Do we have an overpopulation problem?

Question

Can anyone back up their answers?

Answer 1

Yes. Too many ignorant neo-cons who keep producing more genetically deficient people, who produce even more deficient ignorant little pieces of turds.

Answer 2

Yup. There are 6.5 billion people on the Earth. We are now being fed genetically engineered food, and there is still famine and food shortage in Africa, South Asia .....

Answer 3

It's true that the human population has never been so high however scientifically if the population ever became severely over populated then there would be a natural leveling off point. Which means that b4 there were tooo many ppl on this planet then some will probably die from disease or etc. nature knows how many people it can sustain and will probably not be able to hold a severly overpopulated population, not to mention that if the earth was coming to an overpopulation then prices would increase meaning that only richer ppl could survive and most poorer individuals would starve this would automatically stop overpopulation from ocurring. So many theories!!!!

Answer 4

NO!

We are more likely facing a problem with population drop.

Here's why - with references (something only one of you previous philosophers seem to find important to have):  

From something I've posted before: Population replacement rates are 2.2 children per woman. The US is about 2.3, but this is deceiving in that this is an average of all women. Women 70 and older have a ratio of 2.8. Younger women are foregoing children and men are refraining from making the relational conditions that foster a positive attitude in women towards having kids. What this means is the real/current US birthrate rate is much less since the statistics are averaging in higher rate women who are from a time which supported more child bearing. This is why population is still, temporarily, growing in most countries. At least it will numercially until these older cohorts begin to pass-on, leaving successively younger and smaller demographic cohorts.

Before we consume this blither about the need for population control, we might want to consider how infrastructure, peace, economic development and more self interested activities like social security, the search for people who are going to take care of our aging selves and even who is going to buy the cheapening real estate, securities or even cash if there are less young people. It's thanks to growing populations of young people that old folks have been able to pawn off an ever more scarce bundle of stuff (they call them "assets") for the services they need. With a shrinking population, the bundle of stuff becomes less scarce and therefore less valuable. People young enough to provide these services needed for old folks become more scarce and therefore expensive with respect to these ever cheapening assets that we use to pay them. It's a dangerous cycle.

Most economic growth among developed and developing countries is explained by population age demographics. If you have a large cohort of 20 - 50 year olds compared to the groups younger and older than that, your economic growth explodes, at least until that age group moves towards retirement where they need more resources than they can contribute. French, German, Japanese and Iranian economies grew from this and now are suffering a maturity drop in their economics outputs thanks to the young cohort that pushed their economies are now old. China is on the brink of this thanks to its one child policy in the 70's/80's. The US has benefitted from the youth boom in the past and has been able to avoid replacement rate collapse thanks to cultural factors. Many countries including New Zealand, Russia, France and Japan are creating policies to strongly encourage child bearing to fix their problems with population drop.

Answer 5

Absolutely. This planet is so grossly overpopulated..... I'm too lazy to do the research again, but this previous year I did a report on this exact question. I read State of the World '06, and some of the information in there is pretty cool. Our population is supposed to peak somewhere in the double digit billions, then we should experience a massive wipeout of a large number of people which should settle us somewhere around a constant number.

Answer 6

Yes.

If you look at a population where people can't take care of themselves or their young then there are too many people. In nature those people would die off.

Answer 7

too many STUPID people having s*x !