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Underpopulation Crisis
"John Savard" wrote in message ... On 26 Dec 2003 17:35:21 -0800, (Purple) wrote, in part: At the moment the problem is probably more about overconsumption than overpopulation. I don't believe that the indulgence of people in the rich countries of the world in luxuries is the primary cause of starvation. Some of the luxuries we enjoy, after all, in no way compete with the necessities of life. If we stopped manufacturing electronic junk, that wouldn't increase the ability of the planet to grow food one bit. In fact, some of our apparent extravagances have driven the growth of technology which, to some extent, improves the ability of the Earth to support people. I hesitate to take on any part of your long and studied argument, but it should be done. So, here are a few comments. As for the above, the Earth doesn't support people. People support people. People use the resources of the earth and how they use these resources depends on their political and religious beliefs. You are right in terms of technology which has changed the life span of individuals during which lifetime an individual may consume more and/or contribute to the welfare of others more, depending on the individual. If we ate less meat, this would improve the world's carrying capacity significantly, but this would be a much more difficult sacrifice to ask; because meat isn't particularly expensive, and because it is a valuable element in the human diet, you would need rationing, not simply taxation, with its attendant complexities. Another form of consumption that does create problems is using gasoline to move cars instead of to produce fertilizer. Actually, though, fertilizer uses things like nitrogen and phosphorus, so I suspect hydroelectric power would be useful for producing it as well. At present, though, things are indeed pretty good. Most famines are caused by wars. So if we just got rid of all the dictators that lead wars of aggression, and all the dictators that try to steal from international relief efforts, so that all the world's governments sincerely care for the people under their care and otherwise share Western values, indeed, we might have few problems for the moment. Dictators and their supporters in their own countries and from other countries. From what we know, dictators lowering populations by destruction certainly doesn't improve the lives of the other citizens living in those countries. Lowering populations is not the answer. Still, the whole idea of the crisis being "about" overconsumption or "about" overpopulation is really an argument about values. If you think in terms of the Earth having predated humanity, and therefore not "belonging" to anyone in particular, then you might well feel that it is here to provide for everyone. The universe, much less the earth, is not a thinking mechanism. They exists. We don't understand very many of the operational mechanisms. To make a leap that it is here to provide for everyone is just moving into the gobbledygook of the Mother Earth believers. Then you would favor taxing the rich to give to the poor, and oppose having strict immigration laws, and so on. On the other hand, if you think in terms of people and the work they expend, you might think that what any one individual produces with his hands belongs to him, and may be given by him to his descendants; and if someone can't support a family, he has no business starting one. It's not one or the other. Communism didn't work. Capitalism without a moral foundation doesn't work either. What we need is a more careful analysis of the situation than the age-old debate between Left and Right. To use Papa Jack's example of the birthrate in Europe, why is the European birthrate 1.38 children per woman? Is legal abortion the major contributor to this? I doubt this very much. If people engaging in sex outside of marriage are using contraception effectively, not only is this obviously not a bad thing, but if this activity were replaced by (the presumably desired) chastity, the effect on population would be nil. The underpopulation problem in Europe isn't stopping the political dictatorship of the developing European Union with its growth to 25 countries now. Instead, the most likely cause is that people don't feel they can afford a family. Some people seem to conclude by this that the problem is that too many people prefer a projection TV, or a second car, or overseas vacations to having children. Although I'm not particularly inclined to condemn that kind of "selfishness", I really don't think this is the issue. Instead, "can't afford a family" usually means two things: - not being able to afford housing deemed appropriate to raising children (i.e. a house in the suburbs instead of a city apartment), and - not having a sufficiently *steady job* to be able to anticipate that, for the next 18 years, one will either not be in the situation of looking for a new job, or one will have significant accumulated savings. It could also be that people don't have children as they did in the past because in the past one had to look to one's children in one's old age. Now there is government and pensions, etc. Having children means the parents have to have a sense of responsibility for others, and the more children the more responsibility being taken on. If it has just a matter of income, the rich would have twelve children per couple across the board. More likely it's a matter of how much one "can't be bothered" with children that determines how many children a couple will have. It's true that poor people manage to have children without worrying about things like this, but it should now be obvious why the middle class are having far fewer children. Not out of selfishness, but out of love. They will not have children if to do so would be to risk those children winding up among the poor. When it comes time for them to go to college, the money must be there. When they go to school, it must not be such a school as to be unsafe or exposed to the temptation of drugs. Love isn't the answer. Being able to love one's children is not determined by economic circumstances. No one says "I have enough love to divide into two but not four children." ficantly lower ratio of population to land would do two obvious things: it would lower the cost of real estate, and it would make the economy less dependent on secondary industries, particularly in those countries that now have to find markets for their exports in order to purchase food for their people. Since each country is primarily responsible for the well-being of its own people, allowing this situation to emerge in any country obviously leads to economic instability. Just a little side note. Countries are not primarily responsible for the well-being of their own people. Individuals are responsible for that. The era of Big Brother is not completely upon us. Where individuals give up their liberty to the political establishment, hoping that there is a Big Brother who will take care of them, then they have also given up their other freedoms and shouldn't complain about what happens to them, up to and including having their lives taken for the greater good. People are intelligent, but if they are convinced to sell off their future by not doing the work necessary on a community level in order to get personal gain of the moment, they will lose. Cause and effect. If every country in the world had a population density, relative to its primary habitable area (i.e. measuring population density in Greenland by the same yardstick as population density in Argentina is inappropriate, because much less of Greenland can be used to produce food) of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. Now all we need are dictators who believe in "Thou shalt not covet" and we're all set! There is always something individuals and groups will covet and be willing to put their lives on the line for. And its population would also be considerably lower than it is at present. Of course, the countries of the Middle East need not fear that the rest of the world would lose interest in buying oil, for example, so this is simply a rough approximation to an 'ideal' situation. Why doesn't the world have that population density, approximately? The answer seems to me to be quite simple. Population among humans doesn't normally stop growing when everyone is well-fed and satisfied. Instead, it stops growing much later, when we have such things as poor people living in crowded cities. That there are often other proximate causes, such as feudalism or primogeniture or enclosures, cannot really obscure the fact that in the "big picture", population growth drove the social changes that made inequality, and hence poverty, possible. Since population keeps increasing, while the economy seems to go in cycles - new technologies change the carrying capacity of the land, plagues thin out the populations of the cities, crowded nations carry out successful wars of conquest against distant lands whose inhabitants are less technically competent - some do argue that population isn't the cause. If we are firmly resolved not to do any bad things - don't kill any innocent fetuses in the womb, don't take any continents away from indigenous people, don't drive peasants off their land to man large factories - then we will want to make sure that the future population will always be well under what we are absoultely sure we can support comfortably. This, however, has not historically been the behavior of the human race. Instead, we keep having the situation where growing populations lead to discontent, which leads to authoritarian governments, which leads to them attempting to expand at the expense of their neighbors, which leads to their neighbors emphasizing defense over other social goals, and so on. It is therefore absolutely obvious that it is population growth, at bottom, that keeps the world from being a well-managed, safe, and tidy place. Not obvious. The world will never be a well-managed, safe and tidy place as long as human beings with human weaknesses live on it. Some people don't mind a little unruliness, and fear that such a tidy world would be one without heroes, whether generals or successful businessmen. So again we come back to Left and Right. But in a much less crowded world, there wouldn't be any need to get upset about someone having a little more than his "share", and crowded countries that engage in aggression usually don't respect the property rights of their subjects. There wouldn't be any need to get upset about someone having a little more than his "share?" Wow, you just need to look into how people react in offices to someone getting a little more. Human nature doesn't change. Could the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution have been managed better, if modern methods of contraception were available at those times, so that the technological progress they entailed would still have taken place, but their attendant evils - the rise of large autocratic states, and a peasantry condemned to back-breaking labor in the first case, the dispossession of the peasantry and the formation of an urban proletariat in the second case - being utterly avoided? That, to me, is the question of the hour. After all, unemployment rates have edged up since 1965 or thereabouts. Are overcrowding, aggressive competition, and perhaps even war, really needed for progress? Or could we do away with all these things, and still have technical progress because, say, people enjoy watching Mars launches on TV enough to pay taxes for them? It's not overcrowding that brings progress, nor aggressive competion or war. Progress comes because individuals learn from their environment about cause and effect. They sacrifice, work harder, plan, expend energy, compete believing that they will get something more than if they just put in a day's work for a day's pay. Do you really think people will do all of those things, make all of those sacrifices so they can come home and watch Mars launches on TV, something they will also get if they do nothing more than put in a days work for a days pay somewhere without problems involved in sacrificing? Or would a stress-free society not work, because with a stable population, as opposed to a low and growing one, you wouldn't have all the men being happily married, because the women wouldn't be interested unless they could have babies, this being more important to them than mere sex? Just look at what happened to marriage and family life in the Soviet Union for your answer. Look at the alcoholism rate among men in the Soviet Union. Women had their child, aborted many, got the government supported job and didn't need men any more. These are the kinds of questions I ask. I would like to do away with the bad things I read about in newspapers and history books, but I presume other people would as well. So it's obvious we don't quite know how yet, so there must either be answers we don't know - or questions we haven't asked. John Savard http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html http://fatima.freehosting.net/Articles/Art3.htm Above is a link to an article by Lee Penn. Anyone talking about population reduction should know that the seeds of these ideas have been planted in the public arena a long time ago by New Age activists such as those mentioned in the essay. Know also that from the writings of those such as New Ager Barbara Marx Hubbard, political New Agers believe that if we don't voluntarily limit the population, they will have the right to bring about another Holocaust or whatever is necessary to reduce the population to what they consider a good number, all for the good of Mother Earth. |
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Underpopulation Crisis
If every country in the world had a population density, relative to
its primary habitable area[.....]of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. If stability and peace are brought about through human underpopulation, why was the world not peaceful and stable in 1800? |
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Underpopulation Crisis
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Underpopulation Crisis
"G EddieA95" wrote in message
... If every country in the world had a population density, relative to its primary habitable area[.....]of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. If stability and peace are brought about through human underpopulation, why was the world not peaceful and stable in 1800? We weren't underpopulated. Food production was much lower and population was lower. Conquest of the New World was partially driven by overpopulation in the Old World. We stole land from American Indians, because we were overpopulated and wanted more land. We were able to conquer, partly because we had a higher population density. |
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Underpopulation Crisis
On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 21:31:15 GMT, "Mike Rhino"
wrote: "G EddieA95" wrote in message ... If every country in the world had a population density, relative to its primary habitable area[.....]of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. If stability and peace are brought about through human underpopulation, why was the world not peaceful and stable in 1800? We weren't underpopulated. Food production was much lower and population was lower. Conquest of the New World was partially driven by overpopulation in the Old World. We stole land from American Indians, because we were overpopulated and wanted more land. We were able to conquer, partly because we had a higher population density. And our weapon technology was better, i.e. we had the Maxim gun and they did not, or as Black Adder once said, in my day if you saw a man in a grass skirt you shot him and nicked his country. Christopher +++++++++++++++++++++++++ "Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it." Winston Churchill |
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Underpopulation Crisis
"Dorothy" wrote in message
news:jOjHb.475744$Dw6.1394391@attbi_s02... "John Savard" wrote in message ... (Purple) wrote: ================================================== ===================== Purple wrote, in part: At the moment the problem is probably more about overconsumption than overpopulation. ================================================== ===================== John Savard wrote: I don't believe that the indulgence of people in the rich countries of the world in luxuries is the primary cause of starvation. Some of the luxuries we enjoy, after all, in no way compete with the necessities of life. If we stopped manufacturing electronic junk, that wouldn't increase the ability of the planet to grow food one bit. In fact, some of our apparent extravagances have driven the growth of technology which, to some extent, improves the ability of the Earth to support people. ================================================== ===================== Dorothy wrote: I hesitate to take on any part of your long and studied argument, but it should be done. So, here are a few comments. As for the above, the Earth doesn't support people. People support people.... ================================================== ===================== Papa Jack commented: Great point, Dorothy. History tells us that many people (perhaps a majority) lived in what we would consider poverty in the years before the industrial revolution. Yet, the world's population was far, far smaller in those primitive days. ================================================== ===================== Dorothy wrote: ...People use the resources of the earth and how they use these resources depends on their political and religious beliefs. You are right in terms of technology which has changed the life span of individuals during which lifetime an individual may consume more and/or contribute to the welfare of others more, depending on the individual. ================================================== ===================== Papa Jack commented: In 1964, I was stationed at Kimpo Airport in Korea. On the short drive to Seoul in those days, we would see families living in cardboard boxes near the river, even in the harsh winter. When I visited the same area in the late 70s, I saw computer manufactures near the same exact place -- with dozens of modern high-rise apartments a couple of miles down the same road. Such impressive progress in only 15 years or so. This is what science and technology can do for a people. Happy holidays. |
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Underpopulation Crisis
"Dorothy" wrote in message
news:jOjHb.475744$Dw6.1394391@attbi_s02... "John Savard" wrote: ================================================== ==================== [snip] ================================================== ==================== John Savard I don't believe that the indulgence of people in the rich countries of the world in luxuries is the primary cause of starvation. ================================================== ==================== [snip] ================================================== ==================== Dorothy wrote: http://fatima.freehosting.net/Articles/Art3.htm Above is a link to an article by Lee Penn. Anyone talking about population reduction should know that the seeds of these ideas have been planted in the public arena a long time ago by New Age activists such as those mentioned in the essay. Know also that from the writings of those such as New Ager Barbara Marx Hubbard, political New Agers believe that if we don't voluntarily limit the population, they will have the right to bring about another Holocaust or whatever is necessary to reduce the population to what they consider a good number, all for the good of Mother Earth. ================================================== ==================== Papa Jack stated: Thanks for the link. The article is a "must read" to understand what some would wish on us. Happy holidays. |
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Underpopulation Crisis
Mike Rhino wrote: "G EddieA95" wrote in message ... If every country in the world had a population density, relative to its primary habitable area[.....]of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. If stability and peace are brought about through human underpopulation, why was the world not peaceful and stable in 1800? We weren't underpopulated. Food production was much lower and population was lower. Conquest of the New World was partially driven by overpopulation in the Old World. We stole land from American Indians, because we were overpopulated and wanted more land. There's really no limit to how much land people want. Humans have pretty much ignored farming the 70% of the world that is ocean and still generally operate there in hunter/gatherer mode. Pretty much no one lives on the oceans. We were able to conquer, partly because we had a higher population density. But consider the much higher technology, protected populations to draw on for reserves, form of government. The Native American Indian response was incoherent to be generous. -- "Throw me that lipstick, darling, I wanna redo my stigmata." +-Jennifer Saunders, "Absolutely Fabulous" |
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Underpopulation Crisis
Christopher wrote: On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 21:31:15 GMT, "Mike Rhino" wrote: "G EddieA95" wrote in message ... If every country in the world had a population density, relative to its primary habitable area[.....]of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. If stability and peace are brought about through human underpopulation, why was the world not peaceful and stable in 1800? We weren't underpopulated. Food production was much lower and population was lower. Conquest of the New World was partially driven by overpopulation in the Old World. We stole land from American Indians, because we were overpopulated and wanted more land. We were able to conquer, partly because we had a higher population density. And our weapon technology was better, i.e. we had the Maxim gun and they did not, or as Black Adder once said, in my day if you saw a man in a grass skirt you shot him and nicked his country. But you'll notice that idiotically we gave away that technology, firearms, pretty rapidly. It isn't like we aren't doing that today by arming other countries with the high technology weapons we've come up with. -- "Throw me that lipstick, darling, I wanna redo my stigmata." +-Jennifer Saunders, "Absolutely Fabulous" |
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Underpopulation Crisis
On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 16:14:28 -0800, "Bill Bonde ( the oblique allusion
in lieu of the frontal attack )" wrote: Christopher wrote: On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 21:31:15 GMT, "Mike Rhino" wrote: "G EddieA95" wrote in message ... If every country in the world had a population density, relative to its primary habitable area[.....]of the United States in 1950, the world would be a much more stable and peaceful place. If stability and peace are brought about through human underpopulation, why was the world not peaceful and stable in 1800? We weren't underpopulated. Food production was much lower and population was lower. Conquest of the New World was partially driven by overpopulation in the Old World. We stole land from American Indians, because we were overpopulated and wanted more land. We were able to conquer, partly because we had a higher population density. And our weapon technology was better, i.e. we had the Maxim gun and they did not, or as Black Adder once said, in my day if you saw a man in a grass skirt you shot him and nicked his country. But you'll notice that idiotically we gave away that technology, firearms, pretty rapidly. It isn't like we aren't doing that today by arming other countries with the high technology weapons we've come up with. Thats was mostly a case of global politics between the major countries in the opposing political power blocks that make the weapons. As you correctly stated we have similar dealings today but on a lower scale. Christopher +++++++++++++++++++++++++ "Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it." Winston Churchill |
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