Should there be a limit on the number of children one person can have?

Yes, but even when restricted to its own species, a lot of that consideration and planning was built upon an incredibly dubious foundationand it still is.

Ben, your reaction substantiates my belief that humanity is incapable of saving itself. We’ll just carry on until nature takes its course.

You imply that the population of Australia (and the world) should continue to grow. Do you believe that there’s any limit? How would you organise Australia to sustain, say, a trillion people?

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Easy. Find another 10,000 earths. Quickly.

edit: and mine them.

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We’re not going to have to worry about that.
Take a look at this chart, based on UN data for the last 100 or so years. Run the slider at the bottom back/forth over the years and you’ll see why.

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I’m not really arguing against your point; what’s currently being passed off as “civilisation” is led (if you could call it that) by people so short-sighted they can’t see past the next election cycle. Without some kind of drastic change (which almost certainly won’t happen) the species is cutting its collective throat.

Personally I find myself alternating between wanting society to hit the brakes on this downward spiral … and just watching the world burn.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that the latter mood is the less frequent of the two. Or, if not, then I’m at least able to channel my cynicism in other ways (e.g. when “rights” seem like too much of a pipe dream to keep the surveillance state at bay, I can work on practical solutions to take that power back).

As for the specific issues stemming from overpopulation; I don’t have hard figures or any idea what the tipping point might be.

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Y’reckon? To anyone who’s managed livestock, those trends will come as no surprise.

Does anybody? Figures exists, but interpretations differ.

My own guess, based only on a lifetime of observation and contemplation, is that we passed sustainable limits of population at some time in the first half of last century.

Consequences of global overstocking are evident in, for example, conflict and asylum-seeker flows. In the Australian context, the Murray-Darling comes to mind. If we manage to screw that up it will eventually recover but, in the interim, Australia’s carrying capacity will drop.

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So it’s back to the baby boomers, then. Not so much their fault (for a change), but the fault of what led to them being called the baby boomers in the first place.

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Well winning WW2 can’t really be considered a bad thing.

There are those who seek to solve and those who seek to blame. The latter is ineffectual.

We could blame every generation that’s produced more children than needed to replace themselves. What would that solve?

Fighting it, on the other hand …

What were the causes of that war? Didn’t one of the belligerents seek space for its population?

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I don’t think there should be a finite number set as a limit to how many children one can have under their care. As long as they have the ability to provide reasonably adequate care towards the children. If one did not have the ability to provide adequate care towards their children, that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis by child protection.

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I agree that the population should not be getting the level of growth it’s getting now. Because it is unsustainable. But we also cannot allow our population to drop too rapidly either. We need to have a population large enough to sustain our current ageing population. But that’s something Australia could probably do with the population decline we would see without immigration. But managing the size of the population would be better done through managing immigration, as opposed to limiting the number of children people can have.

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Agreed, but suggesting curbs on immigration tend to attract accusations of racism. Sustainable Australia has been targeted that way.

I wonder whether we have time for a gradual decline in population. When she strikes, nature will not be gentle.

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Yeah. That’s unfortunate. Especially when the focus is on how many people are in the country and not where they are from.

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So? If we let irrational false accusations dictate our actions, we will quickly find ourselves subject to the whims of irrational people. We’re in the business of evidence, not PC fashion.

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Did you actually look at the charts?
As affluence spreads, births decline. If not for immigration, Australian population would be in decline, as is the same in the majority of western nations.

Either you are ignoring this, or you are talking about something else for which you have provided no evidence.

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You appear to be confusing correlation with causation. I’m familiar with that site. While trying to convey a positive message simply, it tends to mislead.

Is the cause affluence? Is it education? Is it a combination of factors? The latter, methinks. Other factors are what will bite us

What other people believe governs what we can get done.

I reckon we need Australia’s population to fall far more rapidly than economists would like.

On reflection, I wonder whether that’s viable. Australia won’t stand in splendid isolation as the world burns. I know the growth in global population has slowed, but the damage has been (and continues to be) done.

I was recently reminded of a 1980s miniseries, in which James Burke played the role of a historian from the future. In one scene, he mentioned Australian troops machine-gunning people as they swarmed up a beach in northwest Australia. While over-dramatic, that scenario is not beyond the realms of possibility. Come to think of it, the likes of Nauru and Manus could be viewed as steps down that path.

So no, Australia’s birth rate (which is the topic of this thread) is not most of the problem (though it is undeniably part of the problem). Most of the problem is overpopulation, both here and in the rest of the world, with its associated environmental degradation, conflict and so-on.

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There is a lot of rubbish stated with solemn conviction regarding population growth trends. For myself, the last straw was reading of the extrapolation attempt by the Victorian colonial statistician, Henry Heylyn Hayter (a man of no mean talents generally, though this example rather undermines them) to predict, from the 1891 and prior censuses, that the Australian population in 2001 would be 189,269,663 precisely.

In other words, who knows and who cares? This is not an issue worth burning out brain-cells over.

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Population is only one factor of the problem. Higher income societies have a far higher overall environmental impact than lower income societies.

Focus needs to be on getting the high-income impact per capita way the heck down (I’m talking a tenth of what it currently is if not less) before the remaining large low-income populations make their transition.

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That some of us have so much, when so many have so little, is grossly unfair. Is it rational, however, to deny the impact of the sheer numbers? Can we realistically get per-capita impact down to sustainable levels, without also reducing the numbers?

Population will be the subject of tomorrow’s Four Corners. It will also be the focus of Q&A, later that evening.

Who “knows” anything? How do we “know” anything? Do we truly “know” anything? When you say “know”, what do you mean precisely?

I reckon environmental degradation and conflict are indicators. Whether we close our eyes is an individual choice.

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Context is all. I was attempting to indicate the futility of population growth predictions but Alex has already shifted the discussion in a different direction so my point is now moot.

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