
The World Has a Problem: Too Many Young People - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/sunday-review/the-world-has-a-problem-too-many-young-people.html
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chrisan
"In China, where girls have been systematically culled from the population,
there were 34 million extra men in 2010, according to census data. In India,
there are 17 million more men and boys between the ages of 10 and 24. That
makes the marriage market even more competitive, which puts a man without a
good job at a major disadvantage. Many are bound to be bachelors for life — a
potent formula for violence, some scholars say, especially against women."

I know, or rather have heard the stories about baby girls in China, but I had
no idea just how real and much of an impact this had. That is nuts.

The US 2010 census was pretty close to 50/50
[http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf](http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf)

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tomp
> The US 2010 census was pretty close to 50/50

Well, China is as well (according to information above). 34 million is 2.5% of
1.34 billion (Chinese population in 2010), so China is at 47.5/52.5.

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arjie
That's pretty far from 50-50, man. It means one out of every ten men won't
have a partner if you naively paired them up.

~~~
olalonde
If that 34 million figure is correct, it would be 2.5%, not 10% ("one out of
every ten").

~~~
ta_donk_gt
I come up with 4.9%. 1.35 billion in China, and assuming 34 million more men
than women, that gives 692 million men and 658 million women. 34 million of
those 692 million men do not have a corresponding woman. 34/692 =
0.04913294797688.

~~~
olalonde
Oh, you're right, I divided by the entire population instead of the the male
population only.

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lisper
Very misleading headline. It should be, "The world has a problem: too many
young people in poor countries." Rich countries have the exact opposite
problem: too many old people.

But the real problem is just: too many people, period.

~~~
sangnoir
> But the real problem is just: too many people, period

Why do you say that? Which resource is insufficient to support the current
global population? (or even several times that)?

The problem is a lack of balance / poor management

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RivieraKid
> Which resource is insufficient to support the current global population?

The Earth could support perhaps 10x or even 100x more people - but by support
I mean that that amount of people would survive. The real question is how does
quality of life depend on population and where's the optimum. When you have a
small population (e.g. 10 million), the rate of research is slow, there are
not many different products on the market (i.e. you can't choose from hundreds
of cars to buy like today), etc. With a large population on the other hand,
you have less resources per capita - water, oil, minerals, land, wood.

~~~
NhanH
The rate of research is orthogonal to quality of life. On an absolute
timescale, yes you might reach more advancement faster, but also more people
were living at the time without those advancement. So unless we are in a race
with some aliens, it doesn't matter

~~~
13thLetter
> So unless we are in a race with some aliens, it doesn't matter

It matters to the people who die early because we didn't develop a particular
medical treatment. Just to pick a random example.

~~~
NhanH
But by having more people, you also have more people having more problems. In
other word, the person who die early might not even exist at that year if the
population was less. Instead of having an x population over y time span, you
have an x/n population that span n*y period.

My point was that you need to have some kind of metric (suffering per human
per year?), or otherwise the "quality of life" across different population
size and time span doesn't make sense.

~~~
13thLetter
Surely in that case the ideal number of humans is zero, because then there
wouldn't be any human suffering. This is the logic of a mad artificial
intelligence from a science fiction movie.

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andrewclunn
Supply and demand also relates to human labor, migration, and mating. Nothing
really new here, but hat off to the author for having the guts to point out
the ridiculousness of educating away unemployment. The issue is there are too
many people and no positions for them to fill. Automation will only make the
problem worse. One can hardly blame the migrants for making the self
interested choice to move, just as one can hardly blame citizens of the
developed world for wanting to keep them out.

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MichaelBurge
I would expect the least developed nations to have a higher percentage of
young people just because you're more likely to die of malaria or HIV or a
tiger or something.

~~~
simplexion
There has to be a high rate of Tiger deaths in developing nations. It just
makes sense!

~~~
MichaelBurge
They don't call them tiger economies for nothing.

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julie1
The world could have another problem: too many old rich people bleeding dry
the economy and their own kids

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/revealed-30-yea...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/revealed-30-year-
economic-betrayal-dragging-down-generation-y-income)

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eximius
"The World Has a Problem: Too Many People"*

There, fixed it.

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guard-of-terra
Cultures that prefer boys over girls deserve highest levels of contempt.

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bhewes
As I read this I could not help but think the future is going to be bright. A
glut of educated young people even in poorer countries. They will do things
their parents could not even dream of. But it always is painful realizing you
have to make a new world on top of the old.

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mc32
Let those countries use contraception, make it available to all and normalize
homosexuality. It's not like the ones having children are setting out to have
more out of necessity as cheap labor. It's that they don't have access to
cheap contraception. And making homosexuality normal allows gay people to have
a normal life without children, if they so desire. No need for pretending.

More education and better access to contraceptives (or forced pop control like
China which for obvious reasons, less desirable). Many of the poor just don't
know how control the amount of children they produce. They are ignorant about
it and often don't have easy access to birth control.

~~~
cmurf
Birth control in those countries is widely considered to be immoral. Women in
those countries are widely considered to be subordinate to men. Those are a
bigger hurdle the need to be overcome than availability and access to birth
control.

~~~
falsestprophet
Approximately 30% of all women in Africa use birth control, although over half
of all African women would like to use birth control if it were available.

Many cannot afford contraception in any case.

~~~
cmurf
Well maybe they should stop supporting their local Catholic parish quite so
much, who argues against making birth control affordable, and tells them
they're sinful people for using it. The reality is men are not in favor of it,
and you have to fight to make it both legal and affordable, while working on
the cultural problems too. It's not only about one of these things.

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valine
The article seems to suggest the problem of youth unemployment does not stem
from a lack of education. Rather, it's a lack of suitable jobs for educated
young people. The solution then would be to create an environment where
startups can flourish.

~~~
ThomPete
While that sounds right intuitively I wonder if thats really addressing the
problem.

The issues seems to be that the kind of companies that young people create
will be mostly tech companies. Tech companies are by definition capital
intensive not so much labour intensive.

I.e. less and less is needed for the new types of companies which are created.

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melling
"Nowhere can the pressures of the youth bulge be felt as profoundly as in
India. Every month, some one million young Indians turn 18"

A million people turning 18 every month could have been a great thing. Think
the brain drain might have something to do with it?

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-20/india-nabs-
nearly-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-20/india-nabs-nearly-two-
thirds-of-u-s-h-1b-visas.html)

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malandrew

        “A demographic arbitrage between aging societies with a 
        shrinking work force and youthful societies would be good 
        thing, if the whole thing could be managed,”
    

So basically that well off and aging societies brain drain the youthful
societies leaving them with far fewer of the people with the brains and
ambition to create jobs in those economies. What could possibly go wrong?

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microcolonel
I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that this is "the world"'s problem. There
are lots of places where there are too few young people.

~~~
6d6b73
It's not ridiculous if you read the article and spend just a bit of time
trying to understand it.

"But it’s the youth bulge that stands to put greater pressure on the global
economy, sow political unrest, spur mass migration and have profound
consequences for everything from marriage to Internet access to the growth of
cities"

That's world's problem.

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alexashka
Huh? You mean 'we got nothing for people to do'?

People are fine - assholes insisting everyone has to pretend like they're
working even though we have enough resources to go around, maybe they're the
problem.

Here's a comedy bit about it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibb7RjFDGN0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibb7RjFDGN0)

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jonah
South Korea is one of those with too few young people and a generally aging
population:

[http://www.techinsider.io/why-south-korea-is-becoming-the-
ol...](http://www.techinsider.io/why-south-korea-is-becoming-the-oldest-
country-2016-1)

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jonah
Sounds like we need more freedom of movement. Things will balance themselves
out if we let them.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Thank you but no thanks.

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bettyx1138
birth control in the hands of women when they want it is a wonderful thing.

