7 Billion people On Earth

[Gerbil]

This is cool.

Find out where you fit in: BBC News - 7 billion people and you: What's your number?


The world's population is expected to hit seven billion in the next few weeks. After growing very slowly for most of human history, the number of people on Earth has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Where do you fit into this story of human life? Fill in your date of birth below to find out.

[Looper]

Non-logarithmic graph on BBC page so a bit misleading.

Population did increase more steeply since 1500s even on a base 10 scale.



But growth rate has been decreasing steadily since baby boomers age as having kids becomes increasingly a lifestyle choice rather than a forgone conclusion.

[billy the kid]

surely it can only be approx. 7000 million people
nobody can claim to be the 7 billionth person.
could be 100,000 more or less. .
welfare is gonna get stretched to the limit.
could capitalism still function ?

[ENT]

^ Capitalism will not survive the oncoming economic collapse.

[billy the kid]

yes yes
my my, big changes are a coming.

[ENT]

^ True

[Mr Earl]

yes yes
my my, big changes are a coming.

Yep, and food and water will become increasingly important issues.

[CaptainNemo]

What on earth do you think is going to replace the concepts of private ownership of the means of production; creation of goods or services for profit in a market; numerically defined value (prices, wages); and competition?


Food, water, land, energy, accommodation, health & reproduction, pollution, jobs, ...it affects everything; but not everywhere. Before all that, you have the issues of corruption and crime that are perhaps the biggest problems to solve.

[ENT]

^ A credit system not based on money/cash value and interests accruing, but in terms of exchange of global energy units.

"From each.. ability,....to each...needs" ,.... Marx.

[billy the kid]

What on earth do you think is going to replace the concepts of private ownership of the means of production; creation of goods or services for profit in a market; numerically defined value (prices, wages); and competition?


Food, water, land, energy, accommodation, health & reproduction, pollution, jobs, ...it affects everything; but not everywhere. Before all that, you have the issues of corruption and crime that are perhaps the biggest problems to solve.

aye Captain, corruption and crime at the highest level.
capitalism was great for the last hundred years but
the next hundred will have to face big changes.
apparently, a child born in Greece today has a 100,000 euro bill to settle
before it can live in the black.

[ENT]

Competition for wealth as the means to control one's life causes conflict in many ways.
Corrupt practices are then exercised to gain advantage in non egalitarian exchanges.

So we get winners and losers and increasing social dissatisfaction.

Ownership of anything attracts envy and theft.
Theft is a ridiculous and self destructive venture where wealth is held in common.

Individual needs are small, sufficient food and shelter, reasonable occupations and safe environments and a common society of responsibility.

Personal ambitions can be indulged in, but not at the expense of another's well being.
Otherwise, inconsiderate ambition is destructive to the self and others.

All the above are simple observations.

We don't need capitalism at all.

[CaptainNemo]

With socialism

we get winners and losers and increasing social dissatisfaction.

What is "wealth" though? Legal tickets to give exclusive control over access to some item or access to some service.
It is human nature (actually the nature of all living things to some extent) to be territorial and possessive of things for resource reasons, or sentimental and superstitious reasons in the case of humans.

Marxism's been tried plenty of times and it never works... people like to own things and enjoy them and pass them on to their children. People like to feel special and work hard to gain access to some service as a reward - quality of life on one level.
It's not weird to want to own (i.e. have exlusive rights of access to) your own home and a bit of land.
It is weird to want to try and reprogramme people to stop being competitive; it's sinister too (literally).

I realise deprogramming the large numbers of western cryptosocialists is a bit of hill to climb, but it has to be done, the economic crisis, as is yet to be acknowledged, is a result of socialism parasitically feeding off capitalism.
If I was being very generous I'd describe it as a dialogue between free-will and determinism. The lefties seem to treat the hardware and software of humans as separate, and all you have to do to make things better is erase the old programme and install a new one. The alternative, and arguably more rational view is that there is hardware, firmware, and software; where the hardware and firmware are fully integrated to the extent that they won't function without each other, and the software is of less significance.
All these socilialist ideas you espouse are basically fundamentally incompatible with the intrinsic drivers of the behaviour of all living things, including humans.
You can't delete the instinct for competition and territoriality and quality-of-life-seeking, any more than you can delete people's sex drives.
You also cannot have a scenario where everybody wins, it's absurd; and has been proven to be so in the tragic social experiments people revolted to escape.

Think about the robin and the earthworm... from the point of view of each, their needs are immoral... the robin must violate the earthworm's right to live in order to live itself, if the earthworm's rights are protected, the robin dies (trying to keep it simple here... go and read "the little red hen" for a primer on the intrinsic moral hazard of socialism).


"global energy units"... and do you anticipate these having a fixed value for evermore? Or will they increase in value as population increases and places further demands on the finite resources of the non-growing physical planet?
It sounds lovely and everything, but do the sums add up? Or will numbers be illegal as oppressive tools of the bourgeoisie?

The core of the problem is not capitalism, but an unbalanced overpopulation. There are obvious economic realities that result from that.

[Takeovers]

Marxism's been tried plenty of times and it never works... people like to own things and enjoy them and pass them on to their children. People like to feel special and work hard to gain access to some service as a reward - quality of life on one level. It's not weird to want to own (i.e. have exlusive rights of access to) your own home and a bit of land. It is weird to want to try and reprogramme people to stop being competitive; it's sinister too (literally).

Agree. That won't stop some idiots though, to claim it never was real socialism and we will do it better now.

You can't delete the instinct for competition and territoriality and quality-of-life-seeking, any more than you can delete people's sex drives. You also cannot have a scenario where everybody wins, it's absurd; and has been proven to be so in the tragic social experiments people revolted to escape.

Agree again, but ......

the economic crisis, as is yet to be acknowledged, is a result of socialism parasitically feeding off capitalism.

Disagree. The present crisis is not the result of residual socialist tendencies. It is the result of capitalist greed driven to extremes. People at the top in western industry did not dare to as long as there was the counterforce of the communist bloc around.
This is dangerous in the extreme as you can push people only so far before everything comes tumbling down.

Maybe you have missed what has happened in europe in the last two decades. Young people even with a good education cannot get jobs that will sustain themselves, much less a family. The average income is still good but that is from people who have been in jobs a long time.

[ENT]

Capitalism has been the ruling ethos for millenia.

Neither democracy nor socialism have stood a chance against it, too many (once unlimited) resources available for the powerful to capitalise on.

We're still struggling to get out from under the feet of capitalism, a non-egalitarian system of trade and exchange.

Both democracy and socialism advocate a non-hierarchic order, while capitalism fosters increasing competition for control of resources to the benefit of the few, then distributed to the masses via a multi-tiered class structure based on privilege.

[CaptainNemo]

the economic crisis, as is yet to be acknowledged, is a result of socialism parasitically feeding off capitalism.

Disagree. The present crisis is not the result of residual socialist tendencies. It is the result of capitalist greed driven to extremes. People at the top in western industry did not dare to as long as there was the counterforce of the communist bloc around.
This is dangerous in the extreme as you can push people only so far before everything comes tumbling down.

As is reported, the bad debts were bundled with good debts to bury them, and yes there was a massive push for selling loans and maintaining perpetual growth.
I think the ingredients for the mentality of the loan givers and loan takers were fostered by a socialist notion of perpetual growth. Capitalists view growth as cyclical; socialists view it as eternal.
Socialists wanted the bottom end of society to have access to all the stuff (like houses) that the higher stratas of society did - so the bent the rules for them, and by doing what they thought of as compassionate, they inflicted even more harm than would have transpired otherwise.
Those that granted the loans were either pressured from above to do it; or were sucked into the bubble culture... which itself is socialist in foundation, because it ignores what is and replaces it with what it would like to be.

As I see it, Europe, not America, is plagued by socialist parasitical systems, the huge public sectors and welfare schemes and grand (publically funded) projects, and it's the lust for these that drove governments, and in particular Dr James Gordon Brown's government to encourage and not regulate the city.
The markets play to win in every game, and the government is there to set the rules of the game. The socialists were so desperate to fund their social engineering projects that they compromised their values to allow the bubble to keep growing. I don't blame the bankers; I blame Labour: I blame Brown for the whole thing.
Brown's PhD was in the great depression, and I find it hard to believe that he knew as little about the effects of a bubble on the working classes as he evidently did about economics.

Maybe you have missed what has happened in europe in the last two decades. Young people even with a good education cannot get jobs that will sustain themselves, much less a family. The average income is still good but that is from people who have been in jobs a long time.

I'd put a lot of that down to China, and the American-led post-cold war drive for globalisation, wouldn't you?
It's also down to general complacency and lack of taking domestic workforce training seriously.

Capitalism has been the ruling ethos for millenia.

Neither democracy nor socialism have stood a chance against it, too many (once unlimited) resources available for the powerful to capitalise on.

Disagree.
The various socialist revolutions made mincemeat of the capitalist systems they overthrew; they failed because as systems they don't work. Capitalism didn't so much win, as socialism lost.
Democracy is part of capitalism, because the freedom to own your own stuff and profit from it and pass it on to your kids is an anathema to socialism.

We're still struggling to get out from under the feet of capitalism, a non-egalitarian system of trade and exchange.

We?
Life is non-egalitarian.
Your idea of equally distributing energy credits to everyone is frankly, communist, and is destined to fail.
Not everything is equal, and we use numbers to apportion value, and to incentivise and discincentivise; reward, and punish.
It doesn't factor in human nature and how cooperation and cliqueness really works.

Both democracy and socialism advocate a non-hierarchic order,

Except in reality, they don't... Animal Farm.

while capitalism fosters increasing competition for control of resources to the benefit of the few, then distributed to the masses via a multi-tiered class structure based on privilege.

It's not based on privilege, it's based on a complex combination levels of education and intelligence; levels of laziness/hardworkingness; levels of cooperation, cronyism, and nepotism; levels of bureacracy and taxation.

It's nothing to do with "the few", it's do with efficiency - resources going to where they perform best.

Competition is good... it helps everyone maximise their potential.
The problem we have is not that there's too much Capitalism, but that there's not enough! There are hardly any truly capitalist countries in the world.

So many of the working classes have been held down by the welfare state and immigrationism. Labour maintains it's client-voting population's dependency on public sector jobs and benefits and immigration status in all it's urban "heartlands": it's a symbiotic relationship.
Cut the benefits, taxes, the immigration, and open these inner cities to entrepreneurship, and the Labour leviathan is slain.

...but, how easy is it to go and start and run a small business? How much company (and thus jobs) growth is held back by excessive tax and regulation?

When you cut tax, the money doesn't go away, it just goes away from the control of the untalented public sector and into the control of the private citizens and the more efficient (i.e. talented) private sector; in fact the money grows, because the public sector doesn't make money - nationalisation is gone, the money is made by the private sector and milked by the public sector.

[ENT]

^Interesting points, but I must disagree with you, as whatever label that give to each economic system is couched in political jargon lifted from worn out propaganda machines.

The reality is that we are operating under failed and failing trade and exchange systems that do not take into account the finiteness of existing global resources.

Current controls have only increased the wealth gap, giving rise to greater social unease, as demonstrated by recent uprisings around the world.

A genuine democratic socialist global government structure is required for resolution of increasing social unrest and appropriate resource sharing.

Such a structure is also needed to offset the destructive effect of climate change.

Water, the single most important asset the world has (other than clean air and the earth we stand on) will be the main bargaining point in the future.

Currently, China controls the head waters of more than half of the great rivers that support agriculture, which includes all from the Indian ocean through to the north Pacific ocean.

Wealth is a relative value to poverty, not simply an asset.

China is extremely wealthy in resources relative to other territories, but can only enjoy that wealth if poverty exists elsewhere, as it does.

I would not call China a failed communist state, it has evolved into a capitalist state, albeit controlled by a communist government.

Unless wealth sharing is engaged in, only further unrest will occur, not simply within state boundaries, but within the emerging Chinese empire, as it expands.