All three of us.

Everyone else bailed so they could go sit with the cool kids.

Or so I've been told by conservatives. The apocalypse is right around the corner or something like that. Realistically, we need to deal with this problem or we WILL ruin our planet in the long term. Birth control should be free, encouraged and handed out to the citizens of poor countries. Perhaps government programs offering financial rewards to those who abstain for having children. There are no other solutions to this problem. We either halt and reverse population growth or we kill our planet and everybody dies. Somehow we would need to get population down to the 500M-1B mark to live sustainably on Earth.

Part of the problem is our capitalistic system which relies heavily on unlimited population growth to keep things going. That and how our systems like SS/Health insurance/etc rely on a larger base of healthy young people to support the elderly.

At this point I think the only thing capable of saving the world would be if some genius was to create a highly infectious plague that sterilized 95% of those infected.

I'm not in the right forum to say what I really think.

If the goal was to bring mankind misery and destroy the world.

Demonstrably bullshit.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/11/health/us-lowest-fertility-rate/

ALL of the younger generation is multiplying like rabbits.College educated, professional people are having one or two children, and many of them are choosing to be childless.

However, I have worked with people in poverty, and they do tend to begin having children at a younger age, and to have more of them. The problem is that the middle class, which is expected to fund the social safety net, is shrinking, partly because of the income gap, and partly because of demographics. Fewer and fewer people are responsible for taking care of more and more.

The mean age of first-time motherhood is increasing among all racial categories in the US and in all states, teenage motherhood is down 42% from the year 2000.

The national average age of first time motherhood is 26, and the demographic with the youngest average is Native American women, who have their first child at an average age of 23.

For comparison the national average in 1970 was 21 and 24.9 in 2000.

You're suggesting a crisis where there is in fact a success story.

No elephants, no lions, no gorillas. They will be crowded out or eaten.

We have blown through Malthusian limits. Due to gene drives malaria will be gone in a decade. Unless they reform their culture they will destroy their continent.

If Malaria is eliminated and they keep breeding at current rates I suspect they'll just run out of food eventually. The question then becomes whether they'll receive food aid so they can continue overpopulating. It really sucks that they'll probably take down the whole ecosystem of the continent with them. They'll probably eat every critter that can be eaten and raze every last tree to the ground as their society collapses. Overpopulation is the #1 threat to the world IMO(even before climate change). Unless it is dealt with somehow we'll destroy the carrying capacity of the Earth for generations. Do humans have what it takes to be smarter than bacteria which multiply until the death of their host(and then the bacteria themselves all die)?

...of the country with a birth rate low enough to justify shipping in workers, nor will literally ANYTHING they do be able to dent it.

When you have groups with replacement rates of 8 and 10, 1.6 is a joke and our nation is the punchline.

That the racist conservative Family Values coterie is responsible for making sure that there's a very large rate of increase among black Africans and among Muslims? With Andean Latinos and indigenous plus SE Asians coming in second?


You're blaming the wrong people because they're the ones you probably want to blame for everything possible. In this, though, they have little to say. If we can't name the problem clearly, it can't be dealt with adequately.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwii9-_lr-7TAhUFziYKHdDGBTkQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FList_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate&psig=AFQjCNERejCAtfDXCKVzuiAGcu7srnPfAw&ust=1494816551647583

Even the much-vaunted restrictions on family planning clinics in Africa (etc.) don't have the effect most infer. The funding is much less than the demand, and the family planning clinics and agencies are fungible. The last time the funding restrictions went into effect there was great outcry, but the numbers stayed flat: the 20% of clinics that lost funding because they didn't stop counseling or providing abortion services simply had their funding transferred to clinics that didn't and which hadn't been funded before. The family planning services beyond abortion weren't affected. The number of women served didn't decline. It's even unclear if the number of abortions declined.

Lots of figures here: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Download/Standard/Fertility/ (and there's a link to a similar page for overall population figures)

From https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DVD/Files/1_Indicators%20%28Standard%29/EXCEL_FILES/2_Fertility/WPP2015_FERT_F07_AGE_SPECIFIC_FERTILITY.XLS , births per 1,000 women for 5 year age groups, starting at 15 (ie 15-19, 20-24, 25-29 etc.):

1950-1955 86.9 235.7 250.4 200.0 138.6 65.1 15.7
2010-2015 46.2 149.3 144.5 94.7 48.1 15.7 3.8

and the figures in between show the drop in each age group, usually from about 1965 (ie when good contraception was becoming available).

So to say "our younger population has been convince to have as many children as possible" is misleading. The younger population is having fewer children, just like everyone has over the past few decades. The total fertility rate for the world has dropped from a peak of 5.02 (1960-65) to 2.51 (2010-15). The medium variant estimate for TFR drops to 2.22 by 2050, and 1.99 by 2095.

Having said that, fewer babies is a good idea, environmentally, everywhere, and thus socially, as long as people can get over the "they're not from here" mistrust. Relevant: "the number one solution is educating girls and family planning"