More Questions

[Internationale]

In any society, populations keep growing. If that population keeps growing, wouldn't it continue to actual lawlessness and chaos, since there is to many people to handle? Also, if a community wanted to make a decision, how would they make a decision without any sort of leadership? Another thing is, how would healthcare be organized and how would we make vaccinations and medical treatments for upcoming diseases in the future?

[Blake's Baby]

In 'any' society? It's falling in lots of places. So, no, doesn't hold up.

Anyway it's people that solve problems, so the more people we have the better, I figure.

[argeiphontes]

Sure, if population grows without bound it will eventually overrun the carrying capacity of both society and nature. It's not inevitable though. Europe has a declining population IIRC and say what you want about China but their one child policy has been very good for the country. (It's bad in other ways though.)

Decisions can be made democratically and leaders can be natural or temporary, without much, or any, formal power.

[Blake's Baby]

Sorry, this is the second thread you've posted going 'how do people make deisions without any sort of leadership?'

So... how do you make decisions without any sort of leadership? Who's telling you to post these questions? Or are you somehow, through some wild and arcane process, actually managing to work this out yourself?

[BN22]

Re: healthcare, ultimately all human beings need this. It transcends politics and economics. In a truly communist way of being, healthcare would be provided by those who have the ability to provide it, to those who are in need of it.

Healthcare needs no further incentive, it would be organised just fine without a monetary system in place. It is a means unto its own end.

[The Idler]

Peoplequake by Fred Pearce is a book about the coming population crash.

[reb]

There already are too many people to handle, and it has been that way for quite some time. If everyone just decided to say it "fuck it", dropped tools and headed towards their nearest symbol of state to smash it, there wouldn't be enough police to stop them. There are other ways in which people come to accept the social relations into which they are placed and we should be looking towards that direction.

[Thirsty Crow]

In any society, populations keep growing. If that population keeps growing, wouldn't it continue to actual lawlessness and chaos, since there is to many people to handle?Woops massive false assumption right here. For instance, here where I live, there's negative demographic growth. So, no, even when combined with immigration, this society isn't growing - it's shrinking in numbers actually. This goes for a lot of European countries as well, though I'm not so sure immigration doesn't cancel the trend out (sorry, can't be bothered to pull up graphics representing the evidence, will try to do it at a later date though).

Why is it so, that's another question.

[The Idler]

A review of Peoplequake (http://makewealthhistory.org/2011/04/21/book-review-peoplequake-by-fred-pearce/) makes for interesting reading
The first thing to remember is that population growth is its broadest context is not a straightforward upwards graph towards inevitable destruction, as the more panicky end of the environmental movement would have us believe. It certainly looked that way in the middle of the last century, when mothers were having five or six children. In fact, the fertility rate peaked in the 1960s and has been falling ever since. Add a lifetime of 70-80 years on to that moment of peak fertility and you can see where we’re headed – a peak population scenario. Around 2070, the world’s population reaches a natural peak and then begins to decline. “If you are over 45, you have lived through a period when the world population has doubled. No past generation has lived through such an era – and probably no future generation will either. But if you are under 45, you will almost certainly live to see a world population that is declining – for the first time since the Black Death almost 700 years ago.”
To look at it another way, the ‘peoplequake’ is in many ways a population bulge. It starts as a baby boom, moves into a youth bulge, and then works its way out towards a ‘grey bulge’ of retirees. This is where it starts to get interesting. Is it a coincidence that Japan is the oldest country in the world, and that its economy hasn’t grown for 20 years? Or what about the revolutions sweeping the Middle East, considering that the average age in Egypt right now is 24, or 22 in Libya? Pearce doesn’t address all of those questions, but the book opens the box on demographics and all kinds of ideas come tumbling out.
All around the world, fertility is falling. From that five or six children 50 years ago, fertility is now around 2.6 births per woman. In many countries the birth-rate has fallen below the replacement level, and populations are declining. Italy, Germany and Russia all have falling populations, as do Japan and South Korea. Australia is paying bonuses to couples who have a baby. Singapore is the only country in the world where the government runs dating agencies. What does this mean? How will an aging population affect our politics, economy, and society?
One thing is for certain – meddling in population control is a dangerous thing. The opening chapters of the book tell the history of population studies, from Robert Malthus to the inhuman legacy of eugenics. We’ve forgotten far too many of the horrors detailed here, from the Malthusians who opposed food aid during the Irish famine, to the 60,000 forced sterilizations in the US between the wars, or the millions of poor men talked into vasectomies for cash in India. Any advocate of population control needs to read this book and see the kinds of things that can happen when that thought begins to become policy. If we’re not aware of this history, we’re likely to sleep walk into the same atrocities.