One of the many strange things about this age is that the most urgent issue facing the developed world gets the least amount of attention. That urgent thing is the collapse of fertility in every country with indoor toilets. Even India, a country famous for outdoor toilets, is having a baby bust. Indian fertility is now below replacement and, according to recent reports, is following the rest of Asia off the cliff.
In the EU, there are currently 1.46 live births per woman. France has the highest TFR at 1.84 live births per woman, but that is mostly the foreign population. The rest of Europe has birthrates well below replacement. Spain and Italy are at 1.3, which is what demographers call a population collapse. The only place in Europe with a healthy TFR is the Faroe Islands, which lies east of Iceland.
The Occident is doing well compared to the developed parts of Asia. Hong Kong no longer has children, as there is less than one live birth per woman. South Korea is right there with a TFR of 0.6. China is at 1.2, which should be what gets the ruling class to take notice, given China’s rocket high fertility in the recent past. It seems that wherever there are good times, people have stopped making babies.
This flies in the face of what we think we knew about biology. It has been assumed, because history seems to confirm it, that in good times people tend to have more children, while in bad times they limit their children. It is why Western nations cooked up schemes to limit reproduction during the Industrial Revolution. It was assumed that improving living standards would result in overpopulation.
The great global baby bust is telling us something. One is that what we thought we understood about demographics and population is wrong. When what was predicted did not happen, instead you got the opposite, it is time to rethink everything. The other is that there is a combination of forces that have been unleashed leading to what is looking like a great pruning of the human population.
That is the show this week. Everyone has their favorite reason for the population collapse, but those answers are probably wrong for the simple reason they assume a one-to-one relationship. In reality, complex things like human reproduction have highly complex causal relationships. That means the population collapse is most certainly do to a combination of things working in concert.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- The Fertility Crisis
- Diet
- Development
- Deracination
- Divinity
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Simplify the world, live better lives. Regression to the means may be part of this, a correction if you will.
I do want replacement level populations but only for certain races and countries. If India, China and the large ethnic urban areas dried up, it would be great planetary improvement.
The trad people told us Bill Gates was trying to reduce Africans with vaccines. Or something. And we needed to stop him! Anyway, if that was his dastardly plan it didn’t work.
They were just the lab . We are the real target. It is working on us. Probably better than bill’s wildest dreams.
Unpopular opinion: We’re not smart enough as race to “engineer” any virus, particularly if we barely understand how viruses spread. It’s just that the Cloud People like to think they are God, and won’t really fight against ideas that encourage that opinion in the Dirt People. 2nd unpopular opinion: Many elites really did think they were saving everyone with their crap “vaccine”. At least in their minds, they were the hero of the play. That includes some of the players who knew better. RNA technology had so much promise, if we could just work out the little “bugs” like it… Read more »
Viruses are engineered every day. What cannot be controlled (yet) is how fast they mutate in the wild.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask to describe me a bit of the “engineering” process and/or a lab that openly claims to “engineer” viruses for research or profit. Before 2020, “engineering” what amounts to a bizarre chemical strand that lives between alive and not, with almost unpredictable infection rates would have been laughable. We only take it seriously now because we lived through a mass hysteria.
“I don’t think it’s too much to ask to describe me a bit of the “engineering” process and/or a lab that openly claims to “engineer” viruses for research or profit.” Fair enough. We must start at what constitutes engineering a virus. Not heard of starting from scratch as Mother Nature would do, but have heard of engineering virus modifications such that the abilities of the virus to infect and produce “mischief” has been discovered. Hence the “gain of function” research Fauci has vigorously denied he funded. WRT Covid-19, there are reports that the initial virus removed and studied from first… Read more »
The allegation was that the vaccines contained human chorionic gonadotropin,which was intended to cause the production of autoantibodies to same. Such antibodies would prevent a pregnancy from being carried to term.
A British comic shared a hilarious joke years ago.
The mosquito nets in Africa are responsible for saving the lives of millions of mosquitos from dying of aids.
Have a son in his 20s – two things on a personal level.
I have a daughter in college so I can give you the flip side from her and her friends. Granted, she’s still dating her high school boyfriend who’s also in college so I can’t speak personally about her dating scene. Also, these are pretty smart, upper middle-class young women who are doing well in life, though this is the type that most guys want to marry. Most don’t care much about a career and want to get married. Yes, they’ve been indoctrinated into the “you have to have a career to be independent,” but I don’t see them buying it… Read more »
Nice guy who has the 6’s. Uh huh. She sure seems like the kind who will settle and resent the beta in her 30s than divorce him in his 40s. Same story. At least she got the dei and aa advantage against her male competition that you don’t care about anyways.
Unfortunately, yes, they do have ridiculously high expectations. Six-foot tall (or taller as most of them played volleyball), college-educated, etc., is their baseline. I’ve mentioned to them that women outnumber men nearly 2 to 1 at college, so it’s impossible for all women to get this. They don’t care. There is no more succinct way to summarize the problems in the world than this. The best, smartest young women, raised correctly with smart, moral parents showing the way, all armed with logical arguments and tons and tons of data and… They don’t care. Women are incapable of making decisions. Especially… Read more »
Most all my nephews are awkward soyboys who live in the basement. It’s like HG Wells got it all backwards: The helpless eloi are homely, scrawny and live underground. The robust Morelocks build houses, fix cars, run machinery and live in the fresh air.
Same here with a son in 20’s who wants to be in IT and have a family. Trouble on both fronts of finding a job and sane wife. Human reproduction is very complex.
I have seen more than one marriage that came about through ”dating sites”. No, not Tinder crap. There are any number that seem legit and cater to those excluded from typical venues such as church affiliation. No my thing, but neither were bar pickups.
The brother dated a Chinese gal this last year, from the one-child gen (she doesn’t understand “brothers and sisters”.)
Instead of dating sites, we could do like they do in China. Every Saturday in the public park are dozens of women holding up signs advertising what they have in assets, career, health, and other selling points.
This, in a country where 200 million men can’t find a wife, because it was the girls who got aborted. (In the olden times, girl babies were the ones left in the field, which led to the Boxer Rebellion.) Something is off over there.
It is not easy to find a woman who wants a large family. It is also not easy to find employment that pays enough to support a large family on one income. Two income families mean one or two children max.
There is a concerted effort by our rulers to limit all economic activity to cities. They want no rural population. Travel through the Midwest, mlssouri,Kansas, Kentucky , and WVa. They are STUNNINGLY empty. At least away from the cities . In the cities they build enormous apartment complexes but no houses. The rural land is being bought up by ngo groups and made into “preserves” like black mountain Kentucky. Those preserves allow almost no public access. Not even camping or hiking. There is clearly large forces at work worldwide. The same thing is going on ic Canada, Brazil, Australia,and lots… Read more »
This is a good reminder that our side should buy more rural land. What’s stopping us from forming NGO’s to pool resources and buy land? Land acquisition is a wise capital preservation strategy, especially considering the uncertainty related to the economy and the dollar going forward.
Exactly. Throughout history, land was the signature of true wealth. Still is today. The rich know this. Whether they buy such directly (think Bill Gates) or indirectly (think Blackrock) the elites are hedging their bets. However, land must be held and defended. For that, the elites are dependent on us peons. What Bill Gates buys can’t be moved and will be taken back when the time comes.
There’s a wonderful line from a Western story, it goes “my grandfather held this land against Apaches, you think an old man who wants to sell his coal for 2 cents more a ton can’t be taken out?”
Yes. Someone recently put it this way. If you are a billionaire and you have a compound that is guarded by warriors, is it your compound or theirs. Of course, once they can do it with robots, they dispense of the loyalty and physical inferiority problem.
The praetorians were the kingmakers of Rome. Get good land and own it outright. Don’t be an island. Build community and networks and steward your posterity so they can be effective stewards across generations.
I wonder if it is even possible, C. I love the dissidents, I love their ideas about traditionalism and self reliance… but that comes along with a very, very rugged individualism that is a double edged blade. Sure… the classical dissident will function well on his own but by his very nature… organizing into a coherent functional social unit with such men is going to be a bear. They are not ones to put aside differences, bury the hatchet, let go of old grudges… and a lot of that is for the better, IMHO… but in the face of what’s… Read more »
I can get along fine with my neighbors and most any collection of white folks. My wife however…
Absolutely!
I haven’t had time yet to listen to the podcast, but the topic immediatly called to my mind the “Six Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse,” identified by the blogger Chateau Heartiste years ago. Here’s a list: “Again, Le Chateau was on top of all this years ago, when we proposed a sea change in the American cultural landscape heralded by the coming of the Four Five Six Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse: Effective and widely available contraceptives (the Pill, condom, and the de facto contraceptive abortion). Easy peasy no-fault divorce. Women’s economic independence (hurtling towards women’s economic advantage if the college enrollment ratio is any… Read more »
I can further simplify this list:
Read a study couple days back that reported that 98% of the parents of U.S. daughters want their girls to ‘have careers’ and to ‘live independent financially’. That’s the plan in life: Don’t need no man. When I was a kid 70 years ago, most parents raised daughters to marry, to marry young, and to produce many wonderful grandchildren. That’s back when the nation actually worked. DIEversity hires, all, just like the Mayoress | Patriactionary Modern parents of the past half-century don’t raise daughters for marriage, but to have hard-charging careers while the government mandates the mass hiring and promotion… Read more »
Exactly, as the guy with daughter points out with clarity. He doesn’t care one wit about the young male except to get out of the way of his special girl who wants the 6s.
People don’t want kids because they watch the news.
Not the news. Entertainment in all forms now.
There have been studies of other mammals that show the females simply stop reproducing when the environment reaches a saturation level. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/11/001128070536.htm For humans, this is made easier by technology factors like abortion and chemicalization of the food supply. But the principle is the same. Population density seems to be associated strongly with declining fertility rates, with religiosity and social norms as moderating factors. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34914431/ I view the population decline as a good thing. I don’t worship GDP which depends on population growth – currently being achieved through mass immigration – to expand. Fewer people means more open space. Fewer… Read more »
Bill gates?!?! I didn’t know you followed Z. Tell klaus hi for us. How’s that new set of vaxes going?
One hundred percent. The bellowing mostly comes from the same folks who want mass migration and look solely at GDP as a measure of human flourishing. Here’s to non-white populations particularly collapsing! On to listening to the show.
At the risk of being the eugenic depopulationist in the punch bowl, the problem is not so much the people who aren’t reproducing as those who are. Africa alone is projected to have 4-5 billion by the end of the century. Automation, AI and robotics will make the GDP growth argument irrelevant.
What will be done with all those surplus people. Send them to Mars? Yeah, right.
Well, Sailer is correct regarding what he calls, “The World’s Most Important Graph.”
“Population density seems to be associated strongly with declining fertility rates, with religiosity and social norms as moderating factors.” Thoroughly confounded conclusion. India and China, and even Japan have been heavily (relatively) populated since recorded history. Their history is filled with evidence of population woes such as repeated famines and epidemics. Yet, their population increased century by century. It’s too simplistic a notion that at some magical and unproven density level, women stop reproducing. I would maintain there is, or has not, been any density level reached which causes decline in birth rate for humans. Rather, we have reached a… Read more »
“It’s too simplistic a notion that at some magical and unproven density level, women stop reproducing.” I can believe in two ideas: 1)God puts limits on natural systems. We have seen those systems have similar patterns of boom/bust 2)Given a chart of estimated human population growth for the last 500 years, we’re reaching that limit. “Rather, we have reached a scientific and sociological point where birth rate is controllable—by women.” I cannot say it enough that feminism benefits men and not women. As proven by the obviously disturbed screeching harpies that push feminism, feminism at it’s core is about destroying… Read more »
it’s women who like babies, not men. This part is correct, but I assert that women like *babies*, but they do not like *children*. It is men who are focused on putting in a lifetime investment in order to protect their legacy and have opportunities for mentoring and teaching, etc. Women want babies because they are cute. Women also want to be lazy and (above all!) unburdened by responsibility. Birthrates crumble when women have the ability to get their cuteness needs met by getting a puppy. It’s easier and far less responsibility than having another human being depend on you.… Read more »
Piffle, no argument against any of your sage comment. And I might add that yep, any father that says he was not jealous of his first child is lying. It is the price we pay for a good mother of our progeny.
This really is it in a nutshell. Declining birth rates corresponds much more closely to increases in women’s freedom than it does to any arbitrary metric of total population, population density, etc.
My mom and her 4 siblings (boomers) had 11 children total. Those 11 children (older millennial) only have 3 children among them with most having exited fertility age now. This is how fast it happens.
“One of the many strange things about this age is that the most urgent issue facing the developed world gets the least amount of attention. That urgent thing is the collapse of fertility in every country with indoor toilets. “ Excellent to see this highlighted. And, yes, of course! Biologically, what would we think of a group of creatures who were given shelter, food, and even peace and prosperity – yet, given the choice – refuse to reproduce themselves? I think the biologists would assume that, despite appearances, there was something Very Wrong Indeed. I got interested in this stuff about… Read more »
Separating physical intimacy from reproduction is a cornerstone of the transhumanist/depop plan.
The end goal is managed artificial reproduction, most likely in a cloning facility or warehouse of artificial wombs. Many sci-fi dystopias have covered this.
“In a nutshell; mankind is stopping reproducing mainly because our sexual development, and instincts leading to reproduction, are being genetically disrupted, in a cumulative (generation by generation) way. This potentially explains the trend for ever-worsening subfertility across all cultures, societies, races, religions etc.” Excellent point. I would like to explore such at a more minute level. We keep saying “collapse”, but what does that mean? At the general understanding it means a birth rate of less than 2.1 offspring, but what of the mixture of mated pairs of humans in general? Some have no offspring, some have 1, some have… Read more »
Z is right that this is a complex problem with several causes, but at the top of the list is women’s rights. Rich country, poor country, urban, rural, black, white, when you give women the right to education, to work and to contraceptives, birth rates collapse. That’s big reason why people don’t like to talk about the issue much or if they do, they don’t want to look at a key cause . . . because that would mean talking about women’s rights in a negative way. I’ve watched videos and read articles about the fertility collapse and they either… Read more »
Better to have a ruined country, better to present a hundred reasons for birth collapse, rather than face the plain truth: feminism — so greatly beloved by governments, colleges, media, corporations, and the parents of daughters — is a death cult. Plain and simple. Nations that adopt it fail and fail hard.
And feminism is America’s national religion. Don’t even think of trying to tell me its Jesus and Christianity. Women long ago took the place of God in the U.S.
blacks > women
When feminists complain about misogyny in rap lyrics, the blacks win.
The more empowerment women get, the more unhappy they are.
(Sure, explaining women’s increasing unhappiness is probably more complicated than that, but the previous sentence is fun to say to liberals.)
As untrustworthy as science and science reporting are, they seem to always say that, as each decade since the 1960s passed, women have become more miserable and on more psychiatric drugs.
You go girl.
Feminists are dumb and annoying. And the courts are awful to men. But I have a feeling that most of this is driven by economics and children now being a liability. Japan has women’s rights but not like we do. And their fertility is worse. Yemen is the most anti-feminist country on Earth and has a fertility of 3.72. Sounds high but it’s come down from 8.0 in the mid 1990s. Countries like Nigeria are sky high because they are stupid ignorant backward people. We need to focus on lowering their rate.
There is never a right time to have a baby. Women rate higher in neuroticism, thus giving women control, any control limits fertility.
Now what does control mean? Studies have been done and comparisons between countries made. Its not abortion, it’s not free childcare, it’s not the civil rights. It’s the mere knowledge that fertility can be controlled: timing sex around fertility cycles and pull out game.
Any kind of sex education beyond it’s God’s will and His alone and humans go extinct.
So free fornicating chimpanzees are the ones who actually follow God’s will? Who knew.
When was the last time you met a woman proclaiming that her dream is to have a big family?
Actually, I once worked for a large corporation where we did the “where do you see yourself in 5 years” exercise. A female colleague, 23 years old, said that she wants to start a family and eventually have 5 children. She left the company one year later to do the eat pray love thing in Asia. Today, she’s in her mid 30’s, with no kids.
Most people don’t know this, but the exotic “lovers” found in Eat Pray Love and How Stella Got Her Groove Back were both hedging on a green card. When they got their cards, they immediately filed for divorce. If I recall correctly, both men were gay. There are no happy endings for naive leftwing women in real life.
Hun-
I get the impression that your female colleague thought she would manage to tie down a, “Kuta Cowboy,” of her very own.
Not a good assumption.
It didn’t help that she was surrounded by a large number of very thirsty simps who would do anything for her (this was at a tech company). Being in an environment like that can’t be good for mental health, nor lead to an accurate world view.
Simping is a menace.
It is a virtual impossibility for anyone who is not an attractive woman to see the world as an attractive woman does. And vice versa. Because she is treated differently. Always has been, always will be. Regardless of prevailing norms, government regimes, etc.
Not even attractive. Young and 4/10 or higher is already living in a very different world.
That being said “treated differently” is on a completely different level these days, compared to what it was in the more distant past.
We would be wise to not make the same mistake we make in all matters that led us to this precipice. That is to Universalize a problem. Below replacement fertility on its own may actually be healthy, though not without serious issues to address as we go through it. Our biggest problem is the invasion of our homelands and the ongoing cultural genocide against our people. Period. Full stop. Even saying that the Occident’s problem isn’t as bad as Asia’s is a big mistake. This is due to several factors, one of which is importing high fertility people. That is… Read more »
I’m going to be superstitious here and blame Mother Nature. Nature always finds a way. Respect the Dao. Soon after hitting 5 billion people in 1987, we started getting busts all over. This is merely some dormant program that gets activated when the human population can’t cull itself through natural disasters, pestilence, and war. I suspect the rat and cockroach population has a similar dormant program.
Excellent point on restaurant food. Even the ones that are “family owned” that people are convinced have better food get most of what they serve off the same truck that stops at Chili’s and Cracker Barrel. The main difference is in the price with possibly slightly higher quality people doing the cooking and prep.
I’m not sure if that’s true. Large restaurant chains have very refined and customized supply chains. They don’t buy ground beef. They buy ground beef already shaped and sized for their specific menu items. For example.
Fast food places do. I see the same trucks from major food service companies like Sysco outside causal dining chains like Applebees and locally owned places. I’m sure certain items come standardized, but most of the food comes from the same place.
SS Africa is the only region defying the trend. What will Minnesota look like in 50 years after the swamping of the native pop. by the high time preference hordes? Bantus, Somalis, etc. are bad at debt management. That’s a huge problem combined with the general decline in population through a lower overall TFR. There just won’t be enough quality people to repay the high debt burden we face as a society. At some point it’s all going to collapse in on itself.
It is not defying the trend. But it has a lot farther to fall than the rest.
You’re correct. Well, thankfully they refused the mRNA death jabs /s
Part of the reason is liberal women like Melinda Gates desperately pushing birth control and feminism on the women there. They are having some success at lower birth rates rapidly, who knows what will happen as this progresses.
One major reason is that nobody wants to subject their potential offspring to the soulless, inhuman future the controllers are implementing.
Another major reason is that the Earth is a very large, yet ultimately finite system. The problem is that the limits of that system are not clearly knowable by our crude human perception and tools.
Although there may be multiple causes, some of them are a lot more obvious than others. E.g. birthrates have been generally falling since the IR, but it really fell off a cliff in the 60s after hormonal birth control was invented. Adding abortion without the father’s consent basically put women in 100% control of reproduction, and we’ve seen how they act when that is the case. Why would you want to give up the free infinite attention from male suitors in your 20s just to have 1 male giving you attention while bearing the burden of pregnancy? The answer is… Read more »
“…welfare for single-mothers, which has helped eliminate the natural male role as the provider. “ No general objection to the observation, but the exclusion of children in the equation is to not understand the situation completely. Welfare was sold as not for the mother, but for the children—the mother was a live-in babysitter. Indeed, look at most all these unfair situations you decry and you can see it’s the children in the marriage that produces much of the unfairness. A couple with no children can divorce without many of the problems of settlement we hear of—especially if the woman continued to… Read more »
I don’t know if “My Posting Career” or MPC is still around, but a poster called Pleasureman distilled most of the problems down to something he called SCALE. Size, Complexity, Atomization, Liberalization, Elitism. It functioned as a good explanation for all societal problems, but it definitely applies to our declining birth rates. Communities break down when you expand past Dunbar’s number at around 100-250. You can’t have high trust with people you don’t know intimately without strict reciprocal laws that guarantee some level of safety. The complexity of our society further drives the codification and bureaucratization of things since we… Read more »
People had lots of kids in the past because it made economic sense. 99% of people lived on farms and they needed help. Children were feeding chickens and fetching water from a young age. Children used to be an asset. Now they are a liability. That sums up why we don’t have as many kids anymore. Our ancestors weren’t more moral than us and we aren’t a bunch of hedonistic wretches. The profit and loss calculation changed. From what I can see, that’s what’s driving it.
Our ancestors most definitely were considerably more moral than us by *any* objective measure of morality.
I wonder if the jabs are having any impact on this. With an advertised 70% uptake for the Western population we should probably be curious. Of course this problem has been with us a long time but the jabs could be making it worse.
Faroe Islands – I hear that one of the most popular imports there are south-east Asian women. Maybe that explains their fertility rate.
This. It would be interesting to know the fertility rate of women born *in* the Faroe Islands. My guess is the number is abysmal, as any reasonably attractive young female immediately leaves the “boring” islands for Europe at the first chance she gets.
Perhaps there is a presentiment of doom. And nobody in their right mind wants to bring helpless babes into a world destined for nightmareland.
I’ve talked to people about how South Korea has basically decided to genocide itself thanks to not having babies. They don’t really get it, or choose not to get it. The obvious implication of this – that feminism allows women to end civilization and end their people, if they so desire – seems too horrifying and too shattering to the liberal consensus to contemplate.
It has been assumed, because history seems to confirm it, that in good times people tend to have more children Or maybe this assumption remains true, but an economy that makes supporting dependents on one income nearly impossible, that inflates the price of housing assets so much that few young people can afford any kind of long-term housing stability, and that requires young people to spend a majority of their most fertile years “in education” in order to (maybe) attain wages above subsistence-level is not, in fact, an actual “good time”, regardless of what “line goes up” on government crafted… Read more »
Fertility and morale go hand-in-hand. Modern or modernizing societies emphasize personal fulfillment and the materialism that some confuse with fulfillment. That materialism is poison to social morale and the religion that sustains it. Throw in easy means of contraception and, 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘭à, you have a baby bust. The regime encourages the bust by anti-natal propaganda, which claims that the world is over-procreating when the reverse is the truth (in the First World).
Is there anyone anywhere in the world who looks around and says “You know what this place could use? More people!!!”
All of this fretting about demographics is really about our worshiping of the economy gods and the truly sacrosanct GDP along with Ponzi based retirement programs. We have to sacrifice to appease the economy gods. This is also why we are wrecking our nations with third worlders, to appease the GDP/Economy gods.
Well that was a helluva good kick off for the new year, Z. And you’re right… there’s a lot of stuff going on here. I am not one for preachin’ and speechin’… but the fella out at the little chapel in the country had a good point as he was going over the Exodus, and how the Egyptian pharoah was getting hit with plague after plague for refusing to release the jews … and he just keeps doubling down on stupid. Our preacher said we too live in an age “where the locust are eating everything that is left…” I… Read more »
“ I personally think God has abandoned us until we come to our senses… “ Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were on the news yesterday stating that the Fed’s would pick up the complete cost for the CA fires for the next 90 days at an estimated $90B—if I remember correctly. Is this promise a net good for CA and its people? God never abandons us, but he is infinitely wiser than humans like Joe and Kamala. The Bible is replete with stories of God allowing us to receive the consequences of our folly such that we learn from our actions. It… Read more »
Any of the homeowners who aren’t compensated by the insurance companies will be made whole by fedloldollars. Guaranteed. The contrast with East Palestine and western North Carolina will be stark.
Yep, and without consequences felt, the Dem’s will rule forever in CA, while we pay for their folly.
I think that all your items are contributing factors and that it is a multi-factorial problem, but I think there is another major contributor that you allude to some of its effects at times but don’t specifically mention, which is feminism. Socially this is a huge contributor to the changing social norms that you talk about some. It is hammered into women to seek first an education and career. This is a primary driver of the marriage age being pushed later and later. When coupled with steep decline in fertilty by the time a woman hits her 30’s, it makes… Read more »
Excellent show. Thank you.
Probably because it’s something that fascinates you as you said at the end.
As I understand it, the human population was between 1m and 10m at the start of the Holocene. Even 2000 years ago I think the human population was only around 200m. Human crossed the 1bn mark in around 1840 (I think). We’re certainly in overshoot territory right now. India and China are in extreme overshoot territory, and probably so is Europe. Europe’s natural carrying capacity is probably around 50m-70m. It’s got maybe around 450m or thereabouts today.
How do you estimate these numbers? And how do you define carrying capacity?
I think the biggest tragedy is that people of European heritage used to be close to half of the world’s population and now are at maybe 10%. Any decline in global population must be carefully managed so that we are not eaten by the zombies, whose populations have exploded in the second half of the 20th century. Minimum requirement for careful management is to not let the zombies in your home.
“I think the biggest tragedy is that people of European heritage used to be close to half of the world’s population and now are at maybe 10%.” It was around one third in 1900. It’s less than 10% now. As for where I got the figures, it’s from a number of sources over the years which I don’t remember, but the numbers have somehow stuck to my memory. The reasons for the population explosion probably lie with effective methods to decrease infant mortality. And also, more efficient methods of agriculture and animal husbandry. Again quoting from memory. Famines, pestilences like… Read more »
I don’t think it’s useful to calculate carrying capacity of a continent based on ancient methods of agriculture, famines and plagues. We don’t need to go all the way back to those times. I certainly don’t want to. We need to find the right balance.
He just makes numbers up.The Roman Empire had 60 million at its peak and that didn’t cover the whole of Europe; and they certainly did not have the most efficient agricultural system.
Well, a quick Google search reveals this from a Wikipedia article (which I was hitherto unaware of): “Published estimates for the 1st century (“AD 1“) suggest uncertainty of the order of 50% (estimates range between 150 and 330 million). Some estimates extend their timeline into deep prehistory, to “10,000 BC”, i.e., the early Holocene, when world population estimates range roughly between 1 and 10 million (with an uncertainty of up to an order of magnitude)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population As for the other numbers I give — *shrug* — do your own homework. I’ve given ballpark estimates and don’t have any ego invested in them Also, with regard… Read more »
This is so true. Also, we must define carrying capacity carefully. It means many things to different people. A Europe with 50M people would seem to assume most folk are subsistence farming. I have no inclination to return to scraping the earth with a stick for 14 hours a day while fearing death through disease or other calamity of Nature.
“A Europe with 50M people would seem to assume most folk are subsistence farming. I have no inclination to return to scraping the earth with a stick for 14 hours a day while fearing death through disease or other calamity of Nature.” I agree with you in principle. But. Modern agriculture and animal husbandry is energy intensive (tractors, fertilisers, trucks to transport food) and requires an industrial base (to manufacture said tractors, trucks, and fertilisers and provide electricity, gasoline, and water on a large scale). How long this stays in place I have no idea. When it goes, we’ll have… Read more »
Yes. One of the interesting things about the recent H1B spat was the viciousness of the Indians and their hatred for Americans. It was only a few decades ago that they were going to mass starve. It was American and European technology, AND GENEROSITY, that allowed them to move out of starvation and go through a massive population boom.
That is conveniently forgotten. We need to remind people of that to combat the colonizers deserve colonization myth.
I recall making the quip in jr high in the early 80s: “It’s television. It’s easier to turn on a TV than a woman.”
Population decline in developed countries is not a problem. It should lead to better living with less congestion, pollution and crowding. The problem is the owners of capital need more eaters to buy cellphones, fast food and pay rents, so they are importing the worst kind of humans to keep the “growth” going, in the process crapping up the place for the rest of us. Korea, China and Japan should do just fine, as long as they keep out the brown hordes. Europe is drowning under the brown wave. Canada and the US are going under. Who wants to bring… Read more »
Meanwhile, Trump sentenced to nothing in NYC in ridiculous case…But now maybe Trump understands why he should have pardoned Assange….
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“This flies in the face of what we think we knew about biology. It has been assumed, because history seems to confirm it, that in good times people tend to have more children, while in bad times they limit their children.” I believe this common explanation to be a misinterpretation of statistical cause and effect and basic history. First aspect, people did have/conceive *more* children before the IR. However, people were able to raise to adulthood *fewer* children. Therefore had a higher fertility rate to make up for a 50% childhood death rate of the time. Second aspect, after the… Read more »