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India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

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Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated. Can someone point me to a referenc…

> "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID" My favourite take on this: "I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons. If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1] But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both…

> But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both logistical and political).

Exactly, deciding the cause of a single death is a messy complex task that doesn't have correct answers. Deciding the number of deaths due to a cause is much simpler and can be done most of the times.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? At some point yes we do. > There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society. > here is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Onc…

We entered the 20c with ~1.5Bp, and didn't hit 3 until we were ready to land on the moon. We have a loooong way to go before we run out of people to run an advanced economy. As for the grey-aristocracy: it's already here, just unevenly distributed. Bruce Sterling described it vividly in Holy Fire (1996). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359390.Holy_Fire

If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again.

In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#303

This is good to a degree. But it does mean India joins much of the rest of the world with sub-replacement fertility with just a few outliers. The challenge now switches to how to move from sub-replacement to sustainable fertility. Japan and South Korea are leaders in sub-replacement fertility with not that much success in finding a path towards sustainable population. Both I believe are still dropping. This is the gr…

why did my dental technician (low paid service job with minimal requirements) happily tell me she has five children? their father "lost his green card" and left.. she was happy, it was one of the first things she told me.. I did not ask about that..

meanwhile, people from my own similar background are not getting married, not having children, and even more extreme things like that.. yet the average education in my group is a Master degree from a good college

handwaving about "leaders in whatever" and "the answer is more education" are just wishful thinking and denial, in my direct experience

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty great incentive. From your article: "As part of the measures, young couples will be offered interest-free loans of 10m forint (£27,400; $36,000), to be cancelled once they have three children." The average household income in Hungary appears to be $7,100. So essentially they can get a potential 5 years of income for having kids. Massive incentive.

> So essentially they can get a potential 5 years of income for having kids. Massive incentive. Depends how you look at it. If you're nursing, it takes 5 years to have three kids anyway.

Perhaps the incentives will lead to a drop in breastfeeding rates.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read Robert Caro's excellent volumes about LBJ. You wouldn't think so, but they are real page turners. And yes, they will leave you with the impression that LBJ was not a wonderful person.

Almost as if no word leaders are "wonderful people". There are a few exceptions, like Jimmy Carter and APJ Abdul Kalam.

Jimmy Carter did some bad stuff too. From his Wikipedia page:

> During Carter's presidency, the U.S. continued to support Indonesia as a cold war ally, in spite of human rights violations in East Timor. The violations followed Indonesia's December 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor. It did so even though antithetical to Carter's stated policy "of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world."

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#306

Has anyone stepped back and critically considered the axioms a worldview that celebrates depopulation of a people? You would have to believe it's technically not genocide if you aren't pulling a physical lever, and because you have been party to "managing" it with incentives, you haven't terminated entire genetic lineages using what is essentially deception - which further implies those lives and lineages have no int…

Yes I can. A child unborn is not a child killed so it doesn’t fit your classification of “genocide”. We need about a tenth of the humans we currently have on the planet unless we figure out interplanetary colonization. This is a way that is almost entirely painless and can be achieved with almost no coercion. It’s a panacea we desperately need.

There are some indiginous populations who would probably like a word about this reasoning.

It's like advocates of these policies don't think they're engaged in defacto genocide because of some abstract legalism around their imagined distance from it. I'd say so-called progressives should really examine whether they are the baddies, but it seems to come back to just being nihilists.

The only thing you seem to care about is that you think you aren't getting caught.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world that already has Teslas running around the roads and solar farms being built for profit, but that doesn't already have economical carbon capture, it turns out that renewables are actually the conservative way out.

I mean to solve climate change we need a lot of things. More that solar and wind. Frankly we need to be carbon negative, which will require some ccs, reforestation, land management, fixing the reefs, and more. It's a complex problem that if you treat it as being simple you're taking steps backwards.

The simple part is that we need to stop gathering geologically sequestered hydrocarbons and putting them in the atmosphere.

I have made an effort to understand climate science. Personally, I think the deference to simulations and experts has been hugely detrimental. The important questions seem to not need either PhDs or simulations. Very rudimentary education for anyone who has a science background suffices. Know the sun's rough temperature and the Earth's rough temperature, plus black-body ration, and you know the mechanism of heating. Know a weather-channel level of humidity temperature dependence, and you can know the water vapor feedback.

So yes, cows, concrete, and steel are going to be problems if we solve fossil fuels. But this seems intentionally misleading. Oil comes from a mile underground and we put it in the atmosphere. We've got to stop doing that fast, before we're locked into future effects, like crop productivity declines.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated. Can someone point me to a referenc…

> "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID" My favourite take on this: "I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons. If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1] But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both…

[deleted]

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#309
post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility. I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards l…

Massive population is causing massive issues.

The root cause of all current environmental issues is the massive population growth we've been experiencing.

Even topping out at 9-10 billion seems very challenging. Ideally, in order to protect the climate, environment at large, and quality of life we should aim to bring population down by a few billions...

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#310
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m fairly sure they work their asses off already. Maybe not that gets measured in GDP thought.

I was going to say this. We have this weird habit in the West of trivializing raising one's own children, as if that's not "real work". A lot folks would rather raise their children instead of outsourcing it to strangers just to work a job they hate.

I don't think anyone is trivializing it... but the government can't tax homemakers to pay for medicare, pensions, and other social services which is the relevant point of the discussion.
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