educated sub classes like brahmins too have low fertility rates.
Traditionally wealthy merchant castes, land owning families descendant from royal and military blood lines (kshatriya castes) have slightly higher but still below replacement levels.
The sub groups with higher than replacement rates are typically poor people spread across all religions and castes.
India is a democracy, the poor and less educated people are getting the voting power, woed by politicians. Politicians find it easier to win elections by stoking the resentment and anger of one sub group against other group or against the "elites". So India is getting into very tricky situation due to population distribution shift and a democratic, but very corrupt government.
Re:Not uniform across all demographics. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The current model of continuous growth based economic model will not be sustainable. How to manage a steady state or declining population is not known. And the capital markets seem to be clueless about it.
Next to fix... (Score:2)
Social security (Score:2)
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Exactly. This is why the US needs immigration. The birth rate has dropped significantly since more US women entered the workforce plus the pill.
Recruiting hard workers and people with needed job skills from other countries successfully fills that gap.
Re: Social security (Score:2)
Assuming our civilization doesn't collapse (Score:2)
What I'm wondering is what the folks at the top will do when their fodder starts running out. If you think the guys at the top haven't considered what a permanent labor shortage would mean t
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If you think the guys at the top haven't considered what a permanent labor shortage would mean to the cost of labor, well, you don't know supply and demand.
On the contrary, experience has taught me the guys at the top have zero concerns about anything beyond 2 years from now. They may claim to have a long-term plan, but the details are left to magic asterisks. Though they do have plenty of fans who insist otherwise.
Some PROPER nerdy news right here! (Score:2)
A new low for slashdot...
Disparities (Score:2)
If we reframed this as paying poor people to get sterilized, would those comm
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An interesting TED talk about... (Score:2)
Irresponsible (Score:2)
It's still been irresponsible to grow at this rate. In an area less than the EU, they have more than 3x people. With more limited agricultural and water resources. It's not OK to grow your country's population to 1bn+ in a physical world of limited resources.
Still, much more responsible than what's happening in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, with the unhinged addition of extra billions of people during the next few decades.
Positive Article (Score:2)
I think this is the first positive article I've seen about controlling the population. Never mind that every single resource crisis we have (climate change, energy, water, housing, etc.) can be managed more easily if we would stop multiplying, but people have a lot of trouble setting aside their animal need to procreate as much as possible.
No doubt the government's absolute dependence on continued growth plays in to the situation. Every version of "the massive deficit's not a big deal man!" relies on it.
Population (Score:2)
We have too many idiots and amoral people but not enough people of good character. I feel like with increased population the higher the probability someone is born who can figure out how to solve mankinds hate. I dunno, maybe it would need large scale genetic editing instead of just education.
Anyway, I do not see how population control can fix that. As long as there are people who cannot control their feelings of anger and hate humanity is in danger. After all, humans can be extinction level zeroed with jus
Historic perspective (Score:2)
I studied this back in college, I'm sure they'd like to avoid going back to these kinds of methods. [bbc.com]