7 ms·

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 crue

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.
      - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
        Shiva argues that the methods pushed by industry are what weaken food security. Patent protected seeds that cannot legally be collected put big industry between farmers and their food production. She argues for a more resilient food system through seed collection and sharing, biodynamic farming practices that promote healthy disease resistant soil, and an end to fossil fuel inputs in farming. She is advocating for a stronger food system less susceptible to disease and economic disruption. Regarding intellectual property restrictions: I’m sorry but you’ve bought in to the widely held belief that patents promote innovation. Of course the main function of the patent is to strictly regulate innovation. Large corporations buy up every new idea they can, and use their patent portfolios to threaten anyone who might dare tread on their turf. Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry. With patents, much fewer players buy up rights to yesterday’s ideas and prevent a sea of competition. Think of the 3D printer. $50,000 when release under patent. $25,000 12 years later when still under patent. $2,000 from many companies three years after the patents expired. $250 and available worldwide from hundreds of companies ten years after the patents expired. There was a LOT of innovation that occurred in the 3D printing space in that decade after the patents expired! I’m sorry I’m in a rush but here is some further reading: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2013/03/08/neoliberal-plague-aids-and-global-capitalism/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2013/03/08/neoliberal-pl... https://inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html https://inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...
- imtringued 5y ago
  Eurozone is barely growing, where are all those people shouting hurray for a dysfunctional monetary union?
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).

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.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      Shiva argues that the methods pushed by industry are what weaken food security. Patent protected seeds that cannot legally be collected put big industry between farmers and their food production. She argues for a more resilient food system through seed collection and sharing, biodynamic farming practices that promote healthy disease resistant soil, and an end to fossil fuel inputs in farming. She is advocating for a stronger food system less susceptible to disease and economic disruption. Regarding intellectual property restrictions: I’m sorry but you’ve bought in to the widely held belief that patents promote innovation. Of course the main function of the patent is to strictly regulate innovation. Large corporations buy up every new idea they can, and use their patent portfolios to threaten anyone who might dare tread on their turf. Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry. With patents, much fewer players buy up rights to yesterday’s ideas and prevent a sea of competition. Think of the 3D printer. $50,000 when release under patent. $25,000 12 years later when still under patent. $2,000 from many companies three years after the patents expired. $250 and available worldwide from hundreds of companies ten years after the patents expired. There was a LOT of innovation that occurred in the 3D printing space in that decade after the patents expired! I’m sorry I’m in a rush but here is some further reading: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2013/03/08/neoliberal-plague-aids-and-global-capitalism/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2013/03/08/neoliberal-pl... https://inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html https://inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...
imtringued 5y ago
Eurozone is barely growing, where are all those people shouting hurray for a dysfunctional monetary union?

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).