Some Countries Need Less Population

Thank you for these eminently sensible observations.

The Left has a huge blind spot on population. Just so much as implying that there may be limits causes hair-on-fire tantrums and shrieking about “ecofascism”. It’s so tiresome.

clearly it has more people than it is capable of taking care of. (Though we all know that’s usually a choice, not a constraint.)
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Step 1: Prosperity gospel, there is no society, follow orders and obey.
Step 2: Poison the population, restrict housing food and other necessities
Step 3: Blame the gradual social decline on the people you’ve poisoned, and impoverished.
Step 4: Profit and be lavish in your mansions, wearing silk dress, diamond bracelets, with servants pampering your make up covered sneers.
Step 5 is already underway some of us just don’t want to admit it yet.

Curt, IDK about Europe, but exactly that has been the case in the USA for decades. Lefty intransigence about the alleged moral superiority of “open borders” has not helped, but the root cause of American inability to control our borders is the implacable insistence of the rich that housing prices must not ever decline. The upper class does not make stuff anymore, so RE is where their money is kept.

I hope that people are able to more deliberately choose whether they have children and how many they have, and that a chosen population decline results in the future being gentler on successive generations.

In my personal life, population contraction is visible. Just did a rough count of the girlfriends I’m in some kind of regular touch with, most of them mid-range Millennials:

5 of them have 2 kids
2 of them have 1 kid
1 of them doesn’t have kids yet but wants 1.
15 of them have no kids and no plans to have them.

And to be clear, this was before I started deliberately seeking out ladies who were childfree to make friends. This is just the population I befriended in my 20s and early 30s.

Heh- my three siblings and I were born from 1948 to 1960. 2 of us had children: 1 had a son, the other had 2 sons, all in their 30s. Only one is married, to a woman with a debilitating disease and zero chance of having children.

This population pyramid will not fund future pensions.

I’m only saddened because our wacky family name will die out.

I have to wonder if the statistic is valid, for a specific reason–

Some time back somebody did a great little expose on the fraud of “places where people have a far longer lifespan than anywhere else”– supposedly Sardinia, Armenia I think, Japan at one time, etc. (I have a tiny bit of Sardinian heritage in my DNA, so I connected with that.)

The real reason was fraud. People kept their dead parents pickled on ice (or however) to keep collecting pensions. This happened a LOT in Japan, in fact prior to seeing the above there were many exposes on “missing” or “disappeared” elders in Japan.

So maybe they just caught the fraud, & it creates that image, but the decline happened earlier. I can’t prove this, but I think it’s worth of sharing in the “Just Saying” category.

When climate change hits? It’s been hitting and hitting hard for some time now. I would not know where to begin listing record smashing climate Jacked disasters that have been extremely costly and in a number of case many of the victims and their communities have not recovered at all and some only partially. The world is well on it’s way to losing much of the benefits of the insurance industry (no insurance = no mortgage in many places) due to the increased risk of climate change and a few other factors, but the climate factor will grow and grow and make more homes and businesses un insurable.

The blows have become frequent. This man list climate news, (consequences big & small) every other day

*Latest Round-Ups*

*Catch up on the latest Climate & Economy news.*

https://climateandeconomy.com/
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*Americans face an insurability crisis as climate change worsens disasters – a look at how insurance companies set rates and coverage*
Published: November 18, 2024

https://theconversation.com/americans-face-an-insurability-crisis-as-climate-change-worsens-disasters-a-look-at-how-insurance-companies-set-rates-and-coverage-241772
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What has yet to hit is major wide spread and permanent climate damage to industrial agriculture. It’s underway. Higher CO2 levels are turning some major grains and some species of fish that humans eat into junk food (less nutritious) and long term drought is threatening major grain crop yields. When the commodities speculators strike the fear will cause it’s own damage. In the end it will come down to the food as you have pointed out many vulnerabilities in your piece. I see the same things you do, only I say climate cuts have begun and the blood flow is increasing – speed and scale.
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*Rising carbon dioxide levels are turning rice and fish into junk food*
Jun 08, 2018

“Increased CO2 in the atmosphere reduces the nutritional value of rice, the world’s most plentiful and valuable crop, as well as wheat and many wild plants. But CO2 also has a negative impact on the nutrition we take from the oceans, and that starts at the base of the food web with the harm it does to the microscopic phytoplankton.”

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/june-9-2018-rising-co2-levels-make-food-less-nutritious-neonics-and-bees-tricking-facial-recognition-1.4696119/rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-are-turning-rice-and-fish-into-junk-food-1.4696123

Thank You, Ian.

I guess I’ll be the one to write some criticism here, I don’t think it’s appropriate to write *only* in terms of (over)population numbers. Arguments have to also talk about population pressure, and what kind of way of life a culture has and what relations it has to place and planet.

William Catton, in the 1982 book Overshoot, writes:

“I began to realize how little the average American had at first
understood the reasons for his own anguish over what was happening
to the American way of life in the post-exuberant era. This could be
brought out clearly, I discovered, by asking an American to name an
overpopulated country. He or she was much more likely to begin by
mentioning India than the United States. But in considering which
nation was overpopulated to a greater extent, Population *pressure*
needed to be distinguished from population *density.*”

[…]

“Population pressure can be defined as the frequency of mutual
interference per capita per day that results from the presence of others
in a finite habitat. (This is about what Emile Durkheim meant by
“moral density” in his 1883 analysis of the division of labor in society.3)
Population density in the ordinary sense (Durkheim’s “material den
sity”) is simply the number of people per square mile. Two nations
with equal population density could differ in population pressure if
their peoples differed in level of activity. A population using more pros
thetic equipment would tend to subject its members to more pressure
by doing more things.”

One framing to look at is ‘social thresholds achieved’ vs. ‘biophysical boundaries crossed’ per the project A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries, for example here’s Japan: https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/national-trends/country-trends/#JPN .

There’s a couple reasons I point this out:

1) I feel there has to be additional questions asked when topics of (over)population come up.

2) Only talking about overpopulation can get conflated with planetary health and immigration issues in ways that are arguably racist, see https://www.propublica.org/article/john-tanton-far-right-extremism-environmentalism-climate-change for starters

I noticed on X-twitter that Ian made a point of noticing how many people are apparently clueless about overpopulation. Relatively few commenters on X-twitter identified themselves as agreeing with the observation.

It might be partly the customary “all news is bad news” phenomenon I suppose that leads journalism to focus on “demographic collapse”. There are real problems associated with declining population of course, but it takes some serious stupid not to realize there are also serious congestion and resource depletion problems associated with the massive size of populations and the economic production associated with feeding, housing, transporting and entertaining them.

We really ought to be more worried about the fact that continued economic growth with concentration of income at the top will require eliminating useless eaters not needed for productive and security activity. I expect a lot of people driving Uber are worried about self-driving cars, just as some insured by United Healthcare are concerned about surviving a denied claim.

The thing is, how many people can or will pay enough attention to think through even as basic issue as overpopulation? Recognizing that China is overpopulated is not exactly an intellectual heavy lift. So how dumb are we?

Oh, yeah, Merry Xmas!

There is a thinking error in this.

The error is that the boundaries of a state is thought to be absolute. That all the people within eat must be produced within.

One could as well argue the same about a municipality. That what is eaten within must be produced within. Which would deem every town “overpopulated” and leave only countryside justified.

But a world consisting of only countryside – every square inch not overpopulated – wouldn’t provide more than say a tenth of the present population with food. A world without towns wouldn’t be able to produce the equipment to make agriculture efficient. This because production of almost everything except food is more efficient with division of labour. And division of labour implies towns.

What counts are not country borders, but possibly tonkilometers. The Germans thought in the interwar years that borders were very important and that they must incorporate Poland and Ukraine into Germany to have food in the country. But it could be well demonstrated that it was better and cheaper in all respects to export industrial products and buy food, and not bother with boundaries.

In fact, German geographer Johann Heinrich von Thünen calculated in the early 19th century that the theoretically best way to organize an area was to keep artisans (as they were called then) in the middle, and surround them, concentrically, with gardening, forestry and – furthest out – animal husbandry and cereals. That would create least transport. And transport was expensive at that time. Food is simply not the most expensive thing to transport.

It is tenable to say that there are too many people in the world. At least with the production methods in use today. But it really doesn’t matter if some are crowded together in for example England or Hong Kong.