I think Africa's population growth is predicted to plateau around 2100
Please let us know why we are wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35357326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362526
>Even the current number of humans alive - let alone people yet to be born - can't be maintained without continued growth, innovation, and the paradigm shifts resulting from that innovation and growth.
People in developing or newly industrialized countries typically don't drive SUVs or live in individual houses with HVAC.
This idea that we could solve the climate change problem entirely by restricting the amount of energy people are allowed to consume in the Western world is a misguided and quaintly privileged point of view.
For most of the rest of the world limiting growth would come down to population control and demanding people remain in abject poverty.
Yet right now they are prioritizing heavy materialistic living over a bigger population. It is why the world "can't take the pressure of a huge population" argument surfaces.
The farmlands is a perfect example you make because everyone eats more meat. Meat consumption per capita in Europe increased an average 10% just in the last 7 years.
But Turkey, Vietnam, pretty much the entire middle east and Africa increased per capita consumption by more than 60% in less than two decades.
And on top of that it's even more environmentally toxic as beef keeps taking more and more of the share of the meat consumption.
And it doesn't stop at meat, India didn't even figure in top 10 car sales globally just 10 years ago, now it's the third market in the world after China and US and sells around the same cars as Germany and UK (which are all in the top 8 world markets) combined.
Its already not fine from many of our perspectives.
Trading crops for western currency is a generally neutral exchange, but at least it gives you access to things you cannot otherwise produce - and technology generally can break the zero-sum/geo-arbitrage of trade.
> We literally feed perfectly good farmlands to cows
Where does the wasted energy go?
Multiply population times consumption to get footprint. There is no question we are over the carrying capacity of the planet for humans with a lifestyle of mindless consumption and reproduction.
The insects are mostly gone. Half the animal species are gone. The oceans are filled with plastic garbage. The reefs are dead.
Humans have no capacity to limit our own numbers. Trends in Japan and projections for a few other places ignore the numbers for China and India with over 1.5 billion each and monstrous ecological collapse in both places.
And still the company I work for, like every capitalist organization, harps on the insane Pozi scheme of perpetual growth at every meeting. Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.
The only reason you don't believe that we are in a catastrophe of overpopulation is that the degradation of the environment is not immediately evident if you live in a city.
No, they don't: the birthrates of Japan and China are actually very similar. (India is different.) China is of course much larger, but it's a geographically larger country anyway, and always has been. It's facing the same demographic problems, if not worse.
>Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.
Are you talking about frying pans, or computers? Do you really want to be stuck with a high-quality computer from 1975? Or a television from the same era? Modern electronics use far less energy than stuff from a few decades ago. With clothing, you have a good point though, but here again, who wants to dress like it's 1975?
Religiosity is down, but how long does it take to adapt? Scientology (new strain) is up.
And when I say religiosity I mean the portion of the population that has no or limited religious affiliation is up as a whole not just one particular denomination or religion, it's down as a whole across all religions.
100 years ago: 0 scientologists now: conservatively, at least 100 scientologists
As for the portion of the population that has no or limited religious affiliation, I'm not sure that mean it will keep going down, versus comes into some kind of equilibrium.
Since not all girls will think this, the few that think such will have to have an even higher number. You won't see 1 in 5 think to themselves "I want 10.5 children".
That you want this to happen everywhere is bizarrely misanthropic. It's an Erlichean death cult.
An attempt to justify their own decisions while still being judgemental about the decisions of others. Meat-eaters get enraged, too, when you talk about pollution and disease; and constant tourists try to minimize their individual burning of huge amounts of jet fuel by using collective statistics that elide the fact that 90% of people in the world rarely or never fly.
A lot of us are conservative about everything in the world except things that affect our own lifestyle or our loved ones, when we suddenly become permissive. Others of us are very liberal about how the world should be run, but very strict and demanding when it comes to their own things and their own families.
The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Your comment amounts to "you're wrong, things magically change and it's all good". Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists aren't well-known for bucking the trends their parents set and doing something wildly different than they.
It would take 500-1000 years for it to actually go "extinct" (depending on what do you mean by that).
A lot of things can happen in this time frame. So claims like:
> The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Seem pretty absurd...
As the population declines, the rate will pick up. A nearly extinct Japan will give rise to an even more profound nihilism.
> A lot of things can happen in this time frame.
Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Nothing happens in that time. It's extinction. Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Why?
> Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation? Possibly but it would have been a contrarian opinion.
What about 100 years ago? 150? 200? Almost impossible.
See the pattern?
> Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Right.. I'm sure there were people who were saying this in the 1860s or 1940s. Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed. Of course there is no guarantee that might happen again. Who knows... I'm not the one pretending I know everything.
Because the fertility that they see expressed around them by adults acts as the ceiling, not the floor for their own future fertility. If grandpa had 3 and mom had 3, you might only have 1 or 2, you'll very rarely ever have 4 of your own.
This is just the nature of those numbers... a person with 2 kids is, theoretically, working on a third. Until they get too old, and then it's an "oops".
So, it ratchets downward. When someone waits too long and has fewer, then they become the normal that children around them see, those children internalize the new number (or at least some sort of fuzzy average of those adults around them).
One would expect that to decline ever faster. And that's in fact what we see so far... instead of a fertility rate of 1.4 that just holds steady for centuries until extinction, it drops year to year and decade to decade, and will take far less than a millennium.
> Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation?
Probably, if they somehow could have shed their 1960s biases. The trend had already started.
> Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed.
It's not malleable at all. Adaptable is one thing. Adaptation is an active verb, each person individually and all collectively will themselves to change, so to speak, to overcome challenges. They do that occasionally.
Malleability suggests that some outside force can come along and change them against their will, or at least without them noticing... and they are less malleable than many other cultures. If they were malleable, then we'd expect far more results from the various programs that the government puts in place to alter their culture. And those programs have fallen flat on their faces. They don't make a dent in Japanese work culture, they won't make a dent in Japanese fertility.
We're probably only 25 years or less away from 0.3 fertility rate. By about that time, it won't be so easy to argue against those who say what I'm saying... so those who did will have moved on to "this is a good thing". Some are already hinting it in the other replies. They hate humans, they wish they never existed, and they are secretly cheering this on. (Yet, I'm the fascist somehow.)
This would make me sad, except that it's difficult to be too upset about people who wish they never existed making themselves extinct.
This is magical thinking. It like imagining that if someone diets long enough, they'll disappear. Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
It's experimentally validated. Calhoun ran it multiple times. Animals don't bounce back. This isn't moose populations crashing because of overfeeding and starvation.
> Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
Which is where the analogy diverges from reality. Cultured populations don't reach a comfortable weight... they become "depressed from the hunger", and decide to go for broke.
> Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists..
Do you? Japan has proven highly adaptable in the past.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points without any of that in the future, we'd appreciate it.