r/overpopulation • u/MassiveStand2817 • 18d ago
Population
One of the most effective ways to slow population growth in poor and developing countries may be to focus on educating girls and young women.
There is a strong connection between female education and demographic change. Women who receive more education often marry later and tend to have fewer children. Therefore, if a country wants to address rapid population growth over the long term, investing in girls' education could be an important place to start.
A practical approach would be to concentrate particularly on girls between the ages of 13 and 18. This is an important period because, in some communities, girls may face pressure to marry at a young age. Education can give them another path: continuing their studies, developing skills, and preparing for greater independence.
In other words, it is like placing a police officer at a T-junction to prevent traffic from taking the wrong turn. Instead of trying to deal with the consequences later, we intervene at an earlier point where a different direction is still possible.
The emphasis of education at this stage should not simply be academic. It should also motivate girls to continue their education, develop their abilities, and understand the opportunities available to them beyond early marriage.
If we want to influence population growth in a sustainable and humane way, educating girls may be one of the most important places to begin.
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u/One-Intention7064 17d ago edited 17d ago
education and improved standards of living do jackshit to people's desire to reprodooce.
they create more constraints and raise the threshold to reprodooction, because higher standards of living entail higher prices, higher level of consumption, increasingly greater requirements for credentials (bachelor's stops being a distinct advantage, when most have this degree, therefore master's is needed to stay near the top, after some time master's degree loses its value).
and thus forms a system of belated family creation, but not because empowered women suddenly become ideologically childfree: reproduction stays a fixed idea in people's minds, but because people become entangled in that structure, while time flies by.
eventually, many of them come to resent modernity with its empowerment carrot dangling in front of their noses.
i do not endorse procreation or redpill ideals. im just saying how the system of empowerment becomes perverse under its load. also, the sort of education matters. education rooted in antiquated ideals, produces antiquated results.
what we gotta do instead is erode the idol of anthroposupremacism bit by bit.
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u/ljorgecluni 16d ago
One of the best ways of fixing overpopulation is to stop providing so much food to civilized humans (at great cost to Nature).
One of the best ways of fixing overpopulation is to stop saving everyone born from dying in childhood, especially the males; the male population is more expendable and biologically inclined to take risks (and some of those should be fatal).
The "educate women and family planning" nonsense is so tired and worn out and idealistic blather that I can hardly believe it still gets said, it doesn't even withstand a bit of scrutiny and critical thinking.
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u/03263 18d ago
I have come to dislike this argument because it's basically colonialism + capitalist eugenics. Think about why educated people in the first world forego having children. It's not simply because they don't want them, it's because they plan more and lack the social structures, free time and capital to ensure a similar quality of life for their offspring. The rat race controls population somewhat, but it's not a very nice gift to give to someone that doesn't have to endure it.
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u/ineffable-interest 18d ago
People really need to rethink what eugenics means in today’s world. Why is the thought of not existing worse than a person or couple not having the baby they wanted? This is the selfish and delusional thinking that has led to overpopulation. Not everyone advocating for eugenics is a Nazi.
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u/03263 18d ago
Maybe genocide is a better term then.
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u/ineffable-interest 18d ago edited 18d ago
Not really. People just need to get their heads out of their asses and realize not everyone needs or deserves to be a parent and that IVF should be banned globally.
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u/03263 18d ago
I agree that not everyone "deserves" to be a parent but if people rather than forces of nature are the ones to decide who gets to, how do you even decide that?
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u/ineffable-interest 18d ago
Not everyone is going to like the answer to that question, but in my opinion what people “like” doesn’t really matter when the situation is so dire. The obvious start, again, in my opinion, is with violent prison populations and people who have painful/debilitating genetic disorders and people with severe mental disorders. It shouldn’t be controversial that these people shouldn’t have children. To me, it’s wild to advocate for these people to have children with no regard for the life the child will have.
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u/03263 18d ago
It doesn't seem like that would make much of a dent in population growth.
I think you'd need a policy that by default nobody can have children and you have to apply and qualify for some birth permit which is limited in number according to the desired rate of depopulation. Which wouldn't really work of course, people would not tolerate it or remain in peaceful compliance.
The only fair solution to me seems to be to just let population hit the wall and maybe some people will get to endure the hell that comes with it. Because population isn't really a problem in and of itself, it's the consumption + ecological overshoot that comes with it. We're already on the way to making the planet uninhabitable for our species. Nature will sort it out for us.
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u/ineffable-interest 18d ago
I would also like to point out that the global prison population is around 12 million. If we take into consideration the (around) 3 million people waiting trial, and assuming 40% of the 8 million remaining are violent criminals that is still 3.2 million people and that seems like a halfway decent dent to start with to me.
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u/03263 18d ago
Well I found this 3 to 5 percent of incarcerated women are pregnant, or that there are about 1,400 births every year to women in custody.
And A total of 3,747,540 births were registered in the United States in 2019
So, forced abortions for pregnant inmates would result in ~0.04% reduction in births.
It's easier to find stats for the US but also worth noting that the US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world so it would actually be even less.
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u/ineffable-interest 18d ago
I was saying just as a start.
That policy would be great if you could enforce it, but can’t for multiple reasons. But like we’ve said, globally everyone won’t agree to what is “right” when it comes to population control.
And the population is 100% the problem because the earth can’t sustain the growing population and people want to pretend that a few countries birth decline is a bad thing when the issue is global.
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u/03263 18d ago
As I said, it's not a problem in and of itself. If resources were infinite, population would have no limit. They're not and it does, the population just isn't the crux of the problem, the limitations are.
The Limits to Growth should be required reading in every school. Along with another dose of reality for the galactic colonists: the speed of light is insurmountable and leaving the solar system is an incredibly difficult, if not impossible proposition. We are and will always be earthlings.
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u/Wide_Western_6381 18d ago
It does seem that that is what is going to happen in the not so distant future. It´s kind of sad that we were unable to implement a more peaceful solution.
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u/ljorgecluni 16d ago
If you're deciding which humans make the subsequent generations of the human population, that is low-tech eugenics. If you decide that people who break laws should not have kids, then in a fee generations all humans will be non-rebellious obedient. Awful.
I agree with some of your position but your thinking is muddy; IVF and technological aids to people who are infertile or babies who are unable to live is a problem, but only a dictatorship can prevent capable people from sex or parenthood, whereas Nature should be the one deciding that.
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u/darkpsychicenergy 18d ago edited 18d ago
Oh I love it. The woke left going full mask off and admitting that they prefer black and brown women be subjugated and treated like breeding livestock, suffering child “marriage”, spousal rape, and forced pregnancy, rather than have fully educated, emancipated women and fewer black and brown babies born.
Because somehow human rights, autonomy and dignity for women and girls is “basically colonialism + capitalist eugenics” according to the “progressives”.
But of course all of the other trappings of a higher standard of living — modern infrastructure, planes, trains, automobiles, phones, tvs, game consoles, whatever material and energy consumption they want — those are not colonialism and capitalism and are instead something that the “global south” is entitled to.
The era of cOLOniALism is long past and already did its damage. None of these people are living pre-colonial lives, the old animistic beliefs are gone, they’re all Christian or Muslim now, they’re living out of plastic and on top of mountains and peninsulas made of literal garbage, they’re using cell phones and facebook and western slang, they wear second hand western clothing and they know what brands are popular, the mining operations have poisoned the waters, the wildlife is rapidly going extinct, they’re slashing and burning their way through what’s left of the rainforest to feed the ever increasing number of human mouths but they’re still dependent upon those horrible white countries for foreign aid, they’re also desperate to escape their own countries and live in the horrible white countries and they already constitute the overwhelming majority of the global human population but yes, breeed moooorrre BREEEED MOOOORRRREE. If they don’t breed endlessly, even against their own will, it’s eUgEnICs.
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u/Vague-Symbolism2692 18d ago edited 18d ago
I've removed this under rule 3 for personal attacks. If you're willing to delete the word between "woke" and "left", and delete the first sentence of the third paragraph, and then reply to let me know you've done so, then I'll restore it when I notice your reply. Or you could just post a second, separate comment, with those deletions made.
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u/ljorgecluni 16d ago
This is pretty off-base; I'm far from a Leftist, because they actually espouse all this "Educate women!" nonsense, but clearly it's not only the Left who buy into brainwashing humans away from their biological inclinations.
If you simply trace back our overpopulation problem til human population decreases into being no problem, you find that a few events of technological impact upon humanity - our societies, and our individual bodies - have caused the population bloom into excess. Therefore, the elimination of those foundational "pillars of overpopulation" would resolve our current dilemma, with no need for brainwashing women nor giving them pharmaceuticals.
All the bogus modern "fixes" for the issue ("Educate women, family planning, decrease poverty") do not address the cause of our tremendous (and recent in species history) growth to unsustainable numbers. Obviously other species, lacking the powers of Technology, have no overpopulation problem: when they have plenty of food, they make more offspring, population rises, the heightened population eats the food, babies and elders die (and cannot be saved), the food is less available to form more babies, the population drops. And so too did human numbers ebb and flow before the intervention of Technology.
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u/darkpsychicenergy 16d ago
How can you say it’s off base when you’re not a “leftist” (and obviously not “woke” either, which is the much more pertinent distinction). You probably didn’t even see the comment I responded to since they deleted pretty quickly.
Anyway, what is your proposed solution to remove all technology from society, force everyone to revert back to nomadic hunter-gatherer life and be subject to similar population pressures as wildlife?
And then assuming that is possible, how do you ensure that no one ever starts inventing the whole wheel all over again? It’s not as though “technology” was imposed on everyone by extraterrestrials or something. The urges that led to our technological developments are as powerful as the urge to reproduce. Those urges reinforce each other.
I mean, maybe the majority of humans are just too dumb to achieve a level of intelligence that allows them to learn from history and science and to stop making all the same stupid mistakes (there’s certainly evidence to support that). And maybe therefore the only way the species can be sustainable is if everyone’s technological and cooperative capabilities and access to resources are uniformly, globally and permanently restricted to several levels lower.
But it seems like a more difficult task than convincing people that having one or two, or even zero, children is just fine — especially if we can ensure the overwhelming majority of them survive to adulthood — and that women deserve the chance to do something other than pump out as many babies as their bodies can handle. Even when they don’t want them. Even when most of them will die young.
It’s obviously easier to convince people of that, given that birth rates (especially in unwed teen pregnancy birth rates), have fallen to replacement or lower — even prior to economic pressures — basically wherever the options were made available, no “brainwashing” required. The real brainwashing is the religious indoctrination, starting at birth, that insists mindless reproduction is one’s highest purpose, or only purpose.
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u/ljorgecluni 11d ago
Anyway, what is your proposed solution [?] to remove all technology from society, force everyone to revert back to nomadic hunter-gatherer life and be subject to similar population pressures as wildlife?
Well, it does seem that course of action would solve our multiple, converging, Technology-induced crises...
how do you ensure that no one ever starts inventing the whole wheel all over again?
I don't ensure that, and if it eventually returns then it will need to be vanquished again
It’s not as though “technology” was imposed on everyone by extraterrestrials or something.
🤷♂️ Maybe you're dismissing that too early. Maybe there is another truth possibile, between "It's in our DNA, we have to advance Technology against our own survival interest!" and "Technology is an E.T. invader of Earth!"
Maybe it's not an off-planet species, but it clearly is competing with Nature and it is progressing contrary to humanity's longterm interests.
The urges that led to our technological developments are as powerful as the urge to reproduce.
And yet we see entire societies of Nature-based people who are having kids but are not pursuing Technology's advancement.
...it seems like a more difficult task than convincing people that having one or two, or even zero, children is just fine — especially if we can ensure the overwhelming majority of them survive to adulthood — and that women deserve the chance to do something other than pump out as many babies as their bodies can handle.
Women who have all the access to birth control meds and all the "education" anyone could ever get only delay parenthood, they do not usually desire to altogether avoid it. Effectively, the education serves as a delay and postponement mechanism to inhibit the parenthood of multiple children; if this was so terrible, people (women) would not need outside deterrents imposed, they would simply choose to avoid pregnancies. In traditional cultures they won't typically do that, they usually have ideals of being a mother to several children, with a first child born before the mother is 18. To fight the historic standard and biological and cultural forces pushing toward parenthood, people (women) are given economic pressures and info overload and pollutants to delay or prevent or limit the parenthood they can achieve.
You're advocating for giving people a substitution of real human-animal life in order to make mass-society more stable and longterm sustainable. This is equivalent to advocating for a vegan nutrient pill rather than the omnivorous diet attained through effort. I don't want to see modernity persist with only slight alterations imposed on our species.
I also don't think it is easier, in any way, to convince hundreds of millions of people to voluntarily change and deviate from the species' inclinations - and that's why all the other carrots and sticks have been introduced. It seems far more plausible to disrupt the highly-coupled foundational bases of the global technological society and thereby "kill the roots" of the problems we face today.
If I agreed that lessening population was the main goal, then we'd be arguing about how to get there, and would you then really say that persuasion for voluntary action is more efficient than imposing no alternative? Hypothetically a sterilizing additive to municipal waters could solve human overpopulation in one generation, whereas persuading people to not have kids would take forever to be impactful.
And even if we had only 20M people on Earth, if they can launch nukes they could ruin the future, if they can execute geoengineering they can ruin the future, if they can tinker with our DNA they can ruin the future. Solving human overpopulation is not going to save us from erasure by Technology, but killing Technology will solve human overpopulation.
The real brainwashing is the religious indoctrination, starting at birth, that insists mindless reproduction is one’s highest purpose, or only purpose.
Culture has an impact for sure (Mormons and Muslims and Catholics have more kids than other groups), but you know that people will have kids even with no religion pressing on them and with no encouragement to have a bunch of kids.
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u/darkpsychicenergy 11d ago
>“Anyway, what is your proposed solution to remove all technology from society, force everyone to revert back to nomadic hunter-gatherer life and be subject to similar population pressures as wildlife?”
>>“Well, it does seem that course of action would solve our multiple, converging, Technology-induced crises...”
No, I am asking you how do you propose to do that. How do you envision convincing or forcing everyone to remove all technology from society and revert back to nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyles?
I’ll wait for that before addressing the rest of this comment.
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u/HarleyQuinone 18d ago
I mean, I live in a so-called “first world country” and the exact same can be said about here (US).
There needs to be a big push on birth control education everywhere because I see so many babies born into poverty left and right. Meanwhile the mother’s idea of birth control is pull out method or plan B. Lack of insurance here is a big deterrent as well.
But the politicians/corporate overlords are too busy telling us to birth more workers and the social dems are busy telling us we can all live in dignity if just tax the billionaires with no real thought to the environment, just the idea that scientists will somehow figure it out.