Isaac Asimov as part of his lecture in Barbados, noted the dire consequences of overpopulation. These were dealt with especially in Part I, in terms of dwindling resources for each person. But even before those effects arrive, there will be a diluting effect on democracy and freedoms.
Asimov referenced the U.S. Constitution and Article I which stipulates that "the number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand" This was based on the 1790 census and a then population for the U.S. of 3.93 million.
However, that ratio had grown to 693,000 constituents per rep by 2007, given 435 representatives. Thus, by this measure, U.S. democracy has been diluted by a factor of:
693,000/ 30,000 = 23.1
What makes the difference and why important? Obviously, the more constituents per representative the more difficult for contact to made, in terms of informing about problems, difficulties, efects of legislation etc. Even now, it is nearly impossble to contact a rep directly, and one is left to either email (which are usually ignored) or leave a phone message. The odds of any response are slim to none, and if one does arrive it is usually as a form letter, which the representative may or may not actually sign.
This means that complaints of constituents, unless they are very rich - and contribute to the congressman's campaign purse, are unlikely to be heard. Democracy is thereby undermined.
Asimov actually came up with a postulate that reflects loss of democracy:
"If the size of population grows while the size of the representative body stays constant, the annual rate of the decline of democracy is at least equal to the annual rate of the growth of the population"
Thus, if the U.S. population has grown by 1% since 2007, the democracy in place has declined by 1%. If the U.S. population has grown by 50% since 1951, then democracy has diminished by 50% in the same period.
At first this appears like nonsense, but think about it as Asimov did.
In the 1950s, unemployment rates seldom hit 2% if that. A person could find work, good work, if he or she simply looked hard enough. In addition, bank savings account rates approached 5-6% so people could safely stash money away without putting it at risk, such as in the stock market.
Now, move 50-odd years into the future. The working population has more than doubled, but the rate of new job growth has remained at roughly half that. Even worse, because many of the better jobs are now shipped overseas to India, where workers can be paid at half the rate and there are no benefits.
So, effectively, the number of willing workers outnumbers available jobs by nearly 2 to 1.
With millions of a working surplus population generated, wages (and benefits) can be held to rock bottom levels (vs. 1950 levels, and corrected for inflation) since there will be such a huge backlog of ready and willing workers that virtually 'anything goes'. Guy doesn't want to work overtime for half or no pay? Fine, fire him because there's 200 waiting in line - all with families to feed.
Worse, savings rates have plummeted since bank saving interest has nosedived to not even 0.5%. WHY? Because the growth of population made it too expensive for banks to continue to deliver so much in interest. So they did two things: 1) securitized risks- such as mortgages, by enabling them to be bundled (by the millions) and sold as debt ("collateralized mortgage obligations") on the bond markets, and 2) lowered interest rates to coerce savers to "investing" in the stock market instead.
Governments from the Reagan era played into this using expedient tax cuts, which were "meant to encourage you to invest more in stocks" ('The Demise of the Ownership Society' in MONEY magazine, p. 58, July, 2009)
Adding insult to injury, what had been defined benefit (PENSION) plans, were converted into "401ks" - in which the employee was responsible for his own retirement savings. What happened? Simply put, too many people-workers which made real pensions too expensive for companies to honor over time. This is also why the cost of health care is exploding. Too many people, too much demand for procedures, therapies, operations, etc. - limited supply (of quality) so much higher cost.
In effect, a surplus population acts as a brake on wages and benefits, as well as keeping the hoi polloi in place. (Since there will always be more people than jobs). It also causes limits to be imposed, generaly via external costs, to thereby render quality of life less. Look no further than at the deterioration of our national parks from overuse....or at our healthcare system....which is 37th in the world in terms of quality delivered per dollar paid.
Community costs also increase as the population rises, although the community's income level is hard to sustain.
Costs arrive in the form of: greater traffic volume (requiring more roads, more expense to build them), more schools (requiring higher property taxes to sustain), more hospitals, and more crime. The latter will increase more in locales in which resources are more diluted or diminished, because there will be fewer available as the number grow. In general, one can expect a 1% increase in property crime and burglary for every 10% increase in the population.
In all these cases, personal freedoms and choices are diminished. For example, much higher traffic flows - say taking two hours to traverse a suburb to downtown- will mean more citizens will simply avoid going downtown. The downtown will then "rot" from disuse, or fall into the hands of the wrong element. In all cases then, population increase byond a certain threshold limits personal choice.
As civic problems muiltiply, but tax revenues do not keep pace, cities and counties are forced to cut services. This is currently happening across the nation, and particularly in California. Police and other services are cut, parks closed up, playgrounds shuttered, and civic life is diluted.
Thus, destabilizing pressures inevitably caused by a too large excess population leads to diminished quality of life, which in turn will lead to more crime, more cutbacks in services, and so on.
Not mentioned yet, is the more pernicious form loss of democracy assumes when too many constitutents exist per representative. What happens then, is that the representatives will seek out the opinions, and follow the will of the LEAST number of MAJOR or super-citizens.
In the U.S. right now, these "super" citizens are none other than giant corporations, which are regarded as "persons" under an 1886 Supreme Court ruling (Santa Clara Decision) which extrapolated the 14th amendment to that case. Unlike the normal person-citizen, these are able to potentially live forever, or as close to that sublime state as de-regulating laws allowed. They can live in multiple places at once (branch offices), and even transmogrify themselves via mergers, etc. or 'amputate' themselves into smaller companies bearing the same overall identity, and run by a single interlocking directorate.
These 'corporate persons' were (over time) also able to access a host of special rights and privileges - not afforded ordinary flesh and blood citizens. These included: special tax-write offs, government and state subsidies, as well as deductions.(Like 'tax deferred benefits' packages for CEOs). And, in the late 20th century, a generous form of government subsidy known as 'corporate welfare' .
Since there are far fewer corporate-persons than flesh and blood persons, then our congress critters now acknowledge the priority of their will and rights over those of the (excessive, surplus) flesh and blood citizens. It is easier, after all, to deal with 3,000 neat, organized corporate persons, than 300 million real, scruffy, flesh and blood persons! In effect, the stage has been set for endemic and anomalous political and economic imbalance that has been built into the very legal system, and manner of governance.
This is why, though Asimov didn't use the word, the U.S. is no longer any facsimile of a "democracy" but rather a corporatocracy. This is a system in which elite or corporate interests exert the power of their wealth and influence to control a nation's political and economic destiny. By simple extrapolation, it follows that as the national and global population increase toward 9 billion, we will likely reach a tipping point where all average citizens of the world become corporate vassals, in a giant global slave state.
That, essentially, was Asimov's warning regarding the dimunition of democracy. Not only in the U.S., but globally. Since we are all interconnected now, the loss of democracy in one place easily transfers into its loss in another.
My conviction is that we won't have to worry about a corporate global vassal state, because most of humanity will be gone in the great die off, by the time peak Oil is underway. An end not dissimilar to what the Easter Islanders experienced (Part I) when they consumed more of their resource-energy base than they could replenish.
For more on the basis of the die-off, go to:
http://www.dieoff.org/
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