Until 2100 or so, when it starts falling off a cliff, and that's the worst-case scenario. The more likely scenarios put the global population at ~9 billion at its peak, after which populations start declining rapidly. Mainly because as economies develop and women get educated, population growth falls into negative territory. There will always be alternatives for fixing nitrogen in soil. Fertilizers have been a common option because they're relatively simple and because they get subsidized. When petrochemicals become expensive, other methods will be pursued. We've advanced past the point where a single-resource scarcity would collapse a society. Even something as critical as oil can be replaced, even if doing so will be painful. I'm pretty sure that genocide on the scale advocated by the anti-human Malthusian crowd would require far more compromised ethics than hydroponics.
Churchill was as wrong about that as he was about a great many other things. Conservatives are the fools of the world. Hardly. What's really economically destructive is artificially distorting society to compel people who don't need to work to do so. Most people do not need to work in a postindustrial society. Something like two thirds of the population could just stay at home every day and society could get by just fine--with no real drop in productivity. The structures and systems that force them to go to work impose such harsh inefficiencies that it defeats the purpose of bringing them into the workforce in the first place.
You seem eager to point out how Malthus has been misinterpreted, misrepresented, corrupted or hijacked, but seem to underestimate the extent of humanitarian calamities inspired by the Holy Writs.
There's no corruption or hijacking. Malthus explicitly promoted the notion that human beings have no rights or entitlements beyond what they can wrest from the market. Not even a right to live. He was an anti-humanist.
Humanist? He was a math major. He simply contrasted the exponential natural increase to an arithmetic increase in resources i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 vs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 noting the danger of outsripping resources. If he tried to be a humanist at the same time, he may have put his analogies into a poem. Unfortunately, the multiplication table rarely rhymes. You on the other hand may subscribe to the notion of living for today observing the laws of maximum consumption without any concern for sustainability believing technology will always come to a rescue.
The Chinese like Malthus, and look how well it turned out for them. On the other hand, consider the huge income disparities and economic injustices in countries with a large natural increase, like Nigeria. There, Malthus has been shelved and everybody has turned to the Bible or Koran for guidance i.e. everything Abraham said about his dream to increase his tribe like pebbles on a seabed. Abraham may have been a good agrarian planner, but he was not an outstanding visionary. He was responding to challenges of a different age.
The problem is that population growth and resource utilization are inversely related; the more resources a society uses, the fewer children they have. Malthus never acknowledged that (in part because he didn't have sufficient data). He further took his analysis and promoted various social policies intended to head off that problem--like the aforementioned dehumanization of economic relations. He ventured into social policy too, not just mathematics. That makes his anti-humanism relevant. Note; humanism is a perspective on the utility of human beings, not "the humanities."
He was simply flat out wrong; he was wrong about the rate of resource expansion, and he failed to recognize the inverse relationship between resource utilization and population growth.
Well, the bottom line is, Malthus when you overlook all his other major or minor faults, advocated stability and sustainability, whereas the religious interpretation embraces expansion and conquest. Or perhaps it comes down to statistitians vs sheepbreeders. Or realists vs idealists.
He "advocated" it by promoting ineffective and inhumane policies, based on a flawed theory about population growth relative to resource availability. His proposals are obviously false--the data simply does not support his assertion. In that sense, he didn't advocate either stability or sustainability, he advocated nothing more than a flawed social theory. No. Statistically, he was simply wrong. That makes his social policy idealistic, not realistic.
In 1967 two delusionals wrote the following rubbish heap entitled Famine 1975: [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Famine-1975-Americas-decision-survive/dp/B0007DEZWO"]Amazon.com: Famine, 1975!: America's decision: Who will survive?: William Paddock: Books[/ame] The doom-and-gloom prophets turned out to be totally wrong. In fact, ever since then we have had food surpluses. Whether anyone chooses to believe it or not, we have enough technology to feed multibillions. All it takes is for the will to do so rather than to waste resources on war which benefit the wealthy at everyone else's expense.
And that can only really increase with technological innovation. We can produce food a lot faster today than in the 1800's only because we have huge machines to automate it. That also doesn't prove any point of yours, because we also have many times as many people who consume food, which balances/cancels that out. What happens when oil runs out? It'll run out wayyyyy faster if there's 6 billion people using oil, rather than 1 billion.
That assumes that total production increases. That only gets realistic with major technological advances that allow the production of survival necessities (food, water etc.) to be done more efficiently.
Actually, say you have a forest, with so many deer, rabbits, bears, etc. in it. Say the number of bears decreases (say, due to hunting or whatever). Then the number of deer will increase.....temporarily. The forest only has a certain "carrying capacity" for said deer. Do you deny this simple, well-known biological phenomenon? Limited resources? No such thing except for manufactured shortages such as occurred during the Great Depression and both World Wars. The fact is that resources existed then and there are plenty more available today.[/QUOTE] There's only a finite amount of copper, water, oil, etc. on Earth. There is not an infinite amount of anything in the universe. Let's start there. Do you deny what I just said? If so, you don't believe in reality. Earth is only so large physically.
The truth is, the carrying capacity of Earth is finite, which is why we don't have an infinite number of people on Earth, and the only times that human population (on Earth) has ever increased, is when we've developed more time and resource efficient ways of producing food and water.
Theoretically speaking, the planet should reach its carrying capacity eventually. In practice, we may be able to outpace resource depletion by increasing our efficiency for a long time, which is why I don't tend to worry so much about Malthusian predictions.
I just can't fathom the U.S. ending up like China or India, even with their increased prosperity over the last 10-20 years. I don't think they'd be nearly as bad off if they didn't try to cram 10,000 people per square mile (in some places), when they have not the economic prosperity to support that
China's growth is clearly unsustainable, but not because of resource scarcity. Rather, it's because a large deal of their growth is based upon central banking chicanery, though they do have a lot of precious metals stockpiled...
They better invest in economical skills/knowledge training (which..they are doing, quite a lot actually), and get a lot of deals with other nations to obtain a lot of natural resources, or else their economic prosperity will also be unsustainable. I still think we should make people that are impoverished give up their kids for adoption. That along with significant welfarism reduction would largely mitigate this flooding we have of not-very-productive people in this country.
They're certainly doing some things right, but they, like most modern and developing nations, have an underlying and fundamental flaw with their economic system that will manifest itself as increasingly severe and frequent boom and bust cycles. Of course, that's where we'll always disagree. I think providing the proper incentives would be much more efficient and practical.
I don't know the details of Chinese economic policy but I know that they are overly authoritarian, but we both already know that central controlling bodies are both incapable and unwilling to benefit the society at hand, any more than said society, if left as a group of free people, can benefit themselves with their own decisions. What incentives?
All you need to know is that they have a central bank which monopolizes their money. The incentive to be self-reliant and financially prudent.
That sounds a lot like another nation I know of.. I think the idea I presented would be a good incentive for that..and I don't think it really violates anyone's rights because I think that raising a child in poverty is child abuse or at least something similar.
Indeed. I don't think it would be an optimal incentive and would likely cause a host of human rights abuses.
