"Overpopulation is NOT the cause of social or economic problems."

[Chibiabos]

I believe we are suffering from overpopulation, and population growth control is one of the few tyrannical acts of China upon its people that I feel may be a necessary evil (driving tanks over student protestors and throwing peaceful political dissidents into slave labor camps to do medial labor to export to teh U.S., however, I view as highly unnecessary evils). However, I also believe that, technically, overpopulation is not the cause of social or economic problems. I have no doubt whatsoever that it is a cause, but not the cause, as I have no doubt that greed and abuse of power by a variety of powers (warlords, religious leaders and elite capitalists) are also contributing factors.

 

[Tee Kay]

Mann does a fairly good job with Collapse as well

Can you explain this a bit more? I've read both 1491 and Collapse and I think I'm missing the point you're trying to make.

 

[Masada]

Can you explain this a bit more? I've read both 1491 and Collapse and I think I'm missing the point you're trying to make.

I would have thought that refuting many of the base-line propositions of Diamond - Maya notably - for ENVIROMENTAL DOOM would have been sufficient to suggest that everything following from that is nonsense.

 

[Tee Kay]

I would have thought that refuting many of the base-line propositions of Diamond - Maya notably - for ENVIROMENTAL DOOM would have been sufficient to suggest that everything following from that is nonsense.

Yeah, so I get the Maya part, but that's not to say that environmental change or limitations have no effect.

 

[Masada]

Conversely, that isn't to say that they will have a significant effect.

 

[Tee Kay]

Conversely, that isn't to say that they will have a significant effect.

But environmental limitations did mean that what scarce resources had to be carefully managed. To me it seems like environmental factors played a role and it was the inability to adequately respond or adapt that finally caused the "collapse", something which Diamond also argued IIRC in the Norse Greenland case.

 

[Abaddon]

This is what Google is for, seriously.

Google can give me any answer to that question.. I can show you United Nations Projections that indicate that world population will nearly stabilize at just above 10 billion persons after 2200, or I can find other random snippets like "It is now estimated that it will take a further 42 years to increase by another 50%, to become 9 billion by 2042." This is from a current "estimate" of 6,902,316,920

Either way, I have found nothing that says in 40 years growth will grind to a halt.

... Yes, yes. I get it, you want to push an agenda. That's fine. But if you want to do that, go do it at the local mall into a loud speaker where people might be interested in platitudes and talking points. I'm not.

No need to be an ass about it. Do you disagree? Say how or why, simply to call me out achieves nothing.

 

[El_Machinae]

How long are we talking "No longer seeing an obvious decrease in the relative number of food impoverished people"? Because we're certainly still part of a massive Macrohistorical trend in that direction.

It's the nature of trends that we cannot easily tell if we're still in a trend or leaving a trend, at any point in time (especially when recent indicators are contra-indications of the trend). So, my comment is more that "it's not obvious that the trend is continuing". The problem is that, if the trend reverses, we won't actually know until it's too late.

It's also risk analysis. If I'm wrong, then more people are inconvenienced by eating (say) less meat. If the optimists are wrong, then we're going to see an unnecessary increase in the number of people who suffer real hunger.

Anyway, the trending downwards (of the percentage of hungry people) has appeared to stop. In 2005-2007, 13% of the world was hungry. In 2010, it's still 13% (source). Additionally, the price of food is teetering on rising faster than global economic growth.

The trend we do NOT want to see is an increase in the price of food that's faster than economic growth. Maybe in short-term snippets, it's not bad. But if it becomes the new trend, the world becomes a much worse place.

 

[Dachs]

Exponential growth is magical, but nature has its ways of taking care of overpopulation.

No, it really doesn't.

 

[Narz]

Well Malthus lived there weren't even a billion people total on the planet. Now we have a billion people starving (but, you know, the rich people cancel them out so they don't count). Go progress!

Seriously Brian O'Neil is a dumbass. What are his qualifications exactly?

Once we wriggle free from these intellectual handcuffs, who knows, we might find that there is no limit to how many people we can have on this planet, or to how full and free and satisfying their lives can be.

Who knows? Maybe I'll find out that I don't need to buy food to fill my fridge but discover a magic leprechaun in the back that will bring me unlimited food, babysit for me & find CivGeneral five hot girlfriends! I mean, maybe, it could happen.

Human societies respond population pressures with new form of organization and technology.

Mostly they collapse actually.

Rome's population for instance :

http://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of-rome-through-history/2189/

We haven't refuted Malthus with modern day technology, we just created a bubble.

Well put LastOne. In the end, fossil fuels has allowed us to overshoot sustainable population by way more than we otherwise would have been able to. Probably making the problem far worse in the long run.

A quick word to the wise ought to be enough; that great modern enthusiast on the Malthusian trap, Jared Diamond, has formulated his outstanding theories in unashamed apologism for the triumph of White Europeans and the resulting present world order. His arguments, and those put forth in Collapse, which seems to be the Bible of our Polish protagonist, ought to be paid little heed. We know very well that we have evaded the doom projections of Malthus because, as he was unable to foresee, mechanization has allowed production to outrace the growth of population for more than a hundred and fifty years now, and there is little reason to assume that this trend will dwindle or reverse itself in the remotely near future. That so much poverty and detrimental existence still pervades our planet is testament only to our unwillingness to keep after our brothers, and by no means indicative of some impending social collapse. And I give little credence to the thought expressed in recent posts that Malthus still holds for the Third World. Perhaps if they were isolated societies, but that is not the case. They are but divisions of a larger whole, a whole which has the means to evade this trap, but whose leadership has chosen out of plutocratic self-interest not to indulge in them.

Maybe Diamond is a big jerk (I don't really know, I couldn't get into his book & put it down just a chapter or two in, I much preferred Joesph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies) and certainly rich Western nations could do more to help our brethren but it's naive to think that we can continue our current growth as a species (populationwise & economicly) when so many ecological & social signs point in the opposite direction.

The whole "evil rich men make up environmental problems/global warming" to keep the poor from breeding is pretty much a conspiracy theory. Not to mention if they're trying to keep the poor from breeding they're doing a pretty bad job at it.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Mostly they collapse actually.

Rome's population for instance :

http://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of-rome-through-history/2189/

You have cause an effect fundementally confused.

 

[Narz]

You have cause an effect fundementally confused.

I'm not saying overpopulation & resource/environmental mismanagement was the whole reason for Rome's collapse but it was certainly part of the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period

 

[Dachs]

Relevant post to this lolroman stuff.

Also, the opinion of a real historian.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I'm not saying overpopulation & resource/environmental mismanagement was the whole reason for Rome's collapse but it was certainly part of the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period

No, you misunderstand. Blaming the Roman Empire's collapse on overpopulation is a different kind of stupid.

What you have there is the city of Rome. Which declined (not collapsed) as a result of no longer being the center of a vast empire. This vast empire did not dissapear as a result of the city's population declining.

 

[Dachs]

And Rome had ceased to be the center of a vast empire in the late third century.

 

[ParkCungHee]

And Rome had ceased to be the center of a vast empire in the late third century.

I'm afraid I don't understand the point you're making.

 

[Narz]

No, you misunderstand. Blaming the Roman Empire's collapse on overpopulation is a different kind of stupid.

What you have there is the city of Rome. Which declined (not collapsed) as a result of no longer being the center of a vast empire. This vast empire did not dissapear as a result of the city's population declining.

You misunderstand. It takes empire to support large urban populations. With more & more people flocking to cities it's kind of an important issue. Economic collapse, electrical infrastructure failure, oil shortages, etc. All these things would devastate city populations if they could not be solved within a few days.

Relevant post to this lolroman stuff.

Also, the opinion of a real historian.

I already saw that thread. Skimming your post, the underpopulation problem I assume is a problem of the entire empire & the food supply issue I'm assuming is due to not enough farmers (correct me if I'm mistaken).

Again, Rome's population crashed because it's takes an organized & stable empire to support large cities. All empires that crashed had massive population declines in their urban areas.

It's fine to say, "well they all dispersed to the countryside" but how exactly would that work today when people from the countryside are flocking to cities as fast as their hungry legs can carry them?

People seem to get all excited to knee-jerk react/refer on forums without first trying to understand the point a person is making.

 

[ParkCungHee]

You misunderstand. It takes empire to support large urban populations. With more & more people flocking to cities it's kind of an important issue. Economic collapse, electrical infrastructure failure, oil shortages, etc. All these things would devastate city populations if they could not be solved within a few days

So that's an argument against political destabilization, not overpopulation.

 

[Dachs]

I already saw that thread. Skimming your post, the underpopulation problem I assume is a problem of the entire empire & the food supply issue I'm assuming is due to not enough farmers (correct me if I'm mistaken).

Again, Rome's population crashed because it's takes an organized & stable empire to support large cities. All empires that crashed had massive population declines in their urban areas.

It's fine to say, "well they all dispersed to the countryside" but how exactly would that work today when people from the countryside are flocking to cities as fast as their hungry legs can carry them?

People seem to get all excited to knee-jerk react/refer on forums without first trying to understand the point a person is making.

Yeah, the skimming doesn't help. The only verdict we can make on population levels within the WRE before it ceased to exist is that some areas that weren't very important to the empire overall (e.g. northern Gaul) may have been experiencing a decline in population within a period significant to the collapse of the state, and that in turn is chiefly based on the lack of certain metrics which do not, in themselves, indicate population decline. If the people in a certain location stop building in stone, stop using coinage of a certain kind, and stop using certain kinds of relatively hardy ceramic ware, they are archaeologically invisible. That's essentially all we can say about northern Gaul in that period. Various possible reasons have been put forth for this archaeological invisibility, including a simple loss of political control of the area from the 380s onward, which entailed the departure of probably the most significant population agglomerations in the area, which were 1) the legions on the Rhine and 2) the communities associated with imperial patronage, which ceased to be after Gratianus moved the capital back to Italy.

And that's just one area - northern Gaul. In other areas population decline is archaeologically impossible until after Roman political control ended. In certain others, such as parts of Italy, it may have gone down, but we're not entirely sure to what extent this is migration internal to Rome and to what extent it is people dying off. (And of that migration, we don't know the circumstances; were these people moving around in the same way they'd been moving around Europe since, oh, time immemorial, or were they victims of a violent expulsion, or what?) In Britain, the archaeological evidence is such that we can't tell if the population started to become archaeologically invisible starting in the 380s or the 450s. (The 410s is usually considered to be the best bet based on coinage, but that's only one metric!) And in the overwhelming majority of the territory of the western Roman Empire, population did not noticeably decline until long after the empire ceased to be - the Eastern Mediterranean pandemic is usually assigned the role of culprit, and that didn't happen until the 540s. (And had nothing to do with the fact that there were no longer any reigning emperors in Ravenna.)

The tl;dr version of the above is essentially that depopulation and the political demise of the Roman state in Western Europe are impossible to connect in any meaningful way across the entire spectrum of Roman society.

Your comment about large and stable empires being a necessity for cities is of course silly. (Although if it were true, I'm not sure what point you'd be attempting to prove - as PCH mentioned, it seems to be an argument for political centralization if nothing else, something of which I don't think you're a huge fan!) Urbanization in non-imperial contexts is of course well documented in classical Greece and post-Berengar Italy. Complex societies do not require political centralization. Various explanations have been put forth for the "Great Simplification" of the fifth and sixth centuries, most of which are fairly unconvincing and which require some leaps in logic (most famous of these being Walter Goffart's super-revisionism, which makes for a complicated read!). Plenty of them seem to make the point that in the Roman West, the simplification was not necessarily tied to the political demise of Rome. In some places, it happened earlier (sometimes much earlier); in some, it didn't occur for centuries.

I'm not really interested in tying the case of Rome to the modern world, because circumstances are so radically different. Usually, historical comparisons are bad, or at least poorly thought through, and one can't really learn from the "mistakes" of the past in order to "correct" one's actions in the present.

 

[ParkCungHee]

And uh...could you clarify the importance of the later third century for me?