[phkahler]

They point to population growth as a contributing factor, yet they never suggest anyone do anything about that.

How about free birth control to anyone who wants it? How about permanent birth control to any adult who wants it? I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway. With increasing productivity we don't have jobs for all the people anyway, why not encourage making less of them?

I'm not talking about mandates or government deciding who reproduces, just having them help folks that would prefer not to have kids to not have them. The solution doesn't always have to be more regulation.

[josefresco]

I think one of the keys to "controlling" population growth is to bring people out of poverty. Most studies I read, show dropping birth rates as people/nations climb the economic ladder. Education, and health care also play a big part.

[throwaway5752]

Since the original topic is the global fresh water crisis, wouldn't the increased per capita resource consumption from greater standards of living offset any gains in population growth slowing?

[snowwrestler]

Not necessarily; there is sometimes quite a lot of surface water in poor areas of the world, but no reliable way to disinfect it. So you get wells dug next to rivers, because the well water is clean and the river is not.

Rising living standards create the capital, infrastructure, and stability to build water and sewage treatment plants to make better use of surface water.

In the developed world, much of the "population" problem is the location, not amount, of people. Lots of people have moved to Phoenix because of air conditioning and groundwater wells. Its population growth has been driven almost entirely by migration, not birth rate.

One potential solution there is to allow accurate market pricing of water. If it becomes progressively more expensive to live there as water supplies dwindle, people would stop building water-hungry golf courses and stop moving there. Unfortunately, control of the municipal water supply is often in the hands of the local government...who is not going to willingly vote to raise the price of water on their voters, and shrink their own city.

[DanBC]

Hopefully the developing world can learn from our mistakes and not build cities and farmland in deserts.

[throwaway5752]

I will offer a brief and unenthusiastic defense of that practice... the desert/arid climate can result in great yields as a result sunlight, lower use of pesticides and fungicides (dry climate unfriendly to mold and insects), and be less disruptive to - subjectively, on my part - less important ecosystems.

[dguaraglia]

Great question!

[phkahler]

>> I think one of the keys to "controlling" population growth is to bring people out of poverty.

That implies that poor people have a higher reproductive rate - which I believe is true. A shortcut is to offer birth control to poor people. Many of them don't actually want a bunch of kids, but when you're poor there's not much to do and sex is free.

I agree it'd be nice to bring people out of poverty, but shouldn't we stop creating more people in poverty too? Prevention is cheaper than a cure.

[snowwrestler]

There's a lot more to birth control than just dropping off boxes of condoms or the pill. You need a culture and a religion that allows it. You need women to have the freedom to employ it. You need men to allow women to make those decisions. You need men who are willing to accept the reduced pleasure of sex (from a condom) in order to prevent disease and unplanned pregnancy. You need education so people understand the connection between their individual actions, and the broader trends and problems of the society in which they live. Etc.

Just look at the U.S., where birth control is cheap, plentiful, and legal...yet there is still incredible social pressures working against its availability--even basic stuff like sex education, family planning, and condoms.

[DanBC]

Poor people don't have children because they are bored, but because they are poor and they need the labour to work the farm. Or because they know the infant mortality rates are awful and children under five die from easily treatable illness (eg diarrhea, treatment a few cents of oral rehydration salts and some clean water).

[__m]

there is probably more behind that than boredom. Maybe they want many kids to support them when they get older.

[phkahler]

I know a guy that grew up in a rural US town but went to college and is quite successful now. He went back and visited his ex girlfriend from high school. She had a kid to support and was going nowhere. He said he was extremely lucky not to fall into that trap. An exact quote: "There were two things to do in Beaverton, and I didn't drink".

[ido]

Population growth rates world wide have already plummeted in recent decades and continue to do so as more developing countries industrialize.

Current predictions point to stabilizing world population at 9 billion and the starting to slowly drop. In the most developed countries we have seen lower than replacement rates for a long while now.

[r00fus]

Amusingly, this is the population posed for 24th century earth in the movie "Star Trek: First Contact". Nice to know they didn't pull the numbers from thin air.

[systemtheory]

"I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway."

I totally understand you're coming from a good place here, but this is exactly the type of thing that can go all sorts of wrong when implemented by people coming from not such a good place. Also, this could come across any number of ways if you're coming from a different place (socioeconomic wise). For instance. Well off families tend to have less children and are in a position to provide for them. So, if I'm poor and can't afford to take care of my kids properly, you're proposing I just don't have them?

I use that example only to emphasize what I think is already implicit in your comment, that this is a super complex issue. My reaction to the article was similar to yours, just from a different angle. I kept reading "more efficient use of" and thinking, at what point do we realize we need to use less and not just get more out of what we use?

[makmanalp]

I wonder if there are strategic reasons behind this - do the US and European countries fear a growing China and India and feel the need to compete, for example? Are there military or economic incentives to having a large population today as there used to be a millennium ago? I'm probably going to go with no, but who knows?

[phkahler]

>> I wonder if there are strategic reasons behind this - do the US and European countries fear a growing China and India and feel the need to compete, for example?

Well the US would be in a slow decline if not for immigration, so we're trying to get smart people to come here which both sustains us and deprives the others of talent. We also seem to like ambitious folks willing to work hard for less pay, so we maintain a very leaky southern border.

China is the only country I know actively trying to address population. The guy who invented RISUG is in India, but I haven't checked how that's going in a while.

[auganov]

I always had a feeling that most of China's "success" is just centralizing wealth of the whole country in a few places under governance of not so many people. With so many people you don't have to be terribly successful at reform to produce a bunch of impressive cities etc. Per capita it has a long way to go. We'll never know until/if China breakups into multiple countries (or something similar).

[tracker1]

...or a global plague... something similar to the black plague, or some of the really bad flu epidemics... without the risks from infectious disease, humans are pretty much un-checked.

I'm not suggesting that we actually engineer such a solution, but the fact is there are too many people on the planet, and the population is only growing... Eventually the real perceived value of life will decrease, and more militant solutions will start presenting themselves.

It's not popular, and my only hope is I don't live to see things get really worse.

Desalinization really should be something under much heavier research than it currently is. As should farming with less water usage, as well as cross-country water pipelines.

[civilian]

Our population should cap out at 10billion: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g... and the ethical thing we can do to encourage that is to pull people out of poverty and give them education and tv.

[edkennedy]

Lovely ideas, but very far out of reach. Some of our elected officials would rip apart planned parenthood and impose strict rules on birth control if they could.

[phkahler]

>> Lovely ideas, but very far out of reach. Some of our elected officials would rip apart planned parenthood and impose strict rules on birth control if they could.

Much of the opposition to planned parenthood is their being a provider of abortions. Witness the new healthcare law requirements for insurance to cover birth control. But then Hobby Lobby wants an exception. I'm just advocating the offering of permanent procedures, which should be cheaper long term.

[techaddict009]

Indian Government does have programs for what you have said.

[eikenberry]

When you say free you don't mean free. Free means no one pays for it which means no one spends time making it. If anyone has to spend any time making and/or distributing this birth control it isn't be free by definition.

[MBlume]

"When you see free you don't mean free. Free means [this thing I just decided it means, which is quite obviously not the meaning you're using]. If [the definition I just introduced doesn't obtain] it isn't free by definition."

[Vraxx]

Or they don't mean the specific definition of "free" you've concocted. Free can definitely mean "without payment" which one could easily infer from context and it's what GP meant.