The only economies of scale that continue to gain efficiency from having more than 6 billion customers are those where the cost of R&D dominates. Most products where the cost of R&D dominates are rather bourgeois, not what most people in poor countries need to stop being malnourished to the point of mental retardation.

The problem isn't present population - it's growth. For every increase in population, new infrastructure has to be built -- roads, schools, houses, markets, water treatment plants etc. When a country already cannot provide basic infrastructure for its current population, growth only makes their financial situation worse. When the average age is 15, there aren't enough adults around to teach or feed the noobs, and this further impoverishes the society. Vast tracts of virgin rainforest are razed to produce new farmland and new settlements -- this is a problem. Earth has enough people on it; population growth must stop.

I've been puzzling over a topic related to this for a while so if someone can add anything to this internal argument, please do.

My thought is this. I find that the system that we have today is far superior to a fractional or 1:1 gold standard because when you limit a currency to be representative of a commodity, the more people that you add to an economy, the less wealth can be established.

Example: Lets say we have a 1:1 gold standard. 1 dollar is worth 1 piece of gold. Lets say that there are 10,000 pieces of gold in the economy thus only 10,000 dollars. Eventually, the economy grows in population there will be more people than gold available in the system thus increasing the ratio of people to dollars. As the ratio of people to dollars becomes disproportionate, you'll find yourself with an increasing amount of poor people. Eventually, the people who do the best economically will eventually collect all of the gold and that will leave nothing for the rest to obtain nor purchase with thus preventing the economy from growing.

With that example, you'd eventually need to divide the value of the printed representation of the commodity that it's based one. Eventually, with enough people in an economy, you'd have to go from 1:1 dollars to gold, to 2:1 dollars to gold. If you still had 10,000 pieces of gold (no increase in commodity supply), you'd now have 20,000 dollars and more wealth that could be spread to others. If you're increasingly fractioning a currency against a hard commodity to meet the demands of population growth, you're going to get inflation anyway.

If I understand correctly, that's what the factional system is. You're fractioning how much the printed representation of the commodity is worth in relation to the commodity supply.

People praise the gold standard all the time but it doesn't seem to add up. Populations will always continue to grow as long as we don't have any catastrophic events. I imagine that the gold supply isn't being mined as fast as people are being born so what then? Just keep dividing the value of the currency until your dollar is only worth a tiny percent of 1:1? That seems to be futile and eventually self-defeating.

I would rather have a system like we have today in which the value of the dollar is based on what we perceive to be it's buying power. It seems that it'd be more stable that way because then the value of the currency wouldn't be based on how many notes are in or not in the system. If we lost half of the gold that we had, the value of the dollar would double and the markets would be all kinds of screwed up for a while. If we suddenly found twice as much gold as we initially had, it would halve the worth of the currency anyway.

It just doesn't seem proper in this day an age, with the kinds of product that we're making, with as many people in the total economies to base a currency on an expendable, destroyable, deflatable commodity.

bcglorf, you really think that Hitchens has done all this? "His book on Kissinger has done far more to stop the outrageous actions and policies of the west than you ever could with a gun." Honestly I don't think Hitchens has stopped anything. Nearly all the crimes he mentions in his book, I'm sure, have gone unpunished. Nearly all the criminals he shines a light on continue to walk free, with money in their pockets, and their bellies full.

Perhaps if Hitchens' book had entered the public mind as much as, say, the latest Transformers film, I could agree with you. But as it is, it seems like the only people who know about him and who have read his stuff are extremely small in number, and few are close to political power greater than a city council chair.

Anyway, I thought the end of the video was a bit odd. Hitchens gets furious about people criticizing American or British troops, claiming that they "defend you while you sleep". These soldiers are the enforcers of government law and policies. The same laws that prevent Kissinger, Bush, and other American war criminals from being punished. They (armed agents of the government) were basically responsible with defending Kissinger as he slept, too. How does Hitchens do these two things at once? 1) Argue that Kissinger is a war criminal and must be punished, and suggest that 2) the US soldiers protecting him are heroes.

Is the priority to first wage this "war within Islam", then after it's over, refocus our efforts on getting American war criminals punished?

If so, how easy is it to convince foreigners that Americans are liberators, punishers of the wicked, and not colonizers, if large-scale war criminals (who often have fond opinions of colonialism) go unpunished in America itself?

Furthermore, most of these soldiers he wants to celebrate are people who repeatedly vote against the ideologies of people like Hitchens, and few are for "women's rights" as Hitchens advocates for at the end of this video. They're not going to throw acid into a woman's face, but few think women are the intellectual equals of men, which makes me wonder if they even believe women should have the same number of votes as men.

Finally, is democracy itself even a worthy ideology to pursue? It seems clear to me that most Westerners believe their own societies to be far superior to other societies (politically, physically, intellectually, economically, militaristically, etc.), and that even if a global democracy was established tomorrow, most Westerners would desire more power than their population numbers would deserve. One need only look at how frustrated white conservatives have become in the past few years, thanks to the high population growth of non-white people in the country, to see an example of how quickly democratic philosophies are thrown out the window in order to protect one's freedom/wealth. See the current Health care debate for more examples.

In reply to this comment by Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Uh oh Psychologic... You're daring to bring the taboos of logic, common sense, and reason into this discussion. That's going to get you labeled as a neocon. Get ready for it - because the neolibs won't stand for your simple, correct assessment of the world's capacity to generate resources.

One of the fundamentaal premises of the kook neolib left fringe is that the world is hovering on the brink of resource exhaustion. Look at this thread. It is filled to the brim with literal idiots who are talking all kinds of bull about stuff they know absolutely nothing about except what has been spoon-fed them by equally ignorant professors and media hacks. Check out this glittering example...

"Ideal population growth is as close to 0% as you can get..."

That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Not only does this dingus believe that he knows what number of humams should/shouldn't be born, he also believes he knows what the Earth's 'ideal' population should be. Based on what math? None of course. It's just his opinion.

The neolib left is chock full of these kinds of psuedo-intellectual dipsticks. They go around spouting complete nonsense on topics they know sod-all about and perpetuate fallacies that any person with two gangelon to rub together can see are patently false at face value. But they LOVE this particular left-wing piece of idiocy (overpopulation) because it lets them engage in their favorite pasttime... Making stupid laws to take away freedom, control people, and limit happiness & prosperity based on junk science treated as 'fact' through no other virtue than faith and the psychological makeup of a lemming.

Late to the party but oh well.

Lets see: You bash "the kook neolib left fringe" for their baseless assumptions that the world is hovering on the brink of resource exhaustion, yet you take Psychologic's statement that "we could multiply the Earth's population many times over and still have enough resources for everyone" as gospel. Hmmm. Hypocrisy says hi!

Also, I love how you take Psychologic's assessment that "Infrastructure is the problem" and "The number of people involved isn't the major limiting factor." as "logic, common sense, and reason". Funny. I don't see any logic there considering the fact that "Wars, inept governments, and transportation costs" doesn't automatically exclude population as a significant contributor to famine. War = famine, therefore high population not = famine. Amazing logical inference there.

Hmmm. Perhaps when you say "logic, common sense, and reason", you're talking about Psychologic's claim that "Newer techs will help though. As cheap solar power matures there will be less dependence on power grids (eventually none), and manufacturing processes involving nanotech will reduce the cost of producing necessary items (eventually food too)."

What a prediction! The man must be a psychic or something! He knows in his heart that this "nanotech" thingy will be our salvation! What a brilliant scientific conclusion.

Seriously though, Psychologic's post is as full of bullshit as the posts that preceded it. It just happens to be your preferred flavor of bullshit. But hey, lets stick to the topic at hand here. I wouldn't want to bring something irrelevant such as politics into a discussion about population growth. Oh wait, you beat me to it.

And may I commend you on that wonderfully written diatribe against neolibs. It was definitely not full of your own opinion, and was instead nicely supported by facts, statistics, and science. I especially like the part where you called varietube a "dingus". I'd say something like "childish insults score no points here", but you already mentioned that yourself in your post to varietube below this.

Let me remind you of a quote of yours: "I simply find that I am - sadly - the only person on the sift who is able to provide this much-needed counterbalance in a way that is not inflammatory at its face value."

If your vitriolic rhetoric against neolibs wasn't inflammatory, then I don't know what is. You might want to start practicing what you preach. Unless of course, you feel like it's your duty to counterbalance all the "liberal idiots" on videosift with your own brand of shit.

Uh oh Psychologic... You're daring to bring the taboos of logic, common sense, and reason into this discussion. That's going to get you labeled as a neocon. Get ready for it - because the neolibs won't stand for your simple, correct assessment of the world's capacity to generate resources.

One of the fundamentaal premises of the kook neolib left fringe is that the world is hovering on the brink of resource exhaustion. Look at this thread. It is filled to the brim with literal idiots who are talking all kinds of bull about stuff they know absolutely nothing about except what has been spoon-fed them by equally ignorant professors and media hacks. Check out this glittering example...

"Ideal population growth is as close to 0% as you can get..."

That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Not only does this dingus believe that he knows what number of humams should/shouldn't be born, he also believes he knows what the Earth's 'ideal' population should be. Based on what math? None of course. It's just his opinion.

The neolib left is chock full of these kinds of psuedo-intellectual dipsticks. They go around spouting complete nonsense on topics they know sod-all about and perpetuate fallacies that any person with two gangelon to rub together can see are patently false at face value. But they LOVE this particular left-wing piece of idiocy (overpopulation) because it lets them engage in their favorite pasttime... Making stupid laws to take away freedom, control people, and limit happiness & prosperity based on junk science treated as 'fact' through no other virtue than faith and the psychological makeup of a lemming.

Ideal population growth is as close to 0% as you can.

It's not complicated : Birth Rates - Death rates should = 0%~

That says nothing about a current ideal size, just the fact that sustainable growth is an oxymoron, and if we're only dying so fast, we should only ideally be born so fast. The ideal size is calculated from a carrying capacity, which can be calculated when resources are finite and growth rates/consumption rates are known (which is why the census is important data, republicans).

Carrying capacity can change as we find new improved ways to stretch our finite resources, and it's best if processes are implemented in a timely manner with forethought. This requires science and basic day to day efforts.

The idea is simple but it is obviously very difficult to realize in reality... the problem can also turn into one of underpopulation.

balance is the key. education keeps you too busy to make babies. go to school.

>> ^messenger:
So, what would you choose as the means to stop population growth?


refer to my name

The whole point of the pro-life movement is to encourage an increase in Christian(tm) population to counteract the so-called population growth of the 'heathen' religions.

A child is born with zero knowledge of Jesus and other fantastical religious mythologies. They are programmed into it. You'd think a real god would instill an innate (even if basic) knowledge of divine origin within his/her creatures. Makes no sense not to do so. If you are a divine being who feeds on the faith of one's followers and had ultimate power in the universe over absolutely anything and everything... then why the fuck would it create a world as fucked up as this one? Thousands if not more competing religions, people killing each other over petty grievances, disease, suffering, birth defects, short lives, and an astronomically HUGE universe with a single tiny little habitable planet with a bunch of self righteous idiots who all claim to know what the BIG GUY IN THE SKY knows when they haven't heard a single fucking word or phrase from 'the source'. Of course they all claim they do hear, by default making them liars... whether they be ignorantly self-deceiving, or lying outright for twisted personal gain and profit (televangelists anyone?).

All rooted from a multi-version contradictory, violent, intolerant, unrealistic fantasy riddled tome that is more often than not cherry picked for tidbits of supporting commentary that agree with it's readers world view. The bits that disagree are conveniently ignored and dismissed as a vague parabole having some other meaning than in the horrific form it is written.

Yeah. God works in mysterious ways indeed.

ALEXA DANNER, ABC News: It's an idea that most of us would rather not face — that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind.

It seems outlandish, extreme — even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen.

Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the "perfect storm" of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.

In order to plan for the worst, we must anticipate it. In that spirit, guided by some of the world's experts, ABC News' "Earth 2100," hosted by Bob Woodruff, will journey through the next century and explore what might be our worst-case scenario.

But no one can predict the future, so how do we address the possibilities that lie ahead? Our solution is Lucy, a fictional character devised by the producers at ABC to guide us through the twists and turns of what the next 100 years could look like. It is through her eyes and experiences that we can truly imagine the experts' worst-case scenario — and be inspired to make changes for the better.

Yeah, but first you have to define "wasteful, politically motivated spending". Personally, i think 80% of what the federal goverment does is done wastefully and for political reasons.

The solution is not simply reducing government [spending], but decentralizing it. Downsizing the federal government and especially empowering county goverments (even many states are too big to be centralized).

"One size fits all" is terribly inefficient, has a MUCH higher cost of failure, decreases the value of political involvement by the average individual (thus discouraging it), and increases the motivations for corrupt government. Ultimately, it means the we become a government by and for the lobbyists, rather than the people.

Our nation's founders did a great job of putting in checks and balances. But they did not sufficiently plan for population growth. Add the fact that their primary population adjustment (the House of Reps) was killed off (frozen at 435) about a century ago, and now we our current twisted form of democracy.

If you want real change, we have to fix the scaling problems. This means localizing/decentralizing power (i.e. spending). But no, Obama would never consider that to be a "serious" option. No Democrat ever has, and once in office, few Republicans have either. We need more options.

So, what would you choose as the means to stop population growth?

Sniper007, the only reason we had all the wealth that we wiped out in this financial crisis was because we've been growing our economies at a steady rate throughout the modern period.

That growth is based on technological innovation... railroads, medicine, computers, the internet. They're all "unnecessary" and "unnatural," but they make workers in most areas of the economy able to generate more labor than was achievable in past generations.

Some of the growth is based on population growth, but each new baby makes our non-renewable resources a little more expensive, and so increasing population, especially after a certain point, starts to be a very mixed bag, unlike e.g. increasing our understanding of physics, engineering, and biology.

>> ^chilaxe:
Creating human-level AI isn't an issue of processing power.
We've had for some time supercomputers that already possess greater processing power than the human brain, and that doesn't mean that they do anything more than crunch lots of numbers.
Human-level AI will be about organizing that processing power in a way that's similar to the human brain's functionality.
Regenerative medicine and reprogenetics are much closer on the horizon, and have just as much potential to transform society.


I agree with everything you said. =)

As far as regenerative medicine, that will be an interesting path. We are on the verge of "curing" the aging process. That doesn't mean by 2020, but certainly within our lifetimes.

That brings entirely new situations involving ideas like Social Security and the entire idea of "retirement", not to mention population growth and resource availability.

I totally agree that software will be the largest hurdle on the road to true "strong AIs", but I also think that when most people ponder the possibility of achieving that goal they are doing so in the context of our current technological tools. The leap we've had specifically in data mining has been incredible... Kurzweil spoke of Google Images as one of the main reasons why his computer program was able to teach itself how to distinguish between dogs and cats. We have so much information available to us today (and still increasing) that it is becoming increasingly possible to create learning AIs based on that information.

I don't think it will be terribly long before the same thing is done with medical knowledge, which will be very interesting when combined with voice recognition. The biggest hurdle will be teaching computers to understand the meaning behind what people are telling it, but that is an area of AI that is increasing rapidly as well. There are already programs for cell phones that can translate your speech into other languages. It won't happen overnight, but when you're talking about the current speed of technological progress, 2030 is not an unreasonable prediction for something like that.

I know... I know... "Death"
Death stops population growth!

Sounds like the presenter really misses his days a horse racetrack commentator.

I am surprised that any country at all though would have an average fertility rate of 5-8, that truly is staggering. Also, it's almost ironic then now that as most of the baby boomers begin to retire in the vast majority of the developed world, these countries are clamouring for an influx of skilled immigrants because of their past population growth deficiency.