John Savard wrote:
On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:38:18 +0000 (UTC), Sander Vesik
wrote, in part:

You should also seriously consider proving that the number of people in
poverty would be smaller if the number of people would be lower, and not
vice versa.

It is obvious by observing groups of people in different countries on
Earth now that two things lead to poverty:

a lack of access to technology, and

a lack of access to resources.

Neither of which has any particular relation to the size of the population,
or even more, population density. If you don't see how this is relavant,
look at say Belgium -
* it has had (mod for wars) monotonicly increasing population
* it has had a constant good access to technology and innovation
* it has had a decreasing amount of resources
* it has had a monotonicly decreasing number of people in poverty

It is also very easy to show that should the population growth stop - or
worse, decrease - the number of people living in poverty will start to grow
very fast.


It is possible for a country with limited resources to be prosperous
if it is a world leader in technology - like Japan - and prosperity
can also come from having lots of resources relative to a small
population - like North America and Australia a hundred years ago.

The country being prosperous has little or anything to do with the percentage
of people in poverty. There are plenty of countries that are prosperous yet
have very steep curves


Why should I have to "prove" the obvious, whereas the obviously silly
notion that a larger population, in which resources such as arable
land, water, and metals would be driven to higher prices, being
scarce, and human labor, being common, would become cheaper, would
lead to prosperity and not poverty is not given the burden of proof?

No, you have to prove it because you are using an extremely silly
Malthusian notion that has no basis in practice and to which any
number of counterexamples exist - while being suported at best by
one example in which total destruction of basicly all of the territory
of a country in going after a single mineral resource has left the
country in poverty after depletion accompanied by squandering of money.



John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++