Overpopulation

[Francesca R]

I'm fine with discussing it. Its basicly a math problem. It has little to do with productivity.

Wrong. Why would it be a maths problem? More old people, less young people. So what?

Because older population cohorts are less productive, that's what.

Less labor. isn't necessarily the problem; its the ratio of old people to children that will be the problem.

And wrong again. You tell me why more old people versus children matters then? Do you mean the excessive burden on birthday cake candle manufacture?

 

[quarky]

no, I mean for the survival of a healthy population.

suppose a world consisting of an island that will support 100 people at an acceptable standard of living. If people live to be 100, and their children can't have a child until the 100 year old is gone, they could be 60 or 70 years old by then...too old to reproduce.

The normal way around this is to increase the population; then it doesn't matter.
But assuming we put a cap on that; or one is imposed by the planet; then we'd need to take a different approach to this to avoid demise.

True, not everyone would want to reproduce, which could allow some slack...but this too would eventually lead to species of mostly old. So what, you say?

I'll get back to you.

 

[Francesca R]

OK, you seem to be talking about some competition for space, like a car park where you have to wait for a car to leave before you can get in. Practically I can't see that scenario ("You can't have a child until someone dies"). More like you can, but the extra person has to make do with the same resource pool.

And in that case, again, the principal reason why it is a problem is the net consumption of older people compared to the net production of working-age ones. So the economic issue is people not dying quickly enough, not people being born. In your "car-park hypothetical" where people staying alive itself limits the birth rate, then you are correct to imply that the population would spiral down to extinction more quickly (absent a revolution, which would be more likely IMO)

 

[Delvo]

There have been tiny, isolated populations that have needed to stay tiny because their lands were tiny and isolated. They did not have the one-out, one-in rule. That would obviously be impossible. What they did have was abortion, infanticide, common practice of sexual behaviors in which ejaculation does not occur inside a woman's vagina, and cultural acceptance of suicide for the goal of getting oneself out of the way for others (or out of frustration due to a lack of opportunity to get some of the limited resources for oneself because others already have them, which is related to population density).