World's biggest problem: Overpopulation? (Just something to think about)

[faded glory]

Moron there is OIL everywhere. Caspian, gulf of mexico, alaska, RM, Antartica, everywhere......Give them the chance to explore it will be found

The enviormentalists used to say when I was in school we would run out of fossil fuels in 2020-2050. This we now know is untrue. There is enough oil to keep us going for a long time and possible beyond.

[Goingonit]

In the 1970s there was a group of snooty economists called the Club of Rome, and the predicted we'd be out of oil by 1990. Excuse me, I have to recharge my computer via bicycle now...

[MORON]

I'm TALKING ABOUT JAPAN not the world.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Transcend
Richard, you should go to China or India to FEEL the pressure of population. By living comfortably in your North Carolina suburb, you don't know the pain of overcrowding.

Population Density of China: 136.5 people per square kilometer
Population Density of New Jersey: 402.3 people per square kilometer

My grandparents live in New Jersey, and we visit them frequently. So by your logic I have experience with an area that is three times as painfully overpopulated as China.

And by the way, I'm a college student. We have about 3000 residence hall dwellers on a campus with an area of less than one square kilometer. If this is "the pain of overcrowding" It can't be so bad.

Yes I'm being flippant. That's because "feeling" is less of a rational basis for judgement than the numbers I just spit out.

I will admit that I don't know the pain of filth and poverty. But as I've tried to show, filth and poverty has almost nothing to do with population density or overcrowding. The problems in China and India are due to poverty, not overpopulation.

You should try to get to a Chinese bus during the rush hour,

You should try getting on a New York subway during rush hour.

or you should experience the water being rationed in Northern China,

Isn't water rationed in California?

or you should observe the sand storm in Bei Jing because the desertification caused by people using unsuitable land for agriculture.

We had a Dust Bowl too, back in the '30's. We got over it with better education and technology.

I think is is amusing that all of your terrible indications of third world overpopulation have also been problems in the USA.

I have to remind you that both Europe and Japan depend on foreign grain supplies, the former on American wheat and the latter on Asian rice.

Actually France produces 143% of the calories it needs, and Germany about 94%. I did discover that I was mistaken about current Japanese produation; they make 46% of the calories they need.

But this fails to take into account the economics of comparative advantage. If a country can do something else more efficiently, than it is to their advantage to make that thing, export it, and import the other stuff. Making all the food they need would be a lot more expensive than imports, but that doesn't mean they couldn't do it.

Suppose Japan is fighting another war in Asia and loses its grain supply, you will see a famine happening unpredent in human history.

No I wouldn't. America and Canada would have more than enough food to tide them over.

Great Britian provides a good example of the ability to shift to agricultural self-sufficiency. Before World War 2 it was a big food importer. After the Nazi submarines cut off their food, they decided that being dependent on food imports was a bad thing. So after World War 2 they made a lot of farm improvements and soon they produced all the calories they needed.

Edit: I always miss a backslash somewhere.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by MORON
no meat......

Meat is bad for you anyway. It's also incredibly inefficient; if we didn't devote so much cropland with silage we'd be swimming in excess food. A vegetarian planet would have an enormous food excess even with current technology and our current mishandling of agriculture.

super high rice price..... (in Japan, Rice costs 3+ time more due to protectionism)

But they don't starve.

pollution as bad as Japan? I'll pass....

Yes, their city smog is pretty bad. But so is the pollution in LA and Mexico city. Cars really are dirty and wasteful things. But they used to be worse. Pollution and gas consumption were a lot worse before fuel-efficient Japanese cars started hitting the market....

(Note: Japanese population is declining thanks to low birth rates....)

Yes I know. And nobody had to lecture or force them or set up a major program to stop their reproduction.

No Oil ....... no trees......

Japan imports huge amounts of nature resources for its uses.

Yes, Japan is one of the most barren places on the planet in terms of natural resources. It also has an incredibly high population density. Yet somehow they seem to be managing a lot better than places with a lot more natural resources and a lot less people.

Also don't forget that a lot of those natural resources are for manufactured goods that they ship right back to other countries.

However, I'd agree that without the inefficiency and waste of both human and natural resources, much more people can be support.

Good.

However, it is not infinite.

Of course not. 20 billion people is a lot less than infinity, and most projections show population leveling off a lot below that, without the need for coercion. And according to the UN, the population will not level off due to famine or death or disaster.

Do you want to wait 20,000 years for trees you plant today to become oil?

Of course not. That's why we genetically engineer some bacteria to mass produce the stuff from biomass.

The current consumption outstrip nature's recycling ability. However, the change in technology have saved us by giving replacements faster than the resources running out.

My point exactly.

Assuming people can use infinite variety of resources.... yeah right.... or not

Actually, it is within the realm of possibility that within 50 years almost all of our needs could be supplied with polymers derived entirely from renewable biomass. Du Pont is already running a plant to make polyethelyne from biomass, and that's even without genetically engineering the plants.

Edit: Just once I'd like to get all the quote tags right the first time. The scary thing is I'm a computer programmer.

[Garth Vader]

Isn't water rationed in California?


Probably, and water will be a problem before food and oil will. More and more places are having problems with water quality and availability.

[Transcend]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns

Population Density of China: 136.5 people per square kilometer
Population Density of New Jersey: 402.3 people per square kilometer



My grandparents live in New Jersey, and we visit them frequently. So by your logic I have experience with an area that is three times as painfully overpopulated as China.

And by the way, I'm a college student. We have about 3000 residence hall dwellers on a campus with an area of less than one square kilometer. If this is "the pain of overcrowding" It can't be so bad.

That shows your complete ignorance about the geography of China. 2/3 or China's territory are virtually uninhabitable, and only 10% of the country are arable land. Shanghai has about the same area as Denver, but has at least 20 times its population. Redo your math please.

Since you have never been to China, you are not in a position to judge the effect of overcrowding.

I will admit that I don't know the pain of filth and poverty. But as I've tried to show, filth and poverty has almost nothing to do with population density or overcrowding. The problems in China and India are due to poverty, not overpopulation.

Overpopulation had a smaller effect in industrial countries than agrarian ones where ownership of land was crucial. Unfortunately, both China and India were agrarian societies, with over 90% of their population being peasants. Especially China has way too low land per person ratio. The poverty was widespread, even landlords are just one or two crop failures away from starvation.

My father was born into a comparatively 'well-off' peasant family near the east coast before the end of WW2. The family owned a dozen acres land which was more than most other families in the village, and yet meat was only available during major holidays and celebrations, and rice was not always available. To gather materials for fire(the source for heating and cooking), he often had travel several of miles to chop woods at age 10, every day. Other familes were so poor that some couldn't even afford pants for all of their family members. People living in the vast inland regions were much worse off than that.

Such dire was the living condition around 1949 for the majority of Chinese population, and that condition has persisted for the previous two centuries. To compete for the already very limited resources, it was imperative for each family to have more sons. Adult sons were able to work the field, defend the family, and even go to schools. My grandfather had three sons, and that was one major reason why he was better off than most other families.

The overpopulation was the most important reason why China's population was so poor. Industrialization would have helped. But for it there was no capital. Both China and India were unlucky enough to be on the pillaging end of European powers. European powers, especially England and France, financed their transformation from agrarian to industrial society with looted wealth from their colonies.

I hope now you would understand why overpopulation is intrincably linked to poverty, and vice versa, and why it is important to break the cycle.

You should try to get to a Chinese bus during the rush hour,

You should try getting on a New York subway during rush hour.

Another comment of total ignorance. Do you have to fight to get onto a NY subway? Do you need to professional pushers to squeeze people into a train? I speak from my own personal experience, experience I have had hundreds of times, if not thousands.

or you should experience the water being rationed in Northern China,

Isn't water rationed in California?

The situation in Northern China is far more dangerous than California, with more than 300 millions people being endangered. And do you think it's good sign that California's water is being rationed?

or you should observe the sand storm in Bei Jing because the desertification caused by people using unsuitable land for agriculture.

We had a Dust Bowl too, back in the '30's. We got over it with better education and technology.

I think is is amusing that all of your terrible indications of third world overpopulation have also been problems in the USA.

In the 30s, the US already was far more industrialized than China today. Americans had the capital to develop new technology and fund education, China didn't.

Great Britian provides a good example of the ability to shift to agricultural self-sufficiency. Before World War 2 it was a big food importer. After the Nazi submarines cut off their food, they decided that being dependent on food imports was a bad thing. So after World War 2 they made a lot of farm improvements and soon they produced all the calories they needed.

The majority of convois got through. If Nazis won the Battle of Atlantic, Britain would have surrendered.


I highly recommend you to get informed about third world countries. You displayed too much ignorance in your reply. Read more books from multiple sources, and regard any media reports with discretion, including from conservative sources.

[Berzerker]

Back in ~1980, the late Prof. of Economics Julian Simon challenged Stanford Prof. of Biology Paul Ehrlich ("The Population Bomb" and other books making dire environmental predictions) to a bet. Ehrlich could pick 5 commodities that should increase in price according to his predictions of gloom and doom. They would compare the prices of these commodities - tungsten, chromium, tin, copper and nickel - after 10 years.

Ehrlich lost the bet, all 5 commodities dropped in price and he had to pay Simon the aggregate drop in prices. While Simon has since passed away, Ehrlich is still out there making dire predictions while accusing economists and critics of all sorts of nefarious motives and ignorance. Population growth is a good thing, more people, more brains out there dreaming up new ways to produce value. Is there a point at which too many people will have a negative impact surpassing the positives? Who cares? If you do, have yourself cremated so we can use your remains to fertilize the crops

[Transcend]

Population already reaches critical mass in China and India, especially China where arable land is scarce. The overpopulation and overuse of land is already turning the cradle of Chinese civilization, the Yellow River valley, into a semi-desert. Yellow River, famous for its devastating floods in old times, is now completely dry at certain places during the summer season.

Many people born in America know too little about the precarious situations other nations are in.

[Roman]

Transcend, I agree with you in principle, but I think India has a worse population problem than China. India's area is only one third of China's (and not all of it is arable/productive) and the population is growing much faster. The problem in China is pretty bad too.

BTW: Some people seem to have misinterpreted the issue here. They think that what is being proposed is coercive lowering of the birth rate, but this is not the case. Numerous studies show that many people in the developing world would like to have fewer children, but they don't have the choice (other than abstinence). It would merely be enough to enable these people to have a choice on how many children they want to have and population growth would slow down to much more managable levels.

[DarkCloud]

Overpopulation is also this forums' problem

[WhiteElephants]

Originally posted by Transcend

Such dire was the living condition around 1949 for the majority of Chinese population, and that condition has persisted for the previous two centuries. To compete for the already very limited resources, it was imperative for each family to have more sons. Adult sons were able to work the field, defend the family, and even go to schools. My grandfather had three sons, and that was one major reason why he was better off than most other families.

Doesn't this have far more to do with politics and culture rather than population?

I hope now you would understand why overpopulation is intrincably linked to poverty, and vice versa, and why it is important to break the cycle.

Then by logical extension you would have to believe that the USA is also over populated (or any country in the world for that matter) as the USA also has a proportion of "poor" people living well within its borders.

In the 30s, the US already was far more industrialized than China today. Americans had the capital to develop new technology and fund education, China didn't.

Again politics and culture. China has more than enough human capital to have built a massive infrastructure and instead it choose to remain in the dark ages. You seem to be suggesting America had capital simply because it lacked population.

How much of all this is linked to China's isolationist politics and military dictatorships and not over population?

[Transcend]

I'm not too familiar with the situation in India so I can't comment too much about it. But I was born in China and lived there for more than a decade, and I have visited it from time to time. The last time I was in Beijing, I experienced the sand storm first hand. It was awful and scary.

The cause for the sand storm is the desertification of Inner Mongolian pasture land. Since the time of Emperor Qianlong(1736-1796), China had experienced a rapid growth of it population. Millions of people were losing their land due to the overpopulation in core provinces, and some of them tried their luck in the pasture land of Inner Mongolia. As you know, without sophiscated irrigation technology, which these poor farmers didn't have, such pasture land could easily turn into deserts. After 2 centuries of those developments, the desert has literally pushed into the suburbs of Beijing. Since the 60s, the government has been trying desperately to reforest the area hoping to push back the desert. But demand after burning materials by local farmers again and again frustated these attempts. Not until the late 80s, after the population finally stablized and people's standard of living increased, did the newly planted forest have a chance of survival.

For the people who don't know, China has only 7% of world's arable land, but has to support 20% of the world's population. If the Chinese crop yield experiences only a 5% deficit, the entire world grain export will not be able to help China. Even with the population control, China's future is still hanging in balance.

It really infuriates me that these native born Americans, who have lived their whole life in conformtable, uncrowded places, and who know nothing about other countries's dire situations, and who are only immersed in their own religious dogma, still bemoan the very policy those countries introduced to save themselves. Shame on these Americans!

[Transcend]

Originally posted by WhiteElephants

Doesn't this have far more to do with politics and culture rather than population?

Did you read my post throughouly? I stated clearly that lack of land was the main cause for the poverty of peasants in China, who made up 90+% of the population back then, and what caused the lack of land? Too many people.

Then by logical extension you would have to believe that the USA is also over populated (or any country in the world for that matter) as the USA also has a proportion of "poor" people living well within its borders.

In 1949, even the poor Americans were compared rich to Middle Class Chinese. The percentage of Chinese living in poverty was several times higher than America. At least 99.999% of Americans could afford a pair of wool pants.

Again politics and culture. China has more than enough human capital to have built a massive infrastructure and instead it choose to remain in the dark ages. You seem to be suggesting America had capital simply because it lacked population.

Human capital? If 90% of the population were illiterate and many without land, how could they contribute effectively? You can do it like the depotism in Civ3, but even Communists and Japanese weren't that ruthless. As for material and financial capitals, they were completely lacking. World powers back then were not as nice as today.

How much of all this is linked to China's isolationist politics and military dictatorships and not over population?

If you read my comparison about India and China in the first page of this thread, you will see that Communists were NOT at fault for China's poverty.
Also the magnificent rise of Chinese economy and standard of living in the last 20 years coincided with the population growth being brought under control. Now the growth rate is just a little bit higher than the US.

[WhiteElephants]

Originally posted by Transcend

It really infuriates me that these native born Americans, who have lived their whole life in conformtable, uncrowded places, and who know nothing about other countries's dire situations, and who are only immersed in their own religious dogma, still bemoan the very policy those countries introduced to save themselves. Shame on these Americans!

You wouldn't be refering to the death penalities dolled out to drug offenders and even those caught for tax evasion, would you?

From Amnesty International:

AI-index: ASA 17/009/2001 12/04/2001

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12 April 2001
AI Index ASA 17/009/2001 - News Service Nr. 68
China: Day of death

The execution of at least 89 convicted criminals yesterday in China, shows an appalling lack of respect for human life and will do little to curb China's rising crime rate, Amnesty International said today.

"Like the other 'strike-hard' campaigns before it, this latest crackdown is unlikely to solve the crime problem. The Chinese government only has to look to the USA to see that executing people has no effect on the level of crime," the organization said.

The official Chinese news agency has reported a 50% increase in crime since 1999, which is evidence that extensive use of the death penalty is not working.

"Of great concern is that this blitz on human life increases the chances of miscarriages of justice. The rush to rid society of 'hardened criminals' could result in the execution of innocent people."

Amnesty International is appealing to the Chinese government to stop all executions and review the use of the death penalty with a view to abolishing it.

What about the wonderful world of torture? This article hit home with regards to this thread and as you know Transcend I would hardly call AI a conservative organization.

AI-index: ASA 17/003/2001 formatAI Index ASA 17/003/2001 - News Service Nr. 10 Embargoed for : 12/02/2001 16:00 GMT China: Extensive use of torture - from police to tax collectors to birth control officialsWhen officials from a township birth control office got a hold of Zhou Jiangxiong in May 1998, they hung him upside down, repeatedly whipped and beat him with wooden clubs, burned him with cigarette butts, branded him with soldering irons, and ripped his genitals off. The 30-year-old farmer from Hunan province was tortured to death because the officials were trying to make him reveal the whereabouts of his wife, suspected of being pregnant without permission.