musings on population

I've been having rather morbid musings on population at the moment.



The other day I was discussing Malthus, who as any fule know was the bloke who said that when population expands at a greater rate than food production population will then decline due to people dying of malnutrition.



Thats the basic idea and then it was sort of expanded to say and overpopulation can lead to death from increased disease and poverty from living in overcrowded conditions.



And then it became you get population expansion and there will be a RECKONING. Like Spanish flu or a war that kills us all. And a lot of people (or at least several important, educated, government people here) see HIV or Climate Change as that. They say they are good things because they will decrease the surplus population.



I would like to mildly point out at this point that the only reason overpopulation is a bad thing is because it leads to hunger, disease and premature death. So having hunger, disease and prmature death as a solution isn't really winning situation.



Anyway, me and this visitor were discussing the population trends and how we were going to reach 9 billion by 2050 and I gave the example of China in the 1960s which experienced localised 'classic malthus' where population combined with one years famine led to the deaths of at least 60million (in reality prob much higher).



Then this maths teacher whose here doing her VSO chirped in rather piously and said 'I thought people were dying in China because they were murdering the girl babies'. And I explained no that was a consequence of the mortality, the one child policy was to try and ensure that population growth rate declined so the people who did live had a better chance of surviving, and at first at least it was voluntary, you recieved a loan which you didn't have to pay back if you only had one child, but people kept having a second child and refusing to pay back, and you couldn't force them as they had no money. So then the authorities of the areas were told 'make sure they tow the line, do whatever you have to' and so you get the forced abortions, sterilisations and people abonding or murdering the female infants because if your only allowed one then its much better to have a boy.



At which point the maths teacher looked like she was about to burst into tears so I stopped this recap of my asia-pacific in post-war period module.



But the question which we began to discuss after she had gone was is it likely that any individual country will adopt a deliberate population policy in the near future, or would such a thing not be possible these days? It only worked in China cos they had a powerful non-elected govt. and you could argue it was only nesecarry because they didn't organise a large scale import of food in times of famine. Attempts in India have so far been given short shrift.