Wall Street’s attack on the Euro is about to begin. Their attack on America will be next.

World population growth rates are actually in decline. For example, over the last fifty years the population went from 3 billion to now almost 7 billion. However, U.N. best estimates are that the world population 90 years from now will be just over 10 billion, by which point it will basically plateau. The population explosion is already over in most developing nations in Asia, and really is only ongoing in African nations south of the Sahara.

Take a country like Bangladesh, for example. A half century ago it had just over 50 million and now it has 160 million. It sounds on the face of it like a Malthusian nightmare scenario. But in fact, this trend has already peaked. Over that same time period, the average number of children born per woman went from almost 7 to 2.29 today. To put that in perspective, it isn’t much above the U.S. rate of 2.1 children per woman. In other words, Bangladesh has already largely gotten its population growth problem solved, it’s just that the effects of fertility rate declines are delayed. Many other developing nations also have surprisingly low fertility rates. The only countries that have rates comparable to Bangladesh in 1960 are the poorest African nations and, the most backward nation in Asia, Afghanistan.

Good morning all,

This just in from fireside theater,” We’re all bozos on the bus” with a a rabid republicans driving the bus.

A mechanical over head crane has a limited carrying capacity, like the living mechanical planet earth, that fails when exceeded despite any clever claims of the operators .

There is no way earth will support a 50% increase in population and nature will return to balance no matter what our tiny little brains tell us.

Or was it, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf; Hand Me the Pliers”? I couldn’t bear listening to the MOTU type telling us how sweet it is when your fellow humans are being financially drawn and quartered for his profit and amusement.

Between him, Obama and the GOP, things don’t look good. I cringe everytime I hear someone cheerfully announce, “we’re going to have a baby!”

Toddlers and Tiaras ought to be illegal. Or at least investigated as child abuse.

The trader told the truth, as long as the market is moving traders should make money. Doesn’t matter if the movement is up or down. But I do worry that if Goldman or such should plan for a recession and not get it that they have the power to make one.

Shoot, just revaluing mortgages accurately on their books might be enough.

Boxturtle (If that fails, they can call their buddy in the white house and get more austerity)

We really don’t know how much population the earth will support under the worlds current lifestype. Population isn’t as much of a problem as you’d think, maybe. There’s plenty of open space, like Montana or Russia east of Moscow. Plenty of growing space for crops, if we’re not using them for motor fuel.

You can look at the crowded places, like Mexico City, Tokyo, or New York and say we’re full. But really, there’s plenty more room.

Boxturtle (You’ll notice, however, I didn’t mention a word about energy consumption)

Link.

Wow the video is something else. The anchor lady seemed confused. I must admit I missed what he said about protect your savings/money? I guess if you followed his advise you would remove all your money from the bank and put it under your mattress. At least the interest rate wouldn’t change.

This trader ought to reacquaint himself with the term ‘political risk’. A few changes in the laws can ruin people like him.

Remember the recent freakout when somebody in the white house mentioned the words ‘transactions tax’?

Xenos@10: They pay a lot of money, directly and indirectly, to keep laws like that from happening. They’re well aware of the risk, but feel they have it covered. You haven’t heard the phrase “Transaction tax” from anybody connected with the White House much recently. The banksters probably killed that in under a day.

Boxturtle (They probably killed it with a phone call in 5 minutes, but it took a day for word to spread)

The guy in the video is telling the truth!!! and the anchor is stunned. Amazing he was able to say what he did. He is warning everyone do what you can to get what you have to safety. If you don’t they (the bankers) will take that too.

Well, right off the bat someone needs to put a big, bold sign on my back that says: Don’t Follow Me!

Everything I have ever done to try to move what little extra we had to a safe place backfired in a major way.

Here’s John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman who worked as a economist for among others the World Bank, and the IMF in an interview on 9/26/11 about this situation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl2T1a1CHh4

The very wealthy of the world do believe the dire straights the world has be brought to that’s why they are working hard to end the lives of as many other people as possible: population control by any other name.

That’s interesting. One can wonder what the actual mechanisms will be to force a levelling (or perhaps even decline?) in the numbers. Will such a trend happen quickly or linger over time? The lack of a Malthusian end so far may simply mean we don’t know which of many versions might happen or how long any one of them would take.

A shortage of food was expected to inevitably be calamitous. Growing up in the 1960s I recall scenarios of a rather sudden onset of hunger driven by markets rather than by a shortage of food, itself. It seemed everyone was reading Erlich’s popular “Population Bomb,” long since discredited. India was supposed to have collapsed decades ago that way, and didn’t, my hunch being that was more luck than a human hand in control there.

Perhaps overdevelopment, overpopulation, declining diets, pollution, and global warming all becoming unavoidable — these might slowly weaken humanity in insidious ways over time. Then a sudden coup de grace might be caused by, say, humanity’s weakened health inviting a pandemic.

Or a declining quality of life, increasing competition for dwindling resources, more challenges to individual freedoms versus state/corporate perks — these could invite envy, aggression, conflict leading to largescale warfare.

World leaders won’t be able to control these dangerous trends, I’m afraid. They haven’t been able to so far, so I don’t think they will going forward. Instead they will react to issues of the moment, and the motives will continue to be profit driven comforts and power regardless of ideology. Ideology will remain a vehicle to steer the masses, as before, but not toward long term solutions for problems and consequences which can’t be definitively nailed down.

This is why abortion and homosexuality should be illegal: not enough people.

Over-population = Too much of you, just enough of me.

The interview is awesome. I love the end, when the 2nd anchor asks the 1st, “Do you dream about the economy at night?”

Not so. Joel Cohen’s How Many People Can the Earth Support? ((1995) does an excellent job debunking the argument that the earth cannot support many billion more people (If I recall correctly, his estimate was about 17 billion or so). That’s not the point. It would be a better world if there were fewer of us, and Cohen does not dispute that fact, unlike certain religious sects that need not be named. Rates of natural increase are declining, in Japan’s case they are negative. Politicians and projectors worry about this –’where are all the young people that we are going to need to support the old people?– but that fear is a lot of crap. It assumes that nobody saves, and that the saving does not go into productive capital goods. Whoops. Maybe they have something there. Our saving is going to the bankers! Nevermind.