Social question for you

[CThunder-blue]

To the people who say that with less people, there would be less money circulating; I would say that with less people in demand for jobs, the wages would increase and therefore, allow people to purchase products that they wouldn't normally buy.

Conversely, this would also create more waste. The question is, do we create more waste with more people buying less goods or less people buying more goods? Look at E-waste as an example. People throw out perfectly good monitors, computers, printers, etc because they just bought the latest and greatest and have no desire to keep the old stuff. Some of this gets recycled to community charity, but there's a lot more that ends up in landfills.

I dont think the current population has anything to do with our unemployment rate.

So you're saying that if there were 10 jobs available at the local market and 15 people applied, 5 people wouldn't be unemployed? I know unemployment is based on many factors, I'm only considering it from the population pov.

[Cuongism]

Unemployment rates by year (from http://www.bls.gov/cps/prev_yrs.htm)

Year Annual
1948 3.8
1949 5.9
1950 5.3
1951 3.3
1952 3.0
1953 2.9
1954 5.5
1955 4.4
1956 4.1
1957 4.3
1958 6.8
1959 5.5
1960 5.5
1961 6.7
1962 5.5
1963 5.7
1964 5.2
1965 4.5
1966 3.8
1967 3.8
1968 3.6
1969 3.5
1970 4.9
1971 5.9
1972 5.6
1973 4.9
1974 5.6
1975 8.5
1976 7.7
1977 7.1
1978 6.1
1979 5.8
1980 7.1
1981 7.6
1982 9.7
1983 9.6
1984 7.5
1985 7.2
1986 7.0
1987 6.2
1988 5.5
1989 5.3
1990 5.6
1991 6.8
1992 7.5
1993 6.9
1994 6.1
1995 5.6
1996 5.4
1997 4.9
1998 4.5
1999 4.2
2000 4.0
2001 4.7
2002 5.8
2003 6.0
2004 5.5
2005 5.1
2006 4.6
2007 4.6
2008 5.8
2009 9.3

World population by year (from http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World...edirected=true)



From 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 6.5 billion people currently, there doesn't seem to be any correlating trend in the unemployment rate. 5% of 6 billion is still a lot more people.

I don't think population is really the problem, economy is. Long story though.

[revstriker]

Originally Posted by CThunder-blue

To the people who say that with less people, there would be less money circulating; I would say that with less people in demand for jobs, the wages would increase and therefore, allow people to purchase products that they wouldn't normally buy.

Everything is relative to everything else. With less people, there would be less demand for product (not more), companies would make less money, and there would be less jobs. Your making the assumption that even though there would be less people, the amount of product on the market would be the same or more, and the amount o jobs would be the same. We know from just looking at the current economic situation, this is not true. You can also look at the historical list of unemployment rates over the last 50 years to see that the percent unemployed has been pretty consistent. Yet there are millions of more jobs in the market today than there was 50 years ago.

[DBentley415]

I think there are bigger problems the government should be taking care of in the U.S. other than population control like the problem Seph mentioned about people being able to get government aid way too easily. If less people can get gov't aid then maybe they would feel more of a need to find a job because there are jobs out there despite the fact that they might be crappy jobs flipping burgers. Population control is something other countries like India, etc. need to be informed about since their population is growing so fast and many of the women have to go into prostitution or are forced to since their parents can't afford raising them. Unfortunately, the U.S. can't force them to stop having children so they can better their own living conditions.

[ninja3575]

Is population control in the US viable/possible ? Do chickens have lips !!??
Come on... we all know that its never going to happen... We can come together and complain... and yes, blowing off steam is a temporary fix to our disgust and anger, but in the end the system will remain and we'll just look like a buncha whiners...

Seriously, in our lifetimes, all we can hope to do is alleviate the symptoms... unless some act of God comes and wipes a few billion people from off the face of the earth.

[ninja3575]

Originally Posted by CThunder-blue

To the people who say that with less people, there would be less money circulating; I would say that with less people in demand for jobs, the wages would increase and therefore, allow people to purchase products that they wouldn't normally buy.

I'm confused as to what your point is... with less people you would have a proportional decrease in available money floating around... but thats not really how the monetary system works...

As far jobs paying more because there is less demand for a particular position... well... how do you come up with that correlation?

[CThunder-blue]

Originally Posted by ninja3575

I'm confused as to what your point is... with less people you would have a proportional decrease in available money floating around... but thats not really how the monetary system works...

As far jobs paying more because there is less demand for a particular position... well... how do you come up with that correlation?

There's no money floating around. Most everyone has credit debt in one form or another. Even the government is printing money right now with little to no backing. I never said there would be less demand for a position. I said there would be more demand for workers if there were less available people to do the work. This would have employers offer competitive wages to draw in talent. If you were a tech in the late 90's to early 2k, you'd know what I mean.