It’s like the environment. Some people will only be willing to admit that there is a problem once the air is so toxic that inhaling itself makes them sick. Perhaps then they’ll realize that clean air is an important part of the so-called “standard of living” that they’re so eager to defend via opposing virtually every measure at addressing the problem.

Rationality prevails? Let’s hope it will, and not human nature.

Someone with 4, 6 or more kids (not me, by the way) can discover today that it is not responsible to bring that many new carbon-emitters to life, and they can begin to advocate for better decisions. I believe they have the right to do that, and they should do that. And you can be sure someone will call them a hypocrite and suggest they commit suicide. Those kinds of comebacks are not rational dialogue, but rather reflect the irrational, emotional, baggage-laden nature of the topic.

We should continue to bring up and discuss the subject and either ignore such comments or repeatedly point out their nonsensical nature…until rationality prevails!

Thanks for engaging in such an important conversation.

Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
http://www.growthbusters.com

No wonder no one is particularly eager to broach the topic. And if you dare, your listeners will most likely wonder what sort of unspoken “solutions” you carry around in the back of your head–mass sterilizations? Forced abortions? Extermination camps?

People are–I believe rightfully so–afraid what kind of methods any notion of “population control” would entail in practice, should the idea ever find widespread approval.

For better or worse, the drive to multiply is built into us. Especially if we have kids of our own, the issue of population control becomes deeply personal, and people who raise it inevitably come across as hating children, including our own, and this launches us into an instinctive offspring protection mode.

So even aside from religion, we carry a huge genetic barrier to addressing the problem, as our brains will immediately carry the matter to its radical conclusion, namely that, according to the overpopulation alarmists, we and our kids never should have been born in the first place. Now we’re in Defense Mechanism City. Next comes the suggestion that all people concerned about overpopulation should simply shoot themselves, as this would certainly help drive population down.

I agree with you that reasonable people don’t have more children than they can afford to support, so tax incentives may work. The question is, however, what percentage of the population falls into that category. One could also say that reasonable people don’t eat more than their bodies need, yet look at our waistlines; or that reasonable people don’t spend more money than they have, yet look at our collective credit card debt. Not sure how much stock I would put into people’s overall capacity to act reasonably.

As to your assertion that most people ultimately choose to limit the size of their families at some point for purely economic reasons, that strikes me as yet another first-world phenomenon. In an ironic quirk of nature, people seem to have the most kids in countries where they couldn’t even afford one, let alone feed a whole gaggle.

Regarding immigration, I agree that it is a bit puzzling to hear many tout virtually unfettered immigration on the grounds of this country being a proud nation of immigrants, utterly ignoring the fact that, at its founding, U.S. population stood at less than five million, so it has essentially sixty-upled since then. No more frontiers to move into. (Of course, being a naturalized subject myself, the logical response would be to suggest I return whence I came if I’m concerned about overcrowding in the New World.)

You’re certainly correct in that the planet ain’t getting bigger. Perhaps we could genetically engineer smaller humans who will need less food and take up less space.

Had I only known! While I wasn’t paying attention, I added to the problem. My twerps could be the straws that break ….

In addition, in order to attain population stability in the U.S., we must address our high rates of immigration. While we’re proud of our heritage as a nation built of immigrants, we can no longer sustain immigration at a rate that contributes substantially to population growth.

The biggest obstacle we face in changing attitudes toward overpopulation is economists. Since the field of economics was branded “the dismal science” after Malthus’ theory, economists have been adamant that they would never again consider the subject of overpopulation and continue to insist that man is ingenious enough to overcome any obstacle to further growth. Even worse, economists insist that population growth is vital to economic growth. This is why world leaders continue to ignore population growth in the face of mounting challenges like peak oil, global warming and a whole host of other environmental and resource issues.

But because they are blind to population growth, there’s one obstacle they haven’t considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.

If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.

Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”

Just because good old Malthus’s prediction didn’t pan out as quickly and for the reason he gave doesn’t mean the threat itself isn’t real. You don’t dismiss a general danger just because some guy erred in the timeline. The big food shortage me be coming once we’ve ruined most of the world’s arable soil. Aufgeschoben ist nicht aufgehoben.

As to people worrying about overpopulation in the 1970s, if my math is correct, since then world population has grown by almost as many people as were alive in 1900, which tells me that their worries were right on the nose.

Although the fittest members of our species may be reproducing the least, this phenomenon, unless I’m mistaken, occurs mainly in wealthy first-world countries, which, in the aggregate, comprise only fraction of the world. It doesn’t help much if birth rates are leveling off or falling in a few countries while continuing to skyrocket everywhere else. The “fortress America” deal may not work in terms of keeping billions of desparate people from dragging us down with them. We’ve already got coal dust from Chinese power plants wafting all the way over to California. Check your window sill. Why are the Chinese building power plants like crazy? Because they’ve got too many people who need too much energy.

The only solution seems to be to turn every country into a wealthy first-world nation, although I’m not quite sure how to accomplish such feat.

As to Darwin being puzzled, I’m not sure. After all, the survival rate of these wealthy elderly ladies’ offspring is probably the highest offspring survival rate in the history of survival rates. So it makes sense that upper-class females are in no rush to reproduce, as the survival of the ones they’ll have is guaranteed to an unprecedented degree. I’m not an evolution specialist, but as far as I know, it is high infant mortality which spurs reproduction. Better to have too many than none at all. If you can wait till you’re 40 to have one or two kids that’ll probably survive, then there’s no real need to start reproducing like crazy when you’re 15 years old.

If I were Darwin, I wouldn’t be puzzled at all. Of course, if I were Darwin, I’d be dead. (I was actually going to write “On the Origin of Species,” but then I realized someone else had already done so. Too bad I wasn’t aware of Malthus prior to typing my blog entry. I could have saved myself a lot of pixels.)

Then again, it applies to any and every species. All species die out eventually. A few genes in our gene pool will make it into the next species, better adapted to whatever mess we create.

That said, two comments: 1) Malthus wrote your blog post 200 years ago, and was wrong. He concentrated on food running out, and we figured that one out. Then, overpopulation was the big worry again in the 1970s, but we seem to have stopped worrying about it. That’s because the fertility rate has fallen. So while our population is still growing, we’re really just ageing. 50 years out, and our population will start falling. Maybe we actually have changed course.

2) in the meantime, I prefer to worry (since I do agree that we should always worry, for not to worry is a sign of, oh, whatever) about RELATIVE fertility. We are facing an evolutionary, biological first: For the first time in biologicial history, the “fittest” members of a species (the educated and rich and powerful) are voluntarily reproducing the least. The females of the species in that category are leaving it to the end of their fertile period and then require technological assistance. Meanwhile, the less adapted are breeding profusely.

That one would puzzle Darwin.

I’m actually making a film about this subject, to help make it “okay” to acknowledge the unsustainability of our population level.

Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
http://www.growthbusters.com