The Population bomb - where it is still explodes and where it has reversed

I will put part of the long article below this comment. Here is the summary:

In the West and parts of Asia, there are declining birth rates that now have gone beyond what is considered "critical." In Europe, Japan and China as examples, the rapidly aging population combined with young people optioning to not have children means increasingly there will be no one to service the elderly or keep the economy running. Most of Europe and Japan expect at least a 20% decline in population for the next generation. In a few, the decline is as much as 50% in one generation.
While 20% may not seem significant or even desirable, it really means the number of elderly will literally double while the future work force is nearly cut in half. Europe, in part, responded by importing millions of baby-making worker Muslims not only to fill jobs but to have babies. The end result of this is Europe will become Islamic in the long run and anti-secular Islamic as they are not adopting generally European secular atheism.

However, the story is the exact opposite in African, where the populations are doubling each generation. Remember the math of doubling a penny every day for a month and you have a million dollars. What if, instead, you start with billions and double it every 25 years? The projections go so high that there soon will be a complete reversal of populations. Wealthy industrial nations populations completely collapsing - while the poorest regions of the world face massive unrestrained population explosions.

Yet few discuss the massive implications of these realities.
1. The population of Europe (at least indigenous Europeans) reduced by 50% in half a century - and that population largely elderly. The same for S. Korea and nearly so for Japan and China.
2. Population growth is exploding in the under developed, uneducated and impoverished regions of the world.- population growth literally in the billions and primarily young people.

"The magic figure for demographers is 2.1 births per couple. That, allowing for the fact that some girls die before they reach child-bearing age, is the figure at which a population replaces itself. In Europe the last time that fertility was above replacement level was in the mid-1960s. But now, for the first time on record, birthrates in southern and eastern Europe have dropped below 1.3 – well below the 1.5 which the United Nations has marked as the crisis point. If things continue the population there will be cut in half in just 45 years. In Italy, one recent survey put it at 1.2. Cities such as Milan and Bologna recorded less than 1, the lowest birthrates anywhere.

Things are as bleak in Japan. There the total fertility rate declined by nearly a third between 1975 and 2001, from 1.91 to 1.33. The average family size has remained the same, but there are fewer families. Half of Japanese women have not married by the age of 30, and 20 per cent of them are not marrying ever.

But it is not just the developed world. The birthrate is plummeting in east Asia, too, in countries which were, until three decades ago, considered poor. Overall in Asia the fertility rate fell from 2.4 in 1970 to 1.5 today. China's rate is down from 6.06 to 1.8 and declining. Thailand is now 1.5. Singapore, Taiwan and Burma are similar. The lowest is South Korea with only 1.1 children per couple.

"South East Asia has plummeted to levels it took Europe 150 years to reach in just 30 years," says Dr Jane Falkingham, Professor of Demography and International Social Policy at the University of Southampton. Alarmed by this extremely low fertility, South Korea has slashed government spending on birth control. Singapore is now offering tax rebates to couples with more than two children. Japan is piling money into nurseries and childcare.

But the New Demography does not mean that the population explosion may be about to become a population implosion. It is more subtle – and gives more interesting pointers about how we are to live – than that.

There is still rapid population growth in many parts of the world. Birthrates are still very high in Africa. At their peak in the 1970s Kenya had a growth rate of 4.1 per cent, which was doubling its population every 17 years. The rate is down but 11 African countries still have a whopping growth rate of 2.6 per cent a year. Populations in Uganda, Burkina Faso and Congo will treble or more by 2050. And India is set to leapfrog China as the world's most populous nation by 2050 when its population is expected to top 1,750,000,000 people. (China will be 1,400 million, and the third biggest, the United States, around 420 million.)"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/population-paradox-europes-time-bomb-888030.html

These are such stunning and devastating statistics maybe they are just too difficult to grasp the implications of. The industrial and advanced countries of the world are literally collapsing in population decline and a rapidly aging population that will increasingly stress all social programs. At the same time, under developed and impoverished countries will grow in numbers by the BILLIONS - mostly young people - impoverished, uneducated young people.

In Europe, it seems the older generation has resolved to the accept the inevitable end of their liberal secular culture and accepted that 3rd world theocratic (Muslim) immigrants are the only way to save themselves in their old age - at the expense of the extinction of their own culture and secular liberalism, as well as accepting they are destined to increasingly be a minority of little to no political or social influence among an intolerant, theocratic new population majority.

Is that the reality? That western culture, values and society are outright unstoppable doomed? It would seem so. I've posted many times that it is clear the Europe as it has been for thousands of years is gone. People just don't accept it yet.

The USA? Mexifornia may just be the first stage of Amerifornia as the unstoppable future reality. Nor is this about race and ethnicity as some try to claim. It is about a total replacing of the social culture, laws, government, economic systems, civil rights and secular government replaced with theocratic government. The "liberal secular world" is vanishing - essentially having self sterilized itself. The theocratic and anti-secular dogmatic world is growing exponentially allowed by modern medicine and promoted in theology and some would claim ignorance.

Already, starvation threatens a billion of those people. What happens when that become two, three billion starving people? We have seen the pictures of roads flooded with young, poor, uneducated, militant and anti-secular Muslim men flooding into Europe. What if that number also comes to include a billion poor, uneducated and militant young male Africans?

We may be seeing a rapid end of what centuries from now may be seen as the extinct "golden era" of secular liberal civil and human rights that vanished away in this century. A new social theocratic "dark ages" may be at hand.

 

The thing is, in an interconnected world with open movement of people, even if one country manages to get their population growth rates under control it won't end up making much difference if other countries are not able to do the same. You'll basically have some countries being able to continually dump their excess population growth onto other countries that were more responsible.

Look at countries like Brazil and Indonesia where their populations are resulting in severe degradation of rain forest. The people are so poor they don't have the luxury being too much concerned about the rainforest they are clearing down.

 

That's NOT the reason the rain forests are disappearing there. It's due to global market liberalism. Those areas have great agricultural potential, and the rest of the world want cheap food. It's mostly for exports.

Those rain forests would be chopped down no matter how few people lived there.

 

There is no population bomb set to destroy civilization as we know it. But if you are so concerned about the third world countries where birth rates are high then advocated for fossil fuel power generation installation which provides electrical power 24/7/365 which is critically necessary for the rapid improvement in the standard of living. This is will naturally reduce birth rates as has been the case throughout history.

 

What a load of bobbins! Be my guest in attempting to show the weaknesses of conservative policy-making, inspired by neoliberal environmentalism. But there are two issues. First, rather than being an issue of overpopulation, its actually one of Western overconsumptionism (and its part in hindering economic development). Second, the attempt to refer to religion destroyed your attempt at objective comment.

 

Over consumption ?? Our standard of living in the west is too high ?? And that’s hindering economic development (in the third world) ?? That’s ridiculous.

 

Sounds like you're completely unaware of sustainability and how its applied to economics.

 

That bogus notion has been pedaled for centuries. It's as bogus now as it has always been.

 

Has it now? Can you refer me to a political economist who applied overconsumption analysis?

 

Can you point to any actual data showing any evidence of overconsumption threatening the human race ??

 

No, don't hide now. You made the claim. Here it is again: "That bogus notion has been pedaled for centuries". I've merely asked you to support that statement. Can you refer to just one political economist who "pedaled the bogus notion" or were you talking guff?

 

Malthus started this bogus notion followed by Ehrlich and now by many global warming alarmists. Their predictions of the demise of the human race have been a joke.

 

Malthus did not refer to overconsumption. He's used to refer to overpopulation (athough to be fair he's underestimated as his growth theory analysis is still employed). Amazing how you attack your own argument. Its as if it isn't well thought out...

 

Really - Malthus's claimed that over population would result in consumption requirements that could not be matched by resources. That's never happened and will not happen. There is no such thing as over consumption except in the hallowed ivory halls of academia where people behave like water molecules in a pressure field and thus their behavior can be predicted assuming there are functional relationships with defined variables.

 

It didn't happen because of the tremendous advances in agricultural technology, and then shortly after the industrial revolution. And then the colonization from Europe to other far less populated parts of the world served as a big pressure release valve.

You can't say it will never happen. It's already putting a strain on things in India.
While it may be theoretically possible there are enough resources to go around, that does not mean any economic system that exists is capable of allocating these resources in such a completely efficient manner.

There's also the economic of issue of what happens when the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of economic growth. That can put a downward pressure on wages and tip the economy into a Recession, which could become a permanent pit from which it's hard to get out of, like it is in Mexico.
(basically productivity is limited by inequality and low wages, but that lack of overall productivity in the economy also contributes to keeping things the way they are)

 

It's been putting a strain on India for centuries. The birth rate is also declining which is exactly the trend as the standard of living improves.

Global population increases at ~ 1% per year. Global gdp growth is ~ 3% per year. As the standard of living continuously improves the birth rate drops.

All this leads to the conclusion that a catastrophic population bomb threatening the human race will never happen.

 

You're still struggling aren't you? Malthus referred to overpopulation. That is not the same as overconsumption. For the latter you'd have to refer to the likes of Galbraith.

 

Only an academic would claim a difference.

 

Then, no problem. Thanks renewable energy and devices with reduction of energy consumption, each of us getting fewer energy consumption than the past.

 

But paying more for it. How is that progress??

 

The United States population has increased by 58% since 1970, virtually all that growth resulting from people coming in from other countries (and these people also bring up the fertility rate). The world population has more than doubled since that time.

I don't feel like 1970 was all that long ago, in the scale of things.

 

A 1% population growth per year yields ~ 60% population growth since 1970. That has nothing to do with immigration.

 

The natural growth rate of the U.S. population around 1970 wasn't 1% though.

A quick look at a graph shows the average number of children per woman dropped to 1.7 in the 1970s.



That would mean a 15% population decline after every generation, roughly.

 

Nope. Environmental crisis I'm afraid means the Star Trek optimism can be rejected.

Think what would happen if US consumerism was replicated everywhere. How long do you think we'd last?

 

Who says it has to be rejected? It will probably just look like the episodes "A Taste of Armageddon" or "Half a Life".
Of course then there's also "The Mark of Gideon".