From the population point of view, it makes more sense to kill female babies than male babies because females are the bottleneck in population growth. A female can have only 1 infant a year, but a male can father many more if females are unlimited (remember The King and I?).

Evelyne, that makes no sense at all. Unless you meant to say that it makes more sense to kill male babies than female babies.

Evelyn is correct. These are exactly the principles wildlife managers use to manage populations (like deer herds). Population growth rates are limited by the number of breeding females, since a single male could hypothetically be sufficient to impregnate any number of females in an extremely short period of time. Females on the other hand, can only produce a certain number of offspring in any given time, the more females the more offspring.

Of course, applied to people it sounds pretty cold-blooded, especially considering the infanticide, but population reduction is just what happens eventually when sex ratios are skewed towards males.

Edit: Angeline, I think you misinterpreted Evelyn's point - it is more sensible to have fewer females if you want to reduce population numbers, but not if you want to balance the gender ratios which is what I think you are talking about.

Oh, explained this way it makes sense

It would be nice for some people to start thinking about an economic system that is not based on continual growth of the population. I haven't a clue what that might be, but I sure hope some smarties with lots of letters after their names have been thinking about this.

No matter what you may think about population control, there is a finite limit to how many people can exist on this planet. We either stabilize our species' population at a level that allows everyone to have a decent way of life, or we cycle through periods of boom and bust. Bust, in this case, will be a very, very bad thing to be a part of.

I know, I've often wondered at that. There is precious little written about this. Not only is it the way "things are", but there seems to be no real acknowledgement that things could or should be different. All the "undeveloped" countries are trying to jump aboard, and everyone thinks that's a good thing.

It seems that few have wondered if where we are and where we are heading is a good thing. I have serious doubts myself. Have things really improved in the past 100 years? A few things definitively have improved: for example medical care saves more lives. People, especially women, have more freedom and more choices to lead their lives as they wish. But we seemed to have paid a huge price for the improvements we have seen. Gone are the tightly knit communities and extended families. Now we live stacked up in buildings next to people we will never know, living in constant fear of strangers. Gone is good wholesome food. Now we eat the denatured and devitalized mass produced food spitted out from factories. Gone (for the most part) are craftsmen who take pride in producing beautiful and well crafted products. They have been replaced by foreign workers in sweat shops endlessly mass producing soulless and anonymous goods for rich people in other countries. We have replaced quality with quantity at about every level of our lives.

The only people who can afford to live in beautiful surroundings, own beautifully crafted things and eat the best in wholesome food are the rich. Everyone else has been handed cheap plastic substitutes.

They call it progress but I wonder if all that we gained makes up for what we have lost. This is all caused by the “economy”; an insatiable monster than always need to be fed more more more, no matter how it ravages the environment, our lives and our very souls.

The sad part is, population growth is flat in the industrialized world, where it would be easiest to sustain, and greater in third world countries where it is more difficult. I have no answers for that. Anything that approaches a forced solution will be as bad as, or worse than, China's programs.

I'll give you an example of how things have changed, just an anectdotal one, relating to my family.

My father and mother had their first child in their 20's. They had three more sons, and finally adopted a daughter. That was pretty typical for a family comiung up in the 1960's and 1970's; only-child families were less common, and multi-children were moreso. Childless marriages were thought of as sad.

Among my brothers and sister, we produced five total children. We may have two or even three more eventually, but that's not a given. My older brother won't; I may or may not have another. My younger brothers both married late (another now-common trend that was nearly nonexistent in the days of my mother and father) like I did. They may not have kids at all.

And this family profile isn't uncommon in the United States. We see population growth via immigration, both legal and illegal, but the U.S. has some of the most liberal immigration policy in the industrialized world, with other Western (and Asian) nations are more protective of their borders and less likely to allow the massive immigration the U.S. does. If you live in the Southwest, you probably understand how good a thing this is for the U.S., as we are seeing a younger, vital population enter our overall mix, en masse. They will be a huge economic and social force in the next half century.

If my siblings and I had produced like my parents did, we'd have 25 kids, not 5. If we'd produced half as many as they did, there would be 11 or 12.

I suspect that the answer lies within these anectdotal numbers, and in the wider trends that they represent. In nations where better opportunities and social justice exists, populations don't tend to grow as much.

Instead of trying to tell us that a meat based diet is not sustainable, perhaps we could see a movement toward creating societies where people don't see a need to have as many children as they currently do. That's a very longterm "solution", but it's not as inhumane as many of the other things that could be done. Right now, nothing or next to it is being done, and that's passively inumane, as disease and starvation will inevitably take care of the problems we refuse to deal with.

Angeline, that was a really stirring post. Thanks.

I do have to note, though, that I'm sacrificing other areas to eat whole foods. I cannot afford organic meats and veggies, but I don't eat much that comes in powdered form from a box. My chicken comes from a factory, and I am sure it isn't "chicken" as my grandparents had, but it's better than a box of processed stuff with a Kraft logo on it.

I think we may see some reversal of that aspect of it with the rising tide of low carb pushing people toward better foods. I hope so, anyway.

There was something on CNN last night about population growth. It's expect to grow by 50% in the next 50 years. The population in the US is expected to grow by a huge amount, due to immigration, while Europe is expect to stay about the same. Then in India and Africa big growth explosion. I think most of Asia is expected to shrink.

My question is, why wouldn't the emphasis be on limiting the population explosion rather than trying to make due with ever increasingly scarce resources? Maybe folks have written off governments ever trying to do anything about it, most are too chicken to address the issue.

But maybe rather than rewarding people with tax breaks for having children, we should reward them with tax breaks for NOT having children.

I think the original purpose of the tax deductions for children was to keep the children healthy, not necessarily to encourage having more children.

I wouldn't think penalizing is an answer, and anyone who has kids can tell you that the tax rewards hardly cover the costs. Tax breaks are one way they can tilt things a slight bit back toward the besieged middle class.

Well, I just have to jump up and calm down some rampant nostalgia here. A hundred years ago, we had zillions of immigrants who fled that very situation, to live here in tenements and work in soulless factories, because it was better.

Progress is inevitable. It's what we do. And every single thing we do, we do because we are convinced it's better. It may be wrong, it may be right. But we are not happy with the way things are, and want to improve it. That's the real motivation.

How far back do you want to go? When you got transported to the colonies for stealing a loaf of bread? When you cowered in your village while the Mongols thundered by? When Ancient Greece had a small cluster of men who voted and some lucky ones could brain or brawn their way out of slavery?

I agree, there's some things that have gotten worse, and some things that have gotten better. But one thing has gotten better and better and better.

At no time in history previously has ANYONE had the freedom to change their situation as easily or as rapidly as we have here, now, at the dawn of the 21st Century.

And that's what I call real progress.

Yes I acknowledge that there seems to be a lot of nostalgia in what I said. I certainly know that not everything was idyllic way back, far from it, and I didn’t wish to imply it was. There was poverty, brutality, disease, persecution and exploitation. I am not implying there wasn’t.. But there were also some good things, which I believe were lost. So although the world became a better place in some ways, it also has become worse in other ways. I just believe that with all our technology and pretended enlightenment we could have done a better job at improving what needed improving while minimizing the impact. Certainly health care, personal choice, absence from persecution and personal freedom has been improved greatly. However there has a lot that has changed for the worse..

My point is that we haven't done a good job at managing the tradeoff. We could DO better. We could do a better job of managing the impact we are having on the environment by limiting pollution, depletion of resources and habitat destruction. We could try to provide a better life for all people instead of a system that encourages and promotes hoarding wealth at the expense of everyone else. Damned be the consequences. We could do a lot better, but the desire for that, apart from fruitless wishful thinking, doesn’t seem to exist. If you did a survey, I’m sure the overwhelming majority of people would be in favor of saving the environment, a lesser disparity between the rich and the poor, better living conditions for everyone ….. so long as they don’t have to give up anything for it.

Geez...weren't we supposed to have colonies on the Moon and Mars by now? I was fully expecting to be a chef in a mining colony in the Tycho crater. Now all I have to look forward to is Soylent Green. I am seriously dissappointed in the human race.

To get back to the whole "hungry world must eat less meat" issue, I think of the native peoples in the very cold part of the world, who manage to survive despite having ZERO land for farming, as we think of it. Marginal land will not support agriculture, but will support pastoral (herding) food systems. Which are usually low carb in practice.

In addition, that land that grows grain for animals is not necessarily good land for growing people food, either...