We know telling people to not have sex doesn't work (this is what most people hear, and for many young people is functionally the same, as don't have unprotected sex).
We have HSV, high teenage pregnancy rates, etc in countries that have pushed those approaches as would-be solutions.
Taking a very specific case of trying to suppress young human sex drive with words, and extrapolating that to the general case around technical hacks versus knowledge and informed decision making is a bit disingenuous.
And 'simple' vaccine?
We just last week got rid of the deputy Prime Minister who, at the time this was being debated (debated!) claimed that the proverbial 'some people' didn't like the idea of giving their twelve year old daughters a licence to be promiscuous. I shit thee nay.
From Barnaby Joyce? Ahem.
“Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.”
Still, why are we discussing his personal life and not his abysmal policy decisions?
I'm referring to the media in Australia, not our discussion on HN.
The demographic transition long predates the pill. The pattern was marry early, have children all through marriage, marry late, have children all through marriage, marry late, show obvious signs of controlling fertility. The first definite case of the demographic transition is 1800s France.
And while Malthus was right as a historian, he was wrong as a futurist. Things have been getting better worldwide since the Industrial Revolution even as population increased.
Western Europe hasn't married early for hundreds and hundreds of years, since long, long before the demographic transition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
The fact that Australia is close to achieving this, while many other countries are far off, also points at social factors playing a role. The vaccine works the same everywhere.
> how vaccines and tech are decreasing population.
If it is statistically and empirically true, then it probably is true.If people smarter than me by any measure agree with it, then it probably is true after,all.
That said:
I don't doubt that, it works in a first world nation. But third world , at least India is a different thing, people like to have two kids around here, because it looks whole some. It doesn't matter what the financial situation is , people like to have at least two kids in India(I don't have any metric for it,just a casual observation). What if people see their kids don't die out of diseases and could take food ,education,electricity,clean water and clean air and a good public transport for granted and now want to make more babies? The decrease of population if you pump these resources seems counter intuitive to me. I am not suggesting if Bill Gates should pull out of Africa, I am just not getting the logic here.
It turns out that educated women with more other options almost always want to have fewer children. This should not be surprising; they don't call childbirth "labour" for nothing.
His first TED talk on the best data you've ever seen is also worth watching.
It's an important question, but our understanding of what causes population spikes, and how people respond to improved wealth and health in a country, can make us a little more optimistic.
Yeah, make sure to let the world know when you figure out what that solution is, because it will win you Nobel Prizes in multiple categories.
If Australia had relied on telling children not to have unprotected sex, the HPV rate would not have moved much.
The policy of "teach abstinence" fails people much more so than vaccinating against a single vector.
While a vaccine might not be a license to _____, it also fails to address education, personal responsibility, etc. Sure there are health benefits but if everyone gets a trophy so to speak when and how will the lack of learning Y manifest itself later?
That is, give the vaccine. Sure. But don't be so naive to think that education in some form isn't still necessary.
Furthermore, Mother Nature is clever and crafty. It's only a matter of time, now that protection is less necessary, before she comes up with something new.
I'm not a Luddite. But there are two sides to every advance, and we almost always igrore the unintended consequences until it's too late.
Maybe he was saying that a decrease in fertility had to be an explicit goal, without realizing that decreases in fertility could be a side effect of other social developments.
The reason he said fertility had to be an explicit goal is he lived before we learned how to grow the economy faster than the population. I guess you could blame him for not seeing the industrial revolution coming, but given nobody else at the time did either I think it is a little harsh.
Malthus has historically been excused with "just wait and see" explanations about his ideas, but no one seems able to say what is the kernel of truth in his theory or framework remains after you wipe away the details that were based on misunderstandings about his own time or about the actual dynamics of population growth.
For instance he paid almost no attention whatsoever to mortality rates or the disposition of ages within a population and their effect on growth rates. He also paid no attention to the relative fertility of families with different levels of wealth identified by Adam Smith long before him.
One way to summarize his work is that people's biological capacity to reproduce exceeds their physical capacity to increase the food supply, and that food supply is the ultimate constraint on human population that will be hit without other active constraints on population growth.
Of course humans have the ability to grow faster than their conditions support, or they would not be able to grow when conditions improved, or recover from traumas to a population. But they also have the capacity to not reproduce, and not replace people as quickly as they are dying. It seems like a real leap of faith, to claim that people can only be actively constrained in their fertility, since there hasn't been any evidence that people only limit family size when actively compelled to.
It is also strange to say that if there is no other limit on population growth, food will limit population growth. That's like arbitrarily stating that the only limit on fire is fuel, or that the only limit on fire is oxygen, or temperature. Population growth is a function with many inputs, and populations would approach some equilibrium even if food was hypothetically limitless.
Maybe the excuse is that food is just a metaphor for the basket of all resources that people need, and that it can still be argued that populations without active constraints on growth increase exponentially until they inevitably result in famine, plague or war to decrease their numbers.
What human populations work that way? They tend to ebb and flow in size around an equilibrium, then with a technological advance or environmental improvement they shift from one equilibrium to another at an increasing rate then a decreasing rate, just like a logistic function. Even with a collapse of a civilization the numbers decline like a logistic function. The curve might be steep, but it starts slowly, decreasing faster and faster then more slowly again as it gets close to zero.
I find it interesting that, AFAIA HPV is a sexually transmitted disease but that, certainly in the UK, healthcare professionals seemingly lie (by omission at least) in order to further vaccination.
Also, that insistence on screening seems likely to have been a major cause of widespread infection (eg https://obpmedical.com/resource-center/blog/non-sexual-trans...), though I've never heard of this from a major news outlet?
It amazes me that until 2016 it seems no-one bother to check that sterilised reusable gynaecological instruments were actually sterile, mind-blowing.
I mean, you can't just leave a claim like that dangling. A source would be ideal, but at least explain the claim of what the lie is would be nice.
- you link to peer reviewed science, rather than the manufacturer of devices who have reasons to profit from misleading information (hint : there's a reason you haven't heard about it from major news outlets).
- you back up inflammatory statements (like "healthcare professionals seemingly lie (by omission at least) in order to further vaccination.") with some evidence, particularly where the common narrative disagrees with your statement.
- You avoid misleading arguments ("The solution of no genital contact with others isn't inferior, it wasn't applied" - this is misleading, many have attempted to apply it, it's their attempts that have failed).
Malthus made a big deal how people should have fewer children and the population still grew. With the invention of safe, effective, convenient birth control, world population levels are stabilizing, and even starting to shrink in developed countries.
We need more "fire and forget" solutions. If we want to save our environment and slow down global warming, we need solutions that at most require people to do something relatively painless 1 time. Anything that relies of persuading humans to change their long term behavior is doomed to failure.