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Comment by python_gt_r2 | Hacker News Reader

Many countries need a one child policy, the sooner the better. Not only for their own interest, but also specially for the interest of adjacent regions that are being affected and reap no benefits.

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The UN's population projections have historically been very accurate. They have also consistently shown that the better educated and developed a country is, the quicker its population stabilises.

I'm not sure what you are referring to, because here (https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/) I see 3 models, a high, medium, and low, and they diverge hugely by 2100.

They have outlier models, but look at the probabilities associated with them (should be >90%, i.e., <10% probability for those lines). A better statement on my behalf would have been that their probabilistic distributions have been historically very accurate.

They are also updated very diligently to account for new phenomena. I don't work for the UN, but they take population growth very seriously.

The UN has underpredicted African population growth for decades and they have been predicting that low fertility populations like East Asians will bounce back to replacement too. Still hasn’t happened. Getting things wrong over and over again does not qualify as an accurate prediction. Getting things wrong, over and over again, the same way each time is embarrassing.

Not sure what you are specifically referring to.

The UN says [1] that "Africa continues to experience high rates of population growth. Between 2017 and 2050, the populations of 26 African countries are projected to expand to at least double their current size."

[1] https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world...

China’s one child policy is about to create a huge societal drain as the old population grows relative to the young. It also created over 10 million unregistered and discriminated against people. Plus a huge gender imbalance for young people.

It was very much a short term solution with long term consequences that the country likely isn’t prepared to handle.

There is enough space for everybody. What the world lacks is good education.

And access to some of those pesky infinite resources

People make resources. People made crude oil and coal into resources. People made uranium ore into a resource. People made ores that would have been regarded as uneconomic dirt into wealth all over the world. (Ethnic) Chinese people turned a rock into a first world country in under 50 years, in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The important resource is people. When oil becomes economically irrelevant the Arabian peninsula will be economically irrelevant despite having had a 100 years of sitting on top of huge oil resources.

Ireland’s natural resources are some land that’s good for raising cattle and sheep and they grew rich off of pharmaceuticals, IT and other US multinationals. Luxembourg grew rich off of banking.

Natural resources are nowhere near as important as people. People turn dirt into valuable things. Without them it’s just dirt.

Good thing environmentalists are dead wrong about everything, otherwise putting even more strain on the planet might have me worried.

There are enough resources on earth and beyond. The main issue we have here on earth is the waste of resources, the main one being the human potential.

More Malthusian propaganda... Meanwhile, people in "developed" countries are dying of over consumption of food.

China's one child policy has had HORRIBLE side-effects.

No thank you.

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