7 ms·

Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (w

Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (which sometimes includes multiple wives) to simply have as many children as possible. In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age. The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women. For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2]. It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-prevent-deaths/a-37855420 https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-p... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/

jandrese 5y ago
Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood due to factors like poor healthcare, war, crime, etc... is kind of cruel and likely to be ineffective. There's a lot of evidence that simply improving the standards of living will reduce birthrates naturally. It's better to attack the cause than the effect.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Humans ARE the cause.
  - willmadden 5y ago
    I'm leaning more towards solar activity and H2O myself.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      The sun is "cooling" over the short term, we still have record temperatures.
- macawfish 5y ago
  Thank you! There's lots of evidence that living beings of all kinds actually feel compelled to reproduce _more_ when faced with stressful selective pressures. We don't have a population problem, we have a crisis in greed and hypercompounding concentration of capital and dominating, ineffective forms of power. We have a status quo that abhors any idea of slowing down, even though studies show slowing down would naturally reduce rates of energy consumption and carbon emissions. We have a trickle-down rent extraction problem that's pushing people and communities around the world to the brink.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I'm curious how you correlate Bezos and Gates having money as causing environmental degradation.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      I mean at a minimum their CO2 usage must be astronomical. Likely some of the highest per capita CO2 usage of any human beings ever. Of course they also use their money to invest in development projects which will I would imagine have significant environmental effects. In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects. Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair. Bezos has constructed a machine which consumes huge amounts of CO2 (Amazon) in the form of delivery trucks and a flood of cheap flimsy goods which consume energy when constructed and soon end up in landfills. There’s a lot that billionaires do, by virtue of the power they have in this world, which damages the environment.
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        > In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects. The alternative being more labor intensive agriculture (so requiring more people) and less buffer in case of a bad harvest (so potential famine and instability). > Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair. The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  That meme is not backed up by the statistics. Childhood mortality has fallen all across the planet. For example in Somalia only 12% of children will die before age 5: https://knoema.com/atlas/Somalia/Child-mortality-rate#:~:text=Somalia%20%2D%20Under%2Dfive%20mortality%20rate&text=In%202019%2C%20child%20mortality%20rate,1%2C000%20live%20births%20in%202019 https://knoema.com/atlas/Somalia/Child-mortality-rate#:~:tex.... Thus for the average woman in Somalia with 6 children, statistically, none of her children will actually die. If childhood mortality was such a major issue, then the population would be stable - instead of doubling every two decades. Childhood mortality is also likely to be worsened by having multiple children, since it reduces the number of resources available per child.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    5 is a bit too young for a child soldier. Gotta wait until they are 10. 5 is also too young to have kids. Also, that woman with 6 children has roughly a 50/50 chance of at least one of them dying before age 5.
  - Marsymars 5y ago
    > Thus for the average woman in Somalia with 6 children, statistically, none of her children will actually die. If deaths are evenly distributed at 12%, there's a 54% (1-0.88^6) chance a woman will have at least one child die.
    - wearywanderer 5y ago
      If a woman has 3 children at those odds, there is a 99.8% chance at least one child will live. If she has 4 children, it goes up to 99.997%. Having 6 children is clearly an overcompensation given this level of risk (99.9997% of one or more out of 6 living.)
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    It may be tangled up in the number of children. Spreading resources over more children may put them all further into that 12% category? Anyway it seems to be true that child mortality has dropped across the board. US child mortality used to be almost 50% (in 1800). Now its around 0.7%. Somalia is about where the US was in 1925. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
- johbjo 5y ago
  > Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood ... Are you arguing for more or fewer children? Seems plainly obvious the birthrate is too high.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    I'm saying you're going to be fighting against a strategy that has been used since the dawn of Homo Sapiens to counter high childhood mortality rates. It is an uphill battle, especially in a country without a stable government.
    - prvc 5y ago
      Fighting climate change is an uphill battle (steeper).
nikhilsimha 5y ago
While we are at it, why not declare national emergency, and implement a one child policy in the high per-capita carbon emitters? Like Australia and US? Somalia - 0.1 Metric ton of CO2 per person per year US - 15 Metric ton of CO2 PPPY
- AuryGlenz 5y ago
  Those countries are already below population replacement rate, not counting immigrants.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  You can achieve the same thing in those countries much more humanely by simply limiting immigration intake to high-HDI countries only (where the CO2 differential from the migration is smaller, and fertility rates are closer), and limiting the overall level of immigration. Secondly instead of a one-child policy, Western welfare states could just modify their welfare systems to not reward single mothers for having children (by not paying people extra or giving preferential access to public housing).
blacktriangle 5y ago
Exactly, we thought food aid would solve hunger, instead it caused population explosion and more hunger. Some cultures just breed to capacity.
DelightOne 5y ago
You might want to consider increasing the level of development.
908B64B197 5y ago
> In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age. That's also the arguments used by countries like Canada to justify out of control immigration quotas.
wchar_t 5y ago
> It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception. "We can save your family from starving, but you have to agree to enroll in our long-term contraception program first." That's what is sounds like to me, at least.

jandrese 5y ago

Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood due to factors like poor healthcare, war, crime, etc... is kind of cruel and likely to be ineffective. There's a lot of evidence that simply improving the standards of living will reduce birthrates naturally. It's better to attack the cause than the effect.

koheripbal 5y ago
Humans ARE the cause.
- willmadden 5y ago
  I'm leaning more towards solar activity and H2O myself.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    The sun is "cooling" over the short term, we still have record temperatures.
macawfish 5y ago
Thank you! There's lots of evidence that living beings of all kinds actually feel compelled to reproduce _more_ when faced with stressful selective pressures. We don't have a population problem, we have a crisis in greed and hypercompounding concentration of capital and dominating, ineffective forms of power. We have a status quo that abhors any idea of slowing down, even though studies show slowing down would naturally reduce rates of energy consumption and carbon emissions. We have a trickle-down rent extraction problem that's pushing people and communities around the world to the brink.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I'm curious how you correlate Bezos and Gates having money as causing environmental degradation.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    I mean at a minimum their CO2 usage must be astronomical. Likely some of the highest per capita CO2 usage of any human beings ever. Of course they also use their money to invest in development projects which will I would imagine have significant environmental effects. In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects. Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair. Bezos has constructed a machine which consumes huge amounts of CO2 (Amazon) in the form of delivery trucks and a flood of cheap flimsy goods which consume energy when constructed and soon end up in landfills. There’s a lot that billionaires do, by virtue of the power they have in this world, which damages the environment.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects. The alternative being more labor intensive agriculture (so requiring more people) and less buffer in case of a bad harvest (so potential famine and instability). > Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair. The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
That meme is not backed up by the statistics. Childhood mortality has fallen all across the planet. For example in Somalia only 12% of children will die before age 5: https://knoema.com/atlas/Somalia/Child-mortality-rate#:~:text=Somalia%20%2D%20Under%2Dfive%20mortality%20rate&text=In%202019%2C%20child%20mortality%20rate,1%2C000%20live%20births%20in%202019 https://knoema.com/atlas/Somalia/Child-mortality-rate#:~:tex.... Thus for the average woman in Somalia with 6 children, statistically, none of her children will actually die. If childhood mortality was such a major issue, then the population would be stable - instead of doubling every two decades. Childhood mortality is also likely to be worsened by having multiple children, since it reduces the number of resources available per child.
- jandrese 5y ago
  5 is a bit too young for a child soldier. Gotta wait until they are 10. 5 is also too young to have kids. Also, that woman with 6 children has roughly a 50/50 chance of at least one of them dying before age 5.
- Marsymars 5y ago
  > Thus for the average woman in Somalia with 6 children, statistically, none of her children will actually die. If deaths are evenly distributed at 12%, there's a 54% (1-0.88^6) chance a woman will have at least one child die.
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    If a woman has 3 children at those odds, there is a 99.8% chance at least one child will live. If she has 4 children, it goes up to 99.997%. Having 6 children is clearly an overcompensation given this level of risk (99.9997% of one or more out of 6 living.)
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  It may be tangled up in the number of children. Spreading resources over more children may put them all further into that 12% category? Anyway it seems to be true that child mortality has dropped across the board. US child mortality used to be almost 50% (in 1800). Now its around 0.7%. Somalia is about where the US was in 1925. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
johbjo 5y ago
> Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood ... Are you arguing for more or fewer children? Seems plainly obvious the birthrate is too high.
- jandrese 5y ago
  I'm saying you're going to be fighting against a strategy that has been used since the dawn of Homo Sapiens to counter high childhood mortality rates. It is an uphill battle, especially in a country without a stable government.
  - prvc 5y ago
    Fighting climate change is an uphill battle (steeper).

nikhilsimha 5y ago

While we are at it, why not declare national emergency, and implement a one child policy in the high per-capita carbon emitters? Like Australia and US? Somalia - 0.1 Metric ton of CO2 per person per year US - 15 Metric ton of CO2 PPPY

AuryGlenz 5y ago
Those countries are already below population replacement rate, not counting immigrants.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
You can achieve the same thing in those countries much more humanely by simply limiting immigration intake to high-HDI countries only (where the CO2 differential from the migration is smaller, and fertility rates are closer), and limiting the overall level of immigration. Secondly instead of a one-child policy, Western welfare states could just modify their welfare systems to not reward single mothers for having children (by not paying people extra or giving preferential access to public housing).

blacktriangle 5y ago

Exactly, we thought food aid would solve hunger, instead it caused population explosion and more hunger. Some cultures just breed to capacity.

DelightOne 5y ago

You might want to consider increasing the level of development.

908B64B197 5y ago

> In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age. That's also the arguments used by countries like Canada to justify out of control immigration quotas.

wchar_t 5y ago

> It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception. "We can save your family from starving, but you have to agree to enroll in our long-term contraception program first." That's what is sounds like to me, at least.