June 29th, 2007, 05:45 PM
I found Russian source that shows that during WWII Stalin actualy ordered the country's top genetic expert to find a way to breed primitive men who would make good soldiers that did not mind sleeping on the ground and eating just any food. The man went to Africa and tried to breed ape and human to fullfill his assignment, but it ended in total failure!
I guess it is assumed that the chimp and we humans cannot interbreed!
That was basically the premise behind the movie “Soldiers”. They tried to make better soldiers by removing their humanity but in the end finding their humanity is what made them better soldiers. Really good movie. Lots of gun fire and things blowing up.
fortunately Lysenko was in charge of the genetic programme, and he was a convinced Lamarckist - hence none of his agricultural experiments came to anything, and i would not expect him to create genetically improved soldiers either
August 24th, 2007, 01:42 PM
Chromosomal counts differ between humans, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons.
And there's only a few rare instances of complete haploid chromosome sets where the fetus survives at all; where you might consider fertile, viable crossbreeding. Although contrary to popular opinion, identical chromosomal count is NOT an absolute necessity for fertile viable crossbreeding.
What would be interesting, but of questionable ethics, would be if chimpanzee eggs could be in vitro fertilized by human sperm, or vice versa. Personally, I wouldn't object to the experiment. However, I might object to raising any successful results!
well if we can find two animals that are super similar like the horse and donkey which together create a mule, or the tiger and lion which create the liger, there might be a chance we can make an awesome soldier out of humans and...
March 21st, 2009, 03:11 PM
Ever heard of the sad story of Oliver...?Originally Posted by Dr_Zinj
And no, i don't mean the Twist kind. I mean a ape-like creature who was found that showed remarkable resemblences to that of human. In fact, genetics tests where made on Oliver and they found he wasn't quite an ape, but chromosomely-speaking, not quite a man either.
It was decided it was highly possible a woman was raped by an ape, and she became fertile and then bannished her baby. It was also possible some dirty man raped the ape, but who knows?
March 21st, 2009, 03:16 PM
The Humanzee That Wasn'tEver heard of the sad story of Oliver...?
And no, i don't mean the Twist kind. I mean a ape-like creature who was found that showed remarkable resemblences to that of human. In fact, genetics tests where made on Oliver and they found he wasn't quite an ape, but chromosomely-speaking, not quite a man either.
It was decided it was highly possible a woman was raped by an ape, and she became fertile and then bannished her baby. It was also possible some dirty man raped the ape, but who knows?
They had theories that he was half-man, half-ape. ... found a good deal of interest amongst primatologists in our poster on Oliver at ...www.rense.com/general67/oliver.htm - Cached
Oliver - Is He An Ape?
... amid little hoopla last fall, found no evidence of human chromosomes in the ... years, Oliver surfaced in the early 1970s when he was acquired by a man and ...robotics.stanford.edu/~oli/oliver.html - Cached
Some links i found. Now i am off to read them, with cup of tea. And a smoke.
It's aready been done , most of them reside in Washington, couldn't resist!
?
:P
Well, it would help with those long lines I keep hearing about.
Well, Stalin was a big fan of Hitler right up until Hitler attacked him (which Stalin regarded as a great personal betrayal). People honestly seemed to believe in Eugenics - the idea you could breed a super race, or maybe a lesser brutish race.
What I'd worry about, if I were attempting it, would be the Mule problem. I mean, Mules are easy to create, but they don't reproduce after you create them. I wonder if you bread a human with anything else, what the odds are that the offspring would be fertile enough to have its own kids.
A mule parahuman race would be ideal, actually, since then you limit (though not eliminate) the potential for things to get too far out of hand.
To clear up what most people misconstrue, the theory of eugenics is entirely sound. At least as far as I take it. There are a vast number of genetic abnormalities, some beneficial and many harmful, that could be selectively bred into or out of existence. After hundreds of generations, breeding people to be intelligent, strong, etc, would produce better people than a system without eugenics.
It's sad, but Stalin and Hitler had a completely skewed version of eugenics. It was not only forced, but it was entirely unscientific and based on biases. By contrast, we can objectively define what is and is not beneficial to humanity. For a real world example, everyone could be immune to aids by now if we had a eugenics program. All we have to do is breed out the "door" that it (and many VERY deadly viruses) uses. Said door is also worthless for everything else! Go figure!
http://discovermagazine.com/1997/jun...etoaplague1147
I really wish people would honestly look at Eugenics. It's something we sorely need, something that can be completely voluntary, and in the VERY long run be ultimately beneficial. Even Wikipedia associates it closely with Nazi's, thus invoking Godwin's Law on any conversation supporting it. Nazis/Russians were retards. Lets please move along.
I associate it more with Kahn and and the Wrath thereof
The primary issue is that you need some overseeing entity which can last for hundreds of human generations and keep up the breeding program with a steady aim. The only thing I can think of which could last that long with that sort of tenacity is a religion. Ala Benne Geserit.
I see no reason why normal individuals cannot have the same resolve religious organizations have. I, personally, have such a resolve. Though rather than based on dogma, it's based on tirelessly studied facts and axioms. There's no reason strong resolve must be correlated in any way to religion.
The trouble is that the people you put in charge of a Eugenics program will always find some way to convince themselves that their own children are the genetically superior ones, whether it's true or not.
You can breed horses for certain tasks, so it logically follows that you should be able to breed humans in much the same way, but .... how would a horse breeding process work out if it were being implemented by horses?
Obviously the solution is to put genetically superior people in charge of it. QED.
Would you kill or sterilize your children if it were determined that your genes were genetically inferior for whatever reason? If the answer is no, how can any eugenics program hope to succeed? And if the answer is yes, you're a monster who probably shouldn't have children in the first place
Perhaps that is how we will destroy ourselves. Nobody is perfect, so eugenics will kill us all.Would you kill or sterilize your children if it were determined that your genes were genetically inferior for whatever reason? If the answer is no, how can any eugenics program hope to succeed? And if the answer is yes, you're a monster who probably shouldn't have children in the first place
The plan would be very easy. Those that pass the eugenics bar will be allowed two children, while those that don't will only be allowed one. We need population control anyway, and tying eugenics into it would allow us to eventually be immune to things like aids, while also reducing (and eliminating) genetic disorders. It's most certainly the lesser of two evils, and it prevents retarded evangelical families from raising 20 retarded evangelical children. Or possibly retarded atheist children. Who knows!
yes of course because the government should know just who and when screwing.
it's called freedom for a reason.
We already have a very accurate system for recording every birth that happens in the United States. It's just a simple method of enacting it.
Also, I am MORE than sick and fucking tired of you fucking "freedom" bastards. No, we do NOT have freedom. We haven't had freedom since George Washington and the rest of congress decided to quell a rebellion AFTER THE WAR THEY JUST HAD. Hypocracy? Hell yes. Does anyone know about it? Apparently not! On TOP OF THIS freedom in the purest sense is ANARCHY, and currently (regarding children) we DO have anarchy. Anarchy only works if humanity is composed of well learned individuals that are self sufficient. The united states is largely composed of bible thumping dipshits that think every life is special. ON TOP OF THIS MORE THAN 80% OF THE UNITED STATES MALE POPULATION IS CIRCUMCISED BASED ON SAID BIBLE! CIRCUMCISION. DOES NOT. DO. ANYTHING. BENEFICIAL. This is DANGEROUS to humanity, and as the Earths population CONTINUES TO SURGE we will suffer more and more population related problems.
So yes. Fuck you and your fake DELUSION of freedom we've never had, or for that matter can handle. YOU are the problem with America. Not people like me. YOU. People like you are too busy singing "GOD BLESS FREEDOM!" that you can't pull your HEADS OUT OF YOUR ASSES and realize that we ARE NOT FREE. DEAL WITH IT. USE IT TO YOUR FUCKING ADVANTAGE. Were it NOT for a number of laws currently in place that RESTRICT our freedom, stupid people would run EVEN MORE RAMPANT. All FUCKING hail your brilliant deduction of our problems! Yes, MORE FREEDOM! MORE BABIES! LETS FIX IT BY FUCKING!
How do you decide what the genetic bar is? Especially in gray cases. Like suppose I have natural immunity to malaria. Spreading that gene could save millions of lives annually. But I also have anemia and diabetes and a strong family history of cardiovascular disease. Do I get one kid or two?
The best method isn't limiting kids. It's having lots and lots of kids and "culling" them. Maybe 1 of 100 kids of mine will have the malaria immunity without the other genetic baggage. But there are ethics attached to just killing 99 "defective" kids.
The best option, and one we seem to be going towards anyway, is genetic screening of embryos. Fertilize 100s or 1000s of embryos, and screen through them for the best match. Every couple ends up with a their dream child that is in every conceivable way the best possible child they could have possibly produced. There are still moral qualms about all the discarded embryos, but far less so than culling hundreds of kids.
Incidentally this idea was made into a very prophetic movie called "Gattaca", which is totally worth watching. It's about the dark side of genetic screening.
And you got all this information about slayer-72's personal ideals and religious affiliation from two sentences?
I love it when people get so exciteable on the internet. Bold, italicized, capitalized cursewords will change our minds. Keep up the good work!
The main limitation is that the natural world will not accommodate certain decisions we might want to make. We can't make them. We're not "free" to make them.
That's not any human being's decision, however. If a human being tells you you can't make them, they're just being the messenger, but they're not the true source of the message. The message came from reality.
Forced population control is an absolute inevitability, either by means of thermo-nuclear weapons or by means of the populations of the world allowing their governments to regulate their birth rates.
Where I disagree with Darius is that I don't believe there should be any genetic selection involved. The best chance a birth control law would have of success would be for it to be as simple as possible, and have no criteria whatsoever. Every human being agrees to have two. No more. (If you're trying to shrink)
If we just want a static population, then allow some people to have three. Use the third as an incentive for certain behaviors. Like in China, for example, you could allow people who's first two children were daughters to have a third daughter.
Yes, because immunity to AIDS is SUCH a terrible requirement. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Not necessarily. Look at Europe. It's been in a negative population growth for a while now. It might be that there is feedback between birth rate and the carrying capacity of an area. As long as reliable birth control methods are available, people can decide to have children or not, entirely freely, without any intervention. But natural economic pressures will mean society as a whole reaches its carrying capacity and sustains there.
Of course this is a pretty new trend in Europe, so time will tell if this is just a fad or something with staying power.
freedom bastard? my, it seems as though you dont actually wish to attain freedom.
and well no shit. if true freedom is anarchy, unless i've mistaken a federalism governement for random chaos that is an anarchy, i do believe you are true.
of courses all of your allumptions that every one will always follow the law. hmm, last i knew the US had one of the highest crime rates of most other nations.
so tell me, how do you stop people from fucking? unless your going to catrate every one in the entire nation, your never going to be able to stop it.
i dont know how social you are, but most the people i live around coulndt pull thier head out of their asses enough to solve a simple algebra problem. if we have anarchy then were are our self sufficient well learn individuals?we DO have anarchy. Anarchy only works if humanity is composed of well learned individuals that are self sufficient
aww, you know what your right, and guess what! your life isnt important, so please by all means, go into the nearest corner and die.... :-DThe united states is largely composed of bible thumping dipshits that think every life is special
so you believe that people have the right to die, and not live. well then were is your right to live? why didnt your parrents kill you when they gave birth to you? oh yeah thats right, because they wanted you to live. so tell me. what gives you, or for that matter any one, else otehr than the person going to be killed, the right to decide if they should live or die?This is DANGEROUS to humanity, and as the Earths population CONTINUES TO SURGE we will suffer more and more population related problems.
really i find it sort of ironic. i see people like you around saying we should kill of babies and conrtol birth rates to keep population down, when generations of people currently in middle and high school are so fucked up they couldnt surevive on their own in thier own backyard! strangely enough, i have yet to see any one suggest that the world should be a more deadlier place. making that of a higher death rate to quell increasing birth rates. no one. at least in this manner the ones that do survive are fit to live, and thus, Fit to reproduce...
hmm, i've seen taht somewhere before.... i think the guys name starts with a "D", like a "dar" something. [sarcasm]
as for delusions of freedom, i have none. freedom without anarchy can only be obtained by freedom with discipline. that is freedom guided by a sense of morality. and it's apperent with your "lets kill babies and castrate people" idea, you have little high morality, and thus the only way you can achieve freedom is with your "anarchy is the only freedom" idea.
How do we stop anyone from doing anything? Fucking is not the issue. Excessive reproduction is. The means to enforce the law are already laid out, all we have to do is make it.
You misunderstood. Read again.If we have anarchy then were are our self sufficient well learn individuals?
That's not even an argument. That's an appeal to emotion, and a straw man fallacy. I, nowhere, advocated infanticide for sentient beings.so you believe that people have the right to die, and not live. well then were is your right to live? why didnt your parrents kill you when they gave birth to you? oh yeah thats right, because they wanted you to live. so tell me. what gives you, or for that matter any one, else otehr than the person going to be killed, the right to decide if they should live or die?
By a flawed model of what is "fit". It is by this model humans evolved into near sociopaths, because only the strongest, not smartest, tended to survive. Implementing uncontrolled natural selection is a step back, and controlled natural selection is a step forward. It's peaceful, largely voluntary, and involves no killing of any kind. You may have quoted me, but you by no means said anything I did, and therefore made yet another straw man argument.strangely enough, i have yet to see any one suggest that the world should be a more deadlier place. making that of a higher death rate to quell increasing birth rates. no one. at least in this manner the ones that do survive are fit to live, and thus, Fit to reproduce...
Let them fuck all they want, so long as no children come of it.
How do you stop it? It would probably be the easiest crime to catch someone breaking of any crime that has ever existed in the history of the world.
If someone is found anywhere on Earth who has your DNA, then you have obviously committed the crime of having a child. If there's a law that says you can only have two, but the government finds a third, then the trial to convict you is pretty much and open and shut case.
It's that quality matters much more than quantity.i dont know how social you are, but most the people i live around coulndt pull thier head out of their asses enough to solve a simple algebra problem. if we have anarchy then were are our self sufficient well learn individuals?we DO have anarchy. Anarchy only works if humanity is composed of well learned individuals that are self sufficient
aww, you know what your right, and guess what! your life isnt important, so please by all means, go into the nearest corner and die.... :-DThe united states is largely composed of bible thumping dipshits that think every life is special
Infinity people can inhabit this planet. They just shouldn't try to do it all at once. They should break up into smaller groups, and occupy it one after another, generation after generation.
There's nothing great about having 3 billion, 6 billion, 9 billion, or 12 billion people on the Earth at once. There's absolutely no reason at all that we should be aspiring toward that.
The problem is that, if we don't do it by regulating the birth rate, then its absolutely impossible to avoid having it happen through a massive death rate.so you believe that people have the right to die, and not live. well then were is your right to live? why didnt your parrents kill you when they gave birth to you? oh yeah thats right, because they wanted you to live. so tell me. what gives you, or for that matter any one, else otehr than the person going to be killed, the right to decide if they should live or die?This is DANGEROUS to humanity, and as the Earths population CONTINUES TO SURGE we will suffer more and more population related problems.
really i find it sort of ironic. i see people like you around saying we should kill of babies and conrtol birth rates to keep population down, when generations of people currently in middle and high school are so fucked up they couldnt surevive on their own in thier own backyard! strangely enough, i have yet to see any one suggest that the world should be a more deadlier place. making that of a higher death rate to quell increasing birth rates. no one. at least in this manner the ones that do survive are fit to live, and thus, Fit to reproduce...
There is no third choice to just let the population grow wild. It won't. It will hit a certain point and then stop, but the cause of the stop will be overwhelming poverty resulting in a quality of life nobody could possibly want for themselves.
Right now... we can still pick which way we want it to happen, but later on we won't be able to pick any more. The decision will be made for us by our circumstances. (You can't "choose" to live without food. It doesn't work.)
So tell me Slayer: which one do you want?
simple enough yes, but all the while abortion rates climb. At the same time you have a fixed birth rate, while there is a wildly varying death rate. so what does every one do when a catastrophy occurs with a high casualty coun, well they cant make more babies, as every generation would only be able to have 2 babies, so this can only lead to either a continually diminishing number of populace, or it will encurage couples to have babies at younger ages and not get an education anywayIf someone is found anywhere on Earth who has your DNA, then you have obviously committed the crime of having a child. If there's a law that says you can only have two, but the government finds a third, then the trial to convict you is pretty much and open and shut case
and the only way to truely ensure 0 acidental pregnency's is to either not have sex or to be castrated. condoms can break and birth control can be countered by other hormones.
and just to point out, i dotn disagree that global population isnt an issue, im saying that trying to control birth and death ratio's is not the way to do.
Maybe a better way to do it would be to issue birth permission slips. Give everyone two without having to apply for them, and then only award additional permission slips on a first come first served basis, and regulate the number issued so that it's always equal to the number of recorded deaths.
So, basically, every time a death certificate is issued, a new birth permission slip is written up.
The basic trouble, and certainly the most fundamental problem, is how to actually prevent accidental births. People who want to purposefully break the law would always lie and say it was an "accidental pregnancy".
It's unlikely that enforced abortions will every become acceptable, at least in the USA, because too many people have spiritual beliefs about it. Enforced vasectomies might be a possibility. All births would simply happen via artificial ensemenation. Since a vasectomy doesn't stop you from producing sperm, a doctor would still be able to extract some for you and set up the pregnancy in a lab.
Come to think of it..... enforced vasectomies are probably the way to go. The government could mandate that they happen at a certain age, along side other things like immunization shots.
yeah i suppose that would work. im still personaly against arguments like these. if it's to the point where your government is controling you even down to how you reproduce it's time to have a revolution IMP. lets reduce the poulation that way...
Yes, lets reduce the population by killing people. Let us not improve anything, and instead throw it all to the wind. Come forth dystopian future! Your lack of foresight is astounding. Think very carefully before you condemn yourself and humanity with your careless reasoning. I reason for improvement and gentle shifts, while you reason for mass slaughter and something as chaotic as a revolution. Do you listen to yourself?
yes actually i do listen to my self. i dont think any government should ahve any part in my sexual life what so ever. and a revolution does not have to be bloody. if any government is made by the people for the defense and well being of the people, than the government shouldnt have anything to say if the people decide to over throw it.
and technicaly, if im against what we've been talking about these last few pages, a revolution would be an improvement. and you can take your gentil shifts and go somke a pipe, i believe in getting things done, im not going to drwon my self is the buerocracy that they will be sure to heap on me would i want to change something.
The problem is that there's no way to square that ethic (That the government "should" leave reproduction alone) with a realistic understanding of the need to produce as much food every year as there are mouths to feed.
If a farmer today were to put 10 times as much labor into his/her fields as they do already.... they'd be lucky if they got twice as much output from that land. Do the math. How are you going to feed ten times as many people without ten Earths? How will we even feed twice as many as we have right now? (When we can't even manage to feed one times as many people as we have right now.)
Freedom of Speech works because what you saying whatever you want doesn't really do any harm to anyone. Right of privacy mostly works, because for the most part, what you do behind closed doors doesn't affect anyone else. Basically..... all things you can call an inalienable "right" have to follow that pattern. They have to be harmless. Even the right to keep and bear arms is harmless, unless someone abuses it. (No harm in keeping a gun, as long as you don't shoot anyone with it.)
Unfortunately.... the right to procreate is not harmless.
*cough* Europe's negative population growth caused by a natural feedback between carrying capacity and people's desire to have children (and the ability to chose that birth control allows) *cough*
Sorry, something in my throat
Unfortuneatly the wrong folks seem to be doing the procreating, cough, cough.
Technology wil soon be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Urm, I think they're saying you can have sex with who ever, and when ever you want, just you know...wrap it before you tap it :wink:
Personally, Im not relgious at all, I think its a crutch that humanity has relied on for far too long, how am I better then a deer?
Mandatory birth control is needed. The worlds resources are being used far too quickly, and if you never knew life, you would never miss it...
Honestly if you think of birth control as murder, every time you masterbate you may have just killed the next Einstien... just saying...
This idea is just evolution enforced by the government, you pay them, might as well let them help humanity (as is their job :-D )
I would like to ask you specifically what sort of traits we would expect of someone who passes this "eugenics bar."
I'd suggest leaving Eugenics out of it all together. Education is a better criteria, anyway, because it has more of an effect on one's ability to participate constructively in society than does their raw intelligence. (By which I mean odds of being able to get an education..... cause nobody is born educated.)
True, but if only the educated people from advanced societies don't have kids, the world will be overrun by illiteracy. A cut in population growth has to be uniform across the board, sweeping the educated with the uneducated in a single wave.*cough* Europe's negative population growth caused by a natural feedback between carrying capacity and people's desire to have children (and the ability to chose that birth control allows) *cough*
Sorry, something in my throat
That's why it has to be forced.
In Aristotle's words:
This argument goes all the way back to the 1800s with Social Darwinism. I think the reality is more complex. Plus successful people still seem to have more kids. The more money you have, the more mistresses you can afford after allTrue, but if only the educated people from advanced societies don't have kids, the world will be overrun by illiteracy. A cut in population growth has to be uniform across the board, sweeping the educated with the uneducated in a single wave.*cough* Europe's negative population growth caused by a natural feedback between carrying capacity and people's desire to have children (and the ability to chose that birth control allows) *cough*
Sorry, something in my throat
Think of it like a self policing population control. If you're poor, you aren't desirable as a mate. So you might get a wife and a few kids. Presuming for the moment that in the future poor people will know how to use birth control, they might not even have 2 kids.
If you're rich, you can afford all sorts of ex wives and child support and bastard children.
It's a negative feedback loop. As the population of the society declines, the pressures against having kids declines, and you get (hopefully) an increased birth rate and/or increase immigration.
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to create a mathematical model or computer simulation and project what sort of evolutionary pressures it might create. I imagine it would tend to reinforce the "have kids when affordable" mindset, and punish the "almost never have kids" and "always have kids" mindsets. Until birth control is ingrained genetically thousands of years from now.
Assuming we haven't tinkered with our genes to the point where natural selection is moot.
Civ4 is great for quote miningIn Aristotle's words:
Lol. I totally started the game and everything, just to make sure I had the quote right. :-p
I think war used to be part of the circle. They call them the "baby boomer" generation for a reason. After WW2 and Korea, I think a lot of people geniunely felt the USA needed to expand its population to make up for all the dead.
Trouble is, with nukes, you don't get those kinds of wars. A war between industrial powers sufficiently large to cause depopulation would certainly be a nuclear war. So... one leg of the machine is broken off.
But birth control was also incredibly impractical (condom notwithstanding) until the advent of birth control pills.
It's like the seat belt.. The trick is getting people to use it. (And making it a little more widely available in the third world)
Yeah. The whole "only sailors use condoms" thing wasn't all that great for birth control. So it needs to be socially acceptable. But birth control pills are more likely to be used than condoms regardless, so that was definitely an improvement.
Remains to be seen if humanity in general will plateau or crash when it reaches carrying capacity. But we still have a bit of a ways to go (thanks largely to Norman Borlaug).
If it was up to me, and it was a government policy, I'd make a legal requirement for every male in the whole country to get a vasectomy at about age 10. (That's only because the female alternative is a more invasive proceedure, not because I have a gender preference.)
With a vasectomy, it's still possible for a doctor to extract genetic material, and artificially start a pregnancy. The trick is that you'd have to go visit a doctor in order to get pregnant, and at that point everything has paperwork associated with it.
As far as setting quotas, you'd have to set them to one gender or the other, so we don't run into the problem Numsgil was talking about:
I'd advise setting that quota to females, but the question of which gender we set it to is probably arbitrary.
Why is rich people having more kids a problem? Isn't that what you want?
No.
If you allow any disproportionality at all, then there's a potential for corruption, and reproduction rights are a place where it's safe to assume that absolutely any corruption that can happen.... will happen. It's too close to the human ego.
However: One possibility might be for a poor person to sell the right to bear a child (one or both) to a rich person, so the rich person can bear more than 2, and the poor person must then limit them self to less than 2.
If they're rich it means they're more fit (in the limited Darwinian sense). So yes, they should have more kids.
It seems to me that the present system of reproductive anarchy encourages no more kids than you can afford, and allows you to make that decision. As long as society as a whole is upwardly mobile (meaning that through hard work it's possible to go from rags to riches), you have very effective evolutionary pressures encouraging success.
Of course, many poor families have disproportionately larger families. Assuming this is a real trend and not something just cultural, it's still not a problem from a eugenics standpoint. During lean times, wars, etc. it's the poor who disproportionately die. At the end of the day I think you'll find the human genome come more from the successful than the unsuccessful.
So ultimately it comes down to whether the free market can regulate births the same way it can regulate most other things. My guess is that the free market is an extensions of evolutionary pressures, and that the two constructively feedback into each other.
Your calls to regulation might be unnecessary, or even worse, inefficient. Similar to how a planned economy is inefficient compared to a free market.
I don't really see much in Eugenics. Evolution takes centuries, maybe even thousands of years, to do anything. By then we'll probably have "smart chips" you can surgically implant into your head to make you smart, if you're not already.
I'm just concerned with raw numbers. A sufficiently small population, well managed, would never have a lean year. Nobody would ever have to be selected against.
A large population, even if it's infinity well managed, will have lean years all the time, because our resources set an impossible limit on us. You can't harvest and reap the same field 50 times per year just because people are hungry. But if you have 50 fields, on the other hand, and very few people, then even extreme famine probably wouldn't cause any starvation.
You're assuming that our resources have fixed productivity. Consider 1 farmer farming 100 acres vs. 100 farmers farming 100 acres. The 100 farmers will probably be able to produce more food on the same amount of land, because they can provide more attention to each plant.
There's obviously a limit to this relationship. 1 billion farmers farming 100 acres aren't going to produce substantially more than 1 million farmers. They'd probably even produce less.
So how does a society determine the optimal number of farmers to employ per acre? In a free market, it's determined by the marginal profit from more farmers vs. the marginal profit from more programmers, or whatever.
So there's a feedback mechanism in place. Even if everyone in the world wanted to be a farmer, they won't all be a farmer because they'll get paid better doing other things. Only the people who really want to be farmers will be farmers (I'm assuming you're in a developed country for this).
The same feedback mechanism exists for children. Most people want children, but children are expensive. A family with 8 children might not "demand" a child as much as a family with none, even though the cost is comparable. But it's also possible that a family of 4 might want another child more than a family of 3, because of the specifics of that family's desires (maybe they're Catholic).
Letting it be up to the free market, and assuming a reasonably equal distribution of wealth, means that society as a whole will reach a stable equilibrium balancing people's desires for children vs. the expense of children. And as there are more children, the cost per child will first decrease (from economies of scale), then increase as resources become scarce. Society will arrive at a birth rate to (closely) maximize its happiness.
The only danger then is from supply shocks. A famine or drought or some such. Which is the point you're trying to make I think. But a "planned" society can't be any more robust to shocks than an unplanned one.
In a planned economy, you probably live below carrying capacity. Which means you weather the supply shock just by not having a large demand to begin with. But this also means you are below maximum capacity during times of plenty, because you don't have enough workers to maximize productivity.
As long as times of plenty outnumber times of famine, an unplanned society will out compete you, because it can operate on the razor thin margin between overpopulation and underpopulation. As long as wealth is equalized, and if we assume that wealth makes people happy, the unplanned society will be happier.
That said, this probably isn't as true in developing countries. Mexico is a fine upper middle class country. It just has a surplus of unemployed unskilled labor. The more children they produce, the larger their carrying capacity (from more workers), and they end up in a Red Queen's race.
In reguard's to the OP, I belive hitler had a program of selective breeding, and a show "dark angle" 2000-2002, showed that through years of selective breeding one can acomplish a super soldier. HOW IS THIS DONE? well it si simple you take some one whos stats across thebaord are above normal mate them with some one else = to or greater then said mate. by doing this you select the perfect breeders, you can also look towards other attributes to add in brains, well if two parents have hi IQ and are that rare 3% who use msot of thier brain and mate chances are that the child will also inherit those traits, if you take a strong muscluar physic and breed them you have a high chance of the offspring having the same physical attributes. some nationalities can hande extream weather conditions more so then others, take the two best in on then mate them take the two best of another then mate them. this si done in dog breeding. if humans can duplicate the same methods with in dog breeding toward breeding the super human we would have the best soldier's. the problem si what do you do wiht the 5% of the soldiers born that will utterly be retarded or deformed?
also it would take 200+ years to build a small troop of super soldiers this way, a lto of trial and error dealing with cross breeding genetic traits to encompass the best. but once you have say 500 of each male and female and each have 4 kids then that is 2000. thsoe two thousand will have 4 kids resulting in 8000. but I think people would look down on this more so then some one sleeping with a ape............
Maximization of a resource is basically a hyperbolic curve. Your ability to produce increases in pretty much that way. Your need to consume increases as a straight line, directly proportional to the number of people.
There's no need to wait for feedback once you know that. Just look at how much arable land there is, bring in a few farming specialists to determine the most probable return from that land. Bring in a few nutrition specialists to calculate how much a given population needs to eat.
Trouble when you do things this way is that usually you only find out once it's already too late. You usually don't know you're headed for economic ruin until those kids start becoming adults.
So there's a feedback mechanism in place. Even if everyone in the world wanted to be a farmer, they won't all be a farmer because they'll get paid better doing other things. Only the people who really want to be farmers will be farmers (I'm assuming you're in a developed country for this).
The same feedback mechanism exists for children. Most people want children, but children are expensive. A family with 8 children might not "demand" a child as much as a family with none, even though the cost is comparable. But it's also possible that a family of 4 might want another child more than a family of 3, because of the specifics of that family's desires (maybe they're Catholic).
In classic times, that meant you go have a war.
The trouble is that child bearing is a such a slow moving industry that all changes are supply shocks. Everything always happens too fast for people to respond.
The only danger then is from supply shocks. A famine or drought or some such. Which is the point you're trying to make I think. But a "planned" society can't be any more robust to shocks than an unplanned one.
The advantage of planned economies, then, is that they are capable of acting out of foresight rather than limiting themselves to only hindsight. In an industry that gives rapid feedback, continually updated hindsight is the best way, but not all industries are like that.
When the government started coordinating agriculture in the Great Depression, it became evident pretty rapidly that it was better for farmers to have somebody telling them what to grow, so they didn't all grow the same thing (whatever was selling at the highest price last year), and then flood their respective markets.
In a planned economy, you probably live below carrying capacity. Which means you weather the supply shock just by not having a large demand to begin with. But this also means you are below maximum capacity during times of plenty, because you don't have enough workers to maximize productivity.
Ummm... what's wrong with that?
In terms of the specific quality of life of every member of the society, why not have massive amounts of unused agricultural land or overproduction of food laying around?
In the end, limiting ourselves to "low hanging fruit" style agriculture will lead to food prices that are so low than it only occupies a small fraction of an average worker's income. That means most of their money is disposable income, which is the .... well.... conditions like that are a gold rush from the perspective of the manufacturing industry.
And what are we competing for/against? Quality of life is not a competition. At least, it doesn't need to be. Competition itself must be seen as a tool to serve an end, not an end unto itself.
As long as times of plenty outnumber times of famine, an unplanned society will out compete you, because it can operate on the razor thin margin between overpopulation and underpopulation. As long as wealth is equalized, and if we assume that wealth makes people happy, the unplanned society will be happier.
You're putting the cart before the horse.
We compete to accomplish obtain a quality of life. We do not obtain a quality of life in order to compete.
Yeah, except on part is increasing hyperbolically, and the other is increasing linearly. It's not hard to see how the race will end.
That said, this probably isn't as true in developing countries. Mexico is a fine upper middle class country. It just has a surplus of unemployed unskilled labor. The more children they produce, the larger their carrying capacity (from more workers), and they end up in a Red Queen's race.
The problem is that a technology might have subtle ramifications that the "specialists" don't understand.
You see, the problem with specialists is that they don't respond well to changes they've never seen before. As Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." So your society will not respond optimally to new changes compared to an unplanned society where each individual farmer makes decisions to adopt new technology or not, and compete against each other.
Trouble when you do things this way is that usually you only find out once it's already too late. You usually don't know you're headed for economic ruin until those kids start becoming adults.
In classic times, that meant you go have a war.Well here's an interesting question: is it better to have a child born, live, and then die in a war or never to have been born at all? Let's take it to the other extreme. Let's say that you can make a utopian society in North America for only 100 people. Is that society more desirable than our own? If we take society's happiness as a product that society produces, at what level is happiness maximized? Is 101 people only slightly less than euphoric a more desirable society than 100 euphoric people?In a planned economy, you probably live below carrying capacity. Which means you weather the supply shock just by not having a large demand to begin with. But this also means you are below maximum capacity during times of plenty, because you don't have enough workers to maximize productivity.
Ummm... what's wrong with that?
In terms of the specific quality of life of every member of the society, why not have massive amounts of unused agricultural land or overproduction of food laying around?
In the end, limiting ourselves to "low hanging fruit" style agriculture will lead to food prices that are so low than it only occupies a small fraction of an average worker's income. That means most of their money is disposable income, which is the .... well.... conditions like that are a gold rush from the perspective of the manufacturing industry.
Survival. You can't change the entire world at once. You have to do it virally, where people see your way of life is better and change. So while your society is happy and content, it's also stagnating in production compared to its neighbor: Warmongerland. As a richer, but more desperate society with an excess population, it won't mind fighting you for your resources.And what are we competing for/against? Quality of life is not a competition. At least, it doesn't need to be. Competition itself must be seen as a tool to serve an end, not an end unto itself.As long as times of plenty outnumber times of famine, an unplanned society will out compete you, because it can operate on the razor thin margin between overpopulation and underpopulation. As long as wealth is equalized, and if we assume that wealth makes people happy, the unplanned society will be happier.
This isn't necessarily true, because of economies of scale, and the fact that the rate of new technology is dependent on the number of people researching it, which is dependent on the population vs. it's carrying capacity (fewer farmers = more scientists).Yeah, except on part is increasing hyperbolically, and the other is increasing linearly. It's not hard to see how the race will end.That said, this probably isn't as true in developing countries. Mexico is a fine upper middle class country. It just has a surplus of unemployed unskilled labor. The more children they produce, the larger their carrying capacity (from more workers), and they end up in a Red Queen's race.
Take the industrial revolution. By your logic, it should not have allowed the exponential increase in population we've seen in the last few centuries. Because the more and more factory workers there were the lower and lower their marginal productivity should have been. Or at least we should have a lower standard of living compared to our preindustrial ancestors. Neither is the case.
As near as the evidence suggests, it would seem that, on a global scale of the last few centuries, over the long term, the supply curve is exponential. Perhaps growing faster than our ability to produce children.
Well, neither tool is perfect. Kind of like screwdrivers and wrenches. Don't throw away all your screwdrivers just because you've noticed that they can't loosen bolts.The problem is that a technology might have subtle ramifications that the "specialists" don't understand.
You see, the problem with specialists is that they don't respond well to changes they've never seen before. As Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." So your society will not respond optimally to new changes compared to an unplanned society where each individual farmer makes decisions to adopt new technology or not, and compete against each other.
Feedback methods, like just letting the market sort itself out, have the advantage of accuracy, but the disadvantage of slowness. Some industries are able to respond so rapidly to change that the slowness of this method doesn't hurt them, so the advantage outweighs the disadvantage.
Fore planning methods have the disadvantage that they're not always perfectly accurate (but they are often approximately accurate), but the advantage is that they're not slow. They're faster than fast, because you actually have your information before it happens. The insurance industry uses this method quite a lot, as do most investors.
For population: you'd probably want to go with fore planning, despite the disadvantage of having to usually fall short of totally maximizing your resources in order to allow for Murphy's Law. It's a smaller disadvantage than the alternative, even if it's still less than ideal.
Trouble when you do things this way is that usually you only find out once it's already too late. You usually don't know you're headed for economic ruin until those kids start becoming adults.
In classic times, that meant you go have a war.Well here's an interesting question: is it better to have a child born, live, and then die in a war or never to have been born at all? Let's take it to the other extreme. Let's say that you can make a utopian society in North America for only 100 people. Is that society more desirable than our own? If we take society's happiness as a product that society produces, at what level is happiness maximized? Is 101 people only slightly less than euphoric a more desirable society than 100 euphoric people?In a planned economy, you probably live below carrying capacity. Which means you weather the supply shock just by not having a large demand to begin with. But this also means you are below maximum capacity during times of plenty, because you don't have enough workers to maximize productivity.
Ummm... what's wrong with that?
In terms of the specific quality of life of every member of the society, why not have massive amounts of unused agricultural land or overproduction of food laying around?
In the end, limiting ourselves to "low hanging fruit" style agriculture will lead to food prices that are so low than it only occupies a small fraction of an average worker's income. That means most of their money is disposable income, which is the .... well.... conditions like that are a gold rush from the perspective of the manufacturing industry.
The frustrating thing is that people always leave time out of the equation. If the practice of maintaining a Euphoric society guarantees that we won't go to war, and that we won't nuke ourselves, then more total children get born under that method in the long run.
Nobody is suggesting that fewer humans should live on Earth, only that they shouldn't live on Earth at the same time. Over the course of millenia probably a number of humans approximating to infinity will be born over time, one after the other. There's nothing specifically grand about having them all here at once, so they can all trip over each other, and inevitably ruin each other's quality of life trying to scramble for survival.
I would surely have agreed with you in classical times, when the nuclear bomb wasn't even imaginable, but in the modern world, we don't have to worry too much about Warmongerland.
Survival. You can't change the entire world at once. You have to do it virally, where people see your way of life is better and change. So while your society is happy and content, it's also stagnating in production compared to its neighbor: Warmongerland. As a richer, but more desperate society with an excess population, it won't mind fighting you for your resources.And what are we competing for/against? Quality of life is not a competition. At least, it doesn't need to be. Competition itself must be seen as a tool to serve an end, not an end unto itself.As long as times of plenty outnumber times of famine, an unplanned society will out compete you, because it can operate on the razor thin margin between overpopulation and underpopulation. As long as wealth is equalized, and if we assume that wealth makes people happy, the unplanned society will be happier.
As long as Warmongerland knows my people are nuclear armed, we won't be invaded.
I'm not sure if that's a fact. It seems that the prosperity of a society determines a lot more how fast its technology progresses than it's sheer numbers. You need for there to be people who have the time and energy to just sit around and invent.
This isn't necessarily true, because of economies of scale, and the fact that the rate of new technology is dependent on the number of people researching it, which is dependent on the population vs. it's carrying capacity (fewer farmers = more scientists).Yeah, except on part is increasing hyperbolically, and the other is increasing linearly. It's not hard to see how the race will end.That said, this probably isn't as true in developing countries. Mexico is a fine upper middle class country. It just has a surplus of unemployed unskilled labor. The more children they produce, the larger their carrying capacity (from more workers), and they end up in a Red Queen's race.
The Industrial revolution followed in the wake of the Westward expansion of the USA. In other words: it happened at a time when we had so much land we didn't even know what to do with it. At that time, the exponential increase of population could not possibly impact our food supply even a little bit, because we hadn't even cultivated all of the farm land available to us. Our trading partners in Europe benefited pretty much at the same level, because we were passing our low food prices on to them.
Take the industrial revolution. By your logic, it should not have allowed the exponential increase in population we've seen in the last few centuries. Because the more and more factory workers there were the lower and lower their marginal productivity should have been. Or at least we should have a lower standard of living compared to our preindustrial ancestors. Neither is the case.
As near as the evidence suggests, it would seem that, on a global scale of the last few centuries, over the long term, the supply curve is exponential. Perhaps growing faster than our ability to produce children.
What my logic actually suggests is that without the Westward expansion, there couldn't have ever been an industrial revolution.
When Stalin decided that he wanted to accomplish the same things in Russia, he had to do it by starving out the Ukrainians in order to forcibly drive down the price of food. And... his methods worked. He managed to industrialize Russia (though you tend to wonder whether it was worth it, considering the cost.)
That sort of sidesteps the issue. After all, there is a finite amount of time before the Earth/Galaxy/Universe dies. 1000 people at a time vs. 1 Billion people at a time means that in the end there'll have been fewer people.
We usually say that a human life is "priceless". But what about a potential human life? At the end of the day a decision needs to be made about how many people there are and what sort of quality of life they have. Imagine you took all the miserable poor people in the world and made them disappear like they were never born. Replace their labors with machines or whatever. Is that society better than ours?
If you have a federal government decide what the "optimal" number of people are, it's a decision made by a few in power. If you let the free market decide, it's a decision made by a collective congress of humanity. As long as the forces at work aren't distorted from gov't meddling or supply shocks, you should end up with a reasonable approximation of optimal happiness.
Or at least a stable version of happiness. In some ways it might be like a prisoner's dilemma. That's a possibly valid criticism.
By your logic, we can ensure world peace right now by giving nukes to every country. We don't have a large enough sample size to determine whether a nuclear deterrent is really sufficient for peace in the face of dwindling resources.I would surely have agreed with you in classical times, when the nuclear bomb wasn't even imaginable, but in the modern world, we don't have to worry too much about Warmongerland.Survival. You can't change the entire world at once. You have to do it virally, where people see your way of life is better and change. So while your society is happy and content, it's also stagnating in production compared to its neighbor: Warmongerland. As a richer, but more desperate society with an excess population, it won't mind fighting you for your resources.And what are we competing for/against? Quality of life is not a competition. At least, it doesn't need to be. Competition itself must be seen as a tool to serve an end, not an end unto itself.
As long as Warmongerland knows my people are nuclear armed, we won't be invaded.
Sure. It's something like a function of absolute population and population relative to the carrying capacity.I'm not sure if that's a fact. It seems that the prosperity of a society determines a lot more how fast its technology progresses than it's sheer numbers. You need for there to be people who have the time and energy to just sit around and invent.This isn't necessarily true, because of economies of scale, and the fact that the rate of new technology is dependent on the number of people researching it, which is dependent on the population vs. it's carrying capacity (fewer farmers = more scientists).
You realize America was rather late to the industrialized nation game, right? It started in the UK. America was like 100 years late joining the party. UK obviously doesn't have a frontier. And the farmland they was over farmed for centuries.What my logic actually suggests is that without the Westward expansion, there couldn't have ever been an industrial revolution.
See this article. It's a really complex question, basically. But world economic growth has outpaced world population growth since the industrial revolution (before this they were about equal). And both economic growth and population growth have exploded since the industrial revolution.
Pre industrial revolution societies did not limit birth rate. The mortality rate was so high they didn't have to. Each society reached its carrying capacity fairly efficiently, and when a society had a population setback, it was usually a supply shock (Mayans come to mind. That area still hasn't recovered population wise).
In our post industrial world (Meaning North America and Western Europe mostly) infant mortality is low to zero. We have an over abundance of food to the point that obesity is an Epidemic. And some countries in Europe are experiencing negative population growth. If there's an issue coming, it isn't over population. It's not having enough young kids to take care of the baby boomers.
All indications point to the idea that market forces can find the right carrying capacity for a society. And that it's a stable equilibrium.
However, as a counter argument (because I'm a terrible debater :P), the Industrial Revolution was only possible because of the Renaissance. And there's a case to be made that the Renaissance was only possible because of the Black Death and the massive depopulation of Europe which freed up resources. So there might be a case to be made for applying artificial forces to discourage population growth up to the carrying capacity.
However this doesn't need to be as artificial as a child quota or forced sterilization or anything like that. Our tax structure already influences the birth rate by giving tax breaks for dependents (this incidentally encourages births). If we decided that we wanted to encourage a certain population level, we could employ the current dependents tax structure in reverse. Charge people more taxes for more kids.
Far more effective, with fewer side effects, and easier for people not to hate.
Well, a billion years at a rate of say 1 billion people per generation, as opposed to maybe 1000 years before we nuke ourselves at say.... 12 billion ? You can adjust those numbers, but they'll stay within their ballparks.That sort of sidesteps the issue. After all, there is a finite amount of time before the Earth/Galaxy/Universe dies. 1000 people at a time vs. 1 Billion people at a time means that in the end there'll have been fewer people.
Yes, it's quite a lot better. "Potential" human life is nothing special. We probably have the potential to create 1 trillion people in 20 years, just by perfecting test tube baby technology, then harvesting a lot of eggs and sperm.We usually say that a human life is "priceless". But what about a potential human life? At the end of the day a decision needs to be made about how many people there are and what sort of quality of life they have. Imagine you took all the miserable poor people in the world and made them disappear like they were never born. Replace their labors with machines or whatever. Is that society better than ours?
It's ok to be wrong in guessing the "optimal" number of people. A ballpark approximation is fine, as long as you don't guess too high. Humanity will not end because we guess too low, unless we guess really, really low. If you're worried about the social justice of it, then just put the population cap number to a popular vote.
If you have a federal government decide what the "optimal" number of people are, it's a decision made by a few in power. If you let the free market decide, it's a decision made by a collective congress of humanity. As long as the forces at work aren't distorted from gov't meddling or supply shocks, you should end up with a reasonable approximation of optimal happiness.
A society with massive amounts of excess farm land is much more immune to supply shocks of any kind, than a society that's stretching its land to the very limit, in exactly the same way as a person with 1,000,000 dollars in savings is immune to unemployment surprises.
The two questions: 1) - How much money should a person save before they're missing out on some of the marginal benefit they could have had by spending? - and- 2) - How much farm land should we put on reserve and not use? - Those are very similar questions. Which mistake are you more likely to regret later? Saving, or not saving?
The UK had all kinds of colonies going. The Settlement of Australia started in 1788. http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov....cles/convicts/ Of course, they had other holdings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...as_territoriesYou realize America was rather late to the industrialized nation game, right? It started in the UK. America was like 100 years late joining the party. UK obviously doesn't have a frontier. And the farmland they was over farmed for centuries.What my logic actually suggests is that without the Westward expansion, there couldn't have ever been an industrial revolution.
But even that doesn't really matter because they had close trade relations with the USA. Having strong trade relations with a country at "low hanging fruit" food production, and being at "low hanging fruit" food production yourself are economically identical conditions in every way. ( The USA wasn't going to put an export tariff on beef)
The trouble in the world right now is that no country anywhere on Earth faces conditions similar to the condition the USA (and all its trading partners) were in at that time in history.
That's the strongest argument against population control that I know of. Having a favorable young people to old people ratio is usually beneficial to an economy. A fixed population society would have to find a way to deal with that problem.
And some countries in Europe are experiencing negative population growth. If there's an issue coming, it isn't over population. It's not having enough young kids to take care of the baby boomers.
And it doesn't seem to have damaged the European economy over the long run, nor stifled invention, for this to occur. On the other hand, I'm sure the plague killed more old people than young.
However, as a counter argument (because I'm a terrible debater :P), the Industrial Revolution was only possible because of the Renaissance. And there's a case to be made that the Renaissance was only possible because of the Black Death and the massive depopulation of Europe which freed up resources. So there might be a case to be made for applying artificial forces to discourage population growth up to the carrying capacity.
And, I have to say this debate is really helping me frame my ideas better. I think I could take a few lessons on how to keep a constructive debate going. (As opposed to a destructive one, or a stifled one, which I seem to do... :-( )
Here I totally agree with you. If you can use a gentle nudge to accomplish the same behavioral effect as you'd get by hitting someone with a hammer, then by all means, nudge them.
However this doesn't need to be as artificial as a child quota or forced sterilization or anything like that. Our tax structure already influences the birth rate by giving tax breaks for dependents (this incidentally encourages births). If we decided that we wanted to encourage a certain population level, we could employ the current dependents tax structure in reverse. Charge people more taxes for more kids.
Far more effective, with fewer side effects, and easier for people not to hate.
It's highly likely that we could control our population without resorting to draconian measures (like they do in China). The trouble is how to get highly under educated societies onboard. (They're pretty much the only ones that aren't on board right now, anyway).
Nuclear war is not necessarily inevitable. We just don't have enough data on Cold War politics to make sure guesses about the future. Especially not to make arguments about a link between nuclear war and population saturation.
Of those poor and miserable people, how many do you think have per capita income under $600? Because that was the rough per capita income of people before the industrial revolution (clicky).Yes, it's quite a lot better. "Potential" human life is nothing special. We probably have the potential to create 1 trillion people in 20 years, just by perfecting test tube baby technology, then harvesting a lot of eggs and sperm.We usually say that a human life is "priceless". But what about a potential human life? At the end of the day a decision needs to be made about how many people there are and what sort of quality of life they have. Imagine you took all the miserable poor people in the world and made them disappear like they were never born. Replace their labors with machines or whatever. Is that society better than ours?
And guess what the average per capita income is for our modern world? About $7800. That's rounded down actually. (Source: google for world GDP and population). An average person today is 13 times richer than their ancestors from 500 years ago. That's regardless of ethnicity: the standard of living in the pre industrial world was pretty consistent all over the world. Spanish conquistadors won through military might, not economic domination (see clicky again). And that standard of living is increasing, not decreasing. Since the economic growth of our world is stronger than our population growth.
I don't know what the proper conclusion is to draw from this data.
Savings isn't a good analogy, because when you save money it grows from interest and contributes to the growth of society's wealth through reinvestment. It's more like stuffing money in a mattress when there's inflation. If you stuff your money in a mattress, you will lose some of its value as everyone else uses their money to earn interest.The two questions: 1) - How much money should a person save before they're missing out on some of the marginal benefit they could have had by spending? - and- 2) - How much farm land should we put on reserve and not use? - Those are very similar questions. Which mistake are you more likely to regret later? Saving, or not saving?
That's an interesting idea. Certainly the fact that England could sell industrial goods to other countries is what allowed it to industrialize. It produced way more industrial goods than it could itself consume.The UK had all kinds of colonies going. The Settlement of Australia started in 1788. http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov....cles/convicts/ Of course, they had other holdings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...as_territories
But even that doesn't really matter because they had close trade relations with the USA. Having strong trade relations with a country at "low hanging fruit" food production, and being at "low hanging fruit" food production yourself are economically identical conditions in every way. ( The USA wasn't going to put an export tariff on beef)
To back up this idea we'd need to find figures on what sort of balance of trade England had. How much food they imported, and at what price, before and after the industrialization of their country. And compare that to population level and growth.
I'll bet they imported very little food. Of the food imported, probably most of it was luxury goods like wines. The US exported tobacco, and then after that cotton. The US was not England's bread basket. After all, the trip across the Atlantic was expensive, and food needs to be cheap. But I don't know what sort of balance of trade England had with its other colonies and mainland Europe.
This was during the time of mercantilism, after all.
Only preventatively. If I gave you Europe to control right now, there's not much you could do about the coming demographic crisis. Except import young people (ie: immigration).That's the strongest argument against population control that I know of. Having a favorable young people to old people ratio is usually beneficial to an economy. A fixed population society would have to find a way to deal with that problem.And some countries in Europe are experiencing negative population growth. If there's an issue coming, it isn't over population. It's not having enough young kids to take care of the baby boomers.
Only in the very long run. In the short run of about a century or so Europe was a hell hole. Cities were depopulated as people either died or fled to the country. It took a little over 100 years for full recovery. And of that 100 years, much of it was tortured stagnation instead of growth.And it doesn't seem to have damaged the European economy over the long run, nor stifled invention, for this to occur. On the other hand, I'm sure the plague killed more old people than young.
You're right. It requires a 2 step link. Step 1: Linking war to economics. Step 2: linking economics to overpopulation.Nuclear war is not necessarily inevitable. We just don't have enough data on Cold War politics to make sure guesses about the future. Especially not to make arguments about a link between nuclear war and population saturation.
I think step 2 is the only thing we disagree about. Wars rarely happen without an economic incentive.
The problem with discussing economic growth in a lump sum is precisely that some economic goods (such as TV sets) can be produced ad-infinitum, so long as you have enough workers to work. This creates the illusion that "the economy" can expand to accommodate however many people you introduce into it.Of those poor and miserable people, how many do you think have per capita income under $600? Because that was the rough per capita income of people before the industrial revolution (clicky).Yes, it's quite a lot better. "Potential" human life is nothing special. We probably have the potential to create 1 trillion people in 20 years, just by perfecting test tube baby technology, then harvesting a lot of eggs and sperm.We usually say that a human life is "priceless". But what about a potential human life? At the end of the day a decision needs to be made about how many people there are and what sort of quality of life they have. Imagine you took all the miserable poor people in the world and made them disappear like they were never born. Replace their labors with machines or whatever. Is that society better than ours?
And guess what the average per capita income is for our modern world? About $7800. That's rounded down actually. (Source: google for world GDP and population). An average person today is 13 times richer than their ancestors from 500 years ago. That's regardless of ethnicity: the standard of living in the pre industrial world was pretty consistent all over the world. Spanish conquistadors won through military might, not economic domination (see clicky again). And that standard of living is increasing, not decreasing. Since the economic growth of our world is stronger than our population growth.
I don't know what the proper conclusion is to draw from this data.
However, while 1 TV set (or some other widget) may be exchangeable for say... 1 barrel of grain, at one population threshold, that same TV set would only be worth 1/2 a barrel of grain if the population-to-food ratio were twice as bad.
Food is the one good that no sane person ever refuses to buy. So, if you're a TV set maker at one population threshold, you may have to work twice as hard just to eat as you would at another population threshold.
It doesn't matter whether you choose TV sets, cars, computers, back rubs, paper shuffling, or any other non-resource intensive good as your reference point. The additional people we add after we've maximized our potential in resource-intensive areas will only be assigned to non-resource intensive production.
In maximization equations, your production tapers off as you add more workers to the industry. Since food is a resource-intensive form of production, it's a maximizing problem, and that means that as your population grows toward infinity your abundance of food starts to level off, but, unfortunately, people only have a very limited ability to lower their food consumption per capita. I mean, you can try to live on less than half of your body's natural level of consumption if you want, but it usually doesn't work out very well.
And... that is the fundamental problem. You're "income" might continue growing, but it will only mean you can afford more TV sets/Nintendos/Xbox's/Cell Phones.... etc..... So your kids will have something to keep them entertained while they starve to death. No amount of "income" will allow a society to collectively eat more food than it collectively produces.
Depends how you look at it. Any land we don't need for food can be used to grow stuff to make biodiesel/ethanol from, or cash crops like cotton. If I'm right in my perception that most technological advances appear to focus on labor saving, then, our ability to till more land with fewer people is what's most likely to increase as time goes on, rather than our ability to get more yield per acre.
Savings isn't a good analogy, because when you save money it grows from interest and contributes to the growth of society's wealth through reinvestment. It's more like stuffing money in a mattress when there's inflation. If you stuff your money in a mattress, you will lose some of its value as everyone else uses their money to earn interest.The two questions: 1) - How much money should a person save before they're missing out on some of the marginal benefit they could have had by spending? - and- 2) - How much farm land should we put on reserve and not use? - Those are very similar questions. Which mistake are you more likely to regret later? Saving, or not saving?
The analogy does fall apart though, when one considers depreciation from inflation. Land is absolutely, perfectly, in every way immune to inflation forces (the quantity never increases), so conserving it would only compare with saving money if we went back on the gold standard, I guess.
Actually, what's a stronger point than their ability to import would be their ability to export. When Ireland got struck by a massive potato famine, they didn't stay on their land and starve. Lots of them left.
That's an interesting idea. Certainly the fact that England could sell industrial goods to other countries is what allowed it to industrialize. It produced way more industrial goods than it could itself consume.The UK had all kinds of colonies going. The Settlement of Australia started in 1788. http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov....cles/convicts/ Of course, they had other holdings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...as_territories
But even that doesn't really matter because they had close trade relations with the USA. Having strong trade relations with a country at "low hanging fruit" food production, and being at "low hanging fruit" food production yourself are economically identical conditions in every way. ( The USA wasn't going to put an export tariff on beef)
To back up this idea we'd need to find figures on what sort of balance of trade England had. How much food they imported, and at what price, before and after the industrialization of their country. And compare that to population level and growth.
I'll bet they imported very little food. Of the food imported, probably most of it was luxury goods like wines. The US exported tobacco, and then after that cotton. The US was not England's bread basket. After all, the trip across the Atlantic was expensive, and food needs to be cheap. But I don't know what sort of balance of trade England had with its other colonies and mainland Europe.
This was during the time of mercantilism, after all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Potato_Famine
But that only worked out because there was somewhere they could go. If the British Isles had been under the necessity of containing their population on their own land, they wouldn't have been able to spontaneously de-populate like that.
What I'm getting at is that the worsening young-to-old population ratio only worstens down to a certain point. Once your population has broken even, and stops increasing or decreasing, the ratio is a fixed ratio. World wide, that would be a worse ratio than it is today, but I don't think that it would be an un-livable ratio, after the economy has sufficient time to adjust to it.
Only preventatively. If I gave you Europe to control right now, there's not much you could do about the coming demographic crisis. Except import young people (ie: immigration).That's the strongest argument against population control that I know of. Having a favorable young people to old people ratio is usually beneficial to an economy. A fixed population society would have to find a way to deal with that problem.And some countries in Europe are experiencing negative population growth. If there's an issue coming, it isn't over population. It's not having enough young kids to take care of the baby boomers.
[quote="kojax"]
Isn't that a good thing though? We buy TVs, cars, computers, etc. because we want them and we have surplus money above and beyond that necessary to survive. Producing luxury goods is a good thing. And if we want a good metric for determining standard of living, it should be what percentage of a society's GDP is agriculture. The lower the better.The problem with discussing economic growth in a lump sum is precisely that some economic goods (such as TV sets) can be produced ad-infinitum, so long as you have enough workers to work. This creates the illusion that "the economy" can expand to accommodate however many people you introduce into it.
However, while 1 TV set (or some other widget) may be exchangeable for say... 1 barrel of grain, at one population threshold, that same TV set would only be worth 1/2 a barrel of grain if the population-to-food ratio were twice as bad.
Food is the one good that no sane person ever refuses to buy. So, if you're a TV set maker at one population threshold, you may have to work twice as hard just to eat as you would at another population threshold.
It doesn't matter whether you choose TV sets, cars, computers, back rubs, paper shuffling, or any other non-resource intensive good as your reference point. The additional people we add after we've maximized our potential in resource-intensive areas will only be assigned to non-resource intensive production.
In maximization equations, your production tapers off as you add more workers to the industry. Since food is a resource-intensive form of production, it's a maximizing problem, and that means that as your population grows toward infinity your abundance of food starts to level off, but, unfortunately, people only have a very limited ability to lower their food consumption per capita. I mean, you can try to live on less than half of your body's natural level of consumption if you want, but it usually doesn't work out very well.
And... that is the fundamental problem. You're "income" might continue growing, but it will only mean you can afford more TV sets/Nintendos/Xbox's/Cell Phones.... etc..... So your kids will have something to keep them entertained while they starve to death. No amount of "income" will allow a society to collectively eat more food than it collectively produces.
Agriculture is unskilled labor generally. Manufacturing luxury goods, however, is increasingly a skilled labor job. Designers, programmers, architects, etc. Skilled labor takes schooling, which is expensive.
So the trend in modern society seems to be raising fewer children with more resources. Before the industrial revolution, improvements in technology translated to improvements in population. Populations seemed to stabilize at around $600 per capita. But in our modern society we could not sustain the sort of productivity we have at $600 per capita. We wouldn't be able to pay for schooling, for instance. So in our modern society, our carrying capacity is different.
Basically, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, we've fundamentally changed our reproductive habits. Let's imagine two families. Each make $20K a year. The first has 8 children. The second has 2 children. The larger family has per capita $2K a year. That's barely enough to cover housing and food. They don't go to trade school, and get jobs just from their highschool degrees. The second family has $5K a year per capita. That might just let them send their kids to college with financial aid and student loans.
Each family individually makes decisions about how many kids to have, and from that how much to spend on each kid. The data has shown that after the industrial revolution, the birth rate first increased, then dramatically declined. Meaning that at first families were using their wealth to have more kids, but after a bit they switched tactics and now are having fewer kids with more resources.
Understanding this trend, it should be easy to see that food isn't the limiting factor anymore. A family will run out of money long before they go hungry. Anymore the limiting factor is education and job availability. A family that is unemployed will probably not chose to have children at that moment. So it creates a feedback between unemployment and birth rate. And as college prices go up many families will make real decisions about how many kids they can afford to have and send to college. So there's also a feedback between how many kids are going to college and birth rate.
And between food and rent, there's no contest. No matter where you live, food costs less than housing. So as we start running out of land, it won't be starvation which limits our growth. It'll be crowding, and the limitations of how far from work you can live. A large part of our modern society is urbanization. As more of a family's budget is paying rent, they'll opt to have fewer kids so they can ensure each child gets an education.
So to sum up: the industrial revolution has changed not only our maximum carrying capacity, but the per capita income of that maximum carrying capacity. Indications are that we'll approach that carrying capacity smoothly instead of with a crash (as with ancient societies and modern Europe), and that even after we reach 0 population growth our economies will continue to grow from technological improvements and increasingly thorough education and automation.
If anything, the trend might continue to the point where sustained negative population growth is the rule of thumb. The world economy would continue to expand even as the total population of the planet decreased.
Regardless, there's no need for population control at this moment in history for America or Europe. GDP is growing faster than population, and the percentage of GDP involved in agriculture and construction is dropping. You only really need to worry about overpopulation when that trend is in reverse. When population grows faster than the economy or the percentage of GDP spent on rent and food increases faster than the rest of the GDP then you know that it might be time to start imposing population limits. But again, all indications are that population growth will reach 0 well before that happens.
[quote="Numsgil"]It means you're using more labor saving devices, so the farm land is getting farmed by fewer people but resulting in the same yield. In Mexico, you might have 20 people doing a job that would only require one person in the USA.
Well, if you factor in the cost of building the farm machinery, there are skilled contributors. A lot of farmers in the USA actually get degrees in Agriculture in order to maximize the productivity of their lands.
Agriculture is unskilled labor generally. Manufacturing luxury goods, however, is increasingly a skilled labor job. Designers, programmers, architects, etc. Skilled labor takes schooling, which is expensive.
It seems like the change between the colonial/westard expansion era and the present is that we went from just evicting another Indian tribe when we needed land, to installing "friendly" governments in South America that would allow us to buy up their countries' farm lands. (With the decline of the Soviet Union, we've had a harder time making up excuses.)
So the trend in modern society seems to be raising fewer children with more resources. Before the industrial revolution, improvements in technology translated to improvements in population. Populations seemed to stabilize at around $600 per capita. But in our modern society we could not sustain the sort of productivity we have at $600 per capita. We wouldn't be able to pay for schooling, for instance. So in our modern society, our carrying capacity is different.
Basically, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, we've fundamentally changed our reproductive habits. Let's imagine two families. Each make $20K a year. The first has 8 children. The second has 2 children. The larger family has per capita $2K a year. That's barely enough to cover housing and food. They don't go to trade school, and get jobs just from their highschool degrees. The second family has $5K a year per capita. That might just let them send their kids to college with financial aid and student loans.
Each family individually makes decisions about how many kids to have, and from that how much to spend on each kid. The data has shown that after the industrial revolution, the birth rate first increased, then dramatically declined. Meaning that at first families were using their wealth to have more kids, but after a bit they switched tactics and now are having fewer kids with more resources.
Understanding this trend, it should be easy to see that food isn't the limiting factor anymore. A family will run out of money long before they go hungry. Anymore the limiting factor is education and job availability. A family that is unemployed will probably not chose to have children at that moment. So it creates a feedback between unemployment and birth rate. And as college prices go up many families will make real decisions about how many kids they can afford to have and send to college. So there's also a feedback between how many kids are going to college and birth rate.
For most of the 2nd half of the 20th century, the USA was free to consume the lion's share of the world's oil and steel. Why? Because hardly anyone else had industrialized to the point where they would want to compete with us for it. Last year, scrap iron reached an all time high price, because of construction happening over in India, and China. --- What happens when there's no longer an un-industrialized world for us to get our resources from?
Do you think there's honestly a potential for everyone on Earth to join our economic class? If they worked really hard, and studied, and built infrastructure with their own hands, would that get them everything we have? Or would we inevitably shoot them and take those resources for ourselves?
Urban sprawl motivates more and more farmers every day to sell their farm lands to real estate developers. Food may not be the dangerous thing *right now*, especially since you can always just lower the quality (eat food with more chemicals/pesticides in it, instead of paying extra for "organic" foods), but that doesn't mean we couldn't eventually become a net food importer instead of a net food exporter.
And between food and rent, there's no contest. No matter where you live, food costs less than housing. So as we start running out of land, it won't be starvation which limits our growth. It'll be crowding, and the limitations of how far from work you can live. A large part of our modern society is urbanization. As more of a family's budget is paying rent, they'll opt to have fewer kids so they can ensure each child gets an education.
It depends on how fairly we're getting the resources we consume. If we're installing dictators in South America on the basis of who will and who won't approve the sale of their countries' land to American corporations, well there's no market force associated with the justice or injustice with which a resource is obtained. However: if you're getting it unjustly, it eventually will collapse.
So to sum up: the industrial revolution has changed not only our maximum carrying capacity, but the per capita income of that maximum carrying capacity. Indications are that we'll approach that carrying capacity smoothly instead of with a crash (as with ancient societies and modern Europe), and that even after we reach 0 population growth our economies will continue to grow from technological improvements and increasingly thorough education and automation.
If anything, the trend might continue to the point where sustained negative population growth is the rule of thumb. The world economy would continue to expand even as the total population of the planet decreased.
Taken as a whole, our country and several South American countries might collectively have already surpassed population equilibrium, but we're blind to it because it isn't affecting us, and they're blind to it as well because they think we're to blame for all of it. (Instead of both sides having too many people). As our own population continues to grow, we'll just tell more of their children that they have to starve, and most Americans will be totally oblivious.
The funny thing about international industrial capitalism is that we're only dealing with their upper class (basically similar to a nobility), for the most part, instead of with them. As individuals, the common people wouldn't trade their country's land for cars and TV sets, but their leadership would, because their leadership is in no danger of going hungry.
As the total domestic supply of food decreases in their countries, the leaders' food costs go up from maybe something like 3% to say 5%, of their income, while the food costs of a field worker might go up from say 75% to 125% (meaning they can't honestly afford enough food to eat).
Basically, you can dodge any market force you want, just by choosing the right people to deal with. As a group, lead by a corrupt dictator, the group might choose to go hungry (as in... the dictator might choose that for them), in exchange for a few TV sets, a private plane, and some DVD's to watch while he (err... they?) flies around in it. And, the market will behave as if that made sense.
I hope it does reach 0 soon. Then we can start figuring out how to get it to reach 0 in the third world.Regardless, there's no need for population control at this moment in history for America or Europe. GDP is growing faster than population, and the percentage of GDP involved in agriculture and construction is dropping. You only really need to worry about overpopulation when that trend is in reverse. When population grows faster than the economy or the percentage of GDP spent on rent and food increases faster than the rest of the GDP then you know that it might be time to start imposing population limits. But again, all indications are that population growth will reach 0 well before that happens.
That's a good thing, right? I just want to make sure we're on the same page about that. The lower the agricultural GDP of a country is, the better. Right?
That's my point exactly. Pre industrial revolution, you had most of the work force engaged in agriculture. The sort where you learn how to do it by helping your father in the field as you grew up. But now that's changed. Farmers are increasingly educated and increasingly fewer in numbers. And they are hiring fewer, but more educated, workers (for the most part. Some unskilled labor is still employed in harvesting certain crops where machines aren't delicate enough).Well, if you factor in the cost of building the farm machinery, there are skilled contributors. A lot of farmers in the USA actually get degrees in Agriculture in order to maximize the productivity of their lands.Agriculture is unskilled labor generally. Manufacturing luxury goods, however, is increasingly a skilled labor job. Designers, programmers, architects, etc. Skilled labor takes schooling, which is expensive.
The industrial revolution in a nut shell is the movement from subsistence (everyone's a farmer) to industrial work to the post industrial society of America where most of the economy is service based.
First of all, South America is growing faster than we are. source. And if you google around for population growth of each country, it's all lower than their economic growth. It'd almost have to be. We can't hardly reproduce at 4%. Meaning the average person in South America is getting richer. Not poorer. That's including the population growth.It seems like the change between the colonial/westard expansion era and the present is that we went from just evicting another Indian tribe when we needed land, to installing "friendly" governments in South America that would allow us to buy up their countries' farm lands. (With the decline of the Soviet Union, we've had a harder time making up excuses.)
...
It depends on how fairly we're getting the resources we consume. If we're installing dictators in South America on the basis of who will and who won't approve the sale of their countries' land to American corporations, well there's no market force associated with the justice or injustice with which a resource is obtained. However: if you're getting it unjustly, it eventually will collapse.
Taken as a whole, our country and several South American countries might collectively have already surpassed population equilibrium, but we're blind to it because it isn't affecting us, and they're blind to it as well because they think we're to blame for all of it. (Instead of both sides having too many people). As our own population continues to grow, we'll just tell more of their children that they have to starve, and most Americans will be totally oblivious.
The funny thing about international industrial capitalism is that we're only dealing with their upper class (basically similar to a nobility), for the most part, instead of with them. As individuals, the common people wouldn't trade their country's land for cars and TV sets, but their leadership would, because their leadership is in no danger of going hungry.
As the total domestic supply of food decreases in their countries, the leaders' food costs go up from maybe something like 3% to say 5%, of their income, while the food costs of a field worker might go up from say 75% to 125% (meaning they can't honestly afford enough food to eat).
Basically, you can dodge any market force you want, just by choosing the right people to deal with. As a group, lead by a corrupt dictator, the group might choose to go hungry (as in... the dictator might choose that for them), in exchange for a few TV sets, a private plane, and some DVD's to watch while he (err... they?) flies around in it. And, the market will behave as if that made sense.
Second, you're fixating on food. But food isn't the limiting factor at all. America isn't importing food. It's a net exporter of food clicky. And the percentage growth of the agricultural sector is lower than that of the GDP as a whole. Meaning the average person will spend less percentage wise on food in the future. And the current epedemic in the US? Is it starvation or obesity?
Get off of food. No industrialized country will ever reach a point where on average each person is living a subsistence lifestyle like before the industrial revolution. For reasons I outlined before. If you must dwell on limited resources, choose oil.
Third, South America isn't the primary trading partner. It's Asia and Europe. See clicky. And in case your curious, exports and imports.
Fourth, last I checked South America was for growing drugs. You can't eat drugs. By trading drugs to the US instead of food, the South American farmer will be much richer. So if anything our interactions with South America are harmful because they're getting money from us to fuel drug lords. Not because we're starving them.
Fifth, what South American puppet dictator are you talking about? Is it Chevez? Because we all know how warmly he regards the US. Name even one South American country where the US had much of anything to do with the current leader. If anything, the US has been ignoring South America.
Sixth, if you take the poorest country in South America (Bolivia), find its per capita income in 1985 dollars, it's $550. That link I used in an earlier post says that pre industrial society's per capita income was roughly $600 (in 1985 dollars). Bolivia, Paraguay, and Guyana are living basically a pre industrial standard of life. All other South American countries are at least 2x as rich per person as they were 500 years ago. Wealth is not a zero sum game. We do not make ourselves rich by making others poor. They're poor only by comparison to how rich we've become.
We'll switch to other materials. We use metal because it's cheap, not because it's the only material for the job. See this and this (For most of the 2nd half of the 20th century, the USA was free to consume the lion's share of the world's oil and steel. Why? Because hardly anyone else had industrialized to the point where they would want to compete with us for it. Last year, scrap iron reached an all time high price, because of construction happening over in India, and China. --- What happens when there's no longer an un-industrialized world for us to get our resources from?).
And the Earth is a closed system. The metal we use doesn't disappear. It just gets put into landfills. If scrap metal prices climb high enough, people will just start digging it out of landfills.
Likewise with Oil. Guess what the original oil was? Well, whale oil. But after that. The Model T could burn ethanol, because rock oil wasn't in common use. We use rock oil today because it's still cheap. As its price rises, the market will begin looking to alternative fuels like ethanol, electricity, etc.
The only danger here is that our current economy is based on cheap fuel. In the coming decades if our GDP growth drops then goes negative relative to population growth, then we know that's the case. But I suspect that the shortage of rock oil will only slow economic growth slightly as the economy transitions. We are just too resourceful, and there are too many alternatives, for it to be a real nail in the coffin.
As I pointed out above, you're fixating way too much on food. As a country agricultural GDP growth is holding steady at ~150% our population growth (clicky), while the GDP as a whole grows much faster. We are a country that pays our farmers not to grow food. And we are suffering from an obesity epidemic from too much cheap food. In the mean time the inflation adjusted price of oil is climbing clicky, and the price of housing skyrocketed (though hopefully the recent housing bubble burst will correct that).Urban sprawl motivates more and more farmers every day to sell their farm lands to real estate developers. Food may not be the dangerous thing *right now*, especially since you can always just lower the quality (eat food with more chemicals/pesticides in it, instead of paying extra for "organic" foods), but that doesn't mean we couldn't eventually become a net food importer instead of a net food exporter.
When we reach population saturation, it won't be food that's the limiting factor. It'll be rent, and the related cost of transportation (for people and freight). So please, get off of food.
Yes, the Earth can become as rich per capita as America. The average human today is 6.5 times as rich as their pre industrial ancestors. Americans are 40 times as rich as their pre industrial ancestors. The world economy is growing at 5.2% clicky. And from the looks of it that number is actually growing. That number is also larger than America's GDP growth.Do you think there's honestly a potential for everyone on Earth to join our economic class? If they worked really hard, and studied, and built infrastructure with their own hands, would that get them everything we have? Or would we inevitably shoot them and take those resources for ourselves?
At 5% growth rate, the average human will become as rich as the average American is right now in ~90 years. China is already well on its way to this mark, with a growth rate of 10% over the last 15 or so years. Even with their dirt poor start, they should reach how rich Americans are now in about 100 years.
If China can do it, everyone can. You can make as many arguments about limited resources and running out of food/land/oil/steel as you want, but the data suggests that the current world is an increasingly prosperous one. The simple fact of the matter is that world GDP grows faster than population. And it has been for the last few hundred years. And there just isn't any data to suggest that that macro trend is going to change anytime soon.
Actually check out this link again. The Third World is following something called "Malthusian Population Dynamics". Meaning that increases in GDP cause equal increases in population. However, especially with birth control, this trend reverses as the GDP per capita passes a certain point of about $2000 (1985 dollars) per capita. Or $4000 in today's dollars. 66% of the countries in the world today are past this point.I hope it does reach 0 soon. Then we can start figuring out how to get it to reach 0 in the third world.
The Third World is full of dictators and war lords. Which makes for a hostile environment to investment. As I see it, almost all of the Third World's ills are a result of either too much (dictators) or too little (chaos and warlods) government. Look at Japan and South Korea. Both were essentially poor before American military intervention. America essentially set up capitalist friendly governments in both countries. And both countries are now economic powerhouses.
Likewise look at China. They did a massive economic reform in the late 70s to become more capitalist and less dogmatic. They are experiencing nose bleed economic growth as a result.
To improve quality of life in a country, it only needs a government strong enough to protect it from chaos and lenient enough to let capitalism thrive. Time and time again this has been the recipe for success.
Sorry to take so long answering this time. I'm starting to see the nature of the rift
between our views. Suppose we take Mexico as a metaphor for planet Earth, which means it's like Mexico if Mexico had nobody to trade with. No goods or services could ever enter or leave its borders (because no goods or services are capable of entering or leaving the Earth's borders).
Now, the way we evaluate GDP is we start with a consumer price index. We do a survey to see what people are buying, then we match their purchases to prices, and we compare our results with previous surveys. What people are buying right now is built into the GDP. If their buying decisions changed radically, that number would fluctuate radically as well, even if exactly the same items were produced and in exactly the same abundances.
Now, in Mexico there's a very wealthy class, and a lot of poor people under them. It's basically a middle income country with horrible wealth distribution, or at least that's I've usually heard it described.
Now, suppose something evens out all of the incomes, and everyone has the same amount of income for a while. What quite a lot of your poorer field workers would buy is food. A very substantial portion of the lower income workers in that country either eat less than they'd like to in total, or end up having to settle for less desireable food options in order to make their budget fit their needs. The primary meat used in cooking tends to be parts like the intestines, that wealthier people wouldn't want to buy, and many groups can't afford to eat meat at all, settling instead for some kind of staple diet.
Now, if Mexico is like Earth, and unable to import/export, then it has to produce this food on its own land. If say.... 50% of the arable land were already being used for edible food production instead of cash crops, that % would have to increase, but it's not going to increase to 125% no matter what anyone does.
Maybe today's population, the number of people alive right now, this very second, in Mexico, could be fed just by cutting into the cash crop production. It's probably true that they could. Maybe even twice that many could, but ask yourself: what percent of the land would that require? That tells you exactly how much larger the population can grow before starvation would be forced to set in.
And now we're back to the question of: what does GDP mean? No nation that is capable of imposing starvation on a substantial portion of its population will ever appear to be short on food in total. Economically it will always behave as though food were plentiful, and people were simply choosing not to buy it (because they want other things instead).
It's an un-called bluff, just like if somebody bluffs in poker and nobody calls it. Each starving worker believes that they, as an individual, would have more food if they could make more money, and it's true that they (as an individual) probably would, because they'd move ahead of the curve, the curve would shift up slightly, and it would be someone else who couldn't stay ahead of it.
Economic theory predicts that if more people start buying something, the price of that item will go up. This is local inflation. However, the law of supply and demand dictates that this local inflation will be temporary, because suppliers will begin increasing the supply to match the demand. That effect should cancel inflation. But, what happens if there's a maximum possible supply?
In a case like food, economic law will be trumped by a law 10 trillion times more powerful: physical law.
If you're happy starving out the bottom 5, 10, 15% ... etc of your population on a
consistent basis, then this is all nothing to worry about. The market will adjust
alright all on its own (someone will "choose" to go without). It's only if you want to change this condition that population control becomes mandatory. My personal prediction is that problems such as terrorism will only grow unless we do something to change the order of things around a bit, so that nobody ever needs to be totally marginalized. But... maybe the civilized world's anti-terror tech will outpace the ability of marginalized individuals to blow stuff up when they see the writing on the wall, and realize they're part of that bottom 5,10, or 15%.
Let's do a little math.
First, corn has roughly 1500 Kcal per pound. And let's say that an average adult consumes 2000 Kcal per day. So it takes roughly 500 pounds of corn to feed an adult for one year.
Second, I can't figure out how much kcal a pound of sugar cane can produce, but let's say it's comparable to corn (my guess is that it's even higher).
There's 110 million people in Mexico right now. Mexico produces 46.81 billion tons of sugar cane, and 15.72 billion tons of corn. For a total of 568 tons of sugar cane or corn per person.
Well, that number doesn't seem quite right... But even if you take it down by a factor of 1000 to 62.53 million tons, that's still 1136 pounds per person. Or 4600 kcal per day.
And that's just its two largest crops.
Where does most of that food go? Probably livestock feed. I had a link but lost it. But basically the average cow gets more food than the average poor rural farmer.
Mexico's problems are one of distribution, not production.
Your basic argument is called a Malthusian catastrophe, by the way. It was pretty much a rule of law before the industrial revolution. People would reproduce to the edge of sustainability.
Post industrial societies have a different demography. This change is called the demographic transition, and is really the core to my argument.
Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that food is the limiting factor for a post industrial population. Let's also say that real production is capped at a fixed value. As you pointed out, GDP is determined by sale price, not by production. So as we increase the population, and the price of food sky rockets, the apparent growth of the agricultural sector in GDP will increase, even though its actual production is fixed. You know there's potentially a problem of food shortage in a country when the following conditions hold:
1. The growth of the agriculture sector outstrips the growth of the rest of the economy, and this growth is not fueled by an increase in actual production.
2. The population growth rate is above the growth rate of the nation's GDP.
However, again, food is not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is maximum population density in a city. 15% of American GDP is produced in our three largest cities (LA, NY, and Chicago) even though they only account for 5% of our population. That's why the rent in the downtown of a city is so high.
Check your household budget. Roughly half of your post taxes income is probably spent on rent. I have many relatives (myself included atm) who live with older family members (parents, grandparents), because they can't afford rent. Before the housing bubble burst, housing prices were growing at an insane rate. Well above both population, housing growth, and GDP growth. Does that sound familiar? It should, it fulfills the two criteria I set above for food shortage.
The limiting factor is rent. Living far from a city is much cheaper, but takes more time to commute, and more money. Cities have a maximum effective radius, and usually a severely outstripped infrastructure (roads, public transit, etc.) which hamper further population growth.
Because of the demographic transition, this translates into lower birth rates.
Wow. I knew growing livestock was an inefficient use of food, but I guess I never knew it was so seriously inefficient.
I'd still like to live in a world where we can all have meat in our diets, but I guess a desire for a luxury, even if you desire for the enjoyment of that luxury to be universal, isn't a terribly strong philosophical argument if it goes against other serious concerns.
Your basic argument is called a Malthusian catastrophe, by the way. It was pretty much a rule of law before the industrial revolution. People would reproduce to the edge of sustainability.
Post industrial societies have a different demography. This change is called the demographic transition, and is really the core to my argument.
Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that food is the limiting factor for a post industrial population. Let's also say that real production is capped at a fixed value. As you pointed out, GDP is determined by sale price, not by production. So as we increase the population, and the price of food sky rockets, the apparent growth of the agricultural sector in GDP will increase, even though its actual production is fixed. You know there's potentially a problem of food shortage in a country when the following conditions hold:
1. The growth of the agriculture sector outstrips the growth of the rest of the economy, and this growth is not fueled by an increase in actual production.
2. The population growth rate is above the growth rate of the nation's GDP.
This pretty much describes my argument. Just with one qualifier. If income distributions are uneven enough, agriculture's apparent GDP will not increase regardless of the relative amount of population to agricultural production.
On paper, it looks like the population isn't choosing to buy food, when the reality might be that a large portion of the population isn't capable of doing so. The wealthier class in that uneven group doesn't have to increase their bid to buy food unless somebody else is bidding against them.
I tend to see the two as interchangeable. (It's an unfortunate irony that large cities are usually built over the top of some of the best agricultural land) If these cities build straight vertical to accommodate larger populations, then it's not quite as much of a trade off. All you really lose is fresh water resources as the city grows (making it more difficult to get good irrigation to nearby farms).
However, again, food is not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is maximum population density in a city. 15% of American GDP is produced in our three largest cities (LA, NY, and Chicago) even though they only account for 5% of our population. That's why the rent in the downtown of a city is so high.
Check your household budget. Roughly half of your post taxes income is probably spent on rent. I have many relatives (myself included atm) who live with older family members (parents, grandparents), because they can't afford rent. Before the housing bubble burst, housing prices were growing at an insane rate. Well above both population, housing growth, and GDP growth. Does that sound familiar? It should, it fulfills the two criteria I set above for food shortage.
The limiting factor is rent. Living far from a city is much cheaper, but takes more time to commute, and more money. Cities have a maximum effective radius, and usually a severely outstripped infrastructure (roads, public transit, etc.) which hamper further population growth.
Because of the demographic transition, this translates into lower birth rates.
Usually, however, cities sprawl instead of building vertically. When that happens, you'll see large amounts of prime farmland getting sold to real estate developers to build houses on. If the farmland were going to waste by being used to grow cash crops, we could reclaim it, but it's very hard to convince people to let you tear down their house and grow food there instead.
I guess the majority of farms are very far away from Metro Centers, so I might be exaggerating the effect. I see a lot of it where I live, because I'm kind of in that zone where you're near enough to a city that people want to live on the lands around you, but far enough away that the new residents buy a lot of acreage to go with their houses, acreage you know was formerly farm land, in many cases.
And... I might be missing your point.
Because farm land translates into real estate, and real estate prices are able to assert themselves in a strong enough way to motivate family planning decisions, that means market forces can stop runaway population growth. That would explain why, in the USA, it seems to be the rednecks that are having all the kids. (Since most of them live far away from a population center)
The various megacities getting built in India are probably a very good trend, then, because that will surely compress some of their population growth.
If you cant breed human with monkey or ape than that means humans did not come from monkeys. Eh?
You can breed a chicken with a duck but for some reason not a human with an ape?
This proves we did not come form monkeys.
No, it doesn't.
You also can't breed a great dane with a chihuahua, but that doesn't mean they didn't both come from wolves.
Also, btw... the claim is not that "we came from monkeys." The fact is that we share a common ancestor, and further, humans ARE apes, so there's always that.
| « Best way to guide an autonomous combat robot? | Muskets vs. a Modern Rifle » |
| Bookmarks |
Bookmarks |
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
