The Population Bomb Was a Dud

Was it really? Will Ehrlich be held to account for his wrong prediction? Did he really misunderstand human potential?

 

Two-thirds of world population will live in cities by 2050...

U.N.: Two-thirds of world population will live in cities by 2050
May 16, 2018 -- Two-thirds of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050, a United Nations report on sustainable urban planning said Wednesday.

 

Wrong. The developed countries got their population growth under control; in many of these countries there are even birthrates below the replacement rate.

The Third World continues to have a population growth problem, but have in the last 20 to 40 years or so been emptying out their excess population into the more developed countries in the world: mainly Western Europe and the Anglosphere (Australia, Canada, the U.S., etc.).

But this can't continue on forever. Eventually all these countries are going to fill up. And besides that, these immigrants have higher fertility rates in the new countries they come to than the people that were previously living there.

What will happen in these Third World countries when the overflow valve is shut off, and other countries can no longer take in any more of their increasing population?
Looks like Pakistan has an overpopulation problem

 

Mass die offs either intentional or unintentional.

 

Analysis into over-population still plays an integral part in analysis into climate change, particularly in showing the limitations of standard economic analysis. The important point, mind you, is that it has to be combined with over-consumption analysis. Imagine, for example, if the developing world did mimic the US in its level of consumptionism? What would happen?

 

Japan which has had negative population growth for a while is now trying to import people to fill job vacancies.We here in the U.S. have the lowest birthrate in our history of 60.2 live births for every 1,000 women of child bearing age,3% lower than the record low of 2016.The teen birth rate is at an all time low 70% lower than the peak year of 1991.China has a huge male to female imbalance brought on by the one child policy where female babies were terminated so their population will continue to decline.India will soon be the most populated country.

 

They're not very anxious about importing lots of foreigners though. Many Japanese live in Tokyo, or a few other high-density cities, and don't have a lot of space, pretty cramped living spaces for a developed country. There have also long been real estate affordability issues, and, although they struggle to find enough labor, the amount of money a lot of workers make is difficult to live off of in that high cost of living area. An aging population and declining demographic is challenging, but Japan doesn't know how else to deal with it. Crime rates are also very low and Japan doesn't have the type of social problems that a lot of other big cities in the world have, and Japan doesn't want them.

 

But they do want profitable businesses selling to as much of the world as is possible, an increasingly aging population does not help that??

 

It would seem they prefer cultural stability over profitability and money.

 

It probably has just as much to do with real estate issues. Bringing in more immigrants would no doubt further exacerbate real estate prices in the big cities. Japanese are so crowded right now, they could scarcely tolerate being jammed into smaller living spaces.

Furthermore, if many Japanese are already struggling to live there, foreign migrant workers would essentially be living in conditions of abject poverty. Not necessarily the type of thing you want to have in a city, even if your country does have a labor shortage.
There'd probably be a bunch of social issues and negative impacts on all the other residents in the building resulting from 10 people crowding together in an apartment that's already very small.

What Japan has been doing though is bringing in Filipino nurses on temporary guest worker permits to help take care of the old in the country's more rural areas.

 

A massive contagion will wipe out most of it.

 

Ehrlich predicted global starvation and mass die offs would occur in the 1970's and 1980's. We are still here. He was wrong. The population bomb was a dud, just more fear mongering by leftists.

 

The population bomb was a dud in that it didn't blow up and wipe out humanity but our overpopulation is a big issue. We have spread out over nearly every habitable area of Earth with agriculture to feed our masses and have displaced other species in the process. Elephants in Africa have especially been victims of this and Europe has crowded out numerous species while America fights over keeping the last few wolves alive. Tigers in India are out of room and the list could go on forever on every continent in every country.

Oh and let's not forget the so called C02 pollution from all our planes trains and automobiles that carry us all over the world. The same people that say that is dooming us are busy having more babies as we speak.

 

It's interesting to watch this dynamic play out. On the left, the competing necessity of ever expanding the political base premised on subservient dependency requires an ever increasing population to exploit. And, at the same time, it fundamentally contradicts their entitled notion of reserved opulence for themselves. Ever wonder why the elite/left build gated communities? To keep all of their imported squalor far away from their tranquil luxury.

And for the rest of us, we simply do the actual work of cleaning up after these dolts, figuring out how to improve production capacity, etc, lower the costs of density, etc. And for many of us, a real sense of conservation has been instilled. Which is then constantly tested by the continued demands of the liberal elite in their vain efforts to retain what they believe is their birthright.

 

Wolves are proliferating in North America, so that part of your narrative is false. In terms of CO2, in 2016, the U.S. had the greatest reduction in CO2 emissions in the world. While Europe, China and India produced more CO2, we reduced our CO2 emissions.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/art..._gas_is_slashing_us_co2_emissions_110310.html

 

Wolves are moving in from Canada and are being shot for deprivation of cattle and sheep as fast as they move in. Idaho even killed most of a pack in the Frank Church wilderness to protect the elk guiding industry. We have not left enough room for these top tier predators to thrive.
As for C02 emissions wherever population is growing so are emissions. On a smaller scale wherever a family is growing so are emissions. If a warmer cult couple has two kids and they each have two kids there are eight people instead of two driving cars, heating and cooling homes, eating etc.

 

Look at the Eastern Europe phenomenon. Chronic adversity and lack of economic opportunity lead to hoplessness and fatalism and average low fertility rates below the replacement rate.
We could already see that happening in parts of America, among certain ethnic groups in particular.

Of course there are different types of poverty. Some types of poverty can lead to people having too many children (as seen in Mexico in the 1970s, for example).

Yes, yes, I know, sounds like an inexplicable and fascinating paradox. But I think it probably has something to do with the ratio of job opportunity to men, relative to women, relative to cost of living and affordability.

Lots of female employment opportunity combined with low family income and high costs of living would be expected to suppress birthrates the most. It also happens to be the combination that would make people the most miserable.

 

He won't, and he did. The entire world could live in an area the size of the US. Corporations and Governments have set most of our planets land into reserve- innaccessible by humans. Resource scarcity is being manufactured by the elite so they can control us. We're ever so slowly being corralled back into feudalism by the ancient royalties we dethroned during the renaissance. They want their thrones and slaves back.

 

Spin spin spin. Ehrlich made precise predictions, they did not come true. He failed.

 

So if someone makes precise predictions and they do not come true their entire argument and logical line of reasoning should be ignored.

Even John Stuart Mills and Adam Smith made predictions that didn't exactly come true.
And people who do make predictions that happen to come true usually get almost entirely ignored. (Like Ross Perot in the 1992 Presidential debate when he said the experts he talked to said the trade imbalance would have to end in 14 or 15 years when wages went down and the country got poorer, and then the Recession happened in 2007)

Theoretically. But quality of life would really suffer.
And one can question whether there is really any economic system (known to man) that is efficient enough to allow that to happen.
The plain truth is that people actually need a lot of space. If not directly, than indirectly, as numerous industries that supply things to cities need a lot of space to operate economically and keep prices down.
I can guarantee you that if you blockaded a densely populated city the entire population within would quickly descend into dire poverty and they would have a very difficult time being able to be economically self-sufficient. (Even allowing for the possibility of blockading multiple large cities but still allowing those many cities to trade with each other)

I don't think that's truly the issue. If you privatized all those lands, it wouldn't be another 50 years before there were the same problems as before.
While it is true that in the U.S., in terms of area, the federal government owns a large percentage of land, the majority of that land is located in desolate low value areas, much of it in the mountainous and desert West with little rainfall and limited availability of water.

Just suppose hypothetically, for the sake of argument, that government owned 50% of the land in a protected reserve inaccessible to humans, and you were trying to make the argument that that was holding back the economy. It seems to me that if the other 50% of land held in private hands didn't seem to be "enough", there's not really any reason why doubling the land area would solve all the problems. If government held 90% of the land, you would obviously have a point, but since that is not the case, you're left having to explain why the land that is privatized doesn't seem to be enough.
And what you're proposing seems to be a quick fix, a one-time solution that can't be used again.

I see this issue the same way I see taxes. If taxes are at 40% and the current government budget is far from "enough", there's no reason why doubling it would make it enough either. In fact, even if taxes were 100% of income (only theoretically possible) they would still not be "enough".

What I'm really trying to say is, if 100% would be perfect than why isn't 50% enough?
(to state it as simply as possible and with as few words)

I'm not really making a good argument here, but hopefully this is enough for your to put things together and realize you're not really right.
It's just a tantalizing illusion.

I do believe you are right though to point towards land as important to the economy, but it has more to do with it in other ways that are different from the one you're thinking of.

 

Ehrlich made very clear predictions, that there would be global famine and mass deaths starting in the 1970's and going into the 1980's, with a huge reduction in the global human population.

That's a very precise prediction. He didn't say "maybe", or "possibly" or "sometime in the future". He did not say there would be mass deaths and famine "somewhere in the world".

He was precise. He was totally wrong, wildly wrong. His entire argument can be ignored.

 

So, you're claiming that a finite world can have an infinite population.

No wonder nobody pays any attention to your side.

 

Depends on quality of life you want I guess. Theoretically we could stack people in small housing containers like cord wood and feed them some mixture to keep them alive to a point pushing infinity but I doubt many would like that life. Then again as it happened generations would adjust and think they had a good life in their little pod with their tube of slime delivered daily for substance. Glad I'll be long dead by then.

 

LOL, foolish attempt to mislead and change the subject.

Ehrlich made precise predictions, he was hugely wrong, his argument was flawed.

Look at it the other way.

His argument was so flawed it led to wildly inaccurate conclusions and predictions. His entire argument and its foundation led him so far astray that it can be discarded.

 

It depends more precisely what you mean by "Ehrlich's predictions".
He was wrong in a specific sense but (perhaps) not in a general sense.