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Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Canada
1026 Posts |
 Posted - 01/30/2007 : 09:06:29 AM
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| I should point out that "almost 2 babies per woman" is not actually a sustainable rate - since not all babies grow up to be parents themselves, I believe the quoted figure is about 2.4 babies per woman to maintain an even population. |
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New Hinda
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Israel
469 Posts |
Posted - 01/30/2007 : 09:07:00 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Max Torque
Chinese families, which used to be quite large, now have only one child to lavish all their attention and money upon. As a result, the youngest generation in China is getting fat and spoiled. Childhood obesity is skyrocketing, along with the resultant health problems. r.
I don't think anything as complex as a sudden increase in childhood obesity can be attributed to one cause. Perhaps its more the result of a Westernized diet and increased consumerism-more TV sets. I'd like to see a study of the level of childhood obesity in Ulta-religious Christian and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish families-people who think television sets are simful. |
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Pip
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
333 Posts |
Posted - 01/30/2007 : 12:50:11 PM
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The Chinese not only have a tradition of murdering girls; they have a tradition of murdering cerebral palsy cases. That doesn't make their "one child policy" right.
No it doesn't. I'm not sure what your point is. We have a (fairly new)tradition of aborting fetuses with Down Syndrone. Maybe the Chinese, when they become more sophisticated, will follow in our footsteps. Will you look upon that as dimly?
Who says the herd is going to be driven past what the earth can take?
A growing legion of people, actually. Everybody from those speaking toward greenhouse emissions (It's a fact, folks; just because Al Gore says it's true doesn't mean it's not) to the studies that show world petroleum production will peak in the next couple of years. (check out http://www.oilfield.com/forcast.html I've actually met Dr. Hatfield.)
With the biotech revolution, pretty soon we'll be able to farm all that empty land in Russia and Canada.
Oh, well there you go. That's a perfect excuse to pack the planet. Breed! Breed for the Fatherland!
How can our "public lands" be violated by "teeming throngs" when they're tax payers and its public land? Their land?
Anybody who's seen the bumper-to-bumper traffic in Yosemite, the Smokies and Yellowstone can answer this one. Are we being good stewards if we allow large portions of these irreplacable places to be ruined by overaccess given to motor vehicles and general overuse? Is it OK to ruin them now, under the theory that since we each own a weensy fraction of the public lands it's alright to stampede them into rubble, so that future generations will have nothing?
We'd have more land to build on and farm on-by the way, do you know how much of a food surplus the United States has?-if it wern't for open-space laws. Why shouldn't our cities sprawl?
This is a veritable piñata of idiocy. No matter where you hit it, something stupid falls out. Where to begin? With the idea that we should plow/pave over our parks? Or the idea that open-space laws are bad and that our prime mission is to be broodmares for Madison Avenue and socialist hucksters? "Why shouldn't our cities sprawl?" Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's the pollution, traffic, soulless prefab architecture, overcrowding, crime, grime, loss of open space...
Pip
"These five fingers: individually they're nothing, but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold!" - Lucy Van Pelt |
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Icrywolf
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
Australia
144 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2007 : 11:50:35 AM
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Population overgrowth is a global problem, and one that is best solved by, ironically, prosperity. Someone else was correct when pointing out that population growth in the USA is almost entirely due to immigration (last I saw, our birth rate was 2.2, which is the very definition of stable, since only half of all babies are female, and not every female bears a child). Prosperous countries tend to see their birth rate decrease, and impoverished ones tend to see them increase. The "reason" for this is nebulous and impossible to ascribe in any meaningful way, unless you think of the human race as a massive regenerating organism: when one piece of the organism is under threat, it ramps up growth activity as protection. (Another way to look at it: if your child's chances of survival are 1 in 10, you're more likely to have 10 children, though it would be a fallacy to think this is the conscious rationale is behind population overgrowth in India and Africa.)
Population is then a self-regulating mechanism that mostly gets out of control when one of two things happens: 1) life sucks, 2) a new resource is discovered (the plethora of new resources -- and ways of using old resources -- fueled the 20th century boom). While there's plenty of room to debate how much the USA can do about life sucking in other places in the world, there's no doubt that we are guilty, culturally, of taking advantage of #2. The cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas are both marvels of human ingenuity and abominations of nature, yet they grow because they can. Meanwhile, resource-rich areas of the Midwest are actually clearing out.
So, there is a good case for curtailing global growth, but in America, it's not the size of our wang, it's what we're doing with it.
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R. Dittmar
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
420 Posts |
Posted - 01/31/2007 : 9:46:33 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Icrywolf
Population overgrowth is a global problem, and one that is best solved by, ironically, prosperity. Someone else was correct when pointing out that population growth in the USA is almost entirely due to immigration (last I saw, our birth rate was 2.2, which is the very definition of stable, since only half of all babies are female, and not every female bears a child). Prosperous countries tend to see their birth rate decrease, and impoverished ones tend to see them increase. The "reason" for this is nebulous and impossible to ascribe in any meaningful way, unless you think of the human race as a massive regenerating organism: when one piece of the organism is under threat, it ramps up growth activity as protection. (Another way to look at it: if your child's chances of survival are 1 in 10, you're more likely to have 10 children, though it would be a fallacy to think this is the conscious rationale is behind population overgrowth in India and Africa.)
Icry,
You’ve really crossed the “T” here because, even though I still disagree that overpopulation is any sort of problem whatsoever, if you are inclined to think so than you have to admit that prosperity is indeed the antidote. The more prosperous a country becomes, the lower the birth rate becomes. I’m arguing that we’ve even discovered a new facet of this phenomenon in that some prosperous countries become so self-absorbed and hedonistic that procreation is viewed as a burden. I also think that your discussion of the probability of survival is spot-on and touches on long ingrained reasons for behavior. Five hundred years ago dirt-poor farmers in (pick your third world county) had to father a score of children in hopes that 1 out of 10 or 20 would survive. Today, millions of (pick your third world countrymen) are still dirt-poor farmers who have known nothing else for generations but ceaseless attempts to procreate. The rationale isn’t conscious, it’s habitual. Were people not oppressed by tyrannical governments that kept them impoverished and backward at gunpoint, birth rates in these countries would fall.
quote:
Originally posted by Icrywolf
The cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas are both marvels of human ingenuity and abominations of nature, yet they grow because they can. Meanwhile, resource-rich areas of the Midwest are actually clearing out.
OK, I loath gambling and I loath Las Vegas and the mobsters that gave it birth and I wish our dear Lord would go Sodom and Gomorrah on it. Phoenix, however, I don’t know about. These instances of American ingenuity again point out how dysfunctional other parts of the world are in comparison to the relatively free U.S.A. If you want to point out desert marvels, look to the turbulent Middle East. A host of Arab countries have built cities in the middle of a far more savage desert, but all these constructions were bankrolled by a lucky surfeit of oil resources buying Western ingenuity. Were some Braniac tomorrow to discover a way to replace petroleum with, say, potato squeezings all of these cities would vanish into the sand because none of these countries have developed a free and civil society and an educated middle-class that could maintain the infra-structure. Phoenix and Las Vegas, however, would continue to prosper because their existence is based on human resourcefulness not resource exploitation. |
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