One-child policy began in 1979. In 1980, My mother hid in her relatives' houses and finally delivered her second child - me. I was very lucky because if my mother was caught, I can't sit here to type these sentences.
I do understand the one-child policy because there are too many people in China, especially in cities. The population should be under control. (However, as far as I know, one-child policy never really works in the very poor area. It's common to have 3+ children there.)
In recent decades, China becomes much richer and people have better education. Many families (in cities) get used to having only one child and don't want to have the second child because the cost of raising a child becomes very high. Two-child policy should come earlier.
Ecosystems have carrying capacities. There is only so much water and arable land. There are only so many resources in the mines/oil wells waiting to be extracted.
Technology (like GMOs) can help you make incrementally more efficient use of those resources, but not as fast as unbounded exponential population growth.
At some point, the average standard of living has to come crashing down. The biologically necessary quantity of food and water is not available for everyone. Even with unlimited labor to supply factories, there are no more raw materials to make gadgets and medicine out of.
A country in that situation has basically one reasonable course of action: kill the neighbors and take their resources.
China is arguably being a good world citizen by trying not to put itself in that position.
You may find this statist interference with a natural process distasteful, but consider the alternative: only the fittest get to survive.
Arguably 1/2 of the molecules in our bodies come from the artificial nitrogen extraction process developed during WWI. Without that, Earth's human population would have been limited to half of what it is now back in the 20th century.
If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend the book, "The Alchemy of Air" about the invention of Haber-Bosch.. It was unbelievable what they went through to fix nitrogen, they literally invented new fields of study in materials science and chemistry. The perils of a Jewish inventor creating a new method for making explosives under the Third Reich is a side story in the book but another fascinating historical anecdote.
And also Zyklon which would become Zyklon B when the warning eye irritant was removed to make it a better weapon for murdering people. There was a RadioLab[1] episode that talked about how it was eventually used on some of his own relatives.
The earth could probably support 100+ billion people at reasonable comfort levels with slightly better technology as long as we give up the idea of life outside of zoo's.
That said, past experience has demonstrated the Human population can easily grow at 5% per year. At that rate it's doubling every 15 years. Trying to double the universes food supply every 15 years is just not possible indefinitely.
PS: 2^n is crazy. It takes less time than you might think before the mass of humanity is growing faster than a sphere expanding at the speed of light could support.
Uh, the current growth rate is around 1% per year, and it's decreasing as countries enter the first world. That's a doubling every 70 years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
We've got a lot of efficiency left in terms of agriculture as well, so there isn't much reason to think reaching the carrying capacity of the planet is a particularly pressing issue. The amount of food that we already grow that we don't eat roughly 1/3 already, and the vast majority of land doesn't contribute to agriculture.
The counter argument goes something like this. Let's double every 1,000 years for the next 1,000,000 years that sounds easy.
Let's see that's only 7billion * 2^1,000 or err ~7 * 10 ^ 310 people. Hmm, there are only ~10^83 atoms in the observable universe. I guess they must be really tiny people.
So, yea it's not a problem in right now and probably not for a long time yet. But, as soon as you start doubling something has to give.
The top of the curve can be unpleasant. It doesn't have to be.
The worst is when population goes past carrying capacity and then crashes. That's when you get mass die-offs.
Population can settle down at carrying capacity simply through reduced birth rates matching up with death rates. That's the situation we see in much of the western world, with better availability of birth control etc.
Every part of the curve faces that sort of instability. The number of crops actually growing isn't particularly higher than the number needed to sustain the population, and we can't just spin up enough food for billions of people even if we do have plenty of land to do it on.
With humanity, "carrying capacity" is unlikely to be food-limited.
The large number of overweight Americans is a huge pool of excess food and takes a lot of extra daily calories to maintain. As is the large number of livestock being produced and all that corn ethanol etc.
The top of the curve removes that as we can't pay for the inefficiency's of livestock or the extra daily calories to be overweight and feed 50+ billion people.
"carrying capacity" is set by a lot more factors than just food.
Human population is expected to level off at 10-13 billion based on factors relating to social organization, not the 50+ billion that could theoretically be fed.
Replace food with water, land, etc and you get the same instabilitys. Social factors at the limits can easily lead to war, revolution, and or the breakdown of society.
sure, but you don't need to be at the limit to have that sort of instability. It becomes a bit more pronounced when there's less leeway, but it's not different in kind, only a little bit in magnitude.
China is a very big country. But only a small portion of the land is suitable for living. Almost 94 percent of Chinese people live in the Southeast part of the country which covers 43 percent of its land area; while the other six percent people live in the northwestern areas which cover 57 percent of the territory. [1] And people like to live in cities. Can you imagine there are 23.9 million people [2] in Shanghai City?
The problem isn't really population per se, it's population growth. China instituted the one-child policy so they could slow down their population growth to more manageable levels.
We could have 10 billion people on this planet and we'd be fine, so long as we were resource-efficient.
> What is the standard to determine the right population
only someone who's never been to china would ask about the 'standard' for determining overpopulation. it's abundantly clear as soon as you step off the airplane and take a look around. it's just too damn crowded.
what is the standard for determining that water is wet?
When I visited China with my wife, she had told me beforehand her parents lived in a "rural" area. What I imagined was acres of farmland and long dirt roads. The reality of "rural" China was closer to the density of Bay Area. It was incredible how dense everything was, even in the less dense areas.
Its not current population so much as the growth rate. China is 2/11 of the World. That's between 1/5 and 1/6, so small changes they make have dramatic effects decades down the road. Our current population is almost certainly not sustainable doing things the way we are now, but we are changing that. Population growth is only sustainable with dramatic changes in the way we live, yet we are adding people by the billion.
The kinds of socio-economic figures measured by NGOs like per capita GDP and infant mortality and life expectancy. If you increase GDP you can give your people healthier/better lives.
> If you increase GDP you can give your people healthier/better lives.
Sort of. You'll still bump up against physical system constraints, at least until we're swimming in an excess of renewable, clean energy.
It would take many Earth's worth of resources to have the quality of life American's have. Clean energy goes a long way to solving that, but again, physical systems have limitations.
Malthusian catastrophe. Population tends to grow exponentially, but not the resources. Historically, the excess of population have been controlled through wars and famines. The CP wanted to control with laws instead...
The thing is that in developed countries this kind of laws are not necessary because people just don't have children because they are too expensive.
There are too many people on the planet to start with, and 1/6 of them is in China. The effect that they are having on the environment (both in "nature" and in their own living spaces) is atrocious, but there are too many people to reasonably switch to a sustainable model. Additionally, if you account for the fact that a gigantic portion of their land is basically uninhabitable (the Gobi Desert), they have an unreal population density (among non-trivial sovereign nations). If their population keeps expanding unchecked, they'll stop being able to feed everyone.
> There are too many people on the planet to start with
The issue isn't whether that's true. The issue is who gets to decide what the right number is and what we all do about it. To most of us, the moral hazards (and realities!) of coercive birth control are severe.
The moral hazards of uncontrolled population growth are far more severe. The only question is whether we control population via a statutory law (as China did), or through extreme costs-of-living (as "liberal" Western countries do). I'd argue a statutory law is far more humane.
Not only more humane, but more fair. Why should the people who provide the least resources to their children be the ones to create the most human progeny?
Given that coercive abortion and gender selection are realities and the problems of overpopulation are more theoretical, I wonder what your definition of humane is.
And again, who decides which is more humane? If you and your cohort wants to stop reproducing as a good example, nobody is stopping you.
Your elected government? Isn't that what you elected it for? Or just hold a referendum or something.
The "who decides" question is a problem here. It doesn't matter who, it only matters that the decision has to be made and then carried out. The coordination has to arise or be enforced, but happen the coordination must. What you're implying by asking this question has many names. In politics, it's "total anarchy". In biology, it's "cancer". In infrastructure projects, it's called NIMBYsm. Imagine trying to run a large company with the rule "we're all equal, who gets to decide?" - how long would it survive?
Like it or not, Earth will have to have a "top management" layer. Run it top-down, run it co-op style, whatever - but after some size, you can no longer ignore the looming coordination problems and their deadly consequences.
Yes, as with everything, there are failure modes. Coercive abortion and gender selection happen mostly because of misalignment between "one child rule" and the economics, so the people selfishly prefer to spawn an offspring that will give better economic payoff. But incentive structures we can manage. We could manage it better if we stopped just asking "who gets to decide?" and instead picked someone to decide.
Also, the only problem with "coercive abortion" is the "coercive" part; if you believe that abortion is ok, then gender selection via abortion is also ok. If you don't believe gender selection via abortion is ok, then you also must disagree with general abortion as a practice.
EDIT:
Also2, we have a "who gets to decide?" problem when it comes to inconvenience ourselves and spawn less children, but we do not have that problem when it comes to decide who to bomb the living shit out of, killing their children, along with parents, grandparents, livestock and future. Strange, isn't it?
Also, the only problem with "coercive abortion" is the "coercive" part; if you believe that abortion is ok, then gender selection via abortion is also ok. If you don't believe gender selection via abortion is ok, then you also must disagree with general abortion as a practice.
Not at all. The entire point of this line of discussion centers around limiting an implied personal right to reproduce for the good of society. A one-child policy might serve society's needs as a whole. A one-child policy that allows prospective parents to, say, flood the world with a supermajority of male children does not serve society's needs.
I think that gender selection via abortion is ok in the general sense, absent perverse incentives that cause society-crippling gender imbalances, but if those incentives exist and are abused, I can certainly understand a desire to make that illegal, while still allowing (and supporting) gender-blind abortion.
You have decades, if not centuries of propaganda, that people need to have more children, that having as many children as you want is somehow a human right. Even recently in the past, there were yet vast undiscovered countries awaiting the world's population. The notion that one could have "too many children" and that this selfish behavior is intolerable will take time to catch on.
Even this thread is hopeful to me, a decade ago there wouldn't have been near as much disagreement about whether you have the right to burden society without limit.
What's theoretical about the high and unsustainable cost of living in high-population areas?
>And again, who decides which is more humane? If you and your cohort wants to stop reproducing as a good example, nobody is stopping you.
This argument is such a canard. If someone is blaring loud music throughout a neighborhood, the solution is to force them to stop, not to tell everyone else who finds it annoying to just be quiet.
EDIT: I can't reply to the below comment, except to question whether it is equating fines for extra children with being a murderous dictator. That is quite a hyperbolic comparison. The road to hell is already being paved by those who advocate a cancer-like approach to human population growth.
.... Said every murderous dictator when he decided a certain segment of the population was polluting the gene pool and he no longer wanted to see or hear them.
or in other words: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. "2+2 = 4" said every murderous dictator ever, and yet we don't ban arithmetics for being a tool that Stalin used.
Pulling out a Straw Man, is the last resort of the lazy debater. I never implied correlation or causation. I attacked a repulsive philosophy.
I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the terrible things a totalitarian dictator did to Jews and homosexuals in your country during the 40s. In fact this same philosophy would have been used to ban your grandparents, and mine, from breeding had they been successful.
Adopting a policy of "anything goes because it is for my perceived good of society", without regard for society's wishes, allows for any manner of evils to be 'legally' imposed on that society by the ruling classes.
PS. To address the point you made: the US does in fact ban the export of arithmetics (cryptography, software) to a number of countries ruled by dictators (not that I think this is a good policy or that it has the intended effect).
A straw man is what you're pulling out here right now :).
> I implied the justification of "its for the good of society" in removing/restricting human rights (reproduction) and mutilating woman (forced abortions), is no different to the justification historical dictators used when they did the exact same things ... like for example the terrible things a totalitarian dictator did to Jews and homosexuals in your country during the 40s
That's my point - the philosophy may or may not be sound, but the fact that evil dictatorships used such philosophy doesn't matter. It doesn't reflect on its soundness.
There are reasons that humans shouldn't generally be allowed to go for "ends justify the means" though. Like you correctly observe, historically it ended up with people abusing the power to promote one group over another. But the philosophy is not in itself repulsive.
Earth doesn't have too many people. The people inhabiting it are just, currently, quite wasteful with resources.
What's the goal here? We could have many more people each living in misery, crowding, and poverty. Or we could have fewer people with each one being rich and free and having access to parks and open space to breathe and relax.
More people isn't somehow good in itself. Children are great but one or two is enough.
> We could have many more people each living in misery, crowding, and poverty. Or we could have fewer people with each one being rich and free and having access to parks and open space to breathe and relax.
A false dichotomy. The latter experience can be given to the former's population.
More people isn't somehow "good", but it's not bad.
> The latter experience can be given to the former's population.
How? Keep in mind only a small fraction of the world's population is even capable of being a tourist. Imagine how that changes when everyone is well-off enough to travel at will. Imagine your favorite beach, favorite museum, or your favorite national park and multiply the number of visitors by 10, 20, 40, etc. Waiting-lists for years to visit the Louvre. Prices so high that only the 1% of the 1% can afford to visit Maui.
Maybe you are assuming that VR will solve these issues? Perhaps a Matrix-like future awaits us.
Most of us discussing this are already living a Matrix-like reality. 80%+ of life in front of a screen, with that last bit of time at the gym (with screens), cafe/bar (with screens), or maybe an inner-city park (with cellphone screen out). A diet primarily consisting of processed grain, factory meat and barren vegetation. Blaming our inevitable neuroticism on a chemical imbalance or moral failure, not the alienated zoo life we live -- or worse, distracting ourselves so thoroughly we don't notice it. Of course this kind of person is going to think we can fit billions more on the planet.
Our wellbeing probably does rely on technology like VR and automation, but with so many mentally ill, I would say our current situation is already unacceptable (and has been for thousands of years). Adding billions more to the equation isn't going to help.
From the article "All couples will now be allowed to have two children".
So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.
China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws (still bad for Western standards, but huge step comparing to China 30 years ago).
Only because West thinks this is "brutal and cruel" dosent mean our laws would ever worked there.
Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.
There is a lot more at play in the middle east than "they never really wanted it".
As I wrote elsewhere, it's hard enough in a vacuum to overthrow a dictatorship and start a free and functional democracy. It's even harder when there are a multitude of foreign powers interfering in your country preventing this from happening. Democracy is failing in the middle east because there are a lot of powerful people and nations who don't want it to succeed, want the region to remain unstable, and want the region to remain within their respective spheres of influence.
And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
> And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
It's not even that easy. Ask the entire country in a free and fair manner and you'll quickly discover that people's opinions are not independent and do not exist in a vacuum. They may say to you they prefer living in a dictatorship because of a combination of not knowing anything else and pro-dictatorship propaganda. Or they may say "democracy!" because they drank the kool-aid.
I'm starting to believe that the only way to reach democracy as a stable state is for a society to naturally evolve towards it. Just leave it alone, let them figure things out; after a few generations they will probably sort out their culture and then they'll have a democracy that's sustainable because it'll be backed by decades of cultural growth. Trying to speed this transformation up is a dangerous game. Trying to speed it up with tanks and guns is just crazy.
> China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws
To be clear, do you think that killing children or forced abortions were major contributors to that? Or does it just so happen that the two happened at the same time?
It seems like a bit of a logical stretch to me to say, "America installing democracy didn't work in Iraq, so we shouldn't be worried if China kills or forcefully aborts children."
Maybe instead of building camps and fighting between A and B consider option C? I am not saying its OK by my standards but it seems that this was only way for China to properly handle this issue at the time when they made this move.
Your assumption is a stretch. You are putting words in my mouth and that's just below level of conversation one should expect from HN community.
>Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Well for one thing, you'd have a billion more potential farmers...
Population growth is a pretty old problem, and if recent developed nations' demographic reports show, it solves itself once you reach a certain level of development.
China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government. It could very well be in spite of them.
China already has an average of ~1.7 children per family [0] if you factor into account that the policy is enforced at a provincial level, and depending on that province, it may be the case that (0) people of certain backgrounds (e.g. farmers, minorities, parents with disabilities or medical conditions) can be exempt in some areas, (1) affluent people sometimes just pay the fine and have a second child, (2) in the most recent version of the law, if one parent is an only child, they were permitted have 2 children, (3) Chinese citizens who have resided overseas for some period of time may be permitted to have 2 children.
A lot of people may go from 1 to 2 children. Not that many people will go from 2 to 3 children. Children are very expensive for most families.
imo you are not including the fact that Chinese culture is quite different to other parts of the world. It would be better to compare them to India and Vietnam rather than world statistics.
The quantity of the available resources is not nearly as much of a problem as the allocation. Subsistence farmers are not as productive on the same plot of land as industrialized commodity farmers.
We have more than enough land and water to feed everyone, but the (simplified) problem is that when one person does all the farming for the whole world, nobody else can afford to trade for any of it from them.
Surely the farmer needs clothing. So he will trade with the sole cloth maker. Surely the club maker needs threads and dyes, so she will trade with the due maker and the thread spinner... And ad infinitum.
>China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government.
Please enlight us then; Knowing that in china government is present in EVERY aspect of a life (religion, state, education, internet) I cannot see how their success is not because of the policies of the government. Any place that has an exploding growth is in deep shit just look at the whole africa. better off countries with exploding growth, turkey or maghreb countries are also in deep shit with big parts of the population immigrating to europe to survive this.
China's success is DEFINITELY because of the policies they put in place.
Population growth at China's scale is not a "pretty old problem". It's literally the largest population in the history of the world. No one, not even the U.S. government has an idea of what to do there. Then, add in the fact that when these policies were made, China had not even been through an industrial revolution and just had a MASSIVE famine (20-40 million deaths), I think the decision to have a one-child policy made a lot of sense.
Development is not something that happens naturally if you just leave people alone. Overpopulation hinders development. They most certainly wouldn't be as developed as they are if they had grown faster than their economy could sustain.
> Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify)
Some parts of the world are not grown up to handle democracy or make social decisions. Those worlds usually have only three options, forced dictator, forced democracy or domestic war.
We could go in to the detail but I assumed my point was clear on this one.
>Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
A mistake was made. It was not understood that people in war-torn countries want peace and stability above all else, and are willing to hand in their liberties for it. It was also not understood that among people who don't trust news or words of any kind (justified in this case) it is rational to support the candidate that's closest to yourself genetically.
The link between democracy and wealth, stability and trust flow both ways, and it's easier to start with wealth, stability and trust than with democracy.
Also, there is a lot more at play in the middle east than simply whether the people want democracy or stability. There is plenty of foreign interference going on from USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc... it's hard enough to overthrow a dictatorship and set up a free and democratic replacement. It's even harder when several foreign powers are fighting to prevent this from happening.
As I understand it (probably needs some correction):
This is a cold war being fought over who will supply Europe with natural gas. Russia, the current supplier, makes a ton of money off the current arrangement and it gives Russia influence over Europe. Europe has largely stayed out of the fracas publicly, to avoid antagonizing Russia, but supports the US's efforts to get the pipeline built to have an alternate source for the energy they need. I'm unclear as the role of the US in all this, but we're tightly allied with Western Europe, so I imagine we're representing Europe's interests by proxy. But what is clear is that it's no coincidence that the countries where all this craziness is happening are the countries along the planned route for the pipeline. Seen through this lens, everything starts to make sense, including Russia's endeavors to support Assad, an opponent of the pipeline.
Expecting stability in a region where one superpower wants a pipeline built and another doesn't isn't reasonable, no matter how ready the population is for democracy. Add in that the region has a ton of people who believe in a medieval religion that advocates violence against non-adherents, and what little hope there was vanishes.
It should be that way. But some cannot understand that some countries do not want Democracy. Its not that they don't matured - they just don't want it. Even in some European countries we can see the move to shift much more power to presidents (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland).
Oh hell like anyone wants to shift power to president in Poland. Or as if anyone believed presidents have any power over anything (even the US president doesn't have any real power; you don't get to be in that position if you're a wildcard that is likely to do things against your party or the rest of administration).
If anything we have a conflict between people who want the country to be more Catholic and the ones who want it to be less Catholic, and a secondary push against any government because people seem to believe that entrepreneurs are force of good that is being murdered by the Evil Government through means like taxation.
Democracy is strong here - people are being indoctrinated in it since early childhood, and it's especially effective since we have the boogeyman of comunist USSR to scare them with.
If someone truly doesn't want democracy then they are participating in it. Only some theoretical person without desires could be said to not want a system that lets them express them.
Now, it's debatable if a "representative democracy" would seem to offer that, but I wonder that myself from time to time...
The problem is that current democracy is no democracy at all in most countries. It support corruption, the governments are barely changing (same deputies, the name just changes), total detachment of administration from real human problems, hostile approach towards small businesses.
The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
In Libia for example most people loved Kadaffi. Yet, he was removed by revolution that would surely fail if not for major help from west. Kadaffi while violent man, managed to make Libia in to blooming example of African country that can distribute prosperity to majority of people.
Let us check Singapore - did it work? Sure. Was it bad for people? Not really. Obviously there will be some affected by strong power, but devastating majority seen their lives skyrocketing comparing to Malasia.
The issue is that majority of strong Leaders are either military man, or democratically chosen governments that refuse to give power away - and they are often bad news.
> The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
Exactly this. And isn't it the reason so many people here are into startups? Technology is inherently undemocratic, and so are tech startups that succeed - but we don't call it that because this is "private land", not "politics land". And even ignoring the profit motive, that's why technology is appealing - a few smart people (backed by enough money) with one good design can force a change on the entire world that would never fly if you've asked people themselves.
And frankly, this might be something that we desperately need for the coming decades. Democratic countries have proven themselves unable to tackle the serious issuses of energy and climate change. They don't even bother making token gestures. On the other hand, if a decade ago they'd just said "fuck it, we're building those nuclear power plants whether you like them or not", we'd all be running on green energy now.
Sure, in many places, for some time, a benevolent dictator in tune with the needs and desires of their people might best approximate a democratically chosen ideal. And in other times not.
The point though, is that nobody can choose to not have the freedom to choose. And as such, we all wish to choose the best government for us - whatever form that may appear. But when it stops serving us...
"Royalists" have been a phenomena everywhere. Then again population of a country is able to change it's mind.
Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it.
For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.
> Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism.
Just to get a real feel for it, I recommend reading through this[0] book review, it may scare one shitless. Also, that belief went for longer than just I WW, it went through the II WW and finally dwindled down when the Cold War started. But imagine this - western newspapers were literally refusing to print bad news about Soviet Union, because it would offend their readers.
As has barefaced lying to the populace about their own dislike for democracy.
It seems particularly common in Egypt where the idea that "the people just aren't ready for Democracy yet like they are in the west" is commonplace among the country's elite.
>It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend.
Nobody's ever voted democracy away and it's not fashion that causes it to end, it's violence.
There is always some kind of "evidence" for vote rigging. How about Egypt? Turkey? You don't vote Muslim brotherhood into power while thinking they maintain democracy. German federal election, March 1933, over 50% of population voted for either NSDAP or communists. And then there is Bhutan.
When a death row inmate is killed the executioner is without doubt responsible for the death. Just like the judge that sentenced him is responsible. Now whether they were justified or not is a different question (which many would argue there is never good enough justification for the death penalty)
Anyway, it's not interesting, the only thing the parents are responsible for is having a second child and breaking the law. What people do to enforce the law is their responsibility not the responsibility of the parents that broke it, the same applies for the murderer on death row.
Just because something is legal doesn't absolve you of responsibility. The same way soldiers "just following orders" are responsible for the actions they commit at the behest of their superiors. Both the superiors and the soldiers are responsible
If you don't consider any punishment the responsibility of a criminal, then I think you're using a different definition of 'responsible' than most people, and this might actually be a semantic argument rather than anything meaningful.
> responsible : having an obligation to do something, or having control over or care for someone, as part of one's job or role.
The criminal is only responsible for breaking the law, the only thing he had control over before he was caught (assuming he was caught for the sake of argument). We as society are responsible for dealing out the punishment.
How could the criminal be responsible for the punishment when he is not the one inflicting it on him/herself.
edit: To make my argument slightly easier to understand I'm going to give an extreme example
Let's say it's illegal to be a certain religion. Is it the insert religion here person's responsibility that he is punished and sent to a death camp?
Honestly curious: Are you making an argument that laws and punishments for breaking them are wrong across the board? Or are you saying that the laws might be just in some cases, and the punishment a necessary evil, but that even in those cases you think it's important to place responsibility on the enforcers of those laws?
The latter. If people took responsibility for their actions I believe injustices like forced abortions wouldn't happen as often. I can imagine it's very easy for somebody that is forcing a woman to have an abortion at 8.5 months pregnant to rationalize away what they are doing as upholding the law and that the government is responsible for what is happening.
The punishment being justified depends entirely on whether or not the law itself is just (e.g. capital punishment is largely considered to be a legal injustice). Whether or not responsibility is transitive a separate, but important, matter.
As it turns out, responsibility for statutory laws is only transitive when applied to a party to the statute (e.g. a lawmaker or the enforcer).
A thief is responsible for restitution because depriving someone of their property is violation of natural law. A party who breaks a contract is responsible for fulfilling the terms they agreed to, because they made that agreement.
A thief, or a party who breaks a contract, is not responsible for a _statutory law_ enforced against them (unless they are a law maker or the law enforcer).
The creators and enforcers of the statue are responsible for creating it and enforcing it. They are responsible for its outcome, whether that is a dead murderer or a dead baby.
And if the contract is "you can live and work here if you don't have a baby"? Let's say a hypothetical government doesn't touch the woman, but they insist the woman do something to avoid raising too many children.
You have to punish the defectors if you want to have a stable society. If you set up a law that says "X is punishable by death" and someone does X, then you have to deliver death to that person, or else the law loses all its coordinating power. If the law itself is not just, then you're responsible for unnecessary deaths, but a person committing X in full knowledge of the consequences is responsible for their own death.
It's really similar to jumping out of the 10th floor window. It's the dv/dt that actually kills you, but it's you who is responsible for your own death.
This assumes that China has a strong legal system and that government officials won't abuse the system to meet arbitrary quotas. Neither of which are true.
tl;dr Couple had the legal right and license to have a second child, but the local family planning officials were over quota so they made up some bullshit about her license being expired and forced her to abort her 8-month old fetus.
Plenty of godfilled cultures have compromised just as many if not more violations of the sanctity of human life. Take your god away from me, and help yourself instead.
These are two different issues -- democracy and human rights. There's nothing wrong with having a king, for example; but there's something very wrong with state-mandated infanticide -- and it would be just as wrong if it was imposed by a democracy as by any other form of government.
Are you implying that all those middle-eastern countries were failed states, ruled by hordes of warlords? For instance, I vaguely remember Iraq being a pretty fine country; for decades, a lot of engineers from my country went there, and we had a pretty good economic cooperation. Then the US came and bombed the living shit out of it.
As for Africa, isn't most of the mess the result of Europe coming there, destroying their local governance, abusing them for a while and then withdrawing, leaving a huge power vacuum behind?
Iraq after the invasion sort of was. No civil society existed, but there were plenty of bands of guerillas and local religious extremists who'd been fighting Saddam; they inherited the state when we destroyed the Baathists. (The CPA tried to create a civil society, but that can't be done artificially.)
_The Prince of the Marshes_ is a good book to read on this subject.
Brutal and cruel? I agree it's a severe limit on the personal freedom but China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does. Brutal and cruel is not the right terms for this in my opinion, you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. You can plan to have just two children (up to some point).
Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.
Just to make it clear, these types of enforcement are not norms. The law never suggested such enforcement. The law is that you get a financial fine if you have more than one child, that's it. It's actually against the law to force any kind of abortion. That being said, in some rural area, some officials maybe so greedy to make achievement for their "career" that they "enforce" this policy by breaking the law.
Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people.
> Just to make it clear, these types of enforcement are not norms
Back up your statement with a citation please. Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
> Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
The officials are not dumb, they probably saw the incentives structure and decided to ban this proactively.
GP has a good point. Singular events in few decades in a population of over a billion? That's either bullshit or random fluke, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the report, but it's definitely not something a reasonable person should care about.
i've lived in China for a few years, and no one's ever seemed to care much about the one child policy. i just asked some people, and they said it depends on where you grew up, but that it hasn't ever really been a big deal for at least their lifetimes (~30 years).
you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications.
it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
The context you likely have is that of the more urbanized parts of China - not the rural towns and villages where most of the more extreme ("brutal and cruel") practices take place.
yeah, i know, i live in a big city. but i'm talking to some people that came from rural areas... no one's even heard of this stuff. that in no way means it doesn't happen - China's a really big place - but it certainly doesn't seem to be the status quo.
friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff.
did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?
Enforcement have been fairly lax in the last decade or two across the country. For every "unplanned" childbirth you can pay a one-off fine (Social Maintenance is the current euphemism) which is probably more like a poll tax based on your income (with caps in certain regions) and your offspring is readily accepted into society.
The main contention is that people who work in the public sector (which is giant in China) does not have the option because it is still, technically, illegal and will ruin your chances of promotion within the party or any state-owned enterprises. The law change merely levels the playing field for public sector workers so they have one less incentive to leave.
Most of the brutal and cruel acts you listed are a result of carrying a child to birth. Surely they would have noticed that they were pregnant and had the opportunity to abort at an earlier time. Better yet, why couldn't they just... not have children? Do they not have access to contraception?
Perhaps nobody's denying that China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does, or that you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less.
Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
You're in luck. human overpopulation is mostly a solved problem thanks to modern contraception. To curb it all one needs is to build a robust economy and make it avaliable. No need for state policy beyond it, people will do it themselves.
Larger creatures, and those higher on the food chain, having greater access to resources and higher survival rates, invest more in fewer children. Smaller creatures, with lesser access to resources and higher mortality rates, invest less in more children.
A rabbit doe can theoretically have 480 offspring, at 12 per litter, 10 times per year, over 4 years. That's the kind of thing you might do if 98% of your kids get eaten, because you will still have 10 left. Rabbits can also abort their litters when stressed.
An elephant might have one calf every four years, over 55 years, or a maximum of 14 children. That's what you might do if only one other species can reliably kill any of you, and you expect all of your babies to survive to adulthood.
With humans, the observed historical behavior is that poor or uneducated humans are relatively fecund, producing 8-30 children per pair, occasionally with multiple births. As wealth and education increase, and particularly when child mortality drops and elder care becomes socialized, birth rate drops down to the population replacement rate (or below). Middle-class first-worlders usually have 0-4 kids.
It solved the problem so well that the human race is actually likely to go extinct over the long run. Just need to get Africa and India on board with the program.
Africa and India to play ball. The wealthy West limiting its procreation doesn't buy much for the Earth when somewhere else, poor families are pumping out children by the dozens.
Africa and India don't have widely available contraception, high levels of education, and low rates of infant mortality. Solve those problems and people will have fewer kids.
Yes, but we are a) not growing, b) moving to greener energy sources. Compare with Africa and Asia exiting poverty with positive growth, lots of people, and little clean energy infrastructure.
I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
I completely agree with you. In terms of population alone, we are exceedingly multiplying; something that might not be of out best advantage. More even when you consider that there will be less opportunities for an increasing number of people, and we will lose this personal freedom you spoke of -to an extent-
I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing.
Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
Human ingenuity is the world's greatest resource and leads to wealth creation and advancement of living standards. Limiting population growth would be ill-advised.
While in essence I agree, I think it is much more nuanced and complicated.
Inequality seems to be deeply encoded in the system. Capacity, in my opinion, only makes sense if you extrapolate from an average human, but there is no such thing as an average human being. However, I don't think it is an exaggeration that our western way of life is not sustainable on a global scale. I wish the fruits of human ingenuity could be enjoyed by every single one of us, but unfortunately it seems utopian.
In what year was the average, or even marginal person better off? Yes, there may be more income distribution, but would you prefer to be born into a different time under the veil of ignorance?
Even the poorest in our society have incredible access to goods.
Just to list a few:
Wikipedia
Ability to talk to relatives from across the world to little or no cost (Skype and alternatives)
Ability to send money and store wealth cheaply (low cost ETFs, bitcoin, free checking)
Social acceptance of previously marginalized lifestyles
Access to wide variety of foods and entertainment
There has never been a better time to be alive, and I expect that to continue, despite greater inequality.
That is, if the population growth doesn't destabilize the economies and make us revert back to the old times. That's the crux of the issue. The rising tide is lifting all the boats, but we need to make sure the tide keeps rising.
How is it that we're on a technology forum and people continually insist that we've achieved the maximum rate of advancement? Also we most certainly do not spend all of our resources advancing areas of technology that would sustain more people, for instance I think there could easily be more research put into food growth/production/sustainability and perhaps things like housing development than are currently being done, but since there is no impending doom from overpopulation we tend to spread our interests around as the free-ish market allows. Everything we produce isn't going to make it easier for more people to survive, but I'm sure much could be done if it became a priority.
Some of us wish we'd be smarter than free market and have the ability to allocate resources proactively, instead at the last possible minute, when prices finally start to reflect the impending doom. Noticing that Earth has a carrying capacity and that we have to do something about it (either stop growing, lower our footprint or extend that capacity) is expressing the belief that we can do better.
I didn't insist anything. I simply suggested reading about carrying capacity. It's a relevant topic to population control, and it could broaden his understanding of the issue.
The "carrying capacity" of earth is well, well above (constantly revised) estimates.
What will need to change is the efficiency of how we as a species make use of the earth. We can feed many times the current world population easily. We can house many times the current world population easily. What we can't accomplish is doing those things the same way we do things now.
Advances in agriculture, energy and housing are needed. Advances which are happening as we furiously type at each other.
I would put any research or estimates into perspective. We have well surpassed predicted carrying capacities, but maybe these estimates are different?
Example:
> In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million
The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil.
These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
Additionally, Z is dependent on social and economic pressures. As the world becomes more urbanized, birth rates have been going down because it is becoming more expensive to raise children. This is occurring naturally without artificial limits imposed.
As much as I agree that the earth is overpopulated, I think better than taxing people is providing access to free birth control. A lot of people don't have access to it, or education about it.
Having many children is an economic issue, not access-to-birth-control issue. Poor families in third world countries will continue to mass-produce children because they can't afford not to. For the contraception to be used, we need to raise them out of poverty first.
I think lack of ability to plan when and if you have a family is a contributor to poverty in many places. Children are expensive and time consuming.
I've noticed here in the USA young girls getting pregnant and not being able to pursue higher education. I've also met some of my family in the Philippines who had many children by age 14. The husband's salary would pretty much all go to the children, and the wife would spend all day taking care of them. They are just trying to survive day to day-- little thought was given to trying to reach for anything higher.
Most people with access to birth control have children-- just when they're more ready for it. Not only does this make them more financially steady, but they are happier, and the same goes for their children.
"I find suggestive evidence that individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later." - Martha J. Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. Here's the article and link to her work. http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/09/the-long-term-effects-of-...
I think you are trivializing thousands of years of history with this. China is ... china. They use the same alphabet they used when egyptians used hieroglyphs. The sensibilities of the chinese population are not about a people being dominated by a marxist tyranny. It's china being ruled as it has always been ruled - the dynasties have come and gone but the dynamics of government - and the cultural sensibilities which coexist with these - have co-existed longer than most western countries have a written history.
The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.
> the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy
Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.
'Immoral coercion' makes it sound like a quick graft. I suggest it's more fruitful to compare countrys policies with the histories of government within the same region rather than other countries in different cultural regions. If you want to moralize this method makes it far easier to pinpoint the really bad apples.
No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?
As I implicitly recognised in my initial comment, the number of non totalitarian communist governments is small. Nonetheless there are plenty of people who self-identify as communist (e.g. in Greece) who don't advocate policies that require or imply totalitarianism. That's why the precision matters.
Well there aren't any actual communist governments, so there haven't been any totalitarian ones. :P
I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.
The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.
In this case they're not totalitarian though. China is a Republic, it's just a Republic with a taller pyramid than our own.
You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.
Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.
China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.
Look at the unrest in Hong Kong over China pre-approving candidates for political office. In a place that had democracy and is transitioning to Chinese rule it is obvious that very many people don't think they are getting "more choice" with their locked in list of candidates. I am not championing the US system (it has many flaws) but at least Democrats and Republicans have vastly different ideologies that people can choose from. That citizens from both parties tend to pick moderate candidates (that are closer in ideology) does not lessen the real choice the people are given when voting in elections.
Looking at what China does in Hong Kong is vastly different from what China does in China.
By the same token, in the States we get say in the president. The same is not true for places under the control of The Office of Insular Affairs & Puerto Rico.
At least the citizens of Hong Kong get to vote.
I'm not saying Chinese government is perfect, it absolutely has massive hurdles before it could be described as modern, but it's not nearly as bad as most Westerners make it out to be. A lot has changed in the last 30 years.
Communist governments, in order to function, pretty much have to be totalitarian - unless you can think of another way to have a one party system with complete control over the economy.
The brutality and cruel enforcement is not a widespread problem at least in the eyes of general Chinese population.
The only lawful enforcement for the one-child policy is a financial fine (which more and more people can afford now).
Any other forceful abortion is against the law. And that is the more common situation in China.
The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before.
And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.
Am I the only person who thinks population control policies like this are a great thing? This strange notion people have that they should be able to breed without bound is baffling to me.
People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.
You're not the only one. I'm in that camp too. Yes, I can imagine perfectly well the happiness a parent gets from having a child, and maybe I will want to have a child of my own in the future. Nobody says we can't breed. When the population levels off, everyone will be able to have two children.
If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets.
But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.
Agreed, but it should also be noted that in practice, families that want to have more than two children are quite rare in urban China today, as they are in most developed countries. Meanwhile, rural families in China have been allowed to have two or more children (depending on a few rules) for several years already.
it is just as brutal and cruel as US cop.in china,one child was a law,you want more child,you pay more money,it was called Social maintenance fees.but someone did not want to pay the money,so come the brutal and cruel just like US cop shoot on blacks,but in china the one child law-executor has no gun,and they are base officer,they have more pressure and want more benefit than US cop
Before commenting on this, there are two things you need to read.
"China - total fertility rate (graph)"[1]
"List of famines in China."[2]
"China - Population 1950 - 2015" [3]
In 1970, the fertility rate (babies born per woman) was 6. That's huge but not untypical for an undeveloped country, where a lot of people die young. Once some basic modern medicine was deployed, the number of people surviving went way up, and the population doubled in 50 years, even with the one-child policy. It would have been much, much worse without it. Something had to be done. China has a history of famines, and the last big one was in 1962, and 20 million to 40 million people starved to death. Keeping that from happening again is a major goal of policy in China.
The one-child policy worked. The population is leveling off. The fertility rate is now around 1.55, which is about typical for a developed country. Once a country develops, the fertility rate drops off without coercion. China has reached that point, and no longer needs a mandatory one-child policy.
India's population grew by a factor of 3.4 during that period, but India has more arable land. China is a big country, but most of it is desert, tundra, or mountains. The US has six times the arable land per capita as China. China has nothing like the Midwestern US.
Actually, the one-child policy was relaxed years ago. Only some provinces require it.
The absurdly high birth rates of the 1960s were due in no small part to government policy. The communist leadership under Mao Zedong encouraged people to have lots of children, believing that a large population would power economic growth. While I agree that controlling population growth is necessary, it could have been done without the draconian and invasive measures imposed by the one-child policy. With proper government incentives for having smaller families, widely available birth control, and decreased infant mortality rates, people would have chosen to have only one or two children.
Compare the mainland's One-Child Policy with the similar "Two is Enough" and "Stop at Two" campaigns in Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively. Those campaigns were successful in reducing the birth rate (too successful, in Singapore's case) without the abuses and demographic issues that plagued China's implementation of the one-child policy.
Isn't this a case of hindsight being 20/20 though? Maybe when China was first considering population control, there was no one there to think of applying just economic pressure? Or maybe the voice got lost in the usual $politics?
Fortunately, future decisionmakers now have competing examples of China, Hong Kong and Singapore to learn from.
Singapore started the Stop at Two campaign in the 1970s. China's one-child policy was instituted in 1981. Granted, the effects of Singapore's program wouldn't have been clear at that point, but there was already a precedent for population control measures that didn't involve heavy-handed government control and quotas.
A lot of the negative effects of the one-child policy were due to uneven enforcement and perverse incentives. Though female infanticide, forced abortions, and gender-based abortions were made illegal, they still happened in rural or poorer urban areas where there was less scrutiny from the central government.
> Though female infanticide, forced abortions, and gender-based abortions were made illegal, they still happened in rural or poorer urban areas where there was less scrutiny from the central government.
From the subthread under [0]:
"Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people."
It's a good point. Makes me wonder how much the negative opinion about China's one-child policy is just overblown and/or pure propaganda.
I have my own graph that questions these two (widely made) assertions. It shows the decline in total fertility rates for two countries over the last 50 years. Those countries are China and Thailand [1]. You can see that both countries had almost exactly the same TFR in 1965 (just over 6.0) when both countries were still mainly agrarian societies. Since 1965 both countries' fertility rates have declined remarkably but Thailand did it without the authoritarian policy that caused such a lot of suffering in China. You can also see from the graph that the introduction of the One Child Policy in China in 1980 caused an interruption in the decline, while Thailand's rate continued to decline smoothly. And Thailand's TFR is now slightly lower than China's.
So why was it necessary to introduce the One Child Policy in China when the fertility rate had already been rapidly declining over the previous 15 years and when a country that was in exactly the same position as China in 1965, and whose fertility rate decline between 1965 and 1980 was less steep than China's, then brought their TFR down to below China's in 1985 and in 1990 brought it down below replacement level and now has a TFR slightly below China's, all without implementing such a drastic policy?
Makes me wonder - is there any work being done on making the desert areas arable? It would probably take big geoengineering effort and one has to be pretty damn sure it doesn't disturb some important climate regulation mechanism, but doubling their arable/habitable land area would sove a lot of problems for China, as well as humanity in general.
And this, folks, is the real kicker: Developed nations naturally begin to level off at a certain 2.x children per couple growth rate. This is a token policy, if anything.
If you ignore the invasive health monitoring, gender selective abortions, forced abortions, and other human rights violations, sure.
But I'm not sure this cure wasn't worse than the disease. Especially, as you point out, since fertility rates seem to regulate themselves in developed countries.
I guess if you're a pure utilitarian, you could try to make the case that it all was a net benefit, but I don't see many utilitarians around these days.
The point is, a country growing like crazy and hitting into famine after famine doesn't have a chance to stabilize and actually develop without ensuring deaths of countless millions over many decades. It's not hard to make a case that China has made the right choice. They developed so well because of the policy.
Human rights are not some global constant, but something that evolves from culture & economics. China has experienced unprecedented growth in the past 30 years, never before seen in history. Hopefully its concepts of human rights will evolve with time, but to judge it now by the same measure we do for the West is unrealistic and impractical
It's also worth remembering that the West summoned its human rights by guillotining people until they finally appeared. It took a lot of blood to get there. Let's hope China can achieve it without so much bloodshed.
Overpopulation is an interesting problem, it exponentially affects every other problem we have -- some balance will have to be found between ultimately telling people they can't kids or maintaining that those people have autonomy over their own lives and can make such a decision. I don't know what the solution is - perhaps making the developing world developed as fast as possible.
Overpopulation is a non-problem. Fertility has fallow to near- or below-replacement rate everywhere in the world, except Afrika (which will likely follow in the next decades.)
You mean, it is not a problem because the planet can support that many? Or do you mean it is a problem, but it will solve itself? I don't think either is correct. The first is only true today because non-First World inhabitants are living on a much smaller ecological footprint than Europe and the US. However, that footprint is increasing rapidly. The second reading at least acknowledges there is a problem, but I think you are underestimating the correction required. I think the correction will not happen (at all, or fast enough) through natural means.
We are already at more than twice a sustainable population level. Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people. But most estimates say that the Earth can support 2-3 billion people at modest levels of first-world consumption. The more our planet will be stripped of its resources now (whether through overfishing, destruction of forests, or climate change), the lower the sustainable planet population will become.
Put differently, we need to lose at least 5 billion people in the next decades without replacing them with a younger generation to be able to sustain the emancipation of emerging countries. It's not about population growth stabilizing, we need both massive negative population growth and halving of current energy use in developed countries. The only "natural" means through which I can see that happening is massive food shortages or horrific wars, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that the former will trigger the latter. It's also a pretty safe bet that our global society will disappear in that scenario, so I'd rather we have better solutions before that happens.
The earth doesn't have a "carrying capacity" or a "maximum population". The earth has resources that are used more or less sustainably at different times and in different places. If we all still lived like hunter gatherers we would have run out of resources and become extinct thousands of years ago. Luckily we've had social, economic, and technological development.
As soon as anyone frames sustainability challenges in terms of the earths "carrying capacity" they are revealing a bias that is unhelpful. Even if you accept the premise that the earth does have some 'maximum population' then so what? It's a useless proposition -- what are you going to do, force everyone to only have one child, that is unsustainable as China discovered.
Luckily, as the parent pointed out, overpopulation is not a problem. The rate of growth continues to decrease, and global populations will peak in my lifetime.
About 20 years ago, when I was a grad student, I attended a colloquium where the speaker (a physicist, for better or worse) had computed the number of people that the planet could support if everyone consumed natural resources at the rate that Americans do. His number was 2 billion. I don't remember who the speaker was and I don't know what assumptions he made -- I don't know how much error there might be in his result or how improvements in technology might change it. If his number is even close to being right, "global populations will peak in my lifetime" isn't even close to being adequate unless you expect the bulk of the population to be satisfied with remaining poor while a small proportion of the population devours the planet.
Which is a calculation based on current technological standards, which is also not proof that we will not become more efficient and better able to manipulate our resources as needed.
Strawman. Strong environmental protections and positive population growth can coexist.
And, of course, we should be striving in our generation to solve these existential challenges, rather than squandering our time optimizing sales funnels and click-through-rates.
"Ecologists define carrying capacity as the maximal population size of a given species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future"
http://www.dieoff.org/page112.htm
In the interest of (scientific) discourse, it is generally unhelpful to redefine or ignore generic definitions. Are you asserting that the earth doesn't support any species, or that is perfectly possible to have googolplex people living on earth without reducing earth's ability to support googolplex people in the future?
I think the post is saying that defining the carrying capacity of a technological species is an exercise in futility. Malthus was writing about this many years ago - humans have a habit of raising the bar.
In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)
I (think I) understood the GP post, I just have very little tolerance for idiotic and easily falsifiable statements. Therefore, I chose to respond to the first sentence only, and ignore the rest of the post.
My use of that population number was simply that: a refutation of the assertion that the earth has no population limit, as it will be hard to argue that our planet can support 10^9980 humans per square millimeter of land area. A genuine "argumentum ad absurdum", to counter the GP's completely nonsensical opening statement.
I interpreted the opposition to using carrying capacity to mean that it's not helpful from the perspective of a technological species. If we had that many humans, the odds seem high that we would have a way to supplement resources available to use from outside Earth. Carrying capacity is really about an _ecosystem_ and the resources it can provide vs competition with other species. We effectively have no competition, and we can create our own ecosystems, so it's kind of a strawman to apply the wildlife biology concept to our understanding of how human populations will evolve in the future.
Ah, but that would have been an interesting discussion. We could have discussed the merits of carrying capacity with respect to a species that builds its own ecosystem, or whether it makes sense to consider the entire planet a single ecosystem. We could have a meaningful discussion about the various population estimates and what they're based on. Or we could have discussed whether it makes sense to consider ourselves in competition with future generations.
But instead of that, the initial reply:
- refused the basic premise that would have allowed that discussion, by indirectly positing that space on earth is infinite
- followed it up with a very questionable assertion that earth's resources are used "more or less sustainably" (which is already at odds with the previous assertion that resources are infinite, and ignores the many species we've already hunted to extinction)
- added a non-sequitur that we would have run out of resources as hunter-gatherers (again at odds with the initial statement)
- justified the plain refusal of the basic premise with an ad-hominem about bias
- continued on with the apathetic rationalization that nothing can be done anyway
- concluded by reiterating the initial statement without further substantiation
Now, you may argue that my refusal to engage in that discussion is my weakness and it would still have been possible to salvage something positive, however my time is finite and there's better, less taxing discussions to be had.
(/me out, accepting that meta-justification is considered offtopic and will be downmodded).
Eventually we'll have to reach other planets.. and invent wormholes to move past the universe expanding preventing our light cones from reaching other materials.
It gives me an idea for a sci-fi story, where a stable civilization of smart beings faces a threat of the sphere of all-consuming humans expanding at the speed of light.
What are the "modest levels of first-world consumption" in the estimates you mention? And how recent are these estimates? There are many factors that likely will contribute to a smaller first-world footprint, e.g. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-will-burn-less...
This has a survey of capacity estimates on page 10. I took the median of those, which more or less matched the sources I've encountered over the past year.
Two of the estimates have years associated with them: 1994 and 1999. The survey itself was published in 2013 so didn't have the data available that fivethirtyeight cited. I think it's time for researchers to update their capacity estimates.
I don't. But I've always been a glass-half-empty kinda guy, so I tend to err on the side of caution (or, in this case, catastrophe).
Quite frankly, it doesn't matter to me whether the "real" capacity is 1 billion or 20 billion or 100 billion, as I don't believe we (as a species) have any chance of moderation in the face of opulence. As long as there's any surplus capacity left on this planet, we will find a way to use it. As fast and as wasteful as we can, until it all comes crashing down.
> "Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people."
Can you show me these estimates? Do they take into account ways we could live with a smaller footprint (e.g. vegetarian/vegan diet) and/or advances in eco-friendly technology?
Sadly, no. I never bookmark or save articles as I come across them. It's a pity, as I've been searching for one specific article which compared our energy use with the total solar energy absorption of the planet (iirc, we were using more than 50% of total input).
As for your question, I doubt that they would include an all-vegan world scenario, as it's considered unattainable, regardless of whether it would theoretically help. Technological advances are generally included, but with very conservative gain estimates.
Denying people their meat or SUVs is an equivalent problem to limiting the number of children they have. People won't give their "freedoms" voluntarily - you have to force them either by law or by economy (and letting the free market take care of it will likely be too little too late).
The whole argument sounds to me like "we don't have to force people to change their lifestyle to adjust for Earth's capacity - we can always force people to change their lifestyle".
I'm suggesting people have a smiliar level of attachment to being allowed to buy a SUV as they have to being allowed to have a child in the future.
Which is pretty visible in the West; every time the government tries to limit access to something, you get a stream of arguments that look exactly the same as those against one child policy that are posted here.
Would people miss what they never had though? What if public transport was so good that people just didn't need to buy cars anymore? As in, so good that there wasn't any practical reason to own a car. Would a generation of people raised with a strong public transportation system still find enough of a reason to use a car (aside from as a form of recreation)?
I think they wouldn't. That's why I find most of those objections silly - they're just something people got used to. It's like every time Facebook improves their UX, there's this huge uproar about the fact they dared to change things, but it dies out within a month as people get used to the new look and are still happy.
> "Fertility has fallow to near- or below-replacement rate everywhere in the world"
What do you expect is causing this? Isn't a large part of the reason for this due to changes in society rather than a synchronised biological trend? For example, couples choosing to have children later, if at all.
If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates (I'm using the term birth rates as it's a more general term for what we're considering) can't increase in the future. The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
- enormous reduction in child mortality
- increased female emancipation and economic opportunities
- (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself
> If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates can't increase in the future.
Sure, and there's no reason why the worldwide decrease cant' accelerate further either. The only question is, why do you think some scenario is more likely than the other?
> The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
To me the view that population increase is/will be some huge problem seems to be continuously redressing the Malthusian nonsense that's been wrong for over 2 centuries
> "- enormous reduction in child mortality - increased female emancipation and economic opportunities - (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself"
Those aren't the only trends that matter. How about:
* Reduction in working hours/increased leisure time.
* Possibility for development of life extension technology (so long as this comes with an increased window of opportunity for raising kids).
* Changes to family structures (for example, an increase in popularity in tribe-like family structures, which reduces the burden on individual carers).
The point is if birth rate is only slowing down because of how our society currently is, then birth rate predictions are based on that society staying the same, and we have no guarantee of that being the case. Even if you think it's unlikely to change in the near future, humans will hopefully be living on Earth for thousands of years to come. If you were born 1000 years ago, do you believe you could predict how society would turn out in 2015?
I think perhaps you're conflating world population with the Chinese population. Overpopulation can occur in small areas without the world being too overpopulated as a whole -- most of them in SE Asia. If theres lots of people and limited resources, the math simply won't hold up. It affects issues like the environment and human health.
Singapore is very developed. Overpopulation is more a problem for densely populated developing places - Bangladesh, Victorian London, South American shanty towns et cetera.
This specific talk I feel he panders too much. The British surveys, for example, seem to have been made to take advantage of the anchoring effect to elicit more wrong answers, to the delight of the giggling audience.
Due to already declining birth rates, human population is expected to peak around 11 billion people in approximately 2100.[1] I will grant that the error bars are quite large, and that there is no certainty that the planet can handle even that number, but it bothers me that there are still people that seem to believe in Malthusian exponential growth.
I was using the middle model. The lower model shows a peak of 8-9 billion in about 2050. The upper model shows continued growth past 2011. Hence, "large error bars." Anyway, I agree it is not the best source, but I didn't want to leave my claim completely without citation. If you investigate a bit, I think you'll find that my claim is consistent with UN estimates.
The people saying it's not a problem or that it will sort itself out are missing one crucial point - all the solutions for maintaining and/or stabilizing a big population require technology, which requires a technological civilization to exist. A technological civilization is not a stable, natural state, and industrial plants do not grow on trees. If the growing population destabilizes - let's be frank, Western - civilization, the world is fucked. The population will bounce back, with billions dying from hunger and war.
seems,that other forms of distractions and knowledge are the best presarvatives. But what about cultures that are resistant to education and therefore change?
Exit programs for the kids of the local religious nuts starting from pre-school?
that only moves the problem further along the road - much further, but still:
world won't be able to feed infinite humans so a restriction policy will eventually be needed (or systematic culling, depending on whichever comes first between enlightenment and desperation)
an interesting resulting problem of which is that population will keep aging. solutions will need to take into account non productive member in their older age, either balancing with equal amount of younger or culling from the top instead of the bottom of the age bracket
we won't likely see that in our lifespan, with some luck.
Except in no part of the world of the modern world has human population increase continued unchecked.
Most western countries populations grow only because of immigration - fertility is below the replacement rate.
Overpopulation is the "problem" people trot out so they don't have to talk about things they might actually have to do something about, like switching to renewable energy sources, or improving women's education in developing countries.
So we have to increase the lifestyle of 2/3 of the world. The West is free to have 2 or less children on average. Africa doesn't give a shit, they're too poor to afford it - so their population grows.
making the developing world developed as fast as possible - With the cost of living increasing in India more parents prefer having 2 kids mostly in cities.
You mean like the problem of telling people they can't just drive cars or own firearms and need to meet some competence criteria first, i.e. licensing?
If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding.
Are you going to force women to abort "unlicensed" children? Force women to have birth control implants?
Up until the 1990s in Spain, many thousands of children were systematically stolen from political activists and others with the wrong politics or wrong lifestyle. Parents were told that their newborn had died.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899
A less severe form would be financial incentives for licensed parents. You're still free to have children if you want, but you're only supported by the state if you got a license. Pair this with free birth control implants and abortions for everyone who wants them and you get most of the effect without the use of force. You could even pay men to get a vasectomy.
If only certain people are encouraged to have children, you automatically have an underclass, no matter how it's implemented. I think that providing free (or more incentivized) birth control would lead to very few cases of unwanted children. IUDs and vasectomies are simple and effective.
I don't have data at hand, so I can't contradict you with evidence, but you could also provide some numbers with your claims. I know of Project Prevention [1], which pays drug addicts for long-term birth control. The Wikipedia article doesn't provide data on effectiveness, but I guess they'd stop handing out money if it didn't work.
"You're still free to have children if you want, but you're only supported by the state if you got a license."
The traditional "license" to have children used to be marriage, and children born without such a license were called illegitimate - i.e. outside the law. It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children, and we've moved away from it for a reason.
> It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children
If the current system (where marriage and procreation are notionally separate) were found to hurt a lot of innocent children, would we call our system unjust and abandon it?
I suspect not. The current culture around marriage and parenting didn't evolve from pragmatism as much as (various takes on) ethics, morality, and self-determinism.
Maybe because "it's eugenics, and eugenics is bad, just look at the history!" appeal to 'historic tone-deafness' is not a valid argument.
Yes, Nazi Germany did some shitty stuff for ideological reasons and tarnished the "eugenics" label, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of influencing human reproduction and/or selecting for preferred traits and/or direct DNA interventions.
That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert). After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
In practice, eugenics seems to move from "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others, and we should strive for those in future generations" to "some genetic makeups are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should force there to not be so many of the others". There doesn't seem to be any clear point at which you can say, "No, you've gone too far", and explain to the true believer why the step they took is too far. They'll just tell you that it's logically implied by the steps that you are in agreement with.
And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places. (I probably need to qualify that with "eugenics movements that had some influence", because if you don't have enough influence to get people to accept step 1, you don't move on to step 2. And that may be begging the question on my part, because Nazi Germany may be the only historical example where the ideas got taken seriously and actually influenced much of anything.)
Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
> That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert).
Because it doesn't. I will assert that even though I'm not a Marxist True Believer.
> After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
And that's just plain stupidity, which is exactly what I'm complaining about. It's "someone tried that before some time ago and it didn't work, therefore let's label this stupid and throw it away" kind of attitude. The real reason we're ignoring the entire idea is because communist propaganda has lost and US propaganda has won, and it has little to do with actual merits of the idea itself.
You could utter similar dismissals for fire before we mastered it, or for gasoline before we created ICEs, or for powered flight before Wright brothers. What I was asking for is an actual discussion of the idea - pointing out where the idea is wrong, and talking about how can we modify it to avoid its problems while reaping the rewards.
Which fortunately you did in the rest of your comment, so forgive me for the text above, but I really really disagree with the sentiment of your first paragraph.
--
> And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places.
I don't think we had many of such examples - the only ones we label "eugenics" happened within the last 100 years, and involved powerful people with ideology doing stupid and harmful things because doing things because of an ideology is generally stupid and harmful.
> Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
Yeah, that's a strong point I'm going to agree 100% with. Too strong adaptation to current environment means you'll be really out of luck when the environment changes.
But if it works out badly in practice (enough times, for some value of "enough"), don't you have a basis for saying that the idea doesn't seem to work in practice, no matter how good it sounds in theory?
You don't want to do that after one failed attempt. You probably don't want to do so after two or three. But after enough attempts, you probably have a basis for saying that, no matter how good the theory sounds, it won't work in practice next time either. And if each time it fails produces large amounts of human suffering, there comes a time to quit trying the same stuff that has worked out badly over and over.
No, eugenics really should be tainted forever. Cystic fibrosis can be heritably cured without eugenics, e.g. hopefully within a few decades via gene editing something like CRISPR. Let us not use specious arguments about curing rare Mendelian diseases as a Trojan horse to usher eugenics back into mainstream acceptability.
As a sibling comment notes, eugenics is conventionally understood to be gene selection via people selection, i.e. differential all-or-nothing biological reproduction of whole humans. And it was that sense of the idea I was critiquing.
And it is in that sense of the word that people shooting from the hip with talk of "licensing" the basic human right to reproduce are engaging in shocking historical naivety -- or worse, with facepalm-worthy apologetics like those corners of the commentariat that defend misogyny, slavery and other social aberrations that have rightfully been interred to the dustbin of history.
So you're okay with gene editing. Are you okay with editing a bunch of genes, as long as anyone is allowed to have a child that's still fundamentally a mix between them and their partner?
Because I'm pretty sure that would satisfy 90% of the historical proponents of eugenics, even if you refuse to call it such.
That is direct genetic manipulation. Eugenics is, in many people's mind, limiting people's reproduction to breed them like they were pets.
One is unfocused and hard to target genetic manipulation via reproduction incentives and force, the other is a choice for very targeted and obvious things.
> "If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding."
That sort of licensing is ripe for abuse. What would happen if someone in power took that license away from you just because they didn't agree with your political views?
Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
But what constitutes mentally ill? The line is fuzzy - perhaps someone is just a bit "quirky", but still could be a good parent?
In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance).
Yes, not just political views. As you say, the mentally ill would be one targeted group, former criminals would be another, etc... The most divisive issue would probably be whether those living in poverty would be given the license.
> "In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance)."
At most, I could imagine the benefits of taking precautions against accidental pregnancies (vasectomies, etc...), but only as long as those measures would be reversible at any time. I could also see the need for encouraging single child families as the least draconian method of population control (should overpopulation ever become a big issue). Anything beyond that strikes me as a step too far.
I could be wrong but I thought that was the point parent comment was making?
> Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
Turns out the definition of mental illness covers far more than the most extreme/visible cases so it will be unclear where to draw the line since "mental illness" is too broad a set
How about: every one gets an unconditional license for having one child. That is, pair up with someone and have two children. No need to select subgroups, but enough to stabilize the population.
> "Then your problem isn't the license. The problem is your government."
The license will still be administered by someone / some group. Whether you call those with the administrative powers a 'government' or not isn't really important.
Eugenics is about altering genetics by controlling breeding. Licensing decisions could be based on a broader range of criteria than just genetics. Genetics might not even come into it.
Unlikely. The perceived benefits of eugenics would be too tantalizing for those social engineers in control of "licensing" the right to reproduce. Robust markets for DNA sequencing and clinical already exist. It'd be a vanishingly small step to pivot those platforms for eugenics.
The licensing proposal is odious even if we were to (naively) discount conventional eugenics. Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class.
> "Unlikely. The perceived benefits of eugenics would be too tantalizing for those social engineers in control of "licensing" the right to reproduce."
What if the priorities of the eugenicists and other life licensers clash? For example, what if a known criminal was also the holder of some rare genes that would link up well with someone from the ruling class?
> "Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class."
Eugenics has an unacceptably high -- and excruciatingly documented -- risk of mutating into a demographic weapon wielded by racial groups that have attained dominance by historical coincidence against other racial groups. It is a long-dormant existential threat to large populations. The fact that this cluster of comments is discussing "licensing" the fundamental right of humans to reproduce is in itself a triumph of dystopian rhetoric.
Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
> The fact that this cluster of comments is discussing "licensing" the fundamental right of humans to reproduce is in itself a triumph of dystopian rhetoric.
We're discussing limits on reproduction because this "fundamental right" is most likely going to fuck up the planet. Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
> Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
Yeah, I'd like to exclude Bolsheviks from arguments against communism too. It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
> reproduction ... is most likely going to fuck up the planet
Malthusian fallacy. The idea of a "population bomb" has been indoctrinated into the modern mind of certain political orthodoxies since the late 1960's. It has yet to pass, because it is wrong. The jeremiads of Malthus and Ehrlich are myopic and dangerously lacking in imagination.
We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
> Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
What does that even mean?
The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
> It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
Here's an "actual argument": modern history. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics. Arguments that an idea is grievously misguided based on broad appeals to disastrous periods in recent history brought about by that idea are valid in matters of social policy debate, which this is.
We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
You're doing this again. Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.
> We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
You say that like you had any proof for it. Taken at face value, Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
> What does that even mean?
It means: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
> The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
I don't flip any switch because I personally don't fight for privacy. I see the current levels of it as a historical anomaly, and generally something we need to outgrow as a society in order to progress.
> We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
No, this is dangerously irrational way of thinking. A hundred years ago you would taboo women voting. Two hundred years earlier you would taboo the concept of freedom of black men. What you're doing is just selectively tabooing your cherished belief out of fear your rejection may be wrong. If the belief is valid, it can stand on its own strength, it does not need protection from being discussed.
> Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.
Malthus premised his hypothesis on an assertion that there were obvious limits to growth. Both the premise of obvious limits to growth and the conclusion of catastrophic resource scarcity due to population growth were wrong.
Our food supply is an obvious limit to population growth like an unlocked door is an obvious limit to leaving a room. Yes, if you do nothing, then you will be limited. That should not instill hand-wringing, existential dread.
> Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
History has proven Malthus and his modern incarnation Ehrlich to be wrong time and time again, which doesn't bode well for that probability of yours.
Again, "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it" is a strawman. Pithy, but vapid. Firstly, I said we will engineer ways to overcome limitations. Our current generation is, and will continue to, engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, thrive, and grow our population.
Do I have proof that the engineers of future generations won't all squander their life and do nothing more than optimize sales funnels and click-through-rates? No. But I think it is much more probable that our society will continue to produce some engineers that have not only the talent but the focus we need to break through our current brittle limitations to population growth -- just like their parents, grandparents, and every generation before them did.
>It was also highly effective way to reduce poverty.
Citation needed; correlation does not equal causation. Other East Asian countries showed similar reductions in fertility in spite of no similar policies, and much greater reductions in poverty.
China vs. India vs. Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea): GDP per capita versus fertility rate
Are there any psychology/sociology studies how one-child policy impacted China's society? It has been documented how having one child vs siblings impact one's psyche. I wonder what kind of impact it has on a culture/society as a whole if most are from single-child families.
Their main finding: "[We find that the one-child policy] has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals."
> less trusting, less trustworthy (...) less competitive
I wonder how it goes together. "Less trusting" and "less trustworthy" should mean "less cooperating" and thus more competitive. Adding "more risk-averse", does this mean they just sit around doing nothing? I'd be interesting to read an additional analysis, as I notice I'm confused by those findings. But:
In my personal experiences dating women from China that now live in the US: There is also a loneliness, depression, and generalized malaise to their thoughts due to being an 'only child'.
If we take that observation as general rule (not that it is, but let's pretend) - wouldn't that make for a stronger collective then? In order to mitigate those issues. Lots of interesting speculations can be made. Sociologists and psychologists must have a field day there.
Well, we definitely know that the policy combined with the already-existing culture resulted in a massive gender gap. Not sure of any studies beyond that, I too would be interested!
I have a number of friends who are teachers, all of whom say that you can spot a single child within about 5 minutes of observing them. They just act differently.
Watching the difference in my oldest child when the second came along and was old enough for them to play together - it was astounding.
There must be some optimal number of siblings for mental health. More than 1 less than 4 ?
> I have a number of friends who are teachers, all of whom say that you can spot a single child within about 5 minutes of observing them. They just act differently.
Differently how?
Whenever a student comes late to class, I've always imagined that those students who look up from their work are more likely to come from rural areas in Norway, and that those who don't look up to see who is coming are more likely to come from the city.
But I don't really know what the difference in behavior would be for a sibling vs only child.
Yeah, I wonder if there's been any studies done on the validity of "Little Emperor" syndrome. That is, the fear that the generation of single children would grow up spoiled and socially maladjusted.
Hopefully it can help address the increasing gender imbalance. It has reached 6:5 male to female births, resulting in huge numbers of Chinese men who cannot find marriage partners.
Reminds me of this[0] article that showed up a couple of days ago, which is about a Chinese economist that suggested to legalize marriage between 1 woman and multiple men. Didn't go over to well as I'm sure you can imagine.
My very basic understanding of it was that boys were preferred since they were able to help out in the fields and as a result, girl babies were killed. I wonder if it would just continue since this means 2 able bodies vs. 1? I feel like some state-sanctioned benefits would need to be put into place for the rural populations to prefer raising girls. A 1.2 male-to-female ratio is an appalling metric for a country.
Honestly, for Tinder-like service you just need to turn on WeChat in the evening and run "people nearby" search so that you pop up on a list with updated location. The offers stream themselves.
I installed it like few days ago in hope to establish some unfiltered communication to home, and I already want to uninstall it, because deleting the offers that start coming after midnight is just an annoying hassle. I think it's a fine app to use, but never, ever do a location search after the sun is down.
(That is, if you're not interested in the serivces. If you are, then I guess WeChat is paradise on Earth for the Laowai.)
That's how it actually works. You don't even have to do anything. Just opt-in to temporarily share your location by running a "people in the neighbourhood" scan. "Girls" start writing to you offering "door-to-door full range of services".
I say "girls" because I strongly suspect those are fake accounts run by some agency that will dispatch actual workers to you when you agree for the service. I think so, because otherwise China has a really big evening employment and entertainment problem.
I've been on vacation in China this summer and a tourist guide told me that they can have as many children as they want, but 1) they have to pay some sort of one time fee for the second and successive children (maybe 10,000 Yuan? can't remember) and 2) school, healthcare, etc are to be paid in full for those children. Basically if you're not reasonably wealthy you can afford only one child.
> allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only child
> To ensure coordinated economic and social development, the population size for China should be kept at about 1.5 billion, said Guo, citing the results of a study sponsored by the State Council, China's cabinet.
> China should keep its total fertility rate at around 1.8, and the current rate is between 1.5 to 1.6, allowing the country to maneuver its population policy, according to Guo.
It seems like the aim is for a long-term stable demography. Ensuring the working population doesn't fall too much, for example.
It might have been a big influence, but I am not entirely sure this will help. Similar issues exist in India without any limit, just because of the cost of raising children.
Look at the timestamp. The article you linked was from two years ago.
The "parents can have two kids if at least one parent is an only child" policy described in that article was overturned today. Now everyone can have two kids.
"China will loosen its decades-long one-child population policy, allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only child, according to a key decision issued on Friday by the Communist Party of China (CPC)."
The parent links to an old article, and that's the old rule which was just overturned. Now everybody can have two -- but apparently still no more than two?
Hans Rosling has a documentary about it, check it out via Google, it's on youtube of vimeo or something.
It's not so much that overpopulation isn't an issue, of course it is (that's why it's called 'over' population), but rather that the trend line is that population growth is very rapidly slowing, that people tend to overestimate population growth, are unaware of big population centres that are shrinking, that the average worldwide children per woman rate is < 2.5 (used to be > 5 just 50 years ago) and that population will likely decline after we add a few billion more.
and extrapolated the exponential growth, and ended up with scenarios of doom, war etc. Food shortages for example are consistently predicted, but food production growth has outstripped population growth substantially and food security is better than any time in the past (yet far from perfect).
Obviously there are huge sustainability concerns, but the biggest source is our level of consumption levels and patterns, not our population numbers, which comes in second.
I think the issue is much more what will happen to the world's numbers before the population numbers decline (IF indeed EVERY ethnic groups starts reducing numbers. God help us all if there is one that doesn't)
Numbers of fanatically religious people will double, relatively speaking. Mostly Catholics and Muslims. This is under the assumption that the current rates of conversions remain roughly the same. Trouble is, people turn atheist, don't have kids, and die out, the number of atheists we have today is a historical anomaly resulting from the baby boom. In other words, that effect will stop. This likely will have policy implications.
People in cities are growing FAR slower than people in rural settings. That means that it isn't just atheists that will drop, but everything you associate with city living will lessen. Most city populations are essentially replaced with fresh people from rural settings every 60 years or so (meaning that the number of new rural people in the city at year+60 is larger than the number of people in the city).
Numbers of black people and asian people (not Chinese) will grow a hell of a lot more than the other groups. Africa should have 3-4 times more people than today at least before it stabilizes. Same goes for some countries in Asia. This of course also means that Europe is going to look back to today's Syrian "refugee crisis" and wonder why people were worried about a mere 1 million people per year.
Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do. So it doesn't even really matter.
It's interesting, the generalized idea you have about "Catholics" and "Muslims" comes from a point of view where they're a minority. I'm from Mexico where almost 90% of the population is Catholic and something interesting happens here:
Protestants are the minority and they're viewed as the "fanatically religious people", people would say they're always talking about their religion, they don't party a lot, they don't drink alcohol and usually they have a lot of children, Mexico is a Catholic country and the average family has 2.2 children, but protestant minorities usually have more than 4-5 children.
I've noticed Americans apply some stereotypes to Catholics that would fit pretty well to the stereotypes protestants have in Mexico.
Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.
> Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.
It probably doesn't need to be interpreted as "radical" or even "fanatic", it actually is radical and fanatic.
I grew up in a country of 90+% Catholics, but I was raised in a minority Christian religion. Yes, we always talked about the religion, didn't party (that) much, etc. - that was because we actually cared about following our beliefs, which can't be said about Catholics in my country.
Thinking more about it led me to the following conclusion: any religion that grows so big that it becomes mainstream has to relax a lot. Religious life becomes intertwined with day-to-day problems of employment, managing the economy, etc. Meanwhile you stop having small communities that can push all unconvenient issues to outside with "us vs. them" attitude. Professional specialization starts, people are delegating their religious issues to their priests (compare the way Catholicism looks in big cities vs. small villages). And then one day you wake up and can't ignore politics anymore, because suddenly your religion is the society, and thus is the politics.
TL;DR: Going from "more fanatic / more real" to "less fanatic / less real" seems to me to be a natural course of evolution of a religion as it grows.
Actually atheism is on the rise (or rather, religiosity is on the decline, yes worldwide, too), and urbanisation has been and still is on the rise (recently passing the 50/50 line, with now the majority of people living in cities), and no, rural populations don't impose their culture on cities, rather they seem to get integrated or even further, assimilated by the city culture.
As for an increase in non-white population, absolutely. But you seem to say it as some kind of issue. I don't care about skin color. A concern may be preserving a western culture, absolutely, but there the world has indeed westernised tremendously and shows few signs of slowing down.
I don't really share the sense of concern I interpreted (perhaps wrongfully) in your post.
> Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do.
The answer has always been obvious. It's a long-term answer, one not chosen for centuries. And it's called genuine cooperation and the desire for the rest of the world to rise up, become wealthy, prosperous and sensible, for us to yield some so the rest of the world can rise. Migrants have no interest in moving to where you do, if their own country is great. They have no interest in attacking you, if they're not oppressed or exploited by you. They've no interest in fanaticism if they have something to lose, and no enemy in sight, and an open hand shown to them. They have no need to bear 5 or 6 children if their healthcare system ensures all of them live. The world needs to do everything in its power to help developing countries if you ask me. Every country that has raised living standards has seen population growth decline. And the correlation between living standards and war/religiosity/fanaticism is negative, too. It's a moral imperative to help others, and research shows it helps ourselves, too. It's exactly the same principle why it makes sense for rich people to pay taxes to help the poor in their own country, because it improves their lives when the poor do better, when crime is reduced, and schools improve and roads are safe to drive on and homelessness is reduced and teenage pregnancies drop and schools get better etc etc. Imagine the rich in the US got private armies and lived in gated communities like in some areas in Brazil and walled off their tiny society, the US'd be a terrible country for all, same applies to Europe. Instead we build social democracies. Somehow we don't apply that beyond our borders much, at least not in the past few centuries, instead close our borders, sometimes exploit others beyond our borders, and when we see populations boom and signs of ill will towards us and see populations cling to a different culture than our own, we act surprised. We shouldn't be, it's the logical outcome of our foreign policy.
It's a complete speculation, because I can't cite this, but isn't Earth not capable of sustaining 7+ billion people? Exponential population growth brings even greater exponential rise of greenhouse effect, oil consumption, deforestation, etc. IMHO it is the main problem of overpopulation.
Nobody knows what its capable of sustaining. There's stuff like using resources more efficiently, recycling etc. We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.
> We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.
That's an Malthusianism[0] right here. Why recycling and increased efficiency themselves aren't a solution? Because people will increase their consumption to offset all the gains.
C.f.:
"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were."
The rest of Europe has more than enough farmland to provide for 7 billion people, calorie-wise. If we were to learn how to farm on the open sea, back of the envelope calculations tell me we should easily be able to multiply today's population by 10^4 or more.
If there is a problem, it's water. On the plus side, water is the easiest to recycle by far, the only limit we're close to hitting in some locations is the amount of water that's recycled for free by the weather.
Also, we have skyscrapers. The 11m2 area per person is ground-level area. If you have 10-storey skyscrapers on average, 120m2 for every family on average should be easy, and allow for population to increase 5 fold without exceeding available space in Austria.
It's mostly a resource allocation problem the last time I checked at least with regard to food. We make plenty of it, but we're terrible at allocating it. Water? I think that one is definitely in shortage with regard to potable water. And other resources are more easily managed like metals and other materials that go into electronics we use everywhere (I'm thinking mostly medical, educational, and communications here).
Other than water, I think the only real problem with the current and projected populations is energy. It's not cheap to get oil. And we use it in everything. So, it's really a matter of time before the question of energy makes the rest of the abundance we have useless. No cheap oil means no cheap way to ship food to markets.
So, I'm split on how to see the problem as it is. I think Malthus is going to get the last laugh on all of us.
The Giver’s portrayal of systematic euthanasia of the elderly comes to mind. I really hope we never have to make that kind of decision. After all, what choice could possibly be compatible with our principles of liberty, equality, respect, and fairness? This may be the hardest ethical problem we can’t afford not to solve.
Seems fairly easy to me. Pay 18 year old boys $10k to get a vasectomy. Watch birth rates plummet. Captialism gives us systematic inequality, we should use it to fix more problems
You control birth rates by controlling FEMALE fertility... not male fertility.
There are mathematical reasons behind this, but for the purposes of simplicity I'll give the lay explanation. ie - A female can only have one (or so) child every 9 months. A single human male can produce one every day. So having a population with only one male, but 100 females, allows for a FAR higher reproduction rate than a population with 100 males, but only one female.
Vasectomy is currently the only permanent sterilization procedure without serious health risks. Barring some strange shift in cultural attitudes where fertile males suddenly become irresistible to every female on earth it should do fine until we find a better way for both genders. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In that case... I hope you have some strange shift in cultural attitudes planned for preventing females from being forcibly used by fertile males. I'm not saying we need a perfect method... I'm saying we need a method that acknowledges the realities that many populations around the world live in. Female victimization is a reality in a lot of places on this planet. (To be completely fair... it's a reality even here in the US. Even on the university campus I'm sitting on.)
Rape was the major contributor to population growth in Eastern Kivu back when Nkunda was running rampant. And, to keep everything honest, it still is. (Particularly in Goma). It's not like rape and massacres went away because the Rwandans decided to replace their warlords. The Rwandans still do what Rwandans do I'm sure.
I'm only saying that you ascribe certain properties to the populations you are dealing with. And there are definitely places in the world where your assumptions fail to hold up. But biology ALWAYS holds up.
By the way... I was being kind. Rape is only ONE whole in your plan. There are many. For instance, your plan also assumes women will never simply get horny. Or that they will only "get off" in certain predetermined ways that your plan deems acceptable. Your plan assumes a lot ... and all of it from your own perspective and belief system. If we work within biological limits... we achieve our goals regardless of the local belief system.
One possible problem I see is that females becoming comparatively "irresponsible" about birth control due to perception of males having vasectomy, which may increase accidental pregnancies. I am not taking birth control methods used for STD protection into account here, but the the award of 10k may need to be carefully set so as to have an optimal ratio of infertile vs fertile males. Seems like an interesting proposal though.
And what if a human female "gets off" on the ejaculation???
This is the point I'm making... you are asking that human females satisfy themselves with that which YOU deem it acceptable to provide them. What happens if a human female, indeed many human females, decide they want something different???
I don't know. Going through the comments, people here seem to be ahead of the curve in accepting that China may actually have had a point. But it's hard to agree with for many, because that would mean conceding that undemocratic solutions can be good and effective.
Ya I find that westerners in general have a REALLY hard time dealing with the success of China in the past 30 years, all of which springs from undemocratic policy. All media articles I read about China are ridiculously spun to grasp at straws for flaws in the government, while glossing over the tremendous good that the government has done for the people.
The one-child policy in China is one of the few issues that will piss off both pro-choice and pro-life Americans. Very few things will bring this sort of across-the-board unanimity in American politics.
The once-child policy has been gradually weakened for some time. It will be interesting to see the future population trend in China. I can see it going one of two ways:
1. Multiple children has previously been reserved to those with political connections or money. Now that everyone can have two they will jump at the opportunity.
or
2. Almost every young person in China has grown up in a single child family and sees it as the normal family. Social norms are also based around parents dedicating a lot of resources to one child. So they continue to have only one child. In about a decade China may have to start encouraging people to have more children, like Japan.
I like that question, and I've asked a few people here (I live in Chengdu, China) about it. Anecdotally, it's some of both. City people tend to view raising a child as very expensive, mainly because of education, so many expect they can only afford one. And since that has become the new norm, they're comfortable with that. But many also plan to have two children.
Most I've met who already have a child and could feasibly have a second, don't plan to. I suspect they've already gone through the decision to only have one and don't want to revisit it.
However, I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside.
I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's, with a shortage of young people:
> I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside
Rural families have largely been exempted from the one-child policy for a while now. This new development won't change anything for people living in the countryside.
> I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's
Yeah, China already has an issue with a rapidly aging population. It's called the 4-2-1 problem (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child). But this happens in most developed countries. For instance, the average age in the US would be much higher if it weren't for immigration. The native birth rate isn't very high.
China's 1 child policy (now 2 child, I guess) is a difficult to fully form an opinion on.
On one hand, "population crisis" is something a lot of people are concerned about^ and the policy was a direct and practical way of tackling it. On the other, it is unmistakably totalitarian.
Going to 2 is a strange choice. It's just as totalitarian, but probably has a fairly negligible effect on average fertility rate. I guess they don't see
^On a tangent, I don't totally buy population crisis and judging from how rarely I hear it mentioned these days I think I'm not alone. There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. I think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever. At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years. I can certainly see us absorbing doubling population density in that time considering all the empty oceans, deserts, the potential for landless food productions, megacities and all that jazz. I mean, If the US & Australia went to the population densities of Germany and France (moderately dense with quite a lot of open spaces), we would be good for another 100 years.
We've definitely got the space and the resources. The demographic-economic paradox shows that solving the problem of overpopulation is simply a matter of distributing the renewable surplus we have of food water and shelter to the close to 50% of the world which struggles to obtain. This would create a positive feedback loop which would in turn pay for itself.
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
I think the angle people are missing is that "totalitarian" doesn't always mean bad. Some problems are generally unsolvable by a democracy (coordination problems in general), you have to introduce some way of unilateral decision making to make progress, if you want to progress faster than by a random walk.
Its not really a strange choice, its been "1 with lots of exceptions that mostly make it 2" for some time (there were exceptions with a limit of 2 instead of 1 for many rural areas, for families where at least one parent was an only child, etc.) Going to 2 is a pretty obvious simplification that doesn't really change much except the degree of administrative overhead, plus the policy has hurt perception of China in the developed world, and changing it to two from one along with well-managed press relations get you lots of "China to end one-child policy" headlines around the world, and with most people not reading below the headline, that's a huge propaganda win for doing essentially nothing but making a totalitarian policy administratively simpler.
And, really, it was always the plan: the OCP was originally conceived of as a single generation policy to bring the population down, which would be replaced with a stable population policy; it didn't exactly work out that way in a crisp sense, but a going from a one-child policy with very limited exceptions, to a growing set of exceptions, to finally a two-child policy is, in outline, generally consistent with the original blueprint.
> There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The practical limit is going to be dependent on pre-existing environmental conditions, technology and distribution of lifestyles and other factors; its a moving target. (And not necessarily moving consistently in one direction.)
> The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever.
I don't think that's the issue. I think that the fact that Gen X and the Millenials have been less economically secure than preceding generations (reversing the trend toward greater security) means that increasingly, people are focused on more immediate, personal concerns. Plus, to the extent that there is a concern for broader, global environmental issues, the focus has been climate change rather than overpopulation (the two concerns overlap considerably, but climate change is more specific and concrete than generalized carrying capacity concerns.)
> At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years.
And, IIRC, in the mid-1960s, that was about 32 years. Which difference also contributes to the reduction in concern for overpopulation since then: we may be closer to whatever limit exists, but we're approaching it much more slowly now and that rate is still dropping.
So many people here with really outdated ideas about what causes over population and how to control it. Wish they would read this article by Melinda Gates on some myths around this subject: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Medi...
The sad part is the policy was likely unnecessary given what we now know about the effects of urban migration and modern healthcare on reducing population growth.
It's often too expensive to have multiple children in a large city, and when infant and child mortality is reduced there's less incentive to have lots of kids (so people use birth control).
Thats a good thing. Pressures like these have pushed technological progress forward. Either that, or a natural cycle of starvation and death, unlikely but possible. Let's see what happens.
"A Christian Manifesto" by Francis A. Schaeffer gives a reason why.
Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly.
The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is
predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.
"A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly."
I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom.
"America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms."
At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.
Our founders did that hard work for us. The Bill of Rights and the constitution explain what freedoms we are granted and as well why we are granted them (inalienable rights from our Creator). Previously throughout history, rights were granted to people from their government, through laws.
These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this.
John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it.
I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away.
This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top.
Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that.
Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
"My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away."
I can give several counterexamples to that claim.
Racial segregation "ended" in the United States in 1964. I would claim the country was - at least from a legislative standpoint - more free after than before it. So starting from 1900 I would claim there is a trend towards more freedom.
The recent years have seen the acceptance of more people as they are. Gay marriages are now legal which I think is a fantastic achievement in the history of human rights - no matter how long it took to get there
So, at least from the point of view of several minorities, United States seems to be more free now than ever. I don't know what the totality of the situation is, though (not an american).
I would state that the behavior occurring was already unconstitutional, as we are all created equal and we all have equal rights. This was a founding principle.
The question is, do you have equal rights on my private property? The law says yes. It's disappointing we need a
law to get us that far. We had to give up individual liberty, by allowing laws to move into our personal lives, in order to give equal rights to others?
I don't respect people of other nationalities because there is a law to do so. What new impact did the law have on people's hearts? What impact does the Bible have on a persons heart when it says to "love thy neighbor like thyself".
Even with the Civil Rights acts, we have a heightened sense of urgency in the united states, where the media reports violence between white and black people frequently. A new law won't stop this, but a change of heart just might.
> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view.
America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.
Fixed that for you.
> The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.
Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization.
You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
Justice is not necessarily a moral concept, it's quite a reasonable concept as well. Laws are about reason in the sense that they're things we can convince majorities to abide by; sometimes those justifications are moral, but being immoral is not a justification to be illegal as morals themselves are fluid and what is moral for one isn't for another. As there are no absolute morals, laws are thus based on reasoning between moral beings as to what they can agree to.
It's an expression. Liquid water has mass and takes up space. It's material. It exists in a materialistic universe where the only things that exist are matter an energy.
On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
> Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.
And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is.
> Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism.
Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
> If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
> Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules.
> I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is.
> If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using,
Absurd. Knowledge is impossible if both are right. You're bad at this.
> but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
Says who? Your conventions? What if my "conventions" of logic say the can be compared if they're different systems of logic? You're imposing a "law" of "you can't compare when I say so."
I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
I'm also pointing out your treating laws of logic like laws (yay! I commend you for treating them like laws), but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
> I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
Stawman, that point is not in dispute.
> but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
No I'm not. Your notion that materialism doesn't allow logic is simply wrong. You don't know what materialism is and I'm tired of repeating myself on that point why you continue to skirt the issue and ignore that.
> This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
No, they bow out because you're clearly irrational and unable to engage in meaningful conversation because you don't address points being made to you. You just ignore them and keep saying the same non-sense that's being challenged.
If this account of things were correct, then we would expect to find that less-religious (or specifically less-Christian) nations have less freedom. It doesn't look to me as if this is true; for instance, the nations of Scandinavia are distinctly less Christian than the US (they often have established churches, but the rate of actual religious belief and commitment in the population is low) and they seem no less free than the US; and some notoriously un-free societies have been explicitly Christian (e.g., Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Mussolini's Italy).
We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.
But the OP was not talking about "religion" per se, he was saying that freedom is a natural result of following Christ, specifically following the words of Christ as found in the Bible.
Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
> not talking about "religion" per se [...] following the words of Christ as found in the Bible
We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible".
Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom.
Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.)
> During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language
I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.)
So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link):
"To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."
You say it in a crass way but actually, the point of the growing middle class and shifting of China's economic base means there are going to be fewer people making iphones.
China is getting really good at assembly robots too.
However if the process can be completely automated then why not do the manufacturing right where the bulk of consumption is going to happen to reduce shipping costs which are always growing.
That's a good point, but we still need to reach that outcome, and this will happen graudally. Whatever the end results of robofactory revolution, it will have to start here, in the factory of the world, because that's where we make robots for cheap.
The interesting thing about humans is that they adapt. There's a reason economic growth exists, and not all of it relies on: suck up more oil, chop down more wood.
I do understand the one-child policy because there are too many people in China, especially in cities. The population should be under control. (However, as far as I know, one-child policy never really works in the very poor area. It's common to have 3+ children there.)
In recent decades, China becomes much richer and people have better education. Many families (in cities) get used to having only one child and don't want to have the second child because the cost of raising a child becomes very high. Two-child policy should come earlier.