For one thing, it is temporary, because low fertility will eventually increase the proportion of another dependent group -- the population made up of older people who are no longer working.

I would argue that the impact of this dependency depends on exactly why these older individuals are dependent and how well they've prepared for this period of dependency and how the society in question treats older people and how much access these older people have had during their lives to good nutrition and exercise.

Obviously everyone reaches a point beyond which they can't really work. For some people that's like a second or two before they die, for others it's a much longer period.

In academia, older faculty are often pressured to retire simply because there are too many young people needing their jobs. If the old faculty won't retire, the young faculty won't survive in academia very long.

If there's a dearth of young people, and the old people have had access to good nutrition and exercise during their lives, I think many old people will keep working and the dependency problem will turn out to be a smaller problem than anticipated.

This is something people can prepare for NOW.

Lower fertility means you need healthier middle aged adults so they won't be AS dependent when they get old.

There's a way everyone can win, I think, if people plan ahead for this.

seems to be worsening, seemingly unaddressed. Strict population control does not seem to helped this rural/urban economic divide problem. (Certainly it may have in ways I can't see.)

In India, in contrast (where I would guess the propulation growth rate varies wildly between socioecomic groups), there is that "economic miracle" -- resulting for the very careful nurturing of the talented and hard working -- that similarly seems to have left the vast majority of the rural areas untouched, with laughable electrical supply, water and sanitation.... and the urban poor remain.

It's a nice thought that controlled growth, like China's One Child Family, will result in better allocation of resources, in turn producing a generation of healthier, better educated, more prepared for success Chinese youth... We'll see. The Tiny Terrors are all grown up now ... will they become profligate consumes or the creators of China's next-big-leap forward?

60% of the population is under 18. Barely 2 million Saudis actually have real jobs, with most either collecting on the dole or working in no show government make work. They will either have to create tens of millions of jobs in the next few decades or they will have to continue to rely on the largesse of the kingdom to provide for them.

Look at Pakistan - scheduled to have nearly 300 million people in the next 30 years. And they're poor.

Look at Egypt - on track to be Africa's most populous country soon. Again, few jobs.

Look at Nigeria - today's most populous African nation. Oil production is down 25% because of terrorism and violence. Good luck with that, dudes.

society and populations change... Communism was meant to try to advance extremely underdeveloped rural economies, to force them to -- almost literally -- leap a century into the industrialized, complex economies of the prosperous "Western" model.

There are a lot of populations in the world in need of vast "remedial" help ... even here at home. Without ever enacting something like "One Child Family" policy, the Chinese experiment may be instructive if as a society we ever attempt to change things.

I was struck during a History Channel MLK biography a few months ago when the question was asked -- what sort of society tolerates this sort of inequity?

It's 40 years later, the question remains ... and the path to more and better equality is unclear.

I will start my own humble little bog. Tonight was the tipping point. I got looking at a TV show about mega-yachts, rich Americans' big fiberglass motorboats.

The boats are ugly and boring. And the owners have bad grammar, plus they are ugly and boring. Soon, you will have a chance to read this sort of stuff in more detail.

Welcome aboard!

Humble little BLOG.

I was struck by the fact that the cited article seems to refer only to slowing the rate of population growth, not stopping it.

Surely anyone with even the most cursory acquaintance with exponential rates is aware that any rate of growth -- no matter how seemingly minuscule -- will eventually overwhelm the earth.

For example: assume the current population of the earth is 7 billion. Assume a growth rate of 3% per year -- roughly the high rate we've seen lately. At this rate, in just 1,020 years the population of the earth hits an astounding 61,800,000,000,000,000,000,000. And at that point, assuming that people weigh on average 150 lbs (68 kilos), human beings will outweigh the Earth itself.

Ok, so 3%/yr is pretty high; let's lower that growth rate to 0.3% per year. Does that eliminate the problem? Hardly: at that rate it will take humanity 10 times as long -- 10,000 years -- to outweigh the earth.

And so on: at 0.03%/year, we outgrow the Earth in 100,000 years, and so on.

Add to the mix the inconvenient fact that we will run out of resources (even water and oxygen) long before we reach that date.

The point is that NO growth rate is sustainable in the long run -- not even in the relatively short-sighted long run of a millennium. At some point, we (humanity) will have to stop, even reverse our growth; when do we start planning for that?

Communism was meant to try to advance extremely underdeveloped rural economies, to force them to -- almost literally -- leap a century into the industrialized, complex economies of the prosperous "Western" model.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that extremely underdeveloped rural economies were considered by Marx and Engels as societies NOT READY FOR COMMUNISM.

This is why many European socialists were devout anti-Bolsheviks and anti-Maoists -- because they believed that Russia and China made lousy candidates for building a Communist utopia.

Communism was supposed to be a worker's paradise. There was supposed to be some pre-existing Western-style capitalistic industrial base to the economy so that the workers could be rallied to a revolution against it.

How can you rally the workers against the capitalist bosses when there are no workers or capitalist bosses yet in your society?

This has a lot to do with Afghanistan, actually, because Afghanistan was one of those underdeveloped rural economies that Marxist-Leninists thought they could fast track to Communism without going through an intermediate capitalist industrial phase first.

As you can see, THAT plan failed big time, and 9/11 ended up coming out as part of the blowback.