4 ms·

The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounde

The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounded.

adrianN 4y ago
A number of important ecosystems are now much closer to collapse than they were in the seventies. I don't think that we can say that fears of overpopulation were unfounded. The evidence is quite clear that we consume a large number of resources much faster than they replenish.
noduerme 4y ago
Unless you consider that episodes of individual psychosis seem to have risen exponentially every decade since then..
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There are numerous cases of individual psychosis associated with much lower population densities as well. Wisconsin Death Trip is one reasonably well-known collection of such instances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip I'd be interested in knowing what the basis of your statement is, and how you're considering reporting / observation biases. (Note that I'm actually concerned with overpopulation and various psychological / sociological impacts of same. I'm simply highlighting that psychosis and antisocial behaviour is not exclusive to this particular population pattern.)
muzani 4y ago
Overpopulation hits places like India and Bangladesh badly. China and Europe's population actually seems to be declining and they seem to be quite well off. If you tweak the variables just a little, things change massively, so I think the article gets it right in saying that it's dangerous to draw conclusions. Even drawing conclusions from my previous paragraph.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >and Europe's population Where are you getting this from? Loads of countries are still rising in population, mostly due to immigration (birthrates of natives are below replacement rates). >and they seem to be quite well off. I wouldn't call Europe 'well off', unless your definition solely relies on "well, at least it is a developed country". We're facing multiple crises in several countries, and the younger generations are the ones most likely to pay the price.
  - muzani 4y ago
    A quick Google brings up this list: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... I might have been mistaken in saying "Europe" as a whole but European countries are at the bottom of the list. It also seems that the bottom of the list has some economically struggling families, so this correlation could be mistaken. Fertility seems to be a lagging indicator - if someone can't afford a two bedroom apartment, they're just unlikely to have 5 kids.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Have a look at the graphs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands and notice how the growth percentage has only just reached 0%, despite fertility rate having plunged all the way to near 1.5 since the 1970s. What's more, many still predict population growths and the government is still stimulating it through subsidizing children and giving tax breaks to immigrants. The Netherlands is on the cusp of declining, but not declining yet. If you look up the history of fertility rates, most of developed Europe plunged similarly, yet population kept growing well up to now.
      - muzani 4y ago
        That's helpful. I always assumed that fertility rates linked to population growth, but forgot things like immigration.
harha 4y ago
I wouldn’t say they’re unfounded, humans just evolve more quickly to adapt through technology, giving access to previously inhabitable places. There’s still a lot of these left though overall quality of life would get worse in terms of living space and better in other areas like medicine.
ben_w 4y ago
Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions. The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. With sufficient industrial farming effort[0] and only existing technology, we could support something like 10 trillion on Earth, but if we did that then everything that wasn’t a farm would look like the top of the Wikipedia list of highest density city districts. As for the correspondence between the rat experimental world and the human world, as the article itself says: > Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks. And indeed, a closer look at the interpretations severely undermines them. Also, we aren’t mice, so while we are doing various — and in some cases, unhealthy — things in response to our world of high abundance and low child mortality, we are doing different things, more slowly, and with the ability to discover and respond to the big picture. [0] the material requirements are on par with paraterraforming the Moon, because the first step is “make enough greenhouses for most of the land on the planet”, but it could be done.
- NeoTar 4y ago
  > The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worlds to sustain it. It has a population of 45 billion, and a surface area of approx. 40% that of Earth. Do the calculations, and the population density is, as Wikipedia says: "similar to the current population density of Germany or Connecticut. " I can't speak for Connecticut, but Germany certainly doesn't feel crowded. Even in central Berlin we have a huge amount of green space. Even Coruscant in Star Wars, with a population of 1 trillion people (1 000 000 000 000) has a population density less than New York City.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
If we were half as many as we are today, we would need half as many resources as well. You can cut a cake in however many pieces you want, but eventually there won't be much to go around.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I'll bet there's some kind of hysteresis in that. Things are rarely as nice in a company that has just reached 50 people vs one that has come down to 50 people. Same goes for a lot of orgs.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
But the consequences of too many young males and not enough females, are quite similar. The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight. “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I remember this reporting coming out over a decade ago. We are seeing tbe consequences of this in tons of ways, be it the rise of authoritarianism and incel culture, to region-specific issues for China/India.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    Yes, the problem with comparing the study on mice to people is that mice iterate much quicker than humans. Generation time in (lab) mice is about 9-11 weeks, while in humans living in modern societies it takes between 20 and 30 years. To have actual consequences on society at large we need to wait at least two generations, so obviously in such a long period of time people won't notice the build up, like they do in the short time span it takes for mice. It happened with climate change too.
Hammershaft 4y ago
Hard to agree with this when faced with the overwhelming environmental degradation we see globally. Between extinctions 1000x the normal background rate, microplastics & chemicals poisining food supplies, climate change, oceanic accumulations of garbage twice the size of france and growing exponentially, growing water shortages, topsoil erosion, etc etc etc... it is not clear that those fears are unfounded.

The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounded.

adrianN 4y ago

A number of important ecosystems are now much closer to collapse than they were in the seventies. I don't think that we can say that fears of overpopulation were unfounded. The evidence is quite clear that we consume a large number of resources much faster than they replenish.

noduerme 4y ago

Unless you consider that episodes of individual psychosis seem to have risen exponentially every decade since then..

dredmorbius 4y ago
There are numerous cases of individual psychosis associated with much lower population densities as well. Wisconsin Death Trip is one reasonably well-known collection of such instances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip I'd be interested in knowing what the basis of your statement is, and how you're considering reporting / observation biases. (Note that I'm actually concerned with overpopulation and various psychological / sociological impacts of same. I'm simply highlighting that psychosis and antisocial behaviour is not exclusive to this particular population pattern.)

muzani 4y ago

Overpopulation hits places like India and Bangladesh badly. China and Europe's population actually seems to be declining and they seem to be quite well off. If you tweak the variables just a little, things change massively, so I think the article gets it right in saying that it's dangerous to draw conclusions. Even drawing conclusions from my previous paragraph.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>and Europe's population Where are you getting this from? Loads of countries are still rising in population, mostly due to immigration (birthrates of natives are below replacement rates). >and they seem to be quite well off. I wouldn't call Europe 'well off', unless your definition solely relies on "well, at least it is a developed country". We're facing multiple crises in several countries, and the younger generations are the ones most likely to pay the price.
- muzani 4y ago
  A quick Google brings up this list: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... I might have been mistaken in saying "Europe" as a whole but European countries are at the bottom of the list. It also seems that the bottom of the list has some economically struggling families, so this correlation could be mistaken. Fertility seems to be a lagging indicator - if someone can't afford a two bedroom apartment, they're just unlikely to have 5 kids.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Have a look at the graphs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands and notice how the growth percentage has only just reached 0%, despite fertility rate having plunged all the way to near 1.5 since the 1970s. What's more, many still predict population growths and the government is still stimulating it through subsidizing children and giving tax breaks to immigrants. The Netherlands is on the cusp of declining, but not declining yet. If you look up the history of fertility rates, most of developed Europe plunged similarly, yet population kept growing well up to now.
    - muzani 4y ago
      That's helpful. I always assumed that fertility rates linked to population growth, but forgot things like immigration.

harha 4y ago

I wouldn’t say they’re unfounded, humans just evolve more quickly to adapt through technology, giving access to previously inhabitable places. There’s still a lot of these left though overall quality of life would get worse in terms of living space and better in other areas like medicine.

ben_w 4y ago

Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions. The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. With sufficient industrial farming effort[0] and only existing technology, we could support something like 10 trillion on Earth, but if we did that then everything that wasn’t a farm would look like the top of the Wikipedia list of highest density city districts. As for the correspondence between the rat experimental world and the human world, as the article itself says: > Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks. And indeed, a closer look at the interpretations severely undermines them. Also, we aren’t mice, so while we are doing various — and in some cases, unhealthy — things in response to our world of high abundance and low child mortality, we are doing different things, more slowly, and with the ability to discover and respond to the big picture. [0] the material requirements are on par with paraterraforming the Moon, because the first step is “make enough greenhouses for most of the land on the planet”, but it could be done.

NeoTar 4y ago
> The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worlds to sustain it. It has a population of 45 billion, and a surface area of approx. 40% that of Earth. Do the calculations, and the population density is, as Wikipedia says: "similar to the current population density of Germany or Connecticut. " I can't speak for Connecticut, but Germany certainly doesn't feel crowded. Even in central Berlin we have a huge amount of green space. Even Coruscant in Star Wars, with a population of 1 trillion people (1 000 000 000 000) has a population density less than New York City.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

If we were half as many as we are today, we would need half as many resources as well. You can cut a cake in however many pieces you want, but eventually there won't be much to go around.

lordnacho 4y ago
I'll bet there's some kind of hysteresis in that. Things are rarely as nice in a company that has just reached 50 people vs one that has come down to 50 people. Same goes for a lot of orgs.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

But the consequences of too many young males and not enough females, are quite similar. The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight. “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

tomrod 4y ago
I remember this reporting coming out over a decade ago. We are seeing tbe consequences of this in tons of ways, be it the rise of authoritarianism and incel culture, to region-specific issues for China/India.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  Yes, the problem with comparing the study on mice to people is that mice iterate much quicker than humans. Generation time in (lab) mice is about 9-11 weeks, while in humans living in modern societies it takes between 20 and 30 years. To have actual consequences on society at large we need to wait at least two generations, so obviously in such a long period of time people won't notice the build up, like they do in the short time span it takes for mice. It happened with climate change too.

Hammershaft 4y ago

Hard to agree with this when faced with the overwhelming environmental degradation we see globally. Between extinctions 1000x the normal background rate, microplastics & chemicals poisining food supplies, climate change, oceanic accumulations of garbage twice the size of france and growing exponentially, growing water shortages, topsoil erosion, etc etc etc... it is not clear that those fears are unfounded.