I don’t see why the 4 concepts above are not just the thing you are looking for. These 4 concepts are not understood by either population scientists or the general public.

For example, as far as I can tell the Ehrlichs have never said that births are killing, which is what #1 above says. The Ehrlich message is effectively “if our population keeps growing the environment will be degraded.” Their words are putting the problem into the future, and failing to state that premature death will be the result of our actions. Worse is that they do not identify the action, averaging too many babies. In effect, their words speak to nobody.

I am identifying facts that are unknown, but you asked for myths. I don’t know why the Ehrlichs do not know those facts, but I will speculate. Maybe it is because they have the belief, or myth, like Malthus had, that people do regulate their births and that somehow magically this ensured that the population limit has not been hit yet.

Myth #1: Malthus described the process where the poor consciously or unconsciously reduce their fertility in their struggle to stay alive. The myth is that this sort of individual fertility reduction magically adds up across the whole population such that the population is not attempting to drive our numbers to the limit.

Myth #2: When the population hits the limit, there will be famine wars and vice that will limit the growth the ugly way. This myth was started by Malthus. The myth is that the effects of too much population growth will be obvious.

Myth #1 and #2 are two sides of the same coin. If you believe that the population has not hit the limit, then you have to invent some mechanism that ensures we do not average too many babies. Of course you believe that humans are different from other species in that we can control our fertility, but if you want to believe that this individual control adds up to some overall good, then you have to believe that we are not at the limit now and therefore the symptoms we see today are not enough starvation, conflict, and vice.

Myth #1: Malthus described the process where the poor consciously or unconsciously reduce their fertility in their struggle to stay alive. The myth is that this sort of individual fertility reduction magically adds up across the whole population such that the population is not attempting to drive our numbers to the limit.

Myth #2: When the population hits the limit, there will be famine wars and vice that will limit the growth the ugly way. This myth was started by Malthus. The myth is that the effects of too much population growth will be obvious.

Malthus didn’t have a sense of how an environment of impoverished organisms would regulate itself as a collective “super-organism”. I’ll outline just a few aspects of this super-organism since all of them certainly aren’t known, and one person wouldn’t be able to understand them all if they were. Note that I don’t think anything that could be called “free will” exists. The Ehrlichs, or at least Paul, think such a faculty exists, but I’m not sure how they justify it.

Perspective is important because it allows more depth to words. I think it’s rational for some people to take a “deterministic” perspective since we must explore the solution space of existence, and no one can guarantee the correct model right now, so we must explore a multiplicity. Of course, I think “determinism” is correct and I think “free will” is a harmful concept, but that’s another long topic. The quotes around “determinism” are just to allow for anti-intuitive possibilities in the mathematical models of the Universe, where perhaps the conceptions of determinism, like free will, break down under scrutiny. This would not surprise me. The whole concept of “causality” bothers me on a fundamental level. It’s macroscopically “apparent”, and entropy seems to be an aspect of causality – the cost of it. I just mean, when I think about the Universe existing “moment to moment” – and whether that can even be defined – can we find something that can be said to be “causal”?

People will try to say, for example, that gravity causes objects with mass to exert an attractive force on one another. Or because of distortions of spacetime will move closer, or whatever. Well, “forces”, which are just mathematical models and not the phenomena themselves, don’t explain anything. It’s like how a painting of a tree doesn’t explain a tree. Mathematics doesn’t explain what makes a force “work” – it’s just a “painting” of the shadows of Universal relational aspects we call “forces”. I then don’t understand what it means for concepts of unknown and probably intuitively impossible to grasp ontological status to be “causing” anything. Causality would intuitively seem to require a mathematical definition, and yet saying a force is a “cause” is not saying anything. How is the Universe “updating” itself “moment-to-moment”? I know that we don’t know the answer to this. Therefore, this “causality” concept is suspect.

And then note that “free will”, in wanting to cause an organism to do something, is left with two mysteries – the nature of causality and the nature of free will. Interestingly, free will seems to manifest the causality inherent in the Universe while not being utterly determined by it. This is a strange idea.

But back to Malthus. Human beings are driven by homeostatic pressures – to eat, have sex, nurse an addiction, etc. To understand why the poor have so many children might be to understand if there’s some energy-survival curve being traversed which manifests in biological adaptations to a harsh environment. Instead of this being a case of poor people being “mysteriously masochistic” or some such, maybe they’re at the mercy of a complex of environmental and biological pressures. I think people have tried to use k/r selection theory to explain this, appropriately or not. And I think theories have moved on from k/r – becoming more complex. The point is that we should understand the pressures that create this reproductive situation so they can be mitigated. It’s hard to fault Malthus for not seeing this complexity. We still don’t see it. It must be there, however. People have epigenetic responses to stress and malnourishment that can last for generations, for example. These changes to individual organisms will change the relationships between the population, which will change the character of the super-organism. Perhaps having a lot of children is more ideal for this impoverished super-organism, or perhaps the benefits don’t manifest clearly at that level, but only at the family-node level. These poor people certainly aren’t going to have the meta-cognitive capacity to understand the biological underpinnings of their emergent behavior.

As to the second point I don’t think Malthus was wrong. Again, he couldn’t predict the explosive impacts of technology – on our ability to create so much food. And it’s trivially easy to see that he’s right. If a trillion people were suddenly put on the planet, could we feed them? If not, then there’s a limit. How then does a species approach this limit? This is aside from the fact we have a few billion starving/malnourished people on the planet. It’s a disgrace.

Didem,

I suggest you read my posts on this topic. The fact that births arriving in the world so frequently that they are causing child mortality should have some effect on what you think is moral. These facts need to be known. If a large percent of the population comprehends these concepts, the morality should be different from what it is now, which should have profound effects how your 9 options are perceived.

Regarding your #7 “future generations’ survival is at risk”, the fact of the matter is that the births are causing death right now. This is not some future possibility.

I don’t understand #3.

jt

It’s interesting that you think feminism might be a problem. I’ll have to ask some feminists this question. Life creates entropy, so every child you bring into the world is competing will all other life – current and future – for resources. This perspective should be drilled from a young age. It doesn’t mean we have to live dull, ascetic lives either. It should be tied to specific responsibilities and still be generally adaptable.

I think “super-effective” would be getting mothers to have sterilizations after one child, if the child could be promised quality health services and education. If the child had something like autism, there could be clauses for handling those situations as well.

We need to cut down on population, period. This idea needs to become part of the “zeitgeist”.