drbuzz0 said:

Any country that can’t feed its own people is generally unable to fix any other problems.

If your people are starving, forget about worrying about healthcare or improving housing or transportation infrastructure. Providing a consistent secure food supply is a necessity before you can go any further.

As long as there is not ample food, you will never be anything but a third world, impoverished country.

Norman Borlaug is the single most important individual when it comes to providing for this basic need and thus allowing for further improvements.

A good point. In addition to feeding so many and saving so many lives, Dr. Borlaug also made it possible for whole societies to begin to move ahead in all ways.

Lets not forget that Dr. Borlaug’s work is far from finished. He was still working hard up to his last years because despite all he did, hunger remains. Here’s to keeping fighting the good fight. Dr. Borlaug’s death does not mean the death of his life’s work.

        Pete Murphy said:

But because they are blind to population growth, there’s one obstacle they haven’t considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.

By the time the human population gets large enough that it would cause those problems most of the population will be living in space, not on Earth.

Malthus was wrong and Malthusians have consistently been wrong, it would be nice if people could accept that and accept that we’re developing the technology needed to ensure that we can continue to grow our population much further should the need arise (it will).

The extra term that will add to the geometric growth of population will be insignificant (although those who live a very long time might not have the same need for children as mortals do).

Either way, once we get to that stage routine space travel probably won’t be far off (at which point we have effectively infinite resources).

        Joffan said:

Further to Russ @19, I think the key on pensions is demographic stability – an age profile that is relatively stable and expected to remain so for at least the medium term, say forty years. India, as you say, certainly does not fit this criterion – but I could argue that their situation is favorable for a limited-term early retirement, since the upcoming generation should generate enough wealth to sustain their elders.

Well, considering the situation in India, providing for any large group is going to be a challenge. The country is doing better than it used to, but lets not kid ourselves here – there are millions of Indians in need and the average income of the country is too low for the government to really start providing for the living needs of so many. The total wealth of the country is descent, but divided by the number of citizens is quite low.

We’re talking about providing pensions to a large proportion of the population in a country that still has not gotten to the point of having reliable electricity in all the urban centers. (they have electricity, but as I understand, all the big offices and factories in India have a generator system that gets used a few times a month).

Not to be down on India though, they have made great strides and hopefully they’ll get much closer to the point of having less fundamental social needs and funding problems in the next couple of decades.

Lets not forget the big point of this all though: They already have made the first enormous step toward a better society. Starvation is no longer a problem in India. Perhaps in some isolated circumstances it is, but the country does not have famine problems and it is a net exporter of food.

Any country that can’t feed its own people is generally unable to fix any other problems. If your people are starving, forget about worrying about healthcare or improving housing or transportation infrastructure. Providing a consistent secure food supply is a necessity before you can go any further. As long as there is not ample food, you will never be anything but a third world, impoverished country.

Norman Borlaug is the single most important individual when it comes to providing for this basic need and thus allowing for further improvements.

… threadjack …
If the work in extending human lifespan suddenly blossoms, and we can all refresh mitochondria, replenish brain cells and relubricate our joints as required, the same issue may well arise in the developed countries – but then what will retirement mean in that case anyway? And much more interestingly, how can we possibly contain population growth if people live twice, three times, ten times as long?

        George Carty said:

Isn’t lack of a comprehensive pension system (that’s “Social Security” to you Americans) the main reason why birth rates are so high in India, because people need children to look after them in their old age?

If that is the case then there really needs to be some real campaigning to educate people over the fallacy of this whole idea. Having a lot of children in a situation where you are already in poverty, or at least limited in your financial resources, is a guarantee that things will get worse. Perhaps children will turn around and help in old age, but they cost a lot in the near term and who is to say they will have the ability to help very much? If you’re not upper class and have eight kids, they’ll likely not be educated.

It is likely cultural, as kids have traditionally taken care of their parents. It would be more wise to have fewer children in this day and age and take the savings you get and put it into focusing on those children doing as well as possible. Two children get four times as much attention and money as eight. Another good idea would be to consider investing in savings and retirement plans or elevating your social status. One could argue that not having children assures you are better taken care of if it means you can get a better job, work more time, put more money aside and so on.

This idea is more modern. It’s not the same as when large amounts of labor was needed and big families were the way to keep up the farm or to assure that at least a few survive. It might be hard to change this whole perception. They should still try.

        George Carty said:

Isn’t lack of a comprehensive pension system (that’s “Social Security” to you Americans) the main reason why birth rates are so high in India, because people need children to look after them in their old age?

In one Indian state the government tried everything to reduce birth rates, but didn’t succeed until a pension was introduced.

I don’t know if that would really work. Seems a little shaky if the parents are fairly poor to begin with why would they presume that their children will have the resources to care for them much?

I don’t know that a government pension plan is even really a possibility. You’re talking about a country with a billion people and which is not exactly rich. The Indian government has more money than it once did, but in terms of GPD per person, it still ranks as poor. Providing a pension to that many people, many bellow the poverty line, would be a challenge for the richest countries in the world.

In the long run, it will be better living standards in general and better education that reduces population growth. I don’t know that they can wait that long. In general, I don’t know that I agree with Chinas methods but they do deliver results. The Indian government is a notorious for being a bureaucratic mess, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for them figuring out a viable solution.

Carlyle did not call Economics the dismal science because of Malthus, as 2 minutes with a search engine will show.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal.html

Quote from the latter:
”
Carlyle attacked Mill, not for supporting Malthus’s predictions about the dire consequences of population growth, but for supporting the emancipation of slaves. It was this fact—that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty—that led Carlyle to label economics “the dismal science.”
“