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

science.org

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

#251

Post by paxys »

cute_boi wrote: post #226
paxys wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just by simple numbers – no, you don't need a sustainable population rate. We were perfectly fine as a species when the population was half or a tenth or hundredth of what it is now, and will still thrive if it gets to that again. The problem is the demographic breakdown. If the rate of growth is decreasing it means that when your current population ages and exits the labor pool there won't be enough young people to…

do we need that labor pool considering we are progressing in technology? 100 years ago there were no factories we see today etc. But day by day with technological advancement we are automating lot of things. So I really don't think we need that much labor we required yesterday. Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources…

While technology has definitely made things better over the last few decades, we are still very, very far from the post-scarcity society that we like to envision. The majority of people on the planet today are still doing back breaking labor in order to survive.

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

#252

Post by adolph »

gromitss wrote: post #249
motohagiography wrote: post #243

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.

> We need about a tenth of the humans we currently have on the planet

Which tenth?

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

#254

Post by greedo »

dcist wrote: post #224
naravara wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young people don't vote as much partly due to lack of habit, but also due to their jobs having less flexible scheduling and voter registration rolls being tied to where you live. Old people live in places longer, young people move more. It's simply a much bigger paperwork hurdle to get registered, find your polling place, etc. And that's assuming you can take time off and politicians have actually bothered trying to…

It's ridiculously easy to vote and with early voting being extended for WEEKS and mail-in voting also an option, there is no excuse other than apathy, ignorance, or laziness. If you can submit a tax return, you can vote.

This is not the case for many voters in the US. Not all states offer early or mail-in voting.

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

#255

Post by soperj »

ElectronShak wrote: post #227
soperj wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton's laws are not fact, but scientific theory that's been tested through experiment and observation over hundreds of years. His convictions are just opinion.

For me, the problem is the double standard that is applied to historical writings; Mention Scripture, "Oh, those are just someone's words", Mention a scientific manuscript from the same time "Oh, my, what a genius"! How many of us actually get to prove newtons laws for ourselves? How many of us consciously wake up and say, today I will test out gravity? But isn't the law of Gravity real, yes it is! Thing is, most of…

Anyone can test it though, and if it's proven wrong, it will overturn the science. There's no double standard there, just because you choose not to test it doesn't mean others don't. They have tested newton's laws, a very large number of times, in a variety of different ways.

How do you prove scripture, especially when they contradict each other?

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

#257

Post by otikik »

gromitss wrote: post #245
zpeti wrote: 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…

As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.

"is going to be"?

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

#258

Post by soperj »

dotnet00 wrote: post #220
soperj wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this, but then I look at how rich countries treat their old people, and generally it's stuff them in retirement homes, which seem like awful places.

I agree, but that isn't much of a counter-point, if anything a population that is majority old people will only make that worse since the increased burden on the young would breed more resentment towards older people. Would you rather old people be dying of starvation/due to lack of healthcare because the country isn't rich enough to support them fully than living in old age homes?

They're going to die regardless. Is it better to die younger from lack of health care than die older with dementia and bed sores? I've only witnessed the latter. Doesn't seem like something I'd like to go through.

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

#259

Post by vidarh »

pzo wrote: post #235
vidarh wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not the number. The issue is the rate of change.

I would stay both: rate of change (up or down) and overall size of population - there has to be a ceiling somewhere - if you start filling your bucket with water even slowly at one point it will start overflowing.

There has to be some sort of ceiling, sure, but the point of focusing on a rate of change is that the ceiling is constantly moving too, no matter what you consider the "ceiling".

There are many ceilings. E.g. there's the carrying capacity of earth. But that carrying capacity changes with technological improvements. There's the carrying capacity of the solar system that changes as we get the technology to settle more and more other planets. There's the number of housing units currently available, and the amount of food currently produced, and so on.

But a lot of these current ceilings are highly malleable given time to address them, which is why what matters is the rate of change.

Even if one assumes there is a hard ceiling on capacity for earth that no technological advance can overcome, as long as the rate of change is low enough we can bypass that by building off-earth colonies fast enough .

So ultimately, while you're right there are ceilings, it's still the rate of change that matters: We can build or obtain more buckets to move water to, but we need enough time to do so.

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

#260

Post by dadjoker »

So sad to see this happen. Paul Ehrlich made a similar prognostication that never came to pass. There are many places in the world that did a similar thing and had to work to reverse it (S. Korea, Russia), by actually paying families to have children, and China recently reversed its draconian one child policy because they have seen first hand the problems it creates.

Hopefully India doesn't run into the same problem down the road, because one a population starts to decline, history has shown that it is not reversible.

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