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?
That is not how it works. It would work that way if humans were semelperous organisms with complete turnover per generation, but we are not. Here is the proper equation, and results.
Nt=No((1+(g))^t)
I will assume stable age structure as well as constant birth/death rates (which are not true, but I dont have Matlab handy)
Nt=population at time t, No=initial population size, t is number of years, and g is the population growth rate per annum.
You get with an initial population of 81.9 million...
81.9(1-.00061)^75)=78.2 million.
Now, this is where the assumptions made for this math become very very important. Germany has an aging population. That growth rate will not remain constant for 75 years, right now, you just have a shit load of dying old people. Once the old people who were born between 1945 and 1960 start to die off in earnest, the age structure changes and so does the population growth rate.
By your own metrics there is absolutely no reason to be worried about germany, as in 75 years, you wont have a massive population decline, but a modest one, especially once you consider the increased life expectancy of people born yesterday compared to the ones born back in like 1954. But again, I dont have Matlab handy.
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.
Did you use the same shitty math you used before to generate those figures? Yes. The population problem in Africa is huge, but not the resource consumption problem. Not yet. If you look at per capita resource utilization (You can use per capita GDP, PPP method for this) you will see that the amount consumed by the third world per capita is much the fuck lower than the first world.
Population itself is not the problem. Population+resource consumption is. If we were all Darwinian Demons that were able to pump out offspring from the moment of our birth with no limiting resources, there would not be a problem.
To put this in perspective: Those two countries are at odds over Nile useage. Well guess what, water rights will always be an issue. Always. What matters is how degraded the river system is--like whether or not it reaches the ocean. Many American rivers no longer do. The entire Colorado River Basin in the southwest no longer has an estuary at the end.
Our first world living standards are such that the energy and resource requirements are already so high as to be completely unsustainable. The third world will get there as they advance as their population grows AND so does their per capita resource consumption.
Human fertility is clearly far more dependent on social and economical structure than on genetics or environment.
What, do you think environment for humans is something other than social and economic structure? Are you that illiterate, or do you just have an idiosyncratic definition of environment? I have been going on and on in this thread about the effects of social and economic structure on human fertility.
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.
Because: Per Capita Resource Consumption Is Too High. Are you blind? Or are you just one of those fucktards who will never say that the first/second world needs to sacrifice anything, putting all the blame on the third world?
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.
We. Humanity, fucktard.
And at the same time your population is dropping, your standard of living and thus your per capita resource consumption will be increasing.
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.
No. You should all have fewer children. Right now, the problems come from the developed nations because we consume to fucking much and our population needs to drop. In Africa, they have too many people and cant support them economically, and as they develop, they will begin to consume too fucking much. Therefore their population needs to drop.
Have you not been reading what I post, or do you just break your nose with your own knee-jerk reactions to what I write.
Population and consumption are global problems. Everyone needs to consume and reproduce less. The population of the world is already over what it can sustain indefinitely, but right now, that is because developed nations take too much from it. As time passes, the third world will catch up, themselves becoming first and second world countries and the problem will get worse.
Dost thou comprehend?
Because in this case the First World population will be exploding just like the Third World one, and with the caloric intake of ~3000 calories per day per citizen that is not something you want to see happening rapidly. Or, for that matter, at all.
Yes. Third World is not a permanent classification. As they become first world, they will have all the same problems caused by over-consumption that we do
Well, besides throwing out buzzwords (and ignoring that the first world has little incentive to change seeing as how they could easily feed themselves)
Oh yes. Heaven forbid someone give a shit about poor brown people...
I think it is far better to come up with some sort of realistic solution instead of deciding to clamor for a change of the political system (because for example in France and germany an armed coup and a fascist dictatorship would probably be the only way to change something like this, but I do not think you like that choice either).
We are past the point where a politically feasible solution can work. That is the problem. We could have fixed it back in the 1970s. Norman Borlaug gave us that time. He gave us an extra 40 years of breathing room to get our act together by artificially increasing carrying capacity. He said himself recently (before he died) that we had squandered the opportunity he gave us.
There is no baby boom nor is anyone suggesting it. Alyrium suggested a ridiculous 0.6-0.8 fertility which would topple the population to less than 30% in a human lifetime.
No, moron, you can neither read nor do basic algebra. .6-.8 PER PERSON, which brings fertility to 1.2 to 1.4 combined with mechanisms to increase life expectancy and increase the economic productivity of the old
In other words, slow, easily managed population declines world-wide. Remember, humans dont breed like mayflies.
The original question was how to increase the low fertility rates of First World countries which go as low as 1.4 or 1.2 which is way below replacement level. To which some people replied that fertility should actually be even lower like 0.8.
Yeah, if you were even semi-literate.
Agreed, I would be more interested in seeing what Alyrium has to say in the way of realistically achievable things that might make the situation better.
Alright. Massive agricultural reform.
Stop using high input agriculture as we currently do. World wide introduction of GM crops that require less water, provide more nutrients, and make their own organic pesticides like BT, with subsequent selective breeding of said crops to keep up with the evolution of resistance. Institute nutrient and topsoil recycling through the use of constructed wetlands and biomass mulching to prevent runoff. Use those wetlands to dual-crop things like rice and farm-raised tilapia. Institute huge excise taxes on meat to drop demand and drive cattle producers out of business, converting the massive tracts of animal feed production to human food production. Outlaw the use of front and second line anti-biotics in food production, and invest very very heavily in bioprospecting for new drugs, and in phage therapy.
Deal with the food production problems that climate change and peak oil will bring by lining up the leaders of agribusiness and shooting them (metaphorically speaking), putting an emphasis on local production of food crops, and what little meat production remains.
Desal Plants. Use Them.
Nuclear, Wind, Solar, and Wave power. Use them.
Do that, and we will only be moderately fucked instead of completely fucked.
Alyrium Denryle also talked about something like food production not being able to keep for long the current food production due to some reason (like soil poisoning or overexploitation that nets you unfarmable land after a while, overfishing and ass-raping the places where fish reproduce).
And THIS seems to be the actual problem, since population of third world nations grow only when there is enough food for it (for obvious reasons).
If you can talk more about this, I'm interested. Or link to a good read.
Hopefully I will be able to talk more about that in a bit... this discussion is taking WAY too much time out of the huge amounts of work I have to do over the weekend...
) discussion that popped up rather "unexpectedly" (I used 
), let me see if I understand the issue correctly. 
)
