Jeff Woods wrote in part:
> Seriously though, this is just one more example of "too many people"
> trying to share a finite set of resources.  I think we've proven that
> the Earth can support 6 or 7 billion people (though not well)
> but those
> resources are (on average) being spread thinner and thinner.

I prefer to think of resources as "indefinitely large". It's compelling to
compare the views of ecologists with economists; economists have the better
track record in this regard (with the exception of Paul Ehrlich). Are the "6
or 7 billion people" consumers only, or are we also producers as well? The
Population Reference Bureau site, a large an interesting site whose URL Wirt
provided, has on that page:
Of course he (Thomas Malthus) could not foresee how modern technology would
expand food production

And this is what is interesting; so far, no one has predicted our future
well at all. So far, we really haven't ran out of anything (except customers
for the hp e3000). We find ways to expand production, to find more
resources, and so on.

Wirt wrote in part:
> The population of Japan, if trends stay the same as they are
> now, will peak around 2030 and then drop to 1/3 its current
> size by the year 2100. The same is true from most European
> nations, with many of the former Communist nations already
> in significant populational fall.

And this creates real problems for those countries, such that the U.S. might
do well to learn from the mistakes of France, Germany, and Italy. Japan is
not entirely happy with its declining / aging population, and so refers to
itself as a "chouju taikoku"; see for instance
<http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,644033,00.html>, or
this case study for Fujitsu at
<http://crm.fujitsu.com/en/case_study/japan/combi.html>. Searching on "birth
dearth" and Japan yields 375 hits of varying quality. Ben J. Wattenberg,
Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, author of "The Birth Dearth"
and moderator of the weekly PBS series "Think Tank", testified before the
House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security that "Already, Japanese
demographers are publicly speculating about which year in the Third
Millennium the last Japanese baby will be born."

For the intrigued, Google has a directory of articles on population topics
at
<http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Environment/Population/Colla
pse/News_and_Media/>, the second of which is
<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99aug/9908popdrop.htm>, which offers:
"The evidence now indicates that within fifty years or so world population
will peak at about eight billion before starting a fairly rapid decline."

Even if the naysayers are wrong about birth dearth, if it is only an issue
for the affluent countries
(<http://www.med.harvard.edu/chge/course/driving/population/transcript.htm>)
, and the underdeveloped nations continue to grow exponentially, what are
the consequences of the industrial nation's populations aging, and then
shrinking?

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
Do OT posts need disclaimers?

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *