A scarier strategic problem - no people

[civmick]

QC got their birth rate up, costing them squillions to do it but it's a fact.  Take out QC and I wonder what the ROC rate must be 

 

[chanman]

Conservative does not necessarily = hardworking.  Nor did I imply that.  The article you point out about immigration is an interesting one....I would ask why CDNs don't want to have children? 

It's not just us.

(The Economist) Pocket World in Figures

Lowest Fertility Rates, 2000-2005 (Avg. # of children per woman)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 9. 11. 12. 15. 16. 18. 19. 21. 24. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 34. 35. 36. 38. 39. 40. 41. 43. 44. 46. 47.

Macau Hong Kong Ukraine Czech Republic Slovakia Slovenia Moldova/South Korea Belarus/Bulgaria Greece Latvia/Poland/Romania Spain Italy/Lithuania Hungary Bosnia/Germany Armenia/Japan/Russia Croatia/Singapore Estonia Austria Channel Islands Switzerland Portugal Georgia Barbados/Malta Canada Macedonia Cuba/Trinidad & Tobago Cyprus Sweden Serbia & Montenegro Belgium/United Kingdom China Finland/Netherlands Luxembourg Australia/Denmark

0.84 0.94 1.12 1.17 1.20 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.30 1.32 1.33 1.35 1.37 1.39 1.40 1.41 1.47 1.48 1.50 1.51 1.53 1.61 1.63 1.64 1.65 1.66 1.70 1.72 1.73 1.75

As a point of reference, the replacement rate is usually 2.1

The US has a fertility rate of 2.0

 

[AUADef]

With the costs associated with children, is anyone actually surprised this is occuring?  If you have 1, 2 or worse, 3 or 4 children, the financial drain on the family is brutal..........  The cost of daycare so the mother can go back to work more or less eats her entire paycheque.  Speaking on my own experience, my wife makes about $400 every two weeks.  The cost of our daycare for that two week period is $350.00 - $35.00 a day.  That's alot of hours worked by her for what? One dinner out every two weeks.  The government really should be moving on a plan for daycare similar to Quebec's to encourage re-population. 

Regards

There is talk that the current government may allow for income splitting. This would then allow Moms to stay at home with their children (which is much better than baby sitters) and hopefully keep more money in your families pocket than the current $100 a month your wife is bringing in now.  If we can have government policies that would allow greater freedom in raising a family (mostly lifting tax burdens) then a lot of moms won't have to work at 7-eleven or Wal-Mart unless they want to.  There is nothing more world changing than a dedicated mom to her children. Moms are the ones who develop our next leaders, not some socialist day care program. Quebec may look avant-garde in some of their social projects, but they seem to follow Europe in many ways and that is a slow painful death in the mire of huge tax burdens, even if those taxes are paid for by other provinces. Home schooling in Quebec has many examples of how the government views family and your children, oops, I mean their children.

Most people now days say they can't afford children, so they have to stick to only 1 (or 1.5).  Some wait till they have their careers well underway, but then by the time that happens they are 35 or so and really only have time for 1 maybe 2. 

I think another reason for the low birth rate (maybe the biggest reason) is that our society has become so damn selfish, me, me, me!

http://www.fotf.ca/tfn/family/stories/2007/070214_01.html

 

[chanman]

Well as I stated before I did my share....I more than doubled the 2.0.

Mind you, I think it's the other party that's the limiting factor, not yourself 

As an addendum, a fertility rate of 5 is exceptional for a Canadian couple, but only average for the Kenyans

 

[a_majoor]

Russia's demographic decline sharply limits the ability of Vladimir Putin to recreate Russia as an Imperial or even Great Power. The question for the next 20 to 50 years may well be: "who will move in?"

http://hallsofmacadamia.blogspot.com/2007/09/do-you-think-mark-steyn.html

2007/09/10
Do you think Mark Steyn...

Is working on the sequel to America Alone?

    -- BERLIN -- Sixty years after World War II, Russians are dying younger in peacetime than their grandparents did under Stalin. They are having fewer children, and many are falling mortally ill from alcohol-related diseases.

This is an incredibly significant change, demographically and geopolitically. It forever alters the balance of power in the world and it will occur during our lifetime.

    "A terrible demographic crisis is taking place," said Nikolay Petrov, a specialist on Russian society at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "Over the next 20 years, Russia will need 20 million immigrants to compensate for the labor shortage.

    This is the first time in which the population and labor force are declining together. It will have an enormous impact on Russia's economic and strategic ambitions."

Who's that sitting right next door to the Russians?

This could get interesting.

I suspect the answer isn't what the Blogger is implying, China is also facing a self induced demographic crisis. Population growth in Asia is centered on the 'Stans (the Russian "Near Beyond" which fixtated the Tsars and is still an important consideration for post Soviet Russia). While there will be hordes of young people in the 'Stans who will be available and eager to seek work in European Russia, the Russians themselves will probably be violently opposed.

An Islamic successor state created by young people from the 'Stans moving in and occupying the empty Russian territories will have access to many rich resources, but unless there is a sea change in Islamic culture (perhaps with the current Islamic "Thirty Year's War" being the cause), they will not have or develop the institutions to get a great deal of added value from these resources. Since Europe and China will also be in the throes of demographic meltdowns by that time, the only plausible market for their resources will be....the United States!

 

[Colin Parkinson]

I would do my bit to keep the birth rate up with some hot Russian, Slavic, Indian and Persian woman, if I can get my wife to agree.  ;D

Considering how nice looking those woman are, the fact they are not having enough babies seems to point to a social issue with the guys there.

 

[a_majoor]

The problem with having a demographic crash is you won't have enough hands to do the important work....

http://mesopotamiawest.blogspot.com/2007/10/extreme-demographic-armament.html

Extreme Demographic Armament

If you liked Mark Steyn's book, America Alone, you're going to love Sons and World Power: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations by Gunnar Heinsohn when it comes out in English.

Heinsohn is director of the Raphael-Lemkin Institute at the University of Bremen and he has some fascinating theories on the relationship between family size and war:

    "My point," Heinsohn continued, "is that the strength of a nation's military is affected by the size of a nation's families. Falling birth rates in Western countries mean that even light casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan bring cries of pain in Europe and America. But Iraq and Afghanistan are growing rapidly. Their populations are swollen by youth bulges. Their average family has five or six children. They are in what I call 'extreme demographic armament.'"

Boy is that ever true. One dead soldier rates the front page of all of our national papers, while 25 dead for them hardly gets a mention. Here's some more:

    "Most of the men in this room," he said, "belong to the 45 to 60 age bracket." In this bracket, he continued, the U.S. and U.K. have a four-to-one advantage over the male populations of two youth bulge nations, Afghanistan and Pakistan (Af-Pak), 36 million vs. 9 million. However, in the 0-14 bracket--the cohort that will be reaching military age in 2020 and beyond--the 36 million boys in the US-UK are outnumbered by 38 million boys in Afghanistan-Pakistan alone. From a military standpoint, this numerical edge is bigger than it sounds, Heinsohn added. In NATO countries, where families are small, there is no such thing as a disposable male. Statistically, Western boys are likely to be only sons or only children. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 25 million of those 38 million boys are second, third or fourth sons.

    The real quagmire in Iraq is not military, Heinsohn said. It's demographic. "The Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq stated that 'While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes superb tactical intelligence on al Quaeda in Iraq, our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias.' The report never mentions demography. If we fail to understand the implications of Iraq's demographic armament, the real cause of future insurgencies will remain enigmatic."

Read the whole interview at The Daily Standard.

 

[MechEng]

Back in the day people started having children at ages 16-18 years old.  Having children was less expensive and it was easier to make a living when you were in your late teens.

Today many people don't start to have kids until there 30.  To make a living today many people need to have either a collage or University education.  And many families have to have two incomes just too survive.  This means people have less time to spend on children.  This means less kids later in life.

My Wife and I are 28 years old and would like to start to have children.  But we only recently moved into a house (from an apartment) and we are both still paying off student debt's.  Money is fairly tight and we cannot afford to have children right now.  But we might be able to in 3-4 years when some of our debts will be payed off.

There are a few major issues that keep people from having children.  Wages have not gone up in 10 years.  Yet the cost of living has tripled. This is forcing people to have kids later in life and forcing people in to two income families to make ends meet.  A highschool diploma is unlikely to get you a good job.  To have a better chance at being successfull you need to have a collage and univerisity education.  This takes time and lots of money.  Tuition has doubled in the last 10 years.

Back in 1970 my parents bought a Semi-detached and was able to pay off their mortgage in 5 years.  In 1975 they bought a backsplit and was able to pay off the mortgage in 10 years.  This was fairly common back then.  Today people have 25 - 40 year mortgages.  Before you know it we will need to be sending what few kids we have to work to support the family.  And then we will have come full circle and become the 3rd world country we have been headed for since 20 years ago.

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting argument based on a convergence of economics and demography.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail486.html#auxiliaries

Subject: A demographic theory of war

Jerry,

There is an interesting discussion here of demographics as it relates to war: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/
Public/Articles/000/000/014/185jeplm.asp

Some will see it as another reason to call for action - boost the birth rate now to prepare for future war. Only I doubt that such a call could be effective:

1. The appeal couldn't be direct, it would have to be disguised as something else (religious revival, return to traditional values, etc.). In the Western world, the notion of having more offspring to be cannon fodder for the aspiring empire would be a very tough sell.

2. It might be difficult to achieve high growth rates economically. Lester Thurow explains it this way:

"If one looks at wealthy countries, one sees that they have all had a century or more where population growth rates did not average much more than 1 percent per year. The reasons are simple. Before per capita incomes can go up, the new individuals added to any society have to be provided with those items necessary to generate the society's already existing per capita GDP. Newborn citizens must be fed, housed, and given medical attention until they enter the labor market and can support themselves. Entering the labor force on average at age 20, they need $8,000 per year in living expenses for 20 years if they are to have the average American childhood. To get an average job they must be given the average amount of education. American elementary and secondary education costs $7,200 per year, and higher education $14,700 per year. A little multiplication will tell you what must be invested in education if everyone is to have twelve years of education, and 34% of the population is to have some college education. To create an American average job requires $122,700 in capital equipment. About two-thirds of the adult population works. Social infrastructure, such as roads and airports, requires another $21,000 per person. Adding it all up, total investments of a little less than $400,000 per person are needed to make each new American into an average adult American.

Human populations can at their maximum grow at about 4 percent per year. Not country has ever had a 4 percent population growth but some, like Mexico, have come close for a while. Suppose American's population were growing at 4 percent per year. This would mean 11.3 million new Americans every year and require an investment of $4.4 trillion. But the American GDP is only $11 trillion. Forty percent of the American GDP would have to be devoted to making new Americans into average Americans. This would require a big reduction in the standard of living of existing Americans. They simply would not accept it. The necessary investments would not be made, and the average per capita American GDP would start to fall.

In poor countries, the investment numbers in each category are different, but when one divides by the local GDP the percentages come out about the same---somewhere near 40 percent. As a result, with population growth rates much above 1 percent, it is essentially impossible to catch up. This is one of the main reasons to be optimistic about China's economic prospects and pessimistic about India's economic prospects. One country has its population under control and the other does not." [Fortune Favors the Bold, Lester Thurow, 2003]

So if Thurow is right, you can either be a rich country with population growth at or below 1%, or you can be a poor country that is well stocked with cannon fodder. Doesn't seem like all that much of a choice to me.

But what of those teeming hordes of foreign young men ready to do battle with our precious youth? Well, it is a problem if we expect to embark on daring foreign adventures, imposing our will and way of life on unreceptive native populations by military force. Then we will have wars of attrition that we can't win. But it does not follow that those teaming hordes would necessarily pose a real and severe threat to our national sovereignty. Modern war is as much about logistics as it is manpower and technology. It is hard to imagine any of these relative poor, rapidly growing countries creating and maintaining the supply lines needed to sustain a direct attack on the US. And we already have more than enough nukes to deter any nuclear armed enemy. Terrorism is, of course, something to be concerned about. But I think there are better ways of dealing with those threats than sending an army to execute a regime change with every one of our potential enemies.

All this considered, I'll vote for a wealthy, population stable, energy independent republic!

CP, Connecticut

 

[Brad Sallows]

Back in the day, people didn't feel they needed to be "successful" to raise families.  Next time you drive through a neighbourhood built up in the '40s or '50s, check out the sizes of the homes.  If they have basements, imagine the basements to be unfinished, perhaps with dirt or only very rough concrete floors.  Now imagine raising four or six kids in those houses on working class (non-union) incomes.  The kids didn't get separate rooms; the clothes were handed down; each child might have had only a couple pairs of shoes and less than a handful of pants and shirts at any given time; there were few if any snacks outside meals; nothing prepared for a meal escaped uneaten; and leisure was mostly a product of the imagination and whatever was at hand rather than something purchased at restaurants, theatres, toy stores, and so forth.  Go back a couple more generations and the situations were even more challenging.  I know how the preceding two generations of my family were raised because I asked.  Do you know anything about yours?

Raising a family has gotten, if anything, easier; but the affordability of a basic family has been outstripped by the rise in expectations of each succeeding generation of potential parents.  If you start at 20 immediately desiring what your parents worked 20-25 years to attain, what do you expect?

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Although the US had a "respectable" birthrate compare to most of the West, it is not even across the country, States that are generally Democrat strongholds seem to have a lower birth rate than the more religious states. In fact looking at stats where left wing people live, the birthrate is quite a bit below replacement.

As a species left wingers are not very successful reproducers, but as all species they have adapted, they multiple by taking over the education systems and converting other peoples children to their beliefs, therefore maintaining their beliefs.

 

[MechEng]

Back in the day, people didn't feel they needed to be "successful" to raise families.  Next time you drive through a neighbourhood built up in the '40s or '50s, check out the sizes of the homes.  If they have basements, imagine the basements to be unfinished, perhaps with dirt or only very rough concrete floors.  Now imagine raising four or six kids in those houses on working class (non-union) incomes.  The kids didn't get separate rooms; the clothes were handed down; each child might have had only a couple pairs of shoes and less than a handful of pants and shirts at any given time; there were few if any snacks outside meals; nothing prepared for a meal escaped uneaten; and leisure was mostly a product of the imagination and whatever was at hand rather than something purchased at restaurants, theatres, toy stores, and so forth.  Go back a couple more generations and the situations were even more challenging.  I know how the preceding two generations of my family were raised because I asked.  Do you know anything about yours?

Raising a family has gotten, if anything, easier; but the affordability of a basic family has been outstripped by the rise in expectations of each succeeding generation of potential parents.  If you start at 20 immediately desiring what your parents worked 20-25 years to attain, what do you expect?

I agree that the expectations today have increased. But my parents went to college had 3 kids and had their house paid off by the time they were 40.  This type of thing doesn't happen anymore.  The standard of living for people have been increasing for hundreds of years yet only in the last 50 years have we seen the shift in demographics that we see today.

 

[a_majoor]

Given Canada has a far below replacement fertility rate, we either have to take steps to change the social and political environment that discourages families now, or accept that Canada will fade away perhaps starting late this century. If it is any consolation, there will be lots of Americans from the "red" states who will probably looking for homesteads to settle then.................

http://www.thepolitic.com/archives/2008/03/18/canada-is-aging-we-need-more-babies-should-families-be-considered-producers/

Canada is Aging, We Need More Babies. Should Families be considered “Producers”?

“The only way to stop the Canadian aging process,” states the 2006 StatsCan report, “is to increase fertility.”

    It’s no accident that the world’s most heavily taxed industrialized countries also have the lowest fertility rates. When Canadians have to work half the year just to pay the tax man, babies become economically impossible. By the time a couple achieves financial stability, the woman has often passed her best-before-date in terms of fertility.

…

    The time is past due for all levels of Canadian government to give birth to a new strategy to increase our population the old-fashioned way. Anything less is slow death to Canada’s way of life.

I was thinking about this the other day.  I was thinking about how we subsidize farmers, farms, farm equipment, how we even have special “purple gas” that is tax-free for “producers”.

Why are these offered?  Because the government, from time immemorial, has considered the production of food to be of benefit to the entire nation.

I think it is time for society to collectively get over the “overpopulation” myth.  All around the world, fertility rates are plummeting, in the first world and the third.  There is no slowdown in sight.  At current rates of decrease, the third world won’t have any surplus population to send us to make up for our own fertility shortfalls, within 20-30 years.  Then the demographic glacier that is already visible on our horizon will overtake us, and the Employment Insurance, the Welfare, the Public Health Care, the Canada Pension Plan, all these products of socialism that relies on perpetual population increase, will collapse.

My thinking is that we should start to consider families (and I mean man-woman-children families, which have already been proven to be the most cost-effective structure to produce balanced, healthy citizens) as producers.  Start giving them the same kind of preferential treatment as farmers get.  Without human resources, this nation will fail.  Having kids contributes to the entire nation’s future.  If you choose not to have kids, fine, that’s your choice, but you are not contributing to the nation’s future.  Enjoying the benefits of society now comes at a cost of supporting that society’s future.  It makes sense, then to have those who are not producers support to a degree the producers.  It makes sense to give financial benefits to producing at the lowest cost with the best results.

I don’t question that singles could have kids, or homosexuals for that matter, with fertility treatments, etc.  However, those means have a greater cost to society than the nuclear family.  Using science to make babies is more expensive than using the reproductive organs the way they were designed.  Plus, the cost of raising productive, healthy citizens is higher when a child lacks a parent of the opposite gender.  If health care costs are higher, if socialization skills are lacking (relating to both genders in a family has a greater instructional effect than only encountering one gender outside the safety of the home), that costs society, hence they should be discouraged - or nuclear families should be preferentially encouraged.  Serious thought should be given to how to encourage couple who have kids to stay together - to repair broken relationships, to live in cooperation, to think of their kids before themselves.  This produces healthier adults and healthier children.  And a healthier society.

Choose ye, liberals.  Start scaling back government now, or start encouraging families.  But get a wiggle on, eh?  I kind of like Canada, and would hate to see it go away.

This entry was written by Shane Edwards and posted on Tue Mar 18, 2008 at 12:00 pm

 

[a_majoor]

Lobsided demographics might be the real problem of the mid century:

http://www.steynonline.com/content/blogcategory/16/101/

KILLING HER SOFTLY      
Sunday, 08 June 2008 

‘Someone wins, someone doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told the Washington Post. “But women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Clinton. Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing The Wounds Of Democrats’ Sexism,” as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Senator Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism. How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver’s license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates. “On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today…”

Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, Illinois, many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

But what of the fallen heroine? If it’s any consolation to Senator Clinton, she’s not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a front-page story in London last week about a British Indian couple in Birmingham — she’s 59, he’s 72 — who’d had twins through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned the babies at the hospital when they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy. In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim something got “lost in translation” and have been back to the hospital to visit the wee bairns. But think of mom and dad as the Democratic party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and it all makes sense.

There’s a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to 900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced “one child” policy has brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun — “bare branches.” If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. In practice, a “woman’s right to choose” turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.

And what of the Western world? Between 2000 and 2005, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls. A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean, and Indian communities in America. “The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy,” wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell in the St Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. “But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy's birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1.”

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’s “fembots”), we’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery. And what of the Western world? Canada and Europe are in steep demographic decline and dependent on immigration to sustain their populations. And — as those Anglo-Welsh statistics suggest — many of the available immigrants are already from male-dominated cultures and will eventually be male-dominated numbers-wise, too: circa 2020, the personal ads in the Shanghai classifieds seeking SWF with good sense of humor will be defining “must live locally” as any zipcode this side of Mars.

Smaller families may mean just a boy or a girl for liberal Democrats, but in other societies it means just a boy. The Indian writer Gita Aravamudan calls this the “female feticide.” Colleen Carroll Campbell writes that abortion, “touted as the key to liberating future generations of women,” has become instead “the preferred means of eradicating them”. And, while it won’t eradicate all of them, Philip Longman, a demographer of impeccably liberal credentials, put the future in a nutshell in the title of his essay: “The Return Of Patriarchy.”

Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress — that women’s rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet aeroplane: once invented they can’t be uninvented. But that’s a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this week — the York University Federation of Students wants a campus-wide ban on any pro-life student clubs. Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only “within a pro-choice realm”, as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it. Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.

On such internal contradictions is the future being built. By “The Return Of Patriarchy,” Philip Longman doesn’t mean 1950s sitcom dads. No doubt Western feminists will be relieved to hear that.
The New York Sun, June 1st 2008

 

[dukkadukka]

I don't want to be a debbie downer on this one.  But am I the only one that doesn't see a problem with it? YES it will cause some problems, but as a world, we are insanely over-populated. There was a line in the Matrix (Yes I'm aware that it's a movie line, but highly relevant) that the  human race is like a plague on Earth. We use up resources and have been growing at a baffling rate.  I agree that economically it will hurt our country alone, but I welcome a downsizing population.  In my own community I've seen an entire forest chopped down for more housing.  Displacing the entire environment and ecosystem.  What was once a lush forest beside my house is now a gigantic newly developed neighbourhood. We moved where we did because there was a low population, far from the city life and in a span of 10 years I've seen it all disappear to make room for more people. 

 

[Kirkhill]

And, dukkadukka, I presume you and yours are the first volunteers in the population reduction programme? 

 

[dukkadukka]

hahaha Well... IF I end up having kids... It'll be much later in life.  My "generation" is split down the middle, us career driven gals that don't want kids until we've done everything we wanna do, and those who don't really know what a condom is for (ie. the babies, having babies.)
I know that the population dwindling concerns most people on an economic scale, but the reality is that the population (of planet earth.) is highly inflated and it's created social/economic problems as well as improved social/economic issues from the past.

 

[Kirkhill]

Unfortunately I have been hearing the same line since 1972 with the Club of Rome report "Limits to Growth" which was promoted in schools exactly the same way that "An Inconvenient Truth" is currently promoted.

Fortunately we have not yet run out of Copper or Oil and we are using a whole lot more silicon than the "Romans" ever envisaged.  We are still here.

I take further comfort from the fact that Reverend Malthus originally postulated limits in 1798.  And we're still here.

As well, while the students of Peterborough, Ontario and Sunbury-on-Thames, England got the message and dutifully reduced their procreation efforts to 1.4-1.8 live births per female  the rest of the world didn't seem to get the memo.

 

[blacktriangle]

I'm not worried. I married the army, and my baby will be a new porsche!

In all seriousness though, I don't think many people of my generation are willing to sacrifice quality of life in order to correct the negative birth rate. I know I'm not.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Hello, popnfesh; I think this cartoon, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail, sums things up.

We, humans, have been careless of our environment, counting on our innate ability to invent to solve whatever problems we might create for ourselves. The deforestation of England in the 12th and, again, in the 16th centuries, being god examples – in each case technology or other innovations (trade) meant that the price of environmental degradation change* was easily paid.

I think you have to go to Asia to see that large, highly congested populations can be sustained – with adequate (not always very good) standards of e.g. human health – without absolutely destroying the environment. You do not have to grow your rice within a one day horse-cart trip from the city- technology lets the people of Beijing enjoy cheap rice grown and processed in Thailand. Ditto for forests and rivers.

Of course there are limits and there are unintended consequences but, popnfresh, do you really think we, humans, cannot lick the real problems involved with e.g. fish farming?

----------

* One man's degradation is another's improvment; 17th century British farmers welcomed deforestaion: they sold the wood (to build ships) and, simultaneously, gained rich, 'new' farmland.

Edit: typo