Overpopulation?

Question

"Do you realize in about 50 years our world population will double?"

Do people really believe this? We have Europe, which is looking at 25% of the population having kids at all, and usually just one. We have China, where you can only have one kid, and most of them are boys (psst, it takes both a guy and a girl to have a baby) which means probably a 75% reduction in population in the next generation. Not to mention everyone blowing each other away in the middle east. That into account, what is the big concern about overpopulation? It looks like we need to worry about the opposite, right? Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

There are trends that the most educated people tend to have fewer and fewer children, and I think that also is related to how "advanced" cultures live in the modern world, how complicated, expensive, and challenging that is. Anyway, many countries, like Japan, are now already at zero population growth, but, at the same time, places like India, China, Central & South America, populations are still exploding rapidly. There are so many factors in the equation of population, that it makes simple discussion difficult, but most projections still say pop. will double soon. Some countries are in a crisis of shrinking numbers that will create major economic difficulties, while others are suffering great problems with too rapidly expanding numbers.
We are rapidly coming to a crisis of resources vs. numbers, and only major scientific and psychological changes in us will be able to handle the issues. Intelllectually we are becoming more and more brilliant, while psychologically we are in many ways still back in the caves.
We need to rapidly wake up as a species to deal with what is coming. "My dad is bigger than your dad" is ok on the playgrounds of our youth, but will be of little use solving the problems that are to come.

Answer 2

What you are missing is Africa. While the European and some of the Asian populations (ie: the industrialized countries) are declining and are stabilizing, the populations of countries like Kenya are set to triple in the next fifty years compared to the others. Those in third world countries have to have plenty of children because otherwise they won't be able to have a decent income, or a future for their family. What's worse is that while AIDS runs rampant, that certainly won't reduce the population, it'll only ensure that there will be no people living past their prime.

In the productive, industrialized countries, we are seeing the opposite. In Japan, for example, we have a huge decline in the population because work schedules and so forth, while making them super-efficent, have left many Japanese couples unable to successfully raise and care for a child. This wasn't the issue a generation or two ago, and so we have more old people than young people, creating a huge gap as the old people aren't of reproductive age.

In truth, China got the job done. They reduced the population, kept it under control. What they did to do that, however, was an act of unspeakable evil; we are only beginning to really understand the social consequences their one child policy had.

In general, its a matter of numbers. If people have enough children to replace themselves (two, one for the mother and one for the father, with some excesses), we can expect population to level out to about a comfortable 9 billion. However, if the average is 2.35 or so, only slighly higher, we could easily get about 11 billion people, most of whom will be plague-ridden, impoverished, uneducated, and having tons of children.

It's really not a matter of resources. In this day in age, we produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth(although getting that food to third world countries while ensuring economic profit for the farmers is another matter).

The real problem is that we must educate and provide services for these people early on so that they can be productive members of society, and by extension, they can provide for their children to be educated. They need to be useful, and be able to get jobs, or they'll remain poor. There are also other, related issues that contribute to the overall problem, like the role of women in societies like India.

Overpopulation can be avoided, but it will take the effort of the industrialized nations to offer our aid so that the problem can be stopped before it really starts.

Answer 3

We could take the world's entire population, put it in the state of Texas and the population density would still be less than New York City's.

Answer 4

Thats what it seems like, but I think Americans are making up for that lol. We are doing just fine and having kids like mad.