Could that anonymous reader pedling pop con have been the everywhere-else-refuted Al Gordo of global warming hoax infamy ?

Can any thinking, rational person not understand that at some point conscious and active population control will become necessary for human survival on a limited planet? Either we confront the issue and start consciously doing it ourselves or nature will do it in a random and ugly way, and perhaps in a way that the species won't be able to recover from.

That's all true, but it's also true that fertility rates can sometimes fall without comprehensive prosperity coming first. Poor people have higher death rates, and often higher emigration rates, and if they die and/or leave without being replaced, their numbers drop. This is a good thing.

I'm sorry to contribute to an off topic discussion, but the population control thing really gets me.

Conscious and active population control--to the extent that it involves mandates for individual and group reproduction rates--is pure megalomania. It is based on an incredibly simplistic notion of human behavior and economics.

In the places with the most population growth, there is no legal infrastructure to allow the reliable enforcement of limits on reproduction. In those situations, population control is simply another word for genocide.

Likewise, those are the very places where the realities of existence conspire to increase reproduction rates (patriarchy, poverty, and economic instability, to name a few). By targeting those problems, we can reduce population growth in a humane (yet indirect) way.

But at the bottom of the issue, there is no such thing as "overpopulation"--there are just real problems like poverty, pollution, and unsustainable practices. Given enough capital (including stable, fair social institutions and technology) there is no limit on the number of humans who can survive comfortably on this planet.

Unfortunately, we don't have those tools at our disposal at the moment, but we are building them rapidly. We should continue building them as rapidly as possible and dealing directly with the real problems of human existence, rather than pretending that all of these problems can be solved by adjusting a single parameter in the world.

Finally, urban sprawl in American has very little to do with population growth--it mainly arises from the fact that our lifestyle will expand to occupy all available space...regardless of how many people are involved.

"Given enough capital (including stable, fair social institutions and technology) there is no limit on the number of humans who can survive comfortably on this planet."

All other points taken, but that one statement has to be one of the most irrational (and bordering on insane) I've heard in a while. No matter how stridently we human beings assure ourselves that by the power of our own invention we are not beholden to the laws of physics and biology, in fact we are by those laws those laws- just because we can 'think' something does not make it reality.

I don't advocate any kind of mandated, forced institutionalized population control- the likely result of that would be the worst inbred, lock-jawed, hemophiliac, ruling-class idiot genentic line propagation (metaphorically speaking....). I do think real, in-depth education about what continuous 'growth' really means will lead people to self-limit the number of offspring they consider producing.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461

..for a great lecture on the subject of growth.

...and I don't think this is off-topic- affluence and population growth were mentioned in the blog post, and the blog is called 'how the world works' after all. Can anything be 'off topic' under that heading?

Well, I clearly shouldn't have said that potential population is unlimited, since as far as I can tell, the universe is limited. I particularly shouldn't have said that the potential population of this plant is unlimited, since the amount of matter on this planet is just a tiny portion of what is available in the universe.

However...

I believe that we are no-where near the limit that would be imposed on us by the resources on this planet, if we had unlimited capital (which we obviously don't).

Just for example, consider that we (the USA) are wasting around 100 billion dollars a year on our social engineering experiment in Iraq, which is greater than the entire GDP of Bangledesh (about 150 million people).

My point is that poverty is not an inevitable side effect of the number of people in the world, even if that number were to double or triple. We could probably eliminate poverty today if we only figured out how to stop waging wars, and we didn't have so many people hoarding all of the natural resources and otherwise preventing others from taking care of themselves and their loved ones. Even if we didn't quite have enough technology or material infrastructure to eliminate poverty immediately, we could surely develop those resources over the next 50 years, regardless of population growth.

To wrap this up, I agree that the reduction of reproduction rates is a valuable strategy that individuals or communities can take to get out of poverty, but I deny that there is any reason to think that it is a necessary part of any strategy that reduces/eliminates poverty.

We have too many options before us, and obsessing over one of them will be counterproductive.

we are already implementing a form of population reduction in Western Europe and the United States. Our birthrates are below replacement especially in Italy. The dramatic news stories of the lowered birth rate in Italy describes whole villages populated by an increasingly elderly population with only a few children sprinkled in.

In the US as well as Europe, any population growth comes from immigration from other parts of the world. I suspect the reason for the birthrates decline is from affluence. Make people's lives a lot better and they stop having children. This fits with my philosophy of "don't stop them from coming here, make them want to stay there." Raise the status of women, reduce infant and child mortality, make it possible for women to live independently, reduce the negative influence religion has on women's independence, and soon they will have fewer children.