Anger as moderator says China's one-child policy good for planet

[goebfwai]

I'd prefer to see birth control than Soylent green.

Me too! I suspect thought that a lot of discussions about over-population and the environment will prove quite academic in years to come. I think trying to convince the Dr Strangeloves in government in charge of world nuclear arsenals from actually using them this century will prove an uphill struggle that the people, protest and peace movements will lose, sadly just as easily as the arguments were lost against Iraq War II. This is something that will have quite a major and permanent impact on world population sizes.

I think the resource wars of the 21st Century could be a whole lot messier and destructive than those of the 20th, because we're going to get increased scarcity and pressure on water and food, as well land vanishing beneath the waves thrown into the equation. Since the dawn of time, nations, just like a starving man, have fought tooth and nail over such things.

The drive towards a new world war - if it comes - will come sudden and fast, as quickly as the global economic crisis developed last month, but it wont come out of a clear blue sky.

Lovelock's ideas about the earth ultimately being self-balancing/self-regulating etc seem very pertinent to this subject. Mankind has grown numerous, and having not learned how to work in harmony with nature, and share and share alike, is at serious risk of not being able to feed the world.

And it needn't be so.

There are just far too many rich people and countries trying to keep too big a share of the earth's resources for themselves.

http://uk.youtube.com/user/11thhouraction

 

[Jessiedog]

Well no, it's the old people who do that, by the simple expedient of not dying. Selfish buggers.

if you're making the rather trivial point that old people don't breed, you are correct - but you're missing the point. When people breed they add +1 to the population. When people die they add -1 to the population. If they don't die, the effect on the population size is exactly the same as having a child - but there is no future tax-payer produced on the way.

I was making the point that with zero births and zero immigration, "ageing" - in and of itself - would (rather obviously,) produce zero increase in population.

Stating the obvious perhaps, but countering the assertion that "ageing" increases population. In and of itself, it can't.



Woof

 

[ymu]

I was making the point that with zero births and zero immigration, "ageing" - in and of itself - would (rather obviously,) produce zero increase in population.

Stating the obvious perhaps, but countering the assertion that "ageing" increases population. In and of itself, it can't.



Woof

Wrong again. With zero births and zero immigration, the population would decline. If life expectancy increased, it would decline more slowly, thus the population would be higher than it would have been had the increase in life expectancy never occurred.

You need to make everyone immortal for your hypothetical situation to prove what you want it to prove.

Think of it this way. Take a parallel universe where everything was exactly the same as it is here and now until a quantum event sparked a massive increase in human life expectancy. Will the population of the parallel universe start to get bigger, smaller, or stay the same by comparison to our own?

 

[Cid]

Surely this a hopeless semantic quibble...

Clearly a population will get larger if people stay old, but there still needs to be the input adding new population... without that input the population will not grow, it will decline. It doesn't matter how long the time period is (well unless you make your subjects invincible), it will not grow.

 

[Yelkcub]

think of a conveyor belt with babies dropping onto it every 10 seconds. A big meat grinder is at the other end.
The length of the conveyor belt is lifespan. By making the conveyor belt longer, the total number of babies on it increases.

So do the babies take off or not?

 

[Cid]

Depends whether you strap them to the wheels or put them in the turbines.

 

[Jessiedog]

Wrong again. With zero births and zero immigration, the population would decline. If life expectancy increased, it would decline more slowly, thus the population would be higher than it would have been had the increase in life expectancy never occurred.

You need to make everyone immortal for your hypothetical situation to prove what you want it to prove.

Think of it this way. Take a parallel universe where everything was exactly the same as it is here and now until a quantum event sparked a massive increase in human life expectancy. Will the population of the parallel universe start to get bigger, smaller, or stay the same by comparison to our own?

Nah!


My point stands.

But perhaps I still need need to clarify, let me try again.


I was making the point that with zero births and zero immigration, "ageing" - in and of itself - would (rather obviously,) produce no increase in population.

Stating the obvious perhaps, but countering the assertion that "ageing" increases population. In and of itself, it can't.


Does that work?



Woof

 

[ymu]

Ah - sorry, I missed your point, because you seem to have missed the point of the thread entirely.

Ageing does not cause the population to grow at a faster rate, but an increase in life expectancy does.

 

[Cid]

I think it all goes back to the issue of how you halt population growth and how you can't remove the factor of old people whereas you can modify the child input...

 

[Jessiedog]

Ah - sorry, I missed your point, because you seem to have missed the point of the thread entirely.

Ummmm.

Nope.

It's about whether the "one child" policy in China has been good for the planet.

On a short-term macro-level, it has. On an individual level, it hasn't. And IMHO, the longer-term social consequences of such policies may negate any short-term macro benefits.

Ageing does not cause the population to grow at a faster rate, but an increase in life expectancy does.

Ageing does not cause population to grow at all, neither does an increase in life expectancy - once the myriad of potential confounding factors (such as childbirth and immigration,) are accounted for.


Surely?




Woof

 

[xenon]

Isn't it a classic economics argument that as living standards rise, birthrate declines?

Of course, that same rise in living standards complicates things regarding sustainability. Tricky.

And, for instance. A large family in say somewhere like rural Portugal will consume a lot less than a childless well off couple in the UK.

 

[elbows]

I worry a lot about these issues because global population and specific national demographics are big issues, with big political implications, but its real hard for their to be a sensible mainstream debate about such things. And as most policies about such stuff would cause horror, there could be stealth policies or at least paranoid fear of stealth policies.

Yes I think there is a lot of stuff out there talking about reasons why some countires have high birth rate, eg a lot of the kids will die, or needing them for economic reasons. Baby girls being killed for 'practical reasons' is one of the most horrific things I ever heard about. War is another great horror that can have a big effect, obviously, though its unclear whether we'll have another war like WW1 and 2 which left huge mark on population numbers.

And yet Europe and some other places like Japan face the problem of ageing populations, our demographic timebomb is of a different kind. My Mum is part of the baby boomer generation, they are starting to retire, this has implications, and is wedded to debates on immigration which can go on forever. I was born in 1975, near bottom of the dip in births in recent UK history, and have just one brother.

If post-industrialisation turns out to be deindustrialization in the longterm, then maybe we will see trends int he West reverse, at just the time that there become fewer resources to support life. And thats without even touching on the monty python 'every sperm is sacred' sketch, and the religious angle.

 

[ymu]

Ummmm.

Nope.

It's about whether the "one child" policy in China has been good for the planet.

On a short-term macro-level, it has. On an individual level, it hasn't. And IMHO, the longer-term social consequences of such policies may negate any short-term macro benefits.

What has the one child policy got to do with it? That's a horrible horrible solution to the problem of over-population - but it's not the problem itself.

Ageing[/I] does not cause population to grow at all, neither does an increase in life expectancy - once the myriad of potential confounding factors (such as childbirth and immigration,) are accounted for.


Surely?

No, a confounding factor is something quite different.

Techie and skippable explanation of a confounding factor:
For example, when studies showed that the mini-pill caused more DVT when it was supposed to cause less, one of the obvious confounding factors was that the more expensive mini-pill was generally prescribed to women who were at higher risk of DVT by GPs who were very aware of DVT and therefore much more likely to detect sub-clinical clots. So being at high risk of DVT was causing women to be on the mini-pill as well as causing them to get DVT - it is a confounding factor which cannot be analysed out. It means we cannot use unrandomised studies to study this question.

In this case, we're not talking about a confounding factor, we're talking about two different factors which independently affect the population size - how many people are born/immigrate, and how long they live for.

Imagine a bath with a cracked plug hole which leaks. The water going into the bath is the birth rate and the water leaking out is the death rate. Now adjust the taps so that the total amount of water (the population size) stays level - ie births and deaths balance each other out perfectly and there is no change in the population size.

Now put some putty around the plug hole to reduce the leakage (the death rate). Don't touch the taps, don't empty a bucket into the bath, don't change the size of the bath - just reduce the amount of water leaking away (the death rate).

What happens?

Isn't it a classic economics argument that as living standards rise, birthrate declines?

Of course, that same rise in living standards complicates things regarding sustainability. Tricky.

And, for instance. A large family in say somewhere like rural Portugal will consume a lot less than a childless well off couple in the UK.

True, but if we reduced income inequality we'd all be a lot closer to the world median income and consuming a fuck of a lot less anyway. And we'd have more incentive to find sustainable ways of living because we wouldn't be rich and powerful enough to steal other peoples' resources and keep them for ourselves.

 

[elbows]

Well on that note I think that, tragically, life expectancy has probably peaked in most places. More births and a lot more deaths in future. Ive no idea how long the world population will keep increasing for, not sure when it will peak, maybe there will be 9 billion people one day but most people dying much younger, or maybe the total alive at any one time will fall dramatically. I do fear that if I manage to live another 20 years I could live to hear of several billion people being wiped out for one reason or another, or maybe I will be one of them.

 

[goebfwai]

I read a news story from some medics who said because of the diabetic epidemic (is it 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 in the UK who have it now?) life expectancy looks set to decline. Even fit people seem to be getting it now.

I would be highly concerned if Chinese state-capitalist measures were used to promote a one-child policy in the UK. People wont stand for it. They are already a bit peed off with a lot of nanny state measures that have come in this past decade anyway. Instinctively, based on the prevailing circumstances and climate, overall couples tend to self-regulate when it comes to having children.

Re deindustrialization, in tandem with it and helping to perpetuate it, will be increasing
advances in technologicalisation. This will lead to even fewer jobs as the increasing
complexity of technology, e.g. silicon chips, means large parts of the manufacturing
process are automised.

Ultimately it's a net downward spiral in terms of job creation and an upward spiral in terms of profit maximisation. While new products and new inventions create new opportunities and new jobs, the efficiency and stream-lining inherent in the very technology that manufactures that new technology means there always be increasingly less human input required to create it. A highly efficient distribution matrix fuelled by still relatively cheap oil means there are less people required to distribute what is produced.

Ultimately deindustrialisation/technologicalisation eliminates more jobs than it creates, while increasing profit and return on investment capital. But human capital, human lives are left bereft. This is what is behind the rise of what is termed the underclass or the socially excluded. Blinkered and unbridled free-market capitalism creates a growing army of humanity that are left surplus and excluded from a share, let alone a fair share of what is produced in capitalisms merry-go-round.

The moves towards an increasing digitisation of all forms of mass media is another thing that is looming on the horizon that will have a revolutionary impact on our lives. While there are some benefits that that change will bring, the decimation of the printed book and newspaper industry (and of course look what's happened with the music industry) is going to lead slowly but surely to a significant decline in people working in certain areas of that industry.

All we can do I suppose is try and adapt to change. Governments have a part to play though in creating jobs through command economy measures like nationalisation and national investment that we have seen. But for there to be any hope of producing enough to go around on a society level, there is also going to have to be a massive move towards promoting enterprise, self-employment and helping new small business creation.