On May 07 2012 01:15 goldrush wrote: Doesn't the first graph argue the opposite, or that population size has a negative relationship with population growth? Ignoring any problems with the model, the negative coefficient of the x indicates that as x (population size) increases, the population growth rate decreases.
Yes, if you allow a country with a population of less than 1 million to weigh into the calculation as much as a country with a population of over 1 billion.
I don't consider this to be that influential, though.
Why do you need to reweight it?
For the same reason why each state has a different weight into the house of representatives of the USA, and why each state gets a number of electoral votes proportional to the number of people (roughly) living in the state.
Whether or not I include/exclude really small countries should not have a significant impact on the conclusions drawn from the data, but unless I weight the data according to population they do.
Your units in this analysis are the countries, not the people in the countries. This is different from the USA electoral system, where the units are the number of people.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by rescaling the population growth by the population size, the second graph basically says that the more populated the country, the larger the absolute (not relative) increase in the total number of people. Which is obvious, right? 1% population growth of 1 billion people is 10 million, while 1% population growth of 1 million is 10 thousand.
I don't believe that is what happened when I weighted the data. If anyone else can chime in and verify whether or not that is essentially what happened please let us know.
Could you please look into your spreadsheet and then add up all of the scaled population growth rates for all of the countries? If it's doing what I think it's doing, it'll be equal (or approximately equal to) the world population growth rate, if you also have that. It won't be exactly the same as the world population growth rate given by wiki for sure though.
Yeah, I'm almost 100% sure that's what is happening now.
Country 1: 5 initial pop, 6 end pop. +20% growth rate Country 2: 15 initial pop, 18 end pop. +20% growth rate
This corresponds to your first graph.
After rescaling (note: 6/24= 0.25, 18/24=0.75)
Country 1: 'adjusted' growth rate of +5% Country 2: 'adjusted' growth rate of +15%
Thus, on your graph 2, you would have: Country 1: 6 end pop, +5% Country 2: 18 end pop, +15%
Therefore, the positive correlation seen would be entirely due to larger absolute numbers growth in country 2.
While you were doing that I did a similar analysis using 6 fictitious countries, most of which have populations of <10, two of which have populations of over one million. The results confirmed what you are saying. I'll go back and edit the OP a bit.
edit: I still feel the first graph is misleading... I'm just not sure what method would make sense for showing this. Small countries should count less, but a straight up weighted average doesn't work.
On May 07 2012 02:25 micronesia wrote: While you were doing that I did a similar analysis using 6 fictitious countries, most of which have populations of <10, two of which have populations of over one million. The results confirmed what you are saying. I'll go back and edit the OP a bit.
edit: I still feel the first graph is misleading... I'm just not sure what method would make sense for showing this. Small countries should count less, but a straight up weighted average doesn't work.
Your hypothesis is: The larger a country's population, the faster its relative population growth.
Therefore, your unit of analysis is countries, so in my opinion, small countries shouldn't count any less than the larger countries.
What about the other variables that could affect population growth? For example, if Country A, a country with low technological progress, high child mortality, and low average education, has higher population growth than Country B, a country with high technological progress, low child mortality, and high average education levels. It doesn't make much sense to just compare population size and population growth when there are many, many other factors that are probably more relevant.
On May 07 2012 02:25 micronesia wrote: While you were doing that I did a similar analysis using 6 fictitious countries, most of which have populations of <10, two of which have populations of over one million. The results confirmed what you are saying. I'll go back and edit the OP a bit.
edit: I still feel the first graph is misleading... I'm just not sure what method would make sense for showing this. Small countries should count less, but a straight up weighted average doesn't work.
Your hypothesis is: The larger a country's population, the faster its relative population growth.
Therefore, your unit of analysis is countries, so in my opinion, small countries shouldn't count any less than the larger countries.
What about the other variables that could affect population growth? For example, if Country A, a country with low technological progress, high child mortality, and low average education, has higher population growth than Country B, a country with high technological progress, low child mortality, and high average education levels. It doesn't make much sense to just compare population size and population growth when there are many, many other factors that are probably more relevant.
The problem (using my original method) is the statistical variations... small countries vary much more than larger ones.
But as you are pointing out, the other factors are more important than size. As someone else pointed out in this thread, the people who are having the most children are doing it for the wrong reasons, and this is irrelevant to the size of their country.
They talk about how evolution has actually sped up, not slowed down, due to the change in environment and the massive increase in population (more people = larger, broader gene pool = faster evolution). The subject is about as taboo as eugenics, because to accept that we have continued to evolve would be accepting implicitly that people from different races are actually different in ways other than the color of skin.
On May 07 2012 02:25 micronesia wrote: While you were doing that I did a similar analysis using 6 fictitious countries, most of which have populations of <10, two of which have populations of over one million. The results confirmed what you are saying. I'll go back and edit the OP a bit.
edit: I still feel the first graph is misleading... I'm just not sure what method would make sense for showing this. Small countries should count less, but a straight up weighted average doesn't work.
Your hypothesis is: The larger a country's population, the faster its relative population growth.
Therefore, your unit of analysis is countries, so in my opinion, small countries shouldn't count any less than the larger countries.
What about the other variables that could affect population growth? For example, if Country A, a country with low technological progress, high child mortality, and low average education, has higher population growth than Country B, a country with high technological progress, low child mortality, and high average education levels. It doesn't make much sense to just compare population size and population growth when there are many, many other factors that are probably more relevant.
The problem (using my original method) is the statistical variations... small countries vary much more than larger ones.
But as you are pointing out, the other factors are more important than size. As someone else pointed out in this thread, the people who are having the most children are doing it for the wrong reasons, and this is irrelevant to the size of their country.
If population growth in the smaller countries varies quite a bit year to year in the same country, then you might have a point in saying that it's volatile due to the small population. If so, one way to get around it would be explicitly ignore any countries below a certain size (though this is somewhat arbitrary).
On the other hand, if population growth is stable from year to year in the same country, but varies quite a bit between countries, it could just point to other factors being more important than population size. But that doesn't mean that they're any less important than the others.
I don't think there's a need to adopt unsavory reproductive control practices. Governments in the 3rd world just need to get with the 21st century. Once a country becomes industrialized and wealthy the birthrate plummets naturally. Looking at East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore for example, women used to pop out babies by the litter, but with the modernization of those countries came a decrease in birth rate to the point where they encourage couples to have more children.
On May 07 2012 00:54 HwangjaeTerran wrote: If the Earth can't support any more people, wouldn't the problem solve itself ?
Don't know if anything needs to be done.
I wouldn't argue that it's better to avoid taboo subjects than to avoid the drawn-out starvation of billions of innocent people.
The issue is that it's more of a distribution issue than a production issue. ALthough population is certainliy of growing concern, we have seen birth rates decline 30-40 years after indistralization. Although we don't know the trend will continue, that is what has historically happened.
How can you examine overpopulation without looking at goods/resources distribution. You examine only one factor of the two so your argument is invalid.
On May 07 2012 03:10 Steveling wrote: How can you examine overpopulation without looking at goods/resources distribution. You examine only one factor of the two so your argument is invalid.
Which argument in particular is invalid? I was trying to inspire that we should discuss rather than avoid certain issues. I did not at any point set out to prove anything about overpopulation, or eugenics.
That quote says otherwise "I feel strongly that we are reaching the upper limit if we haven't already overtaken it". You show that the population is reaching heights it never did before. You are not providing facts as to why this is overpopulating or if we can support another 30 billion.
On May 07 2012 03:49 Steveling wrote: That quote says otherwise "I feel strongly that we are reaching the upper limit if we haven't already overtaken it".
That's my opinion.
You show that the population is reaching heights it never did before.
I agree.
You are not providing facts as to why this is overpopulating or if we can support another 30 billion.
Yes, it would be a very difficult thing to prove that we have reached the point of overpopulation, or are nearly there. I did not try to prove it.
I would just like to say you example of two profoundly deaf people having a good chance of having a deaf child is ridiculous, because there are over 53 different genetic issues that can cause deafness (and both parents must have the same gene defect to have a chance of a deaf child), as well as many people being caused deafness by illness or accident. Also that the most Deaf people and hearing people who know them do not consider deafness a disability, but rather something called Deafgain, which is a positive attribute.
Anyway, the problem with this line of thinking is that not everyone has the same values of disabled and 'normal'. Right now plenty of parents are faced with choices about keeping or aborting a child with a disability or genetic disease. Different families make different choices.
I think education and monetary benefits are a good direction to take this kind of issue. It's not a quick fix, but in the long run those kind of solutions produce changes in they way people think about the topic and social norms, rather than something everyone is just forced to do by the government.
If you're worried about the global population, which seems fair, your best bet is figure out what has made countries like mane in northern Europe slow their birth rates so dramatically. If you can identify that, it's possible to impliment social and economic policies to that end, and to funnel international aid through similar channels.
Eugenic policies are not only cruel and impossible/very difficult to enforce, but they may be detrimental to the long-term success of the species. With eugenics, you get to eliminate undesirable traits, but you end up limiting genetic diversity, Increasing genetic diversity is key in the long run.
The point is that even if everyone (and I mean everyone) was behind the eugenics, thus eliminating the cruelty and enforcement issues, it would still be a bad idea. We don't know nearly enough about genetics to start choosing which traits can be safely eliminated or reduced without harming the overall population.
Personally, I hate the idea of the government telling me I can't have more than X children, or that I can't have children with Y person because of Z reason. It seems like an Orwellion control that spells doom for society if allowed to perpetuate. Next, they'll be telling us who our wives/husbands will be, how many children we can have, and that we need to abort one and go again because the child has a 50% chance of needing glasses or having asthma.
That's quite the slippery slope you're applying.
If anything, China's facing a demographic crisis because they didn't apply any controls beyond a child limit, when they certainly could have.
On May 07 2012 05:16 RedJustice wrote: I would just like to say you example of two profoundly deaf people having a good chance of having a deaf child is ridiculous, because there are over 53 different genetic issues that can cause deafness (and both parents must have the same gene defect to have a chance of a deaf child), as well as many people being caused deafness by illness or accident. Also that the most Deaf people and hearing people who know them do not consider deafness a disability, but rather something called Deafgain, which is a positive attribute.
You may be right about the genetics behind being born deaf... I honestly don't know what the numbers are on that. I apologize if I misrepresented the challenge facing deaf couples. However, it's not just a matter of whether we consider being born deaf an advantage or a disadvantage. In schools near me, more money is spent on deaf students than students who can hear, everything else being equal.
On May 07 2012 05:46 Omnipresent wrote: The point is that even if everyone (and I mean everyone) was behind the eugenics, thus eliminating the cruelty and enforcement issues, it would still be a bad idea. We don't know nearly enough about genetics to start choosing which traits can be safely eliminated or reduced without harming the overall population.
As long as it's okay for people to study/research this decision more without being the 'bad guy'...
Are you worried about overpopulation first and see eugenics as the best way to prevent it, or would you like to see eugenics to improve the overall gene pool and want to use overpopulation as an argument to get people to consider it?
Because if overpopulation is your main concern there are better ways to tackle the issue.
There's a reason why eugenics is taboo. It's inherently risky, it creates social tension and it weakens social forces that keep our societies relatively peaceful.
EPT
