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.

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?

lid (John Savard) wrote in message ...

(snip)

John, you make some quite interesting observations, but there are many
different ways of approaching these matters of over-population, global
resources and cyclical famines. Certainly history can guide us here,
but the huge wild card is technology and human genius. We are the only
animal on the planet which can shape its environment and control its
destiny. Environmental Luddites just can't seem to grasp the
significance of this in the long term.

Many of the projections made today about global population limits and
planetary food resources are just that, projections. Most of them are
static models which assume no adjustments in the way we live and no
radical departure from our now fossil fuel-based energy exploitation
model. If one reflects on what the world was like prior to the
industrial revolution, and what it's like now, it's not too hard to
imagine another great leap with respect to harnessing fusion, a
literally unlimited, pure source of energy. After that, perhaps in
three or four hundred years will come the actual manipulation of
matter itself wherein food will be made, not grown. It's simply a
matter of changing, or growing, molecular structures into more usable
forms, both for food and for now unheard of building materials.
Forests will no longer need to be exploited for this purpose. Mining
will also become a thing of the past.

Too, great advances will be made in mapping our oceans, available
stocks of fish and how best to farm them. Remember, almost 80% of this
earth is covered with water, and we know less about this planetary
ecosystem than we do the solar system.

People, many of them scientists, like to throw around numbers to do
with critical population densities on the planet, but these are again
static models. Who knows, this earth could easily support 500 billion
people, perhaps a few trillion, if the oceans are *platformized* to
accommodate small cities here and there. Just as someone in the middle
ages could not have imagined the word we now live in, so, too, are we
similarly limited in imaging what will no doubt be going on 500 years
hence. *Cleopatra*

"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.

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

"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.

"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.

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"

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"

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