How would you raise population growth?

[someone_else]

I read that the main reason for low (and negative) population growth in first world countries is more or less the fact that women are no more confined in homes as baby-breeding/house cleaning/meal-cooking machines and have an actual life. Also reliable contraception and abortion systems play a role.

So, without enslaving women and banning contraception and abortion, how would you keep population growth at decent levels in a first world nation?

[Rabid]

In France, the birthrate is above what is needed to "regenerate" the population. This is due to a certain number of factor :

- The system is made so that a woman can relatively easily continue to have a life even if she has a baby :

* A widespread network of day care facility [even if there is always protest that there never is enough of them]. They are even great to help your children socialize with other children (plus, it make their immune system work, 'cause, you know, these little monsters are living biohazards ! )

* If you can't take care of your children all day long (say, if you have a job...), there are a relatively great number of Maternal Assistant, more commonly called Nourrices [FR] or Nanny [EN], than can guard your child, go and fetch them from school and guard them until you're finished your day, or even take them to the doctor if needed, etc... In my case, I was guarded by a nanny right until middle school. She fetched me at the end of my school day, took me back at her home, and guarded me, with other children, until our parents came back to take us home. If you have a good nanny, she/he can even help your children with his homework.


- A financial assistance from the state :

* If you don't have enough revenue, on a general basis ; It is to say if your declared revenues are under a certain threshold, you have the right to benefit from a grant/subsidy to financially help you raise your children. And school isn't only free for them, but they are also given a grant to help you buy all the scholar material needed for them to study.

* If you have three or four children (don't remember exactly, but I think it's four - I'm the fourth and last child from my family ^^), your family obtain a Large Family Card, that let you access a large number of services at discount prices (travel, cultural activity, etc...).


This result in the fact that women can relatively easily have a large number of children without sacrificing their life or career for their child : My mother and my father were both engineer, and apart from her maternity leaves, my mother never had to cease work to raise four children (I must admit that we had the money to "hire" a nanny, though. That and my grandparents also took care of us).


Basically, this come down to two factor :

- The money needed to "properly" rise a child, "properly" being defined by the expectation of its society and its parent
- The ease with which parent can continue having a "normal" life while having to raise their children.

Or, more simply put, it comes to down to how much hassle it is to raise one children, let alone numerous ones, and what support you can expect from Society to help you raise him/them.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I read that the main reason for low (and negative) population growth in first world countries is more or less the fact that women are no more confined in homes as baby-breeding/house cleaning/meal-cooking machines and have an actual life. Also reliable contraception and abortion systems play a role.

So, without enslaving women and banning contraception and abortion, how would you keep population growth at decent levels in a first world nation?

Why would we want to? Allow me to hit you with a clue-bat(tm). Population growth is already too fucking high. Not only does every person born in a first world nation take up more resources and strain the planet's already faltering biosphere than someone born in the third world, but in 50 years, we hit carrying capacity. Unfortunately, even the demographers at the UN do not have a proper life-table for humans, because the variables... well... vary too much. They use a lot of simplifying assumptions, like a lack of lag-time in population response to density dependent growth which will vary by region. The point being, we may overshoot carrying capacity, and when the population undergoes damped oscillations to bring us below it... well, I just hope I am not alive to see it, because it will be Bad(tm).

If you wanted to be monstrously stupid--

Population growth in first world countries do not respond positively to available child care. Human reproductive decisions are more simple than that, they have to do with risk. A child born in the first world country has a high expectation of survival and reproduction. As a result, the parents invest very very heavily in a few children so that they will be as competitive for mates as possible. Variation in this strategy within the first world responds to the amount of heterogeneity in income(it responds more strongly to this than per capita GDP, and economic growth actually makes birth rates higher as well, high levels of economic growth however are highly co-linear with GINI index, a measure of income inequality.). I ran the regressions myself. If variation in income is high, birth rates will be relatively high as well.

Look at it this way. Poor areas tend to be high crime, decreasing the survival chance of offspring. As a result, parents invest less in an individual, and have more kids. They also have them earlier in their own lives (because in terms of their biological clock, their body is not sure if it will be alive when they reach 25, so they have sex early, and get pregnant in their teens). This drops the generation time in addition to increasing the per capita birth rate. As an example of this, a 12 year old boy in some areas of inner city Detroit has a 50% chance of reaching adulthood (Source: Evolution for Everyone, by David Sloan Wilson). In poor areas, competition for mates is extremely intense, because no one has the wealth to attract a mate, instead they engage in high risk behavior (read: crime) to obtain wealth and to serve as an honest signal of their genetic suitability and ability to protect offspring. Bear in mind, no one really thinks this way. They want money and they want to look tough for the ladies... but it is all sexual selection. This crime leads to a positive feedback loop, where crime decreases survivorship which leads to more births and a faster generation time, leading to more crime.

Now, all that applies to the first world. Here is the problem with high GINI and high Economic Growth. Yes, a poor country has the above problem. However, on a marginal basis (one percentage point of GDP, to treatment effect on population growth parameters... IE the slope of the regression) the effect of GINI and Economic Growth is larger. A poor country with no variation in income, and low economic growth will have a high birth rate because survivorship is low... but with economic growth and GINI, there is another element with a larger treatment effect. The chance that their kids may do better than them.

This happens with birds in unpredictable environments. Mom will lay more eggs as an insurance policy against one dying, and in the hope that she may be able to successfully raise them all, even if on average she cannot. The variance is sufficiently high to justify the risk. Humans do the exact same thing (Again, did the math myself from publicly available datasets).

So, if you want to increase birth rate, do what we have done in the US. Raise GINI by drastically transferring the country's wealth to the already rich, and de-gentrify your inner cities to make them poor.

But why the fuck would you want to do that? Are you insane? Stupid? Evil? A little bit of A, B, and C?

[Thanas]

Do what the French did, really.

And Aly, I do not think birthrates in the first World are a problem, even if somehow they would raise by ten percent or so. The third world is the real trouble in that regard.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I wonder what effect immigrants have on first world birth rate. They are said to have much higher birth rates than natural-born citizens (indeed, one of my friends is a second-generation Indian immigrant, he is one of nine children)

Are there enough of these immigrants to skew the first world birth rates? Is there any data available on birth rates of, shall we say, original residents as opposed to immigrants?

[Akhlut]

Do what the French did, really.

And Aly, I do not think birthrates in the first World are a problem, even if somehow they would raise by ten percent or so. The third world is the real trouble in that regard.

I'd beg to differ. Obesity is a symptom of, if not first world lifestyles, of people overutilizing resources. The US, Mexico, and UK alone have over 150 million obese people, not including all the obese people of Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia; these people are taking in far more food then is necessary (even if they all averaged out to eating only 5% more then they need, that comes out to over 7 million people that could be fed on their overindulgence, and their average is probably well above a mere 5% over-consumption of what they need).

Further, people in the first world disproportionately use fossil fuels (there are 250 million registered cars in the US, as compared to a population fo some 310 million, versus India, which had 13 million for a population of 1.1 billion in 2008 (source)), while also utilizing a much larger percentage of rare materials (tantalum in electronics, for instance).

[Thanas]

Do what the French did, really.

And Aly, I do not think birthrates in the first World are a problem, even if somehow they would raise by ten percent or so. The third world is the real trouble in that regard.

I'd beg to differ. Obesity is a symptom of, if not first world lifestyles, of people overutilizing resources. The US, Mexico, and UK alone have over 150 million obese people, not including all the obese people of Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia; these people are taking in far more food then is necessary (even if they all averaged out to eating only 5% more then they need, that comes out to over 7 million people that could be fed on their overindulgence, and their average is probably well above a mere 5% over-consumption of what they need).

Further, people in the first world disproportionately use fossil fuels (there are 250 million registered cars in the US, as compared to a population fo some 310 million, versus India, which had 13 million for a population of 1.1 billion in 2008 (source)), while also utilizing a much larger percentage of rare materials (tantalum in electronics, for instance).

So? The effect of birthrates in the EU rising from 1.47 to 1.6 or so is not going to be a problem. These will still use fewer resources as their predecessors. The problem will be the third world, as it already has people starving. Your system requires a sort of global commissariat redistributing resources, which will not happen.

[Zaune]

Easier, simpler and cheaper to just import the surplus population of Third World countries. Contrary to what the redtops claim, we have the capacity to support a considerably higher population than we can reach by our own efforts if we so choose, and are in fact in danger of running into real difficulties when the retired start to outnumber the working adult population.

[Akhlut]

So? The effect of birthrates in the EU rising from 1.47 to 1.6 or so is not going to be a problem. These will still use fewer resources as their predecessors. The problem will be the third world, as it already has people starving. Your system requires a sort of global commissariat redistributing resources, which will not happen.

I didn't really propose a system, I was just commenting that people in the first world disproportionately use resources and that an increase in their birthrate is thus disproportionately worse than an increase of birthrate in people in the third world and developing world. If I were to have a system implemented, a global commissariat would be secondary to worldwide access to contraception, abortion, reproductive health, and education so that global birthrates drop below replacement levels. We don't need 7+ billion people on earth, we could manage fine with "just" 1-2 billion people. Of course, if wishes were fish and all that.

[Rabid]

birthrates in the EU rising from 1.47 to 1.6

I want to emphasize that a rate like this isn't even sufficient to renew the population, and if no action were to be taken, it would lead in the long term to a slow collapse of society (in the foreseeable future, with present-day human sociology and technology). I also want to emphasize that in the EU at least, we are able not only to feed, and feed well our current population (a half billion people on the equivalent of the third of continental US), but we are also able to export to others country, even third-world one's (in which case we destroy their local agriculture 'cause our shit are way more affordable to them than what they can produce themselves locally, further rendering them dependent on import, but that's another debate).

Earth, today, is well able to feed a bit less than 10 billion people, in the worst estimate.

The UN demographic forecasts say that by 2050, the world population will hit a peak of over 9 billion people, to then fall down to 8 billion or less by 2100, and after that stabilizing itself around 7 billion. So, a big strain on Earth's ecosystem, but a manageable one (for the human specie, at least).

The real problem isn't "how will we feed all these people ?" as much as "How will we manage to give to all of these people a reasonably good life while trying to limit as much as we can the impending doom of the destruction of Earth's ecosystems ?"

Sure, the best would be to reduce the world population around, say, 3 to 4 billion people. Yeah, good luck with this one.

Anyway, if you want to know what a serious decline in population could cause, just search "Russia population decline" on Google, and cry. It's another question to know if it was the egg or the chicken which came first, but the fact is that in the current state of affair, no country want a decline of its population, or if it want it, it has to be ready to pay a really high price (One word : Japan. They want less people ? Replace them with robots. Problem solved. Nevermind the whole economic fuckup and the slow disintegration of its society ; it's just collateral damage).

I know I'll sound like a mad breeder or I don't know what, but I can't see in which world reducing the world's population before the damage to Earth's ecosystem is already irreversible without some techno-messianic-bable would be possible without-- Well, no, even a global thermonuclear war would fuck the environment up beyond repair.


We are fucked up.


Build these fucking starship, drill the ground to construct these goddamn' shelters, and grow these abominations of genetically engineered comestible fungus that can grow everywhere ; 'cause we are going to need 'em badly in the centuries to come.


If you want to limit the "fallouts" of the ever-growing population, the only solution will be either :

- To 'lower' the global 'living standard' to use less resources, less space, less transportation, less energy ; while equitably redistribute the world's wealth in order to limit the human pressure on the third-world countries environment : The causes of most environmental problem is that people, needing resources to survive, are forced to exploit ever increasing portions of Our-Mother-NatureTM, fucking up with it badly ; that or situation like China's which "need" to industrialize at very fast pace to continue to exist [somehow], which put an extreme strain on its own environment.
So, if you give an African peon a mean to live without hunting gorilla AND you enforce the ban on gorilla testicles, then you'll see that far far less gorilla are being hunted.
The basic logic being : people don't fuck the environment 'cause they enjoy the smell of napalm in the morning ; they just do it because they do not see another way to survive.

- Invade Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, the Filipinos, and India to a lesser extent ; and genocide the shit out of them.


Choose your poison.

Easier, simpler and cheaper to just import the surplus population of Third World countries. Contrary to what the redtops claim, we have the capacity to support a considerably higher population than we can reach by our own efforts if we so choose, and are in fact in danger of running into real difficulties when the retired start to outnumber the working adult population.

I support this proposition. However, it is of utmost important that at the same time you "treat" these country [hate to speak of it like disease...] of their demographical problems. And this require time, money, and political will. Three crucial ingredients whose conjunction is highly unlikely in most of the concerned country, unless we put on them the diplomatic equivalence of a gun barrel in the mouth.

Oh, and while we are at it :

when the retired start to outnumber the working adult population

I already talked about it in the thread about the French protest on retirement legislation : To think that more retired people per working people will mean our doom is utter bullshit. Both productivity per Capital and global GDP/c will continue to increase in the future, and there will be MORE money available tomorrow to pay for them than there is today. The people saying the contrary either have sucked governmental bullshit, are following the Doxa of Neo-Clacissism, or are just trying to find a way to justify spending cuts or I don't know whatever fiscal shit.




TL;DR : Whatever we'll do, it is almost certain the environment will be fucked beyond repair if we don't act to reduce world's population almost by half before 2050.

[Kane Starkiller]

Number of people between ages 0-19 for certain first and second world countries between 1991 and 2010 (taken from census.gov):

Much of the First World and Second World with the notable exception of US has a rapidly declining young population which will inevitably cause a drastic contraction of people in the coming decades.
Meanwhile population of countries such as Ethiopia is expected to explode from current 88 million to 278 million in 2050.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I want to emphasize that a rate like this isn't even sufficient to renew the population, and if no action were to be taken, it would lead in the long term to a slow collapse of society (in the foreseeable future, with present-day human sociology and technology). I also want to emphasize that in the EU at least, we are able not only to feed, and feed well our current population (a half billion people on the equivalent of the third of continental US), but we are also able to export to others country, even third-world one's (in which case we destroy their local agriculture 'cause our shit are way more affordable to them than what they can produce themselves locally, further rendering them dependent on import, but that's another debate).

Ok, first thing is first. Proof-reading. Utilize it.

Second. A drop in birth rate will not lead to a collapse in your society. It will take several decades before a drop in birth rates is noticed in the population figures, and frankly, your population is too large and too dense, the result of the baby boom generation. What is happening is that your birth rate is entering a cycle of damped oscillations. In reality the logistic growth curve is not a smooth one. The Baby Boom Generation introduced a perturbation into the curve, which is being corrected for some 40 years later depending on how you operationally define the baby boom.

You will be fine so long as the operational sex ratio does not fuck up. It is better to have a low birth rate than a high death rate--which is what will happen if we overshoot carrying capacity by a two generation times. So, stop being an idiot.

The problem with the third world is that they have a high birth rate, high variance in resource availability, and high mortality rates.

Earth, today, is well able to feed a bit less than 10 billion people, in the worst estimate.

No. That is a very very liberal estimate. Stop being an idiot. Using methods that are not sustainable and are beginning to result in the world wide loss of topsoil, water table draw-down, massive dead-zones in oceans adjascent to river deltas--which just so happen to be where the fish breed, which combined with overfishing is causing the world-wide collapse of fisheries. Right now, we can feed approximately nine billion using these methods. But it will not last.

In the 1960s, with contemporary farming methods, the carrying capacity for humans on this planet was approximately 4 billion. in the 1970s, the green revolution occurred. High input agriculture increased that carrying capacity to nine billion--temporarily. In this case, it is like deer who overshoot local carrying capacity. This happens because there is a lot of plant biomass, which below carrying capacity gets replaced faster than the deer eat it. However, there is enough to temporarily sustain the deer when they overshoot carrying capacity for some time, even though the rate of replacement is no longer sufficient to sustain food availability. Eventually, the ability of the forest to sustain deer collapses well below prior levels, and with it collapses the deer population.

The situation is similar here. High input agriculture takes so much out of the natural system that eventually the soils and availability of water collapse, sending the capacity of arable land to sustain agriculture even lower than it was back prior to the advent of high input techniques... that downward shift is temporary--for deer. Much longer term when soils have to be rebuild through primary and secondary succession.

In other words, if our population continues to grow, and if we do not solve certain ecological problems, there will be a lot of starvation. So, I reiterate, why the fuck would you want to increase population growth at all? Why the hell are you not asking the question "How do we decrease global birthrates?" I can tell you how to do that. Cap and trade on babies combined with massive reorganization of the way we do agriculture, fishing. Hell, I even have method designed to do the later bit. However, it wont make certain short-sighted corporate interests money... as a result, we should just put our heads between our legs and kiss ~60% of the world population--mostly poor brown people--goodbye.

The UN demographic forecasts say that by 2050, the world population will hit a peak of over 9 billion people, to then fall down to 8 billion or less by 2100, and after that stabilizing itself around 7 billion. So, a big strain on Earth's ecosystem, but a manageable one (for the human specie, at least).

You did not read my prior post, did you? The UN uses too many simplifying assumptions in their math, and do not have enough data to make accurate predictions about population growth. They treat the human population as one huge population--which it is not--and do not take into account local variance, changes in resource availability, local variance in the same, changes in carrying capacity due to resource availability, local demographic parameters, climate change (Hint: Climate change will fuck us sideways with a chainsaw) and peak oil(see climate change), or an increase in the prevalence of disease as populations become more urbanized and anti-biotics become ineffective.

In other words, their demographics are pretty much worthless, because they lack the necessary data. Their models work really well for predicting demographic trajectories in a local garter snake population in a stable environment. Not so well for a global population of humans. They would require very large differential equations and a metric fuckton of matrix algebra for that, which requires data that they simply dont have. The only certainty is that we will hit the liberal estimate for carrying capacity (nine billion) sometime in the next fifty years. That will happen unless there is a rapid and immediate drop in world-wide population growth. What happens after that is anyone's guess. With any statistical extrapolation like the one the UN uses, the confidence interval gets large the farther out you from the point your data ends. This gets worse the more simplifying assumptions you have in your math. Theirs are so big, there probably is not even a statistically significant difference between their three population growth scenarios. There could be, but I doubt it.

The real problem isn't "how will we feed all these people ?" as much as "How will we manage to give to all of these people a reasonably good life while trying to limit as much as we can the impending doom of the destruction of Earth's ecosystems ?"

We cant. It is that simple. The only way to stave off the problem is to bring population growth under control... because we wont even be able to feed them, let alone give them a half-decent quality of life.

Invest Massive Amounts of Money into lowering GINI in the third world, and bring up per capita GDP without handing a blank check to the wealthy. Microloans are a good idea for this. Revamp all agriculture to make use of GM crops across the board, kill off the vast majority of meat production world-wide to shift patterns of land use to something more efficient. Use artificially constructed wetlands to catch agricultural runoff then harvest/mulch the plant biomass to replenish topsoils and recycle nutrients. These can also double as aquaculture operations for raising crayfish, water-fowl, and freshwater fish for human consumption, in addition to providing wildlife habitat. This will also sequester massive amounts of carbon.

Deal With Climate Change and Peak Oil.

Cap and Trade on babies, instituted immediately, setting the amount of children someone may have somewhere between .6 and .8, a couple can have 1 kid, and sell off the remaining .2 or .4 to someone else. Massive Massive punitive tax on people who violate the rules. Maybe even institute mandatory chemical castration. Why? Because it is better to have a low birth rate than a high death rate. It is that simple.

Sure, the best would be to reduce the world population around, say, 3 to 4 billion people. Yeah, good luck with this one.

There is a way to do that, but no one's gonna like it...

- To 'lower' the global 'living standard' to use less resources, less space, less transportation, less energy ; while equitably redistribute the world's wealth in order to limit the human pressure on the third-world countries environment : The causes of most environmental problem is that people, needing resources to survive, are forced to exploit ever increasing portions of Our-Mother-NatureTM, fucking up with it badly ; that or situation like China's which "need" to industrialize at very fast pace to continue to exist [somehow], which put an extreme strain on its own environment.
So, if you give an African peon a mean to live without hunting gorilla AND you enforce the ban on gorilla testicles, then you'll see that far far less gorilla are being hunted.
The basic logic being : people don't fuck the environment 'cause they enjoy the smell of napalm in the morning ; they just do it because they do not see another way to survive.

The problems do not come from the third world. They come from the first world. Bush meat is a problem, but it is not the biggest one. The biggest problems are carbon emissions, industrial/agricultural pollution, and habitat loss. These things happen either because the first world does it directly, or by providing the demand from third world countries. Per capita, our resource consumption is significantly higher than in the third world.

[MKSheppard]

But why the fuck would you want to do that? Are you insane? Stupid? Evil? A little bit of A, B, and C?

Gee, I don't know, to avoid the kind of demographic disaster Japan is going to face from 2030-2050?

[Sea Skimmer]

Give women two years of paid maternity leave, regardless as to if they have a job or not when they get knocked up, I’m pretty sure that will solve the birth rate problem in nine months and a day. Course it would also almost certainly lead to rises in problems like fetal alcohol syndrome, but we might be able to clamp back down on that by making the checks dependent on enrolling in various parental education programs that also monitor the health of the mothers hands on. Support groups or something like that would carry the process on to the start of preschool. Most nations already have programs like that, its just not universal even in the more socialist states.

[Thanas]

Quite frankly Aly, your scenario sounds worse than most fascist dictatorships. Besides it being absolutely unenforcable and unrealistic, it is the kind of plan I would expect from AIs or soulless technocrats. Good luck trying the human population to follow it.

[Thanas]

Give women two years of paid maternity leave, regardless as to if they have a job or not when they get knocked up, I’m pretty sure that will solve the birth rate problem in nine months and a day.

Germany already has that for civil servants and to my knowledge the birth rate there is not much higher than the normal population.

[Sea Skimmer]

Germany already has that for civil servants and to my knowledge the birth rate there is not much higher than the normal population.

Civil servant jobs tend to be highly dependent on seniority from time served, so that isn’t surprising. Other jobs can have the same problem; Japan has this issue for all jobs which is why the fertility rate is so low. Everything is dependent on putting in a flawless never a day missed performance for several decades. Being absent simply means you are left behind forever. So even women who can well afford a child, and the time off simply refuse to risk a dead end career by spending any time on it. This corporate and social culture would need to change too; I don’t see a serious reason why it couldn’t if the situation became bad enough to warrant it. It used to be common for society to promote having children rather heavily... just about everywhere. The thing is no where on earth even in Japan, which had a huge Imperial dictatorship era push for more births for the Emperor, has seen real effects of a declining work force hit home yet, so why change?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Quite frankly Aly, your scenario sounds worse than most fascist dictatorships. Besides it being absolutely unenforcable and unrealistic, it is the kind of plan I would expect from AIs or soulless technocrats. Good luck trying the human population to follow it.

Well given that I am a technocrat (well, technocratic socialistoid?, but why partition?), that makes sense now doesn't it?

You think I like having a pretty good idea of where we are headed? No. No I do not. The fact that we have ignored the problem and made it worse for so long that in order to fix it requires the mass violation of what people perceive as their rights is not something that brings me comfort at night. It is something that worries me, and makes we inwardly weep for humanity and all life on earth for that matter.

It is like watching a deer population explode, eat everything in sight, and then slowly starve to death and not being able to do anything about it--like hunt them. We cant get away with hunting people like we do deer to keep populations under control. We are, in fact, not any smarter than bacteria in a dish that over-crowd their growth medium.

Simply put, we're fucked. There is no solution to the problem that people will accept. Not within the timespan required. All we can do at this point is hope that the we thread a statistical keyhole in the population growth curves and that a technological, economic and logistic miracle occurs like the one induced by a certain Nobel Laureate agricultural scientist induced to make high-input agriculture sustainable. Fat chance.

Gee, I don't know, to avoid the kind of demographic disaster Japan is going to face from 2030-2050?

And trade it for another one, which is worse? Yeah... I will take the issues with pensions, workforce etc over mass starvation. Thanks.

[J]

Earth, today, is well able to feed a bit less than 10 billion people, in the worst estimate.

The UN demographic forecasts say that by 2050, the world population will hit a peak of over 9 billion people, to then fall down to 8 billion or less by 2100, and after that stabilizing itself around 7 billion. So, a big strain on Earth's ecosystem, but a manageable one (for the human specie, at least).

The Food and Agriculture Organisation's Food Outlook Report is...troubling.

Excerpt:

Attention is now turning to plantings for the next (2011/12) marketing season.
Given the expectation of falling global inventories, the size of next year’s crops
will be critical in setting the tone for stability in international markets. For
major cereals, production must expand substantially to meet utilization and to
reconstitute world reserves and farmers are likely to respond to the prevailing
strong prices by expanding plantings. Cereals, however, may not be the only
crops farmers will be trying to produce more of, as rising prices have also made
other commodities attractive to grow, from soybeans to sugar and cotton.
This could limit individual crop production responses to levels that would be
insufficient to alleviate market tightness. Against this backdrop, consumers may
have little choice but to pay higher prices for their food. With the pressure on
world prices of most commodities not abating, the international community
must remain vigilant against further supply shocks in 2011 and be prepared.

Then you add this:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp ... _talks.asp
Excerpt:

Sixty per cent of the wheat samples and 33 per cent of the rice samples sent by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) from its warehouses to its Gurgaon laboratory were found unfit for human consumption. This information was brought out by a Right to Information (RTI) query by Kirit Somaiya, national secretary of Bharatiya Janta Party, according to details given by him.

Much of the foodgrain in the warehouses is supposed to be preserved and distributed among the poor. The wheat and rice provided for distribution under the Food Security Bill would have to come from such warehouses.

India has around 20% of the world's wheat stocks and if this report is correct over half of it is now unfit for human consumption. 10% of the world's wheat stocks, gone.

[Korto]

To answer the OP, the best technical way to do it (obviously, IMO) is to simply import new people, young men and women who will work and have children. There's a surplus in the poorer countries (as has been noted), and since culture tends to hang over a bit, the next generation or two may also have more children than the average before they fully adjust.
This may however cause social unrest, as the dominant race feels threatened by the newcomers, and on one level they're right, as if you continue this policy eventually the old race would indeed be subsumed. I would personally say "Get over it", but then I'm not running for politics.
The more socially acceptable way would be to bring in more child-friendly policies, and a bit of propaganda about the delights of children need not go astray.

A declining population does indeed, as I understand it, cause serious economic problems; a declining standard of living as we try to support a greater and greater proportion of unproductive old people, and we can't exactly not support them. The only way to maintain our present economic system, our present standard of living, and not abandon our morality is to have a continually growing population (nb - I'm not entirely comfortable with this sentence, I feel it begs to be refuted).

Now I'll agree with Alyrium. Such a policy to me is akin to continually pouring in more and more water to solve the problem of a holed plastic water bag. We need a different system, and we can either find it ourselves, or reality will find it for us.
The third world would lower their fertility rate if they felt they could. They have the number of children they do because they need to know that they'll have enough children to look after them when they get old. Remove these worries, and that'll free them up to concentrate on just a couple of children, instead of having to have a tribe. So, decent health care, education, and old-age care. This will take a while, but I feel it's more do-able then Alyrium's solution (although doesn't help the over-consumption).
The first step the West could take on this is to stop being an obstacle. Stop supporting corrupt governments, stop destroying economies with "Aid" that is really subsidies for their own farmers, and open up markets. Give the countries a chance to climb up on their feet.

[Simon_Jester]

A declining population does indeed, as I understand it, cause serious economic problems; a declining standard of living as we try to support a greater and greater proportion of unproductive old people, and we can't exactly not support them. The only way to maintain our present economic system, our present standard of living, and not abandon our morality is to have a continually growing population (nb - I'm not entirely comfortable with this sentence, I feel it begs to be refuted).

I think the present economic system has to give regardless of what we do; globalized capitalism is not going to find a way out of this.

[K. A. Pital]

I concur with Simon - it is much, much easier to remake the economic system or even the human being himself (genetic engineering and anti-aging medicines) than try to devise a way to "raise population growth" and mitigate all the other problems stemming from it.

What is utterly amoral - population control or the desire to see billions of people subjected to constant suffering? I think the latter is definetely more amoral. It is preached to us by organizations that spout out "pro-life" and "family" on a daily basis, like the Catholic Church (thanks for the mess in Africa, idiots) and others like them.

A stabilized reproduction rate is all you need, really.

[Alyrium Denryle]

A declining population does indeed, as I understand it, cause serious economic problems; a declining standard of living as we try to support a greater and greater proportion of unproductive old people, and we can't exactly not support them. The only way to maintain our present economic system, our present standard of living, and not abandon our morality is to have a continually growing population (nb - I'm not entirely comfortable with this sentence, I feel it begs to be refuted).

The declining population is not the problem. It is the shift in age structure. As much as I hate to say it, we were never meant to reach the ages we do.

The solution is to not let people retire in the same way they do now, or have in the past anyway. We need to increase the government pension age so that it is after, not before, the median life expectancy. It forces later retirement, but lessens the economic burden of old people who are ambularory and able to work well into their 6th and sometimes even 7th decades. It sucks for them, but the end justifies the means.

Frankly, the problem will become lessened as the old people die and there are fewer people to replace them, then the age structure will stabilize. Our problem is that we had a massive massive spike in our growth rate post WW2 and Korea, which made the age distribution more fucked up than it needs to be.

Alternatively we could... decrease life expectancy, but how one would do that is more than a bit horrendous, even to this soulless technocrat.

The third world would lower their fertility rate if they felt they could. They have the number of children they do because they need to know that they'll have enough children to look after them when they get old.

More like "To maximize their inclusive fitness", but that is a nitpick. The problem is that the processes at play here are all subconscious. Human behavior is fully caused by genetics and environmental influence. They could no more lower their birth rates than walk on water the way they are set up economically and socially now. I would need to find some good historical data on birth rates to know if access to birth control has a large effect on birth rate, or if the observed trend is the result of co-linearity with other factors.

Remove these worries, and that'll free them up to concentrate on just a couple of children, instead of having to have a tribe. So, decent health care, education, and old-age care. This will take a while, but I feel it's more do-able then Alyrium's solution (although doesn't help the over-consumption).

Which is the problem. The population itself is not the issue, it is the resource consumption. That solution is not only long-term (by which I mean, multi-generational), but it will also increase population growth in the (relatively) short term through a shift in age structure.

The first step the West could take on this is to stop being an obstacle. Stop supporting corrupt governments, stop destroying economies with "Aid" that is really subsidies for their own farmers, and open up markets. Give the countries a chance to climb up on their feet.

Did you read my first post? Opening markets in the way do it just means that a few get wealthy while a shit load are still dirt poor. Aid in the form of micoloans, and massive western investment in african infrastructure will be how you get their GDP where it needs to be, while skipping the GINI issues.

[Korto]

The declining population is not the problem. It is the shift in age structure. As much as I hate to say it, we were never meant to reach the ages we do.

Agreed. I was focused on the declining pop, as it declines from the youngest first leaving the population old-heavy. None the less, I would concede focusing on the "declining" part has a bit of a red herring smell to it.

The solution is to not let people retire in the same way they do now, or have in the past anyway. We need to increase the government pension age so that it is after, not before, the median life expectancy. It forces later retirement, but lessens the economic burden of old people who are ambularory and able to work well into their 6th and sometimes even 7th decades. It sucks for them, but the end justifies the means.

Politically untenable, like any other solution that might work.

The problem is that the processes at play here are all subconscious. Human behavior is fully caused by genetics and environmental influence. They could no more lower their birth rates than walk on water the way they are set up economically and socially now.

Agreed, and that's why I was talking about decent health care, old age care, education. In fact, I would want the full gamut of social services (including the fucking dole) installed as fully and quickly as is economically possible as a top priority. There will be a period of adjustment, but they will adjust.
As a prediction, I admit I feel the first effect will be a population explosion (due to health care, and people feeling flush with funds), and only after that would it calm down and start to decrease. Will it decrease in time? I don't know, and I actually doubt it but it's the only realistic way I can see.

Did you read my first post? Opening markets in the way do it just means that a few get wealthy while a shit load are still dirt poor. Aid in the form of micoloans, and massive western investment in african infrastructure will be how you get their GDP where it needs to be, while skipping the GINI issues.

I would look to the social services to transfer money from rich to poor and level out inequality. When I mentioned markets, I actually meant for the West to allow poor countries to export items such as agricultural produce into the rich country, instead of blocking them (of course Australia would never engage in protectionism. We only block imports on quarantine grounds )
Massive investment in infrastructure would be vital for my exporting scheme (it's no good growing tomatoes for the US market if you have to shift them 200 miles over a goat track to get them to port), and assuming local materials and local labour are used unless absolutely impossible it'll create jobs and industry

[Kane Starkiller]

In other words, if our population continues to grow, and if we do not solve certain ecological problems, there will be a lot of starvation. So, I reiterate, why the fuck would you want to increase population growth at all? Why the hell are you not asking the question "How do we decrease global birthrates?" I can tell you how to do that. Cap and trade on babies combined with massive reorganization of the way we do agriculture, fishing. Hell, I even have method designed to do the later bit. However, it wont make certain short-sighted corporate interests money... as a result, we should just put our heads between our legs and kiss ~60% of the world population--mostly poor brown people--goodbye.

It has already been pointed out to you that for most of the First and Second world the population is not growing. The fertility rate in Germany is about 1.4 which means that in a human lifetime (about 75 years) the population will be 1.4/2.1 or 55 million people in Germany. When people say "increase population growth" they are talking about decreasing the fall from 82 million people in Germany to, say, 70 million instead of 55 million not talking about growing the population to 100 million. Where is this pressing need to go even further and decrease fertility to 1 or lower?

The problems do not come from the third world. They come from the first world. Bush meat is a problem, but it is not the biggest one. The biggest problems are carbon emissions, industrial/agricultural pollution, and habitat loss. These things happen either because the first world does it directly, or by providing the demand from third world countries. Per capita, our resource consumption is significantly higher than in the third world.

No the problems come from the third world. Egypt and Ethiopia are already at odds over the usage of Nile. Egypt's population is expected to increase from 80 million to 137 million in 2050. The population of Ethiopia is projected to increase from 88 million to 278 million. That's 254 million additional people or 50% of total current EU population by the year 2050. In total Egypt and Ethiopia will have a population of 415 million people or 83% of the current population of EU. Caloric intake of Ethiopia is, what, about half of caloric intake of an EU citizen so that's an increase of 25% of current caloric intake of EU for Egypt and Ethiopia alone within the next 40 years.

Human behavior is fully caused by genetics and environmental influence. They could no more lower their birth rates than walk on water the way they are set up economically and socially now.

Human fertility is clearly far more dependent on social and economical structure than on genetics or environment. This is why the fertility of First World Australia is 1.78 while the fertility of Third World Bangladesh is 2.65. There is absolutely no need for First World countries to lower their birthrate since they are already too low and can only get lower as people marry later, have children later and are reluctant to have more than one child due to career etc. Why you are afraid that First World women will suddenly start having 3 children is beyond me.

You think I like having a pretty good idea of where we are headed? No. No I do not. The fact that we have ignored the problem and made it worse for so long that in order to fix it requires the mass violation of what people perceive as their rights is not something that brings me comfort at night. It is something that worries me, and makes we inwardly weep for humanity and all life on earth for that matter.

Who is "we"? Population of my own country, Croatia, is projected to fall from 4.5 million to 3.8 million in 2050. Croatia has about 14,500km2 of arable land. Egypt has 29,000km2 of arable land and a population of 80 million which is expected to grow to 137 million. Croatia has 105km3 of renewable water resources while Egypt has 87km3.
Now Croatia is not a First but Second World country but enough to disprove the silly notion that "we the human race" are headed for disaster.
You say you are a soulless technocrat and even entertain the notion of decreasing life expectancy for the First World but then reject it as too horrendous.
How is this for soulless: fuck the Third World.
You say that decreased fertility is better than increased mortality. Better for whom? Should I not have any children so that some uneducated piss poor guy in Ethiopia can have four? So that population of his country can triple while population of mine halves. No you won't find me weeping over that shit.