X-Message-Number: 22684 Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 08:12:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Randall Burns <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #22680 - #22682 Charles Platt wrote: >the US is listed with 2.07 children per female >lifetime. This is near replacement level. >Therefore the population growth that still >exists in the US is caused almost entirely by >immigration. If an agricultural crisis develops >(which I find totally implausible) obviously >immigration quotas will be revised downward. Well, since the overwhelming portion of immigration at this point is illegal immigration, the quotas aren't especially relevant(see numbersusa.org). I don't like the term "overpopulation". IMHO the proper term might be something more like "under-pioneering". The question is what portion of the agricultural and industrial activities are of a purely extractive nature and what portion are by some measure sustainable. When I look at stuff like salinization of the soil in California-I tend to class that as extractive agriculture. The big failure though: there exist technologies to substantially increase yield of the oceans (seeding areas with iron for example). The main barriers to that technology is essentially legal-noone wants to seed an area they are unlikely to harvest. Another important factor. While the birth rates of Americans as a whole are stable, they vary accross various groups. What that means is that US demographics are changing profoundly. In 1900, the US was about 60% of British descent. By 1970, that group had dropped in absolute numbers by about 1.5-3 Million-despite the surrounding population boom(basically if you look at the US census figures on ethnicity and factor in immigration from Britain. Also, the US used to be more or less isolated from diseases like leporasy-which isn't the case now largely due to uncontrolled borders. The basic science necessary to understand the health impact of immigration in the US is basically taboo. Open borders advocates in major foundations-both places like Cato and Brookings work in unison on this issue. It is quite plausible that at some point, the US will experience a serious and visible epidemic related to open borders. The US now has about a quarter of the world's prison population. These factors combine to make me question the long term political stability of the United States-they strike me as the type of thing that could lead eventually to another incident like the Civil War. We have never yet seen a Civil War fought in a country with a high tech infrastructure and nuclear weapons. A while back, I wrote a claim, USgn that is hosted on www.ideosphere.com That claim was an attempt to project the chance of major destabilization in the US by 2025. (Hyperinflation at the level no government has survived, civil war, breakup) At present it trades at 20-25% If we assume these are realistic odds, then the chance of the US maintainnig its present form in 66 years, is only 42% or so. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22684