[FirstClassSkeptic]

I am talking about human population here.

Are there really seven billion or so people on earth?

I can think of a few reasons to exaggerate population numbers. Most have to do with a socialistic type government system. Simply put: There is a reason to exaggerate numbers if there is money in it.

In the rural county where I live, there are supposed to be ten thousand people. I'd like to know where they are. The biggest town in the county has two thousand, they say, and there isn't even a close second town.

Reasons to exaggerate:

More population means more money for social programs. Public schools can get more money by exaggerating student population. Jails can get more money by the same process.

More road building. By exaggerating the need for roads, more can be built, and more money for contractors and such. SAme with hospitals, schools, and even churches.

More charity aid. Such as for black Africa. By exaggerating the number of starving children in Africa, the charity promoters can tug at hearts and purse strings a little better. Also perhaps exaggerating the number of AIDS victims, and tuberculosis victims, thus commanding more money.

in China, because of central planning, there is great pressure on local officials to always report to their superiors that their district is growing, expanding. The same sort of thing happens in the USA, only by a different sort of mechanism, and maybe not so demanding.

Some evidence, perhaps, that numbers have been exaggerated;

Large 'ghost cities' in China. Maybe there just isn't enough people to fill them?

Many dead people found still drawing a pension. In Japan just a few months ago, there was a news story about looking for some old pensioners, only to find they were dead, and hidden by the family, so they could continue to receive the government dole. Japan brags about having such a long life span in their population. Maybe the dead just aren't being reported?

Cities in the USA going broke. Maybe it's not so much the economy, but just that there aren't enough people to pay the taxes. Of course, one reason is that the cities are full of aliens who don't pay any taxes; that a big part of it. But maybe they are trying to run a city on a budget for, say, two million people when there are only a half million?

[NUKELIES]

They have a better excuse to depopulate if they can convince us that we are overpopulated. Having said that, India is most unequivocally overpopulated. China's more organized, but seems just about as crowded. Due in part to the almost non-existent urban planning in India, but also due to the definite overpopulation, walking down the street can be very difficult indeed.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

but also due to the definite overpopulation, walking down the street can be very difficult indeed.

It's difficult to walk down the sidewalks of Manhattan, because of all the people. And it's often hard to get through an average shopping mall during Christmas. But that really doesn't prove that the earth is crowded with people. It just proves that people like to congregate in certain places. You don't see a billion people in one shopping mall, or on a street in India. The number of people that one man can see at one time is very limited.

[Sorensen731]

Yes.
I thought about it a few times.
Just India alone is enough.
Official data

1951 361,088,000
2011 1,210,193,422

That's absolutely impossible.

Compare,a BIGGER,RICHER,and immigrant friendly country. (The United States)

1950 151,325,798
2010 308,745,538

So,the richest country, enormously big, with no wars, "welcoming" Europeans and South-Americans only managed to double.
And thanks to the best economy, jobs,stability, world currency, huge propaganda.
American won population at the expense of Europe.

How can this numbers of India be real? It can't be,

To double a country needs a hundred years at least, the States had special factors, that doesn't exist in India, India was no "new discovered unpopulated continent", it didn't receive continuous supplies of European immigrants and it wasn't an economic power. No space, no lebensraum, no racial friends coming here, no American dream, no colonial houses with huge gardens for the kids to play.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

Yes, India is a question because when I was a kid, it seemed there was always some advertising on television, asking for money for the starving children in India.

Food-grain production increased from 50.8 million tons in fiscal year (FY--see Glossary) 1950 to 176.3 million tons in FY 1990. The compound growth rate from FY 1949 to FY 1987 was 2.7 percent per annum. Overall, wheat was the best performer, with production increasing more than eightfold in forty years. Wheat was followed by rice, which had a production increase of more than 350 percent. Coarse grains had a poorer rate of increase but still doubled in output during those years; production of pulses went up by less than 70 percent. The increase in oilseed production, however, was not enough to fill consumer demands, and India went from being an exporter of oilseeds in the 1950s to a major importer in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The agricultural sector attempted to increase oilseed production in the 1980s and early 1990s. These efforts were successful: oilseed production doubled and the need for imports was reduced. In the early 1990s, India was on the verge of self-sufficiency in oilseed production.After independence in 1947, the cropping pattern became more diversified, and cultivation of commercial crops received a new impetus in line with domestic demands and export requirements. Nontraditional crops, such as summer mung (a variety of lentil, part of the pulse family), soybeans, peanuts, and sunflowers, were gradually gaining importance.

The per capita availability of a number of food items increased significantly in the postindependence period despite a population increase from 361 million in 1951 to 846 million in 1991. Per capita availability of cereals went up from 334 grams per day in 1951 to 470 grams per day in 1990. Availability of edible oils increased significantly, from 3.2 kilograms per year per capita in FY 1960 to 5.4 kilograms in FY 1990. Similarly, the availability of sugar per capita increased from 4.7 to 12.5 kilograms per year during the same period. The one area in which availability decreased was pulses, which went from 60.7 grams per day to 39.4 grams per day. This shortfall presents a serious problem in a country where a large part of the population is vegetarian and pulses are the main source of protein.

http://countrystudies.us/india/102.htm

[rerevisionist]

@ Sorensen - I think you're completely wrong. There's an approximate rule that a small regular percentage time increase will cause a doubling in 70/percentage time. 2% increase a year will double a population in 35 years, and quadruple it in 70 years.

India and the USA can't really be compared. India has a very warm climate; if you can stay alive overnight, and have a minimum of food and water, and little shelter, you can live permanently. The climate is good for growing plants year round. In New York and northern USA you get snow and winter and no plant growth for months. So informal, outdoor life isn't possible year round. Much of the population growth in India is of poverty-stricken people, and if they marry (or don't marry) at 15 or 20 they can easily have large families. There are huge slum areas in large - and I'd guess other - Indian cities. Watch Youtubes on e.g. Dharavi - in what was part of Victorian Bombay - to see the sort of thing. And note these areas now get intermittent electricity and intermittent fresh water.

A friend of mine once said in passing that cold countries are expensive, which I thought was quite a clever generalisation.

[Sorensen731]

I disagree.
India has the biggest mountains in the world. And it's a third the surface of the states, and was already full/explored as I said.

India has more arable land area than any country except the United States,[6] and more water area than any country except Russia, Canada and the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_India

So, how can a country with less farm land grow faster?

And there is no such rule in demographics, only women bring new members, and some of them, 15-35 years let's say, and some are infertile.

As an example. Spain, from 1940 to 1975 was hugely catholic, pro big family, and the numbers are;
1950 28.117.873
2010 47.021.031

And more,
1900 18.616.630

I can copy past the biggest countries, you get the trend.

It's very difficult to double, not even pro-family regimes achieve it.
Britain achieved it only in the 1840-1900, Spain 1900-1980. But India in 30? And two times in a row?

I recommend you read the article; Mathematics of the Past by Garry Kasparov (A supporter of New Chronology just for the population number anomalies)

China India competition made possible the 1 billion barrier, a communist symbol of power, sheer numbers of production, typical for materialist regimens. I don't believe it.
You can check Russia for example. It only claimed 170 million before the Revolution, with 1/5 of the Earth surface.

[rerevisionist]

@Sorensen - thanks for the Garry Kasparov reference. (NB Why not upload an avatar picture? User Control Panel -> Profile - > Avatar).

Russia, Canada and northern US are cold. Southern US is desert. India has more arable land than every country inthe world except the USA. It also has more water than almost every other country in the world - this includes great rivers such as the Ganges, which on its own supports huge populations. And it has a hot climate. Rice is relatively easy to grow. Also, since independence, it has had antibiotics - penicillin was discovered/ invented/ extracted about that time. Railways were installed by the British. Cheap motor transport - scooters, motorbikes - became available. Electricity became available in dense population centres. Moreover poverty increased; and poor Moslem and Hindu women aged 15-35 often had no choice but to be used to breed. 2% a year is easy enough to attain in such conditions.

Spain may have been keen on population growth officially, but it is (correct me if I'm wrong) arid and doesn't support as much life as India - where there are cows everywhere, though admittedly vegetarian diets are common. The two countries aren't really comparable. Hot wet countries - the whole of central Africa (excluding the Sahara), Indonesia, Burma etc - given the right conditions of disease control - appear likely to have huge populations. South America is an exception, I suppose because it was remote from modern agriculture and disease control and transport; maybe in 100 years Brazil will be populated like India.

BUT IMPORTANT NOTE - Europe is as densely populated as India and China.

But I agree with FCS there are pressures to overrate population numbers, overrate starvation, overrate disease, underestimate education, overestimate poverty. The BNP websites have a lot of sour comment that they've seen advertisements for wells, seeds etc in the Third World, since 1945, for the whole of their lives - there are as many, or more, such ads as ever. And the people running charities make fortunes. Also, in Britain, charities are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Nor are they regulated efficiently. And there are huge numbers of them - over a million, I believe. Undoubtedly there's a lot of strange anomalies. In fact I wonder if the elites - some Jews, some lifetime civil servants, some businesspeople, some think tank research con-artists - are building entire towns in places like Simla where they can retire surrounded by servants.

[Sorensen731]

There are too many variables, including the cultural one, which should be understood first.

Anyway, it's disgusting how they put all the world together as potatoes in a sack, we are not the same it's clear and we are not responsible, specially for the incredible 2 billion new Indians and Chinese after de-colonisation!

It's part of the Language to prepare the world government, speak as a united population.

Spain for example is loosing it's towns, they are falling apart, they are empty! Centuries old jewels of mankind, precious little towns are dying... And we are supposed to be overpopulated?

Yes rerev, part of it is arid (Greek style we could say), and a quarter over 1000meters, but the few small rivers give very good wine! And the best food!
The Capital jumped from 200.000 in the XIX to 3 million!
With that in mind, I tend to think the grow could really be very fast.
The discussion rests on census data, and they are recent, and historically and politically dependent, and I seriously doubt it, as I believe in radical (short) New Chronology.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

The discussion rests on census data, and they are recent, and historically and politically dependent, and I seriously doubt it, as I believe in radical (short) New Chronology.

That's what I was trying to get at; since one man cannot see, much less count, all of the people in his town, or county, he couldn't possibly know how many are on the entire earth, and so, you have to take the word of officials.

When they tell you that two hundred thousand or so children in black Africa are on the verge of starvation, please send money, how many children do you actually see in the pictures?

[FirstClassSkeptic]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ja ... azon-tribe

If the world is so crowded, how can there be isolated tribes of people?

[rerevisionist]

FCS, with the development of science (and such things as the discovery & import of potatoes), white population densities expanded, but unscientific areas' populations didn't.

It's quite difficult to get decent figures - the UN online material has population stuff by country, but seems unable to work out areas, and has masses of garbage on eg 'AIDS'

Anyway, I picked up at random the 1986 'World Almanac' and find on p 529--
______________________
Asia ... 17M sq miles ... estimated population 2.9 bn
Africa ... 11.7 M sq miles ... 0.55 bn
North America ... 9.4 M sq miles ... 0.4 bn
Europe ... 4 M sq miles ... 0.7 bn
______________________
As a very simplified figures, ignoring deserts, mountains, ice, soil quality - and the qualities of the people - etc etc,
Europe has .175 bn people per M sq miles. Pro rata, we have
Asia - 50.6 billion
Africa - 2.0 billion
North America - 1.6 billion

So by European standards Asia would need three times as many people, Africa and North America four times as many people, to get to European levels.

I think most people don't realise the dual standard. Or the amount of technical material needed - or the local technology needed; presumably triple glazing and hefty insulation isn't needed in tropical countries.
___________
[NB that 1986 edn gives total human world popn estimated as 4.845bn]