Posted on 01/22/2012 4:54:42 PM PST by Brian Kopp DPM
Sorry charlie, it isn't “kool aid”, it is reality.
But as I said, your religious bias on this subject is apparently insurmountable by evidence.
The evidence of 7 BILLION PEOPLE rapidly climbing to 8 and even 9 BILLION PEOPLE.
Oh, but it is UNDER population that is a problem - in Bizarro world!
As I said earlier, you obviously haven’t read the original post or the subsequent articles I posted on this thread.
You have no understanding of demographics and the interplay between life expectancy and fertility rates.
Read up on demographics and economics and get back to me.
It will be an eye opening experience for you.
I recommend you start with the books linked in the original post.
Among those who study demographics there is a universal acknowledgment that human population in increasing, and will continue to increase.
Because you don't seem to follow math very well I will explain something to you. 3.5 billion people need a birth rate roughly TWICE what 7 billion people have, in order to add a billion people to their population in the same amount of time.
Because we now have 7 billion people, rather than 6, a declining birth rate will STILL add another billion people faster than 6 billion at a higher birth rate added another billion.
I don't remember, back when there were only 6 billion people on Earth rather than 7, MISSING them in an economic sense.
Similarly, if the illegal population of these United States were to be economically encouraged to go home, it would not be an economic blight upon the USA because of their ‘missing’ population.
How do you reconcile your out of the mainstream view with the economic blight of those nations with huge birth rates, and the economic blight we suffer because of illegal immigration?
Shouldn't all those extra people provide an economic boon? Why don't they?
IS POPULATION GROWTH A DRAG ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?
Julian L. Simon1
This is the economic history of humanity in a nutshell:
From 2 million or 200,000 or 20,000 or 2,000 years ago until
the 18th Century there was slow growth in population, almost
no increase in health or decrease in mortality, slow growth
in the availability of natural resources (but not increased
scarcity), increase in wealth for a few, and mixed effects
on the environment. Since then there has been rapid growth
in population due to spectacular decreases in the death
rate, rapid growth in resources, widespread increases in
wealth, and an unprecedently clean and beautiful living
environment in many parts of the world along with a degraded
environment in the poor and socialist parts of the world.
That is, more people and more wealth has correlated
with more (rather than less) resources and a cleaner
environment - just the opposite of what Malthusian
theory leads one to believe.
For many years until recently, it was thought by
"development economists" that population growth is a drag upon
economic development in poor countries. And even after a
considerable shift in professional opinion in the 1980s,
population growth is commonly believed to hinder development.
This belief was the underlying assumption at the United Nations'
World Population Conference in Cairo in 1994 just as it was at
previous World Population Conferences and as it probably will be
again at the World Population Conference in 2004, irrespective of
respectable scientific opinion.
In accord with the earlier professional opinion, since the
early 1960's official institutions such as the U.S. State Depart-
ment's Agency for International Development (AID), the World
Bank, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities
(UNFPA), have acted on the assumption that population growth is
the key determinant of economic development. This belief has
misdirected attention away from the central factor in a country's
economic development: its economic and political system. This
misplaced attention has resulted in unsound economic advice being
given to developing nations. It also has caused (or allowed) the
misdiagnosis of such world development problems as supplies of
natural resources, starving children, illiteracy, pollution, and
slow growth.
From the 1970s through the date of this publication, the
U.S. government directly and indirectly has been spending
hundreds of milions of dollars annually in foreign assistance for
family planning and other programs aimed at slowing population
growth in the poorer countries. Not only could these funds have
been put to other purposes, but in some cases, the population
control programs funded by U.S. taxpayers have involved coercive
policies designed to reduce birth rates in LDCs.
One reason that population growth has been viewed as a
villain is that poor countries tend to have a high birth rate.
And it seems "common sense" that if fewer babies were born, there
would be more of the supposedly fixed quantities of food and
housing to go around. Furthermore, in earlier decades most
economists did not have another persuasive explanation of growth
and wealth. Population growth became the villain by default.
The belief that population growth slows economic development
is not a wrong but harmless idea. Rather, it has been the basis
for inhumane programs of coercion and the denial of personal
liberty in one of the most valued choices a family can make --
the number of children that it wishes to bear and raise. Also,
harm has been done to the U. S. as donor of foreign aid, over and
beyond the funds themselves, by way of money laundered through
international organizations that comes back to finance domestic
population propaganda organizations, and so on. This topic has
been addressed in detail elsewhere (Simon, 1981, Chapters 21, 22)
This paper makes two points. First, there is persuasive
explanation for why some countries grow faster than others, and
the explanation has nothing to do with population growth. This
factor leaves little room for population growth to be the cause
of slow growth. Second, there is persuasive direct statistical
evidence that population growth is not associated negatively with
economic development in the short or intermediate run, and may
well be a positive influence in the long run. A corollary is
that a more dense population does not hamper population growth.
In the very short run, additional people are an added
burden. But under conditions of freedom, population growth poses
less of a problem in the short run, and brings many more benefits
in the long run, than under conditions of government control.
THE ROLE OF THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM IN ECONOMIC PROGRESS
If there is another convincing explanation for the bulk of
differences among countries in economic growth, then the
likelihood that population growth is an important drag on
development is logically diminished. The most powerful evidence
explaining the rate of economic progress is found in the
aggregate statistics which relate economic-political systems to
their rates of economic growth.
Raymond Gastil (annual) categorizes the systems. He grades
each nation on three measures of liberty: political, civil, and
economic. Economic liberty comprises two sub-measures -- the
extent of government intervention in markets, and the level of
personal economic liberty.
Gerald Scully (1988) related Gastil's data to economic
results. Allowing for other relevant factors, he finds a strong
relationship between each of the three liberty variables and the
rate of economic growth during 1960 to 1980 among 115 nations.
And when he folds all three measures of liberty into a single
variable, he finds that nations characterized as "politically
open, individual rights, and free market" had an average growth
rate per capita of 2.73 percent, whereas those characterized as
"politically closed, state rights, and command [economy]" had an
average growth rate of 0.91 percent. This is a huge difference
in performance.
Gary Becker (1989) deepens confidence in Scully's result
with a study along the same lines which finds that "political
democracy" is positively related to economic growth. And using a
somewhat different methods, Keith Marsden arrived at much the
same now-solid conclusion.
The results in China's agricultural sector before and after
the 1979-1981 period are an important illustration of the
decisive effect of the political and economic structure upon
economic development. Under a system of collective production
where there was little incentive for farmers to work hard and
take risks, but great incentive for them to loaf on the job, food
production stagnated in the years before 1979. The combination
of bad weather and The Great Leap Forward during the years 1959
to 1961 caused production to fall so drastically that 30 million
people died of starvation. This was certainly the worst food-
production performance of any country in modern times, and
perhaps the worst ever.
Then the Chinese government undertook the largest and
fastest social movement of all time. Within a period of three
years, the 700 million people in the agricultural sector shifted
from collective enterprise to individual enterprise, and
agriculture became the largest "private" sector in the world, by
far. And since then Chinese agricultural production has
skyrocketed. Per capita food production showed almost no
increase from 1950 to 1978. But starting with the reform in
1979, per capita production almost doubled by 1985, a truly
incredible increase, with continued growth since then and no
limit in sight. The visitor to China is confronted with
bounteous appetizing food on every streetcorner, it seems, in the
sharpest contrast to the situation in the former Soviet Union.
One may wonder whether the Chinese agricultural turnaround
was "just" an isolated event, and could have other causes than
the shift in social system. We may therefore consult a wider
range of experience, though using prose accounts rather than
statistical analysis. Sven Rydenfelt analyzed the experience of
fifteen socialist countries on four continents and finds a
pervasive pattern of economic failure. However, each of these
cases also can be "explained" on the basis of its individual
culture rather than its socialist system.
Most vivid is the eyeball evidence. One need only travel by
bus across the Karelian peninsula which was wholly within Finland
until World War II. The part that is still within Finland has
incomparably better roads and more modern shops and facilities
than the part that is now within the Soviet Union. Or drive from
West Berlin to East Berlin. Or take the train from the mainland
portion of Hong Kong across the border to China. The differences
in favor of a free-enterprise private-property society are
literally unmistakable for all who are not entirely masked by
ideological blinders.
Evidence that is both dramatic and powerful statistically
arises from the unique experiment that the world's political
system created following World War II. Three nations - Germany,
Korea, and China - were split into socialist and non-socialist
parts, producing three pairs of countries whose members began
with the same culture and language and history. The members of
the pairs also had much the same standard of living when they
split apart, and the same birth rates. Their subsequent
histories enable us to determine the effect of economic system,
because it is the only relevant variable that differs between the
elements of each pair. These comparisons constitute a useful
combination of scientific rigor with ease of communication and
understanding. (Similar comparisons can be made with such
neighboring countries, one socialist and one capitalist, such as
Austria with Czechoslovakia.)
Other than the case of Korea, which will provide a
continuing laboratory example, the results are now in and are
known to all. (For a full display of the data, please see the
predecessor to this essay, Simon, 1990).
Standard measures of development that show the huge
differences in results with different socio-economic systems
include:
Output Per Person
Whether per person is measured by either the exchange-rate
method or the purchasing-power-parity method, the result of the
comparison is the same. The pairs began with roughly-equal
incomes after World War II. In each case, by the 1990s the
communist country had a much lower income. Taiwan's income is
three or four times as high as China's, S. Korea's about twice as
N. Korea's, and W. Germany's was vastly higher than E. Germany's.
Differences in product quality are not reflected in the
standard statisticaly comparisons, but are important. In East
Germany the four-cylinder primitive Trabant was almost the only
car one can buy. A person had to work 3,807 hours to earn enough
to purchase a Trabant, whereas in West Germany 607 hours work
paid for a much better car. And people had to wait in line for
ten years to get a car in East Germany.
A refrigerator required 293 hours of work in East Germany,
but only 40 hours in West Germany; a suit required 67 hours of
work, versus 13 hours in West Germany.
Only 36 percent of housing facilities in East Germany
hadcentral heating, 60 percent an indoor toilet, and 68 percent a
bath or shower. In West Germany the corresponding percentages
were 70 percent, 95 percent, and 92 percent.
Life and Health
Goods only have value if one is alive to enjoy them.
Concerning the number of years that a newly-born person could
expect to live, the free-enterprise countries did better in each
pair, though each pair started out with much the same life-
expectancy after World War II. The same is true of the results
for infant mortality. These results are particularly interesting
because public health had been one of the more-successful
activities of socialized countries. And indeed, for a while the
differences between the members of pairs were small. But
throughout Eastern Europe, life expectancy actually fell in the
last decades of the socialist experiment, and infant mortality
has increased. This reversal is not yet well-understood, but it
certainly stemmed from a congeries of characteristics of a
publicly-run health system, and from the general poverty of
socialized economies.
Proportion of the Labor Force in Agriculutre
The best long-run indicator of the extent of development of
a society is the proportion of the labor force that is employed
in agriculture. The fewer the people that are needed to feed the
population, the larger the number of people that can be employed
in providing other goods. The countries with freer markets --
including freer labor markets and freer agriculture -- needed
fewer people to feed the rest.
Economic Infra-structure
The number of telephones is a good measure of the
development of a country's infra-structure, and more particularly
its crucial communications infra-structure. The communist
countries lagged behind the development of the market-oriented
countries.
These data for the paired-country experiments in political
and economic systems provide evidence that is well-grounded
scientifically as well as dramatic and easily-understood. They
prove that the socio-economic system is the main determinant of
economic growth. There is little other variation in
developmental rates that might be explained by population
growth.
POPULATION GROWTH AND DENSITY AS INFLUENCES ON DEVELOPMENT
The paired-country data corroborate a larger body of other
scientific studies which show that population growth and density
do not hamper development. The first line in Table 1 shows that
in each split-country case the centrally-planned communist
country began with less population "pressure," as measured by
density per square kilometer, compared to the paired market-
directed non-communist country. And the communist and non-
communist countries in each pair also started with much the same
birth rates and population growth rates. There is certainly no
evidence here which suggests that population growth or density
influences the rate of economic development. Contrary to the
idea that population growth necessarily inhibits economic growth,
the free market countries, each with faster expansion in
population, experienced more rapid development -- on a per capita
basis -- than their neighboring socialist nations. If anything,
the data show that more people have a positive effect on
development.
The most powerful evidence on the relationship between the
rate of population growth and the rate of economic growth are the
global correlations. There now exist perhaps a score of
competent statistical studies, beginning in 1967 with an analysis
by Simon Kuznets covering the few countries for which data are
available over the past century, and also analyses by Kuznets
(1967) and Richard Easterlin (1967) of the data covering many
countries since World War II. The basic method is to gather data
on each country's rate of population growth and its rate of
economic growth, and then to examine whether -- looking at all
the data in the sample together -- the countries with high
population growth rates have economic growth rates lower than
average, and countries with low population growth rates have
economic growth rates higher than average. Various writers have
used a variety of samples of countries, and they have employed an
impressive battery of ingenious statistical techniques to allow
for other factors that might also be affecting the outcome.
The clear-cut consensus of this body of research is that
faster population growth is not associated with slower economic
growth. Of course one can adduce cases of countries that
seemingly are exceptions to the pattern. It is the genius of
statistical inference, however, to enable us to draw valid
generalizations from samples that contain such wide variations in
behavior. The exceptions can be useful in alerting us to
possible avenues for further analysis, but as long as they are
only exceptions, they do not prove that the generalization is not
meaningful or useful.
It has been suggested (e.g. by Roger Conner, 1984) that the
studies showing the absence of a relationship between the
population rate and the economic growth rate also demonstrate
that additional people do not imply a higher standard of living
in the long run. That is, because these studies do not show a
positive correlation, one is said to make claims beyond the
evidence if one says that over the very long sweep of human
history a larger population in the world (or perhaps, in what is
the developed part of the world at any moment) has meant faster
rates of increase of technology and the standard of living.
It is indeed the case that the existing body of empirical
studies does not prove that fast population growth in the more-
developed world as a whole increases per person income. But this
is not inconsistent with the proposition that more people do
raise the standard of living in the long run. Recall that the
studies mentioned above do not refer to the very long run, but
rather usually cover only a quarter of a century, or a century at
most. The main negative effects of population growth occur
during perhaps the first quarter or half of a century so that, if
these effects are important, the empirical studies referred to
should reveal them. These shorter-run effects upon the standard
of living include the public costs of raising children -- schools
and hospitals are the main examples -- and the costs of providing
additional production capital for the additional persons in the
work force. The absence of an observed negative effect upon
economic growth in the statistical measures therefore is enough
to imply that in the very long run more people have a positive
net effect. This is because the most important positive effects
of additional people -- improvement of productivity through both
the contribution of new ideas, and also the learning-by-doing
consequent upon increased production volume -- happen in the long
run, and are cumulative. To put it differently, the statistical
measurements of the relationship of population growth to economic
growth are biased in favor of showing the shorter-run effects,
which tend to be negative, and not showing the longer-run
effects, which tend to be positive. If such negative effects do
not appear, one may assume that an unbiased measure of the total
effect would reveal a positive effect of population growth upon
economic growth.
There is still another reason why the studies mentioned
above do not imply an absence of positive effect in the long run:
They focus on the process of population growth. If we look
instead at the attained level of population -- that is, the
population density as measured by the number of persons per
square mile, say -- we see a somewhat different result. Studies
of MDC's are lacking. But Everett Hagen (l975) and Charles
Kindleberger (l965) show visually, and Simon and Roy Gobin (l979)
show in multivariate regressions, that in LDC's higher population
density is associated with higher rates of economic growth; this
effect may be strongest at low densities, but there is no
evidence that the effect reverses at high densities. Again, the
statistical evidence directly contradicts the common-sense
conventional wisdom. That is, if you make a chart with
population density on the horizontal axis and either the income
level or the rate of change of income on the vertical axis, you
will see that higher density is associated with better rather
than poorer economic results.
The data showing a positive effect of density upon economic
growth constitute indirect proof of a positive long-run effect of
population growth upon economic growth, because density changes
occur very slowly, and therefore the data pick up the very-long-
run effects as well as the short run effects.3
Hong Kong is a vivid example of this phenomenon. In the
1940's and 1950's, it seemed impossible for Hong Kong to surmount
its problems -- huge masses of impoverished people without jobs,
total lack of exploitable natural resources, more refugees
pouring across the border each day. Today, Hong Kong enjoys high
living standards, low unemployment, an astounding collection of
modern high-rise apartments and office buildings, and one of the
world's most modern transportation systems. Hong Kong starkly
demonstrates that a very dense concentration of human beings does
not prevent comfortable existence and exciting economic
expansion, as long as the economic system gives individuals the
freedom to exercise their talents and to take advantage of
opportunities. And the experience of Singapore demonstrates that
Hong Kong is not unique.
Check for yourself: Fly over Hong Kong -- just a few decades
ago a place seemingly without prospects because of insoluble
resource problems -- and you will marvel at the skyline of
buildings. Take a ride on its excellent smooth-flowing highways
for an hour or two, and you will realize that a very dense
concentration of human beings does not prevent comfortable
existence and a rapid rate of economic growth.2
At this point the question frequently arises: If more
people cause there to be more ideas and knowledge, and hence
higher productivity and income, why are not India and China the
richest nations in the world? Let us put aside the matter that
size in terms of population within national boundaries was not
very meaningful in earlier centuries when national integration
was much looser than it is now. There remains the question,
however, why so many human beings in those countries produced so
little change in the last few hundred years. Yes, low education
of most people in China and India prevents them from producing
knowledge and change (though we should note the very large, in
absolute terms, contemporary scientific establishments in those
two countries.) But though education may account for much of the
present situation, it does not account nearly as well for the
differences between the West and the East over the five centuries
or so up to, say, l850.
William McNeill (l963), Eric Jones (1981) and others have
suggested that over several centuries the relative instability of
social and economic life in Europe, compared to China and India,
helps account for the emergence of modern growth in the West
rather than in the East. Instability implies economic
disequilibria, which (as Theodore Schultz [1975] reminds us)
imply exploitable opportunities which then lead to augmented
effort. (Such disequilibria also cause the production of new
knowledge, it would seem.)
The hypothesis that the combination of a person's wealth
and opportunities affect the person's exertion of effort may go
far in explaining the phenomenon at hand. Ceteris paribus, the
less wealth a person has, the greater the person's drive to take
advantage of economic opportunities. The village millions in
India and China certainly have had plenty of poverty to stimulate
them. But they have lacked opportunities because of the static
and immobile nature of their village life. In contrast,
villagers in Western Europe apparently had more mobility, less
stability, and more exposure to cross-currents of all kinds.
Just why Europe should have been so much more open than
India and China is a question that historians answer with
conjectures about religion, smallness of countries with
consequent competition and instability, and a variety of other
special conditions. This matter need not be pursued here. But
we should at least mention Lal's 1988 book on India's economic
development over thousands of years, which suggests that it was
only the rapid population growth starting around 1921 which
cracked the "cake of custom" and the Hindu caste system, and
caused the mobility which allowed India to begin modern
development.
Most (if not all) historians of the period (e.g. Nef, 1958/
1963; Gimpel, 1976) agree that the period of rapid population
growth from before AD 1000 to the beginning of the middle of the
1300s was a period of extraordinary intellectual fecundity. It
was also a period of great dynamism generally, as seen in the
extraordinary cathedral building boom. But during the period of
depopulation due to the plague (starting with the Black Death
cataclysm) and perhaps to climatic changes from the middle 1300s
(though the change apparently began earlier at the time of major
famines around 1315-17, and perhaps even earlier, when there also
was a slowing or cessation of population growth due to other
factors) until perhaps the 1500s, historians agree that
intellectual and social vitality waned.
Henri Pirenne's magisterial analysis (1925/1969) of this
period depends heavily upon population growth and size. Larger
absolute numbers were the basis for increased trade and
consequent growth in cities, which in turn strongly influenced
the creation of a more articulated exchange economy in place of
the subsistence economy of the manor. And according to Pirenne,
growth in population also loosened the bonds of the serf in the
city and thereby contributed to an increase in human liberty
(though the causes of the end of serfdom are a subject of much
controversy).
A corollary, of course, is that once the people in the East
lose the shackles of static village life and get some education,
their poverty (absolute and relative) will drive them to an
extraordinary explosion of creative effort. The happenings in
Taiwan and Korea in recent decades suggest that this is already
beginning to occur.
This explanation would seem more systematic, and more
consistent with the large body of economic thought, than are
explanations in terms of Confucianism or of particular cultures,
just as the Protestant-ethic explanation for the rise of the West
(discussion of which goes back at least to David Hume) now seems
unpersuasive in the face of religious counter-examples (e.g. the
Catholic Ibo in Nigeria) and shifts in behavior of Protestant
nations.
Though the statistical studies together with the historical
analogies would seem to constitute persuasive evidence of the
positive long-run effect of additional people, experience shows
that it is not convincing. Perhaps a few thought experiments in
the form of hypothetical comparisons will add conviction.
Therefore, please ask yourself: i) Would the world be in better
or worse shape today if all the people who have ever lived in the
area now called the Netherlands (or India, or China, or Portugal,
or wherever) had never lived at all? ii) If you were colonizing
another planet such as the moon or Saturn, would you prefer that
ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or ten million
persons were also colonizing along with you? Under which
condition would exploration and mapping of the resources of the
moon take place more rapidly? Under which condition would the
moon be more rapidly rendered habitable so that one could travel
safely and find accommodations and a fast-food outlet? iii) If
you were Robinson Crusoe, would you have preferred that the
island were not devoid of other humans, but rather contained some
or many others? Under which conditions do you think that you
would be in less fear of your life, and feel less need to erect
fortifications and stand watch at night? Under which conditions
would there be a greater pool of useful skills, and of the
manpower to build a ship and leave the island? Would the
"congestion" of more people outweigh the isolation of none? iv)
Were the Pilgrims better or worse off for the the presence of
Native Americans in the area when they arrived?
CONCLUSION
For 25 years our institutions have mis-analyzed such world
development problems as starving children, illiteracy, pollution,
supplies of natural resources and slow growth. The World Bank,
the State Department's Aid to International Development (AID),
The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the
environmental organizations have asserted that the cause is
population growth -- the population "explosion" or "bomb" or
"plague." This error has cost dearly. It has directed our
attention away from the factor that we now know is central in a
country's economic development, its economic and political
system. It suggests that attention be paid to population growth
rather than to fighting tyranny and working for economic freedom.
This error also has led to Westerners condoning and abetting
inhumane programs of coercion of couples to prevent them having
children in China and elsewhere. Perhaps the events in Eastern
Europe in 1989 and 1990 will open minds to the irrelevance of
population growth for intermediate-run economic development, and
to the all-importance of the social and economic system.
page 1/article0 catonew/July 3, 1995
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Easterlin
Conner, Roger, "How Immigrants Affect Americans' Living
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Easterlin, Richard A. 1967. Effects of population growth in
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Gastil, Raymond D., Freedom in the World (Westport, Conn:
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Hagen
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page 2/article0 catonew/July 3, 1995
FOOTNOTES
1In this paper I draw freely upon a variety of Simon's other
writings that have touched upon the subjects at hand, especially
"Why Do We Still Think Babies Create Poverty", Washington Post,
October 12, 1985; and "The War on People", Challenge, March-
April, 1985, pp. 50-53. I appreciate comments by Jim Dorn, David
Boaz and Theodore W. Schultz. Stephen Moore helped prepare the
tabular material.
2Hong Kong is a special thrill for me because I first saw it
in 1955 when I went ashore from a U.S. Navy destroyer. At the
time I felt great pity for the thousands of people who slept
every night on the sidewalks or on small boats. It then seemed
clear to me, as it must have to almost every observer, that it
would be impossible for Hong Kong to surmount its problems --
huge masses of impoverished people without jobs, total lack of
exploitable natural resources, more refugees pouring across the
border each day. And it is this sort of picture that has
convinced many persons that a place is "overpopulated" and should
cut its birth rate (e.g. Ehrlich at the beginning of The
Population Bomb). But upon returning in 1983, I saw bustling
crowds of healthy, vital people full of hope and energy. No
cause for pity now.
3It may at first seem preposterous that greater population
density might lead to better economic results. This is the
equivalent of saying that if all Americans moved east of the
Mississippi, we might not be the poorer for it. Upon reflection,
this proposition is not as unlikely as it sounds. The main loss
involved in such a move would be huge amounts of farmland, and
though the United States is a massive producer and exporter of
farm goods, agriculture is not crucial to the economy. Less than
3% of U.S. income comes from agriculture, and less than 3% of the
U. S. working population is engaged in that industry. The
capitalized value of all U.S. farm land is just a bit more than a
tenth of just one year's national income, so even if the U.S.
were to lose all of it, the loss would equal only about one
year's expenditures upon liquor, cigarettes, and the like. On
the other hand, such a change would bring about major benefits in
shortening transportation and communication distances, a factor
which has been important in Japan's ability to closely coordinate
its industrial operations in such a fashion as to reduce costs of
inventory and transportation. Additionally, greater population
concentration forces social changes in the direction of a greater
degree of organization, changes which may be costly in the short
run but in the long run increase a society's ability to reach its
economic and social objectives. If we were still living at the
population density of, say, ten thousand years ago, we would have
none of the vital complex social and economic apparatuses that
are the backbone of our society.
page 3/article0 catonew/July 3, 1995
Wall Street Journal, Sept 4, 1987, p. 1, re the two Germanies
On mark exchange rate: Wash Post, Nov 15, 89 p. A26
page 4/article0 catonew/July 3, 1995
Global warming was a mainstream view till not too long ago too.
Yes or no?
If not, why not?
Why don't all the extra children born into poverty provide an economic boon to the nations with absurdly high birth rates?
How do you reconcile your out of the mainstream view with this reality?
Global warming was a mainstream view until data demolished it.
Where is the data undercutting the widely reported and almost universally acknowledged EXPANDING human population?
Even you admit we may well climb to NINE BILLION PEOPLE!
That is both much more likely and a graver threat to human well being than your mythical decline in human population, based upon an innumerate assumption that the slightly declining birth rates of 7 billion people will lead to demographic collapse, instead of rapidly approaching 8 billion people and climbing.
Hmmm OK so 9 Billion people will over populate the Earth?
I have a question for you. How many states (of the USA) would 9 Billion cover if we all got together for one of those aerial group shots? (shoulder to Shoulder back to front like in a group photo)
MORE PEOPLE, GREATER WEALTH,
MORE RESOURCES, HEALTHIER ENVIRONMENT
Julian L. Simon
INTRODUCTION
This is the economic history of humanity in a nutshell:
From 2 million or 200,000 or 20,000 or 2,000 years ago until the
18th Century there was slow growth in population, almost no
increase in health or decrease in mortality, slow growth in the
availability of natural resources (but not increased scarcity),
increase in wealth for a few, and mixed effects on the
environment. Since then there has been rapid growth in
population due to spectacular decreases in the death rate, rapid
growth in resources, widespread increases in wealth, and an
unprecedently clean and beautiful living environment in many
parts of the world along with a degraded environment in the poor
and socialist parts of the world.
That is, more people and more wealth has correlated with
more (rather than less) resources and a cleaner environment -
just the opposite of what Malthusian theory leads one to believe.
The task before us is to make sense of these mind-boggling happy
trends.
The current gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our
environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the U. S.
Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that U.S. air and
our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the
past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the
world's population has been eating ever-better since World War
II. Every resource economist knows that all natural resources
have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as
shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries.
And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling
all over the world - life expectancy almost tripling in the rich
countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the
poor countries in just the past four decades.
The picture also is now clear that population growth does
not hinder economic development. In the 1980s there was a
complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of population
economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the
National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences
completely overturned its "official" view away from the earlier
worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any
statistical evidence of a negative connection between population
increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of
exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic
growth".
This U-turn by the scientific consensus of experts on
the subject has gone unacknowledged by the press, the anti-
natalist environmental organizations, and the agencies that
foster population control abroad.
Here is my central assertion: Almost every economic and
social change or trend points in a positive direction, as
long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of
time.
For proper understanding of the important aspects of an
economy we should look at the long-run trends. But the short-run
comparisons - between the sexes, age groups, races, political
groups, which are usually purely relative - make more news. To
repeat, just about every important long-run measure of human
welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the
United States as well as in the rest of the world. And there is
no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not
continue indefinitely.
Would I bet on it? For sure. I'll bet a week's or month's
pay - anything I win goes to pay for more research - that just
about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve
rather than get worse. You pick the comparison and the year.
THE FACTS
Let's quickly review a few data on how human life has been
doing, beginning with the all-important issue, life itself.
The Conquest of Too-early Death
The most important and amazing demographic fact -- the
greatest human achievement in history, in my view - - is the
decrease in the world's death rate. Figure 1 portrays the
history human life expectancy at birth. It took thousands of
years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20
years to the high '20's about 1750. Then about 1750 life
expectancy in the richest countries suddenly took off and tripled
in about two centuries. In just the past two centuries, the
length of life you could expect for your baby or yourself in the
advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to perhaps 75
years. What greater event has humanity witnessed than this
conquest of premature death in the rich countries? It is this
decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a
larger world population nowadays than in former times.
Figure 1
Then starting well after World War II, the length of life
you could expect in the poor countries has leaped upwards by
perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the l950s, caused by
advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. (See Figure
2)
Figure 2
Let's put it differently. In the 19th century the planet
Earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years
ago, only 4 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion
people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on
average. The increase in the world's population represents our
victory over death.
Here arises a crucial issue of interpretation: One would
expect lovers of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of
human mind and organization over the raw killing forces of
nature. Instead, many lament that there are so many people alive
to enjoy the gift of life. Even regret death rate. And it is
this worry that leads them to approve the Indonesian, Chinese and
other inhumane programs of coercion and denial of personal
liberty in one of the most precious choices a family can make --
the number of children that it wishes to bear and raise.
The Decreasing Scarcity of Natural Resources
Throughout history, the supply of natural resources always
has worried people. Yet the data clearly show that natural
resource scarcity -- as measured by the economically-meaningful
indicator of cost or price -- has been decreasing rather than
increasing in the long run for all raw materials, with only
temporary exceptions from time to time. That is, availability
has been increasing. Consider copper, which is representative
of all the metals. In Figure 3 we see the price relative to
wages since 1801. The cost of a ton is only about a tenth now
of what it was two hundred years ago.
Figure 3
This trend of falling prices of copper has been going on for
a very long time. In the l8th century B.C.E. in Babylonia under
Hammurabi -- almost 4000 years ago -- the price of copper was
about a thousand times its price in the U.S. now relative to
wages. At the time of the Roman Empire the price was about a
hundred times the present price.
In Figure 4 we see the price of copper relative to the
consumer price index. Everything that we buy - pens, shirts,
tires - has been getting cheaper over the years because we know
how to make them cheaper, especially during the past 200 years.
Even so, the extraordinary fact is that natural resources have
been getting cheaper even faster than consumer goods.
Figure 4
So by any measure, natural resources have getting more
available rather than more scarce.
Regarding oil, the shocking price rises during the 1970s and
1980s were not caused by growing scarcity in the world supply.
And indeed, the price of petroleum in inflation-adjusted dollars
has returned to levels about where they were before the
politically-induced increases, and the price of of gasoline is
about at the historic low and still falling. Concerning energy
in general, there is no reason to believe that the supply of
energy is finite, or that the price of energy will not continue
its long-run decrease forever. I realize that it sounds weird to
say that the supply of energy is not finite or limited; for the
full argument, please see my 1981 book (revised edition
forthcoming) (Science is only valuable when it arrives at
knowledge different than common sense.)
Food is an especially important resource. The evidence is
particularly strong for food that we are on a benign trend
despite rising population. The long-run price of food relative
to wages is now only perhaps a tenth as much as it was in 1800 in
the U. S. Even relative to consumer products the price of grain
is down, due to increased productivity, just as with all other
primary products.
Famine deaths due to insufficient food supply have decreased
even in absolute terms, let alone relative to population, in the
past century, a matter which pertains particularly to the poor
countries. Per-person food consumption is up over the last 30
years. And there are no data showing that the bottom of the
income scale is faring worse, or even has failed to share in the
general improvement, as the average has improved.
Africa's food production per person is down, but by 1994
almost no one any longer claims that Africa's suffering
results from a shortage of land or water or sun. The cause of
hunger in Africa is a combination of civil wars and
collectivization of agriculture, which periodic droughts have
made more murderous.
Consider agricultural land as an example of all natural
resources. Though many people consider land to be a special kind
of resource, it is subject to the same processes of human crea-
tion as other natural resources. The most important fact about
agricultural land is that less and less of it is needed as the
decades pass. This idea is utterly counter-intuitive. It seems
entirely obvious that a growing world population would need
larger amounts of farmland. But the title of a remarkable pres-
cient article in 1951 by Theodore Schultz tells the story: "The
Declining Economic Importance of Land".
The increase in actual and potential productivity per unit
of land have grown much faster than population, and there is
sound reason to expect this trend to continue. Therefore, there
is less and less reason to worry about the supply of land.
Though the stock of usable land seems fixed at any moment, it is
constantly being increased - at a rapid rate in many cases - by
the clearing of new land or reclamation of wasteland. Land also
is constantly being enhanced by increasing the number of crops
grown per year on each unit of land and by increasing the yield
per crop with better farming methods and with chemical
fertilizer. Last but not least, land is created anew where there
was no land.
There is only one important resource which has shown a trend
of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That
resource is the most important of all -- human beings. Yes,
there are more people on earth now than ever before. But if we
measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the
scarcity of other economic goods -- by how much we must pay to
obtain their services -- we see that wages and salaries have been
going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich
countries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services
of a barber or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a
barber or cook -- or economist -- has risen in the United States
over the decades. This increase in the price of peoples'
services is a clear indication that people are becoming more
scarce even though there are more of us.
About pollution now: Surveys show that the public believes
that our air and water have been getting more polluted in recent
years. The evidence with respect to air indicates that
pollutants have been declining, especially the main pollutant,
particulates. (See Figure 5). With respect to water, the
proportion of monitoring sites in the U.S. with water of good
drinkability has increased since the data began in l96l. (Figure
6).
Figures 5 and 6
Every forecast of the doomsayers has turned out flat wrong.
Metals, foods, and other natural resources have become more
available rather than more scarce throughout the centuries. The
famous Famine 1975 forecast by the Paddock brothers -- that we
would see millions of famine deaths in the U.S. on television in
the 1970s -- was followed instead by gluts in agricultural
markets. Paul Ehrlich's primal scream about "What will we do
when the [gasoline] pumps run dry?" was followed by gasoline
cheaper than since the 1930's. The Great Lakes are not dead;
instead they offer better sport fishing than ever. The main
pollutants, especially the particulates which have killed people
for years, have lessened in our cities. (Socialist countries are
a different and tragic environmental story, however!)
The wrong forecasts of shortages of copper and other metals
have not been harmless, however. They have helped cause
economic disasters for mining companies and for the poor
countries which depend upon mining, by misleading them with
unsound expectations of increased prices. Airplane design, CAFE
standards. Misdirected valuable resources. But nothing has
reduced the doomsayers' credibility with the press or their
command over the funding resources of the federal government.
Let's dramatize these sets of changes with a single
anecdote. The trend toward a better life can be seen in most of
our own families if we look. For example, I have mild asthma.
Recently I slept in a home where there was a dog, and in the
middle of the night I woke with a bad cough and shortness of
breath. When I realized that it was caused by the dog dander, I
took out my twelve dollar pocket inhaler, good for 3000 puffs,
and took one puff. Within ten minutes my lungs were clear. A
small miracle. Forty years ago I would have been sleepless and
miserable all night, and I would have had to give up the squash-
playing that I love so much because exercise causes my worst
asthma in the absence of an inhaler....Or diabetes. If your
child had diabetes a hundred years ago, you had to watch
helplessly as the child went blind and died early. Now
injections, or even pills, can give the child almost as long and
healthy a life as other children....Or glasses. Centuries ago
you had to give up reading when your eyes got dim as you got to
be 40 or 50. Now you can buy magnifying glasses at the drugstore
for nine dollars. And you can even wear contact lenses for eye
problems and keep your vanity intact. Is there not some
condition in your family that in earlier times would have been a
lingering misery or a tragedy, that nowadays our increasing
knowledge has rendered easily bearable?
With respect to population growth: A dozen competent
statistical studies, starting in 1967 with an analysis by Nobel
prizewinner Simon Kuznets, agree that there is no negative
statistical relationship between economic growth and population
growth. There is strong reason to believe that more people have
a positive effect in the long run.
Population growth does not lower the standard of living -
all the evidence agrees. And the evidence supports the view
that population growth raises it in the long run.
Incidentally, it was those statistical studies that
converted me in about 1968 from working in favor of population
control to the point of view that I hold today. I certainly did
not come to my current view for any political or religious or
ideological reason.
The basic method is to gather data on each country's rate
of population growth and its rate of economic growth, and then
to examine whether -- looking at all the data in the sample
together -- the countries with high population growth rates have
economic growth rates lower than average, and countries with low
population growth rates have economic growth rates higher than
average. All the studies agree in concluding that this is not
so; there is no correlation between economic growth and
population growth in the intermediate run.
Of course one can adduce cases of countries that seemingly
are exceptions to the pattern. It is the genius of statistical
inference, however, to enable us to draw valid generalizations
from samples that contain such wide variations in behavior. The
exceptions can be useful in alerting us to possible avenues for
further analysis, but as long as they are only exceptions, they
do not prove that the generalization is not meaningful or useful.
The research-wise person may wonder whether population
density is a more meaningful variable than population growth.
And indeed, such studies have been done. And again, the
statistical evidence directly contradicts the common-sense
conventional wisdom. If you make a chart with population density
on the horizontal axis and either the income level or the rate of
change of income on the vertical axis, you will see that higher
density is associated with better rather than poorer economic
results.
Check for yourself: Fly over Hong Kong -- just a few
decades ago a place seemingly without prospects because of
insoluble resource problems -- and you will marvel at the
astounding collection of modern high-rise apartments and office
buildings. Take a ride on its excellent smooth-flowing highways
for an hour or two, and you will realize that a very dense
concentration of human beings does not prevent comfortable
existence and exciting economic expansion -- as long as the
economic system gives individuals the freedom to exercise their
talents and to take advantage of opportunities. And the
experience of Singapore demonstrates that Hong Kong is not
unique. Two such examples do not prove the case, of course. But
these dramatic illustrations are backed by the evidence from the
aggregate sample of countries, and hence do not mislead us.
(Hong Kong is a special thrill for me because I first saw it
in 1955 when I went ashore from a U. S. Navy destroyer. At the
time I felt great pity for the thousands who slept every night on
the sidewalks or on small boats. It then seemed clear to me, as
it must have to almost every observer, that it would be
impossible for Hong Kong to surmount its problems -- huge masses
of impoverished people without jobs, total lack of exploitable
natural resources, more refugees pouring across the border each
day. But upon returning in 1983, I saw bustling crowds of
healthy, vital people full of hope and energy. No cause for pity
now.
The most important benefit of population size and growth is
the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds
matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths.
Progress is limited largely by the availability of trained
workers. The more people who enter our population by birth or
immigration, the faster will be the rate of progress of our
material and cultural civilization.
Here we need a qualification that tends to get overlooked:
I do not say that all is well everywhere, and I do not predict
that all will be rosy in the future. Children are hungry and
sick; people live out lives of physical or intellectual poverty,
and lack of opportunity; war or some new pollution may finish us
off. What I am saying is that for most relevant economic matters
I have checked, the aggregate trends are improving rather than
deteriorating.
Also, I don't say that a better future happens automatically
or without effort. It will happen because women and men will
struggle with problems with muscle and mind, and will probably
overcome, as people have overcome in the past -- if the social
and economic system gives them opportunity to do so.
THE EXPLANATION OF THESE AMAZING TRENDS
Now we need some theory to explain how it can be that
economic welfare grows along with population, rather than
humanity being reduced to misery and poverty as population
grows.
The Malthusian theory of increasing scarcity, based on
supposedly-fixed resources - the theory that the doomsayers rely
upon - runs exactly contrary to the data over the long sweep of
history. Therefore it makes sense to prefer another theory.
The theory that fits the facts very well is this: More
people, and increased income, cause problems in the short run.
Short-run scarcity raises prices. This presents opportunity, and
prompts the search for solutions. In a free society, solutions
are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments
leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen.
To put it differently, in the short-run, more consumers mean
less of the fixed available stock of goods to be divided among
more people. And more workers laboring with the same fixed
current stock of capital mean that there will be less output per
worker. The latter effect, known as "the law of diminishing
returns," is the essence of Malthus's theory as he first set it
out.
But if the resources with which people work are not fixed
over the period being analyzed, then the Malthusian logic of
diminishing returns does not apply. And the plain fact is that,
given some time to adjust to shortages, the resource base does
not remain fixed. People create more resources of all kinds.
When we take a long-run view, the picture is different, and
considerably more complex, than the simple short-run view of more
people implying lower average income. In the very long run, more
people almost surely imply more available resources and a higher
income for everyone.
I suggest you test this idea against your own knowledge: Do
you think that our standard of living would be as high as it is
now if the population had never grown from about four million
human beings perhaps ten thousand years ago? I don't think we'd
now have electric light or gas heat or autos or penicillin or
travel to the moon or our present life expectancy of over seventy
years at birth in rich countries, in comparison to the life
expectancy of 20 to 25 years at birth in earlier eras, if
population had not grown to its present numbers.
Consider this example of the process by which people wind
up with increasing availability rather than decreasing
availability of resources. England was full of alarm in the
l600's at an impending shortage of energy due to the defor-
estation of the country for firewood. People feared a scarcity
of fuel for both heating and for the iron industry. This
impending scarcity led to the development of coal.
Then in the mid-l800's the English came to worry about an
impending coal crisis. The great English economist, Jevons,
calculated that a shortage of coal would bring England's industry
to a standstill by l900; he carefully assessed that oil could
never make a decisive difference. Triggered by the impending
scarcity of coal (and of whale oil, whose story comes next)
ingenious profit-minded people developed oil into a more
desirable fuel than coal ever was. And in l990 we find England
exporting both coal and oil.
Another element in the story: Because of increased demand
due to population growth and increased income, the price of whale
oil for lamps jumped in the l840's, and the U.S. Civil War pushed
it even higher, leading to a whale oil "crisis." This provided
incentive for enterprising people to discover and produce
substitutes. First came oil from rapeseed, olives, linseed, and
camphene oil from pine trees. Then inventors learned how to get
coal oil from coal. Other ingenious persons produced kerosene
from the rock oil that seeped to the surface, a product so
desirable that its price then rose from $.75 a gallon to $2.00.
This high price stimulated enterprisers to focus on the supply of
oil, and finally Edwin L. Drake brought in his famous well in
Titusville, Pennsylvania. Learning how to refine the oil took a
while. But in a few years there were hundreds of small refiners
in the U.S., and soon the bottom fell out of the whale oil
market, the price falling from $2.50 or more at its peak around
l866 to well below a dollar. And in 1993 we see Great Britain
exporting both coal and oil.
Here we should note that it was not the English government
that developed coal or oil, because governments are not effective
developers of new technology. Rather, it was individual
entrepreneurs who sensed the need, saw opportunity, used all
kinds of available information and ideas, made lots of false
starts which were very costly to many of those individuals but
not to others, and eventually arrived at coal as a viable fuel --
because there were enough independent individuals investigating
the matter for at least some of them to arrive at sound ideas and
methods. And this happened in the context of a competitive
enterprise system that worked to produce what was needed by the
public. And the entire process of impending shortage and new
solution left us better off than if the shortage problem had
never arisen.
THE ROLE OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM
Here we must address another crucial element in the
economics of resources and population -- the extent to which the
political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from
government coercion. Skilled persons require an appropriate
social and economic framework that provides incentives for
working hard and taking risks, enabling their talents to flower
and come to fruition. The key elements of such a framework are
economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible
rules of the market that are enforced equally for all.
The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of
political and economic freedom. Powerful evidence comes from an
extraordinary natural experiment that occurred starting in the
1940s with three pairs of countries that have the same culture
and history, and had much the same standard of living when they
split apart after World War II -- East and West Germany, North
and South Korea, Taiwan and China. In each case the centrally
planned communist country began with less population "pressure",
as measured by density per square kilometer, than did the market-
directed economy. And the communist and non-communist countries
also started with much the same birth rates.
The market-directed economies have performed much better
economically than the centrally-planned economies. The economic-
political system clearly was the dominant force in the results of
the three comparisons. This powerful explanation of economic
development cuts the ground from under population growth as a
likely explanation of the speed of nations' economic development.
THE ASTOUNDING SHIFT IN THE SCHOLARLY CONSENSUS
So far we've been discussing the factual evidence. But in
1994 there is an important new element not present twenty years
ago. The scientific community of scholars who study population
economics now agrees with almost all of what is written ahove.
The statements made above do not represent a single lone voice,
but rather the current scientific consensus.
The conclusions offered earlier about agriculture and
resources and demographic trends have always represented the
consensus of economists in those fields. And now the consensus
of population economists also is now not far from what is written
here.
In 1986, the U. S. National Research Council and the U. S.
National Academy of Sciences published a book on population
growth and economic development prepared by a prestigious
scholarly group. This "official" report reversed almost
completely the frightening conclusions of the previous 1971 NAS
report. "Population growth at most a minor factor..." "The
scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor constraint
on economic growth", it now says. It found benefits of
additional people as well as costs .
A host of review articles by distinguished economic
demographers in the past decade have confirmed that this
"revisionist" view is indeed consistent with the scientific
evidence, though not all the writers would go as far as I do in
pointing out the positive long-run effects of population growth.
The consensus is more toward a "neutral" judgment. But this is a
huge change from the earlier judgment that population growth is
economically detrimental.
By 1994, anyone who confidently asserts that population
growth damages the economy must turn a blind eye to the scientif-
ic evidence.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
In the short run, all resources are limited. An example of
such a finite resource is the amount of space allotted to me.
The longer run, however, is a different story. The standard of
living has risen along with the size of the world's population
since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing
economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not
continue indefinitely.
The key theoretical idea is this: The growth of population
and of income create actual and expected shortages, and hence
lead to price run-ups. A price increase represents an
opportunity that attracts profit-minded entrepreneurs to seek new
ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves.
A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off
than if the original shortage problems had never arisen. That
is, we need our problems though this does not imply that we
should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.
I hope that you will now agree that the long-run outlook is
for a more abundant material life rather than for increased
scarcity, in the United States and in the world as a whole. Of
course such progress does not come about automatically. And my
message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with
the doomsayers - that our world needs the best efforts of all
humanity to improve our lot. I part company with them in that
they expect us to come to a bad end despite the efforts we make,
whereas I expect a continuation of humanity's history of
successful efforts. And I believe that their message is self-
fulfilling, because if you expect your efforts to fail because of
inexorable natural limits, then you are likely to feel resigned;
and therefore to literally resign. But if you recognize the
possibility - in fact the probability - of success, you can tap
large reservoirs of energy and enthusiasm.
Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the
means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the
world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brakes are a)
our lack of imagination, and b) unsound social regulations of
these activities. The ultimate resource is people - especially
skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty
- who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own
benefit, and so inevitably they will benefit not only themselves
but the rest of us as well.
page 1 /article3 popenvi2/February 28, 1994
REFERENCES
Schultz, Theodore W., "The Declining Economic Importance of
Land," Economic Journal, LXI, December, 1951, pp. 725-740.
National Research Council, Committee on Population, and Working
Group on Population Growth and Economic Development, Population
Growth and Economic Development: Policy Questions (Washington, D.C.:
National Academy Press, 1986)
page 2 /article3 popenvi2/February 28, 1994
Just because you can physically fit 9 billion people in the State of Texas doesn't mean that they would live for long in such conditions.
So do you think illegal immigration is an economic boon to the USA because of the extra population it provides?
If not, why not?
9 billion people may well live comfortably and happily upon the Earth, with better utilization of resources - that may or may not be the point of “overpopulation” that leads to demographic contraction due to epidemic or starvation or warfare or whatever the ‘release valve’ of the overpopulation ends up being.
The Earth, with better technology, may well support 14 billion people in health and comfort.
And it looks like we had better start planing for such, because despite the idiotic ramblings of a not very bright religious devotee, the Earth's population is increasing and AT an increasing rate.
Where is the data undercutting the widely reported and almost universally acknowledged EXPANDING human population?
Since you obviously are unwilling or unable to read the books and articles I've linked or posted on this thread, at least take a few minutes and watch the Demographic Winter documentary.
You can watch it for free on YouTube:
Demographic Winter - the decline of the human family (Full Movie)
I have read real souces, they and you both seem to agree that we are going to reach 9 billion long before the Earth’s population contracts, if it contracts.
I understand math, and realize that a slight decline in the birth rate of 7 billion people still adds population to the Earth faster than 6 billion people at a slightly higher birth rate.
Even you acknowledge the EXPANDING human population.
Do you now want to retract your statment?
Did you not read the books and articles you linked - because you just this morning opined that the “EXPANDING human population” I made reference to, the one that made you think I didn’t read your inane argument, was going to EXPAND to possibly 9 billion.
So we both seem in agreement that the human population of the Earth is increasing, and likely to keep increasing up to 9 billion or more.
Unless you are so incapble of a cogent argument that you are now going to retract your opinion that we have an expanding human population.
Still haven’t answerd a rather simple question about illegal immigration.
Do you think the excess population that illegal immigration provides to these United States is an economic boon or not?
Don’t be a coward and just cut and paste a bunch of irrelevant crap again - answer the question.
This should be amusing!!!! ;)
Illegal immigrants are helping to prop up the Ponzi scheme of our social welfare programs. Since Americans are not reproducing in adequate numbers to prop it up, both parties understand that to close the border will bring insolvency to Social Security and Medicare that much faster.
That's the reason neither party is interested in closing the border, and both parties want to naturalize illegal immigrants - to get them paying into the coffers and prop up the failing system.
Short term illegal immigration is obviously an economic burden.
Long term, they can and do become contributing members (i.e., paying Social Security taxes, just like all immigrants and descendants of immigrants in our history) of society, and help forestall the economic collapse that will come as a result of decreasing fertility rates.
And that is simply a result of the increasing life expectancy -- which has peaked) counterbalancing the rapidly declining fertility rate (which has not bottomed out, and is accelerating in Third World countries.
At some point, the scales are going to tip, and as those who benefited from the increased life expectancy die off, and global fertility rates continue to decline, global population will peak then rapidly contract.
It might peak at 8 or 9 billion, maybe less, but once it does, the aging population will die off rapidly and global population will decline.
Which part of this do you not understand?
Not after fertility rates drop below 2.1, and the elderly who benefited from increased life expectancy start dying off.
There will be no further increases in life expectancy, and the decreases in fertility rates are well documented and accelerating.
Which part of this simple equation do you not grasp?
Another part I am “not getting” is where illegal immigration is an economic boon to the USA - they consume far more in socialized benefits than they contribute to in terms of taxes, reduce the price of labor, and increase the cost of insurance education and health care.
Another thing I am “not getting” is how a slight decline in birth rates for 7 billion people is a problem when it is going to get us to 8 billion people a lot faster than we went from 6 to 7 billion.
You are absolutely delusional if you think human population is decreasing or that the greatest threat to humanity is our lack of fecundity. 7 billion people and rapidly rising to 8 billion at an ever increasing rate (despite a slight dip in birth rates), and you think human fecundity is a problem IN THE OTHER DIRECTION?
Good luck pounding the underpopulation drum in a world with 8 billion people rapidly on the way to 9 billion!
Delusional barely even covers such inanity!
allmendrean’s posts usually have a subtle creepiness to them. I wouldn’t spend too much time arguing with him.
Actually you can physically fit 9 Billion people in the State of Rhode Island and still have a bit of room leftover. (BTW the answer to the question is 0 States.)
Further I never advocated allowing any illegal in here I am for a Wall on all borders manned 24/7 by tough Hombres like the Marines with orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to get in illegally!
I just point out that the Point is that the Overpopulation Myth is just that MYTH! If we take ALL the people of the world and set them up in the USA spreading them out so they could live comfortably then you would have the rest of the Earth to farm and use for Resources. Point is the EARTH is HUGE in comparison to the Human Population. And the only reason their are people going hungry right now is that Governments are so inefficient at handling resources that they waste more than they use to produce anything.
It is the very reason why Socialism doesn't work. You want everyone fed and happy them give them property rights and toss these Socialist Governments (Starting with the Obamanation) aside and you will see Prosperity Worldwide.
But yes, arguing with fanatics who think underpopulation is a problem in a world with 7 billion people rapidly rising to 8 billion isn't the best use of time.
Amusing, but not likely to garner positive results.
So back to your regularly scheduled delusional pro-illegal immigration, anti-birthcontrol religious dogma.
We all dislike WikiPedia, but their explanation might assist you in coming to terms with this reality (I bolded the important part to assist you):
Sub-replacement fertility do not immediately translate into a population decline because of population momentum: recently high fertility rates produce a disproportionately young population, and younger populations have higher birth rates. This is why some nations with sub-replacement fertility still have a growing population, because a relatively large fraction of their population are still of child-bearing age. But if the fertility trend is sustained (and not compensated by immigration), it results in population ageing and population decline. This is forecast for most of the countries of Europe and East Asia.
Current estimates expect the world's total fertility rate to fall below replacement levels by 2050,[18] although population momentum will continue to increase global population for several generations beyond that. The promise of eventual population decline helps reduce concerns of overpopulation, but many[who?] believe the Earth's carrying capacity has already been exceeded and that even a stable population would not be sustainable.
Some believe that not only this (apparent) economic depression we have entered, but the 'Great Depression' of the 1930's (and beyond?) may be, and may have been, the result of a decline in birthrates overall. Clarence L. Barber, an economist at the University of Manitoba, pointed out how demand for housing in the US, for example, began to decline in 1926, due to a decline in 'household formation' (marriage), due, he believed, to the effects of World War I upon society. In early 1929, US housing demand declined precipitously. And, of course, the stock market crash followed in October of that same year. [19]
Even though the overall world population continues to "grow", it is more at the 'back end' than the 'front end' that this is occurring. That is, more people are kept alive than in the past due to improved nutrition, more refrigeration and better sanitation worldwide, as well as health care advances, from vaccines to antibiotics, and many other advances in medications and in different improvements in health care. Certainly, in advanced nations, few groups would be considered to be "breeding like rabbits". The 'baby boom' (1946-1964) in the US, was likely, if Barber's hunches are correct, more of a return to birthrates closer to historical norms, like those of the first decade of the 20th century (but the 'baby boom' of 1946-1964 were still lower than the 1900-1910 period), with birth dearths both before and since making the so-called "baby boom" appear so big. The pig in the snake wasn't so big. It is more that the periods before and after it were so skinny!
Sub-replacement fertility can also change social relations in a society. Fewer children, combined with lower infant mortality has made the death of children a far greater tragedy in the modern world than it was just fifty years ago. Having many families with only one or two children also reduces greatly the number of siblings, aunts and uncles, making this 'demographic winter' much of the world is in not only 'colder', but also much lonelier. This may be the reason that Europeans, overall, appear more reluctant to send their sons to war, including Russians to Afghanistan and Chechnya, than Americans have been (even though US fertility rates are, in some comparisons, only marginally higher).
Population aging poses an economic cost on societies, as the number of elderly retirees rises in relation to the number of young workers. This has been raised as a political issue in France, Germany, and the United States, where many people have advocated policy changes to encourage higher fertility and immigration rates. In France, payments to couples who have children have increased birthrates.[20]
In the developed world, all other things being equal, you must have an ongoing fertility rate of 2.1 simply to maintain a population. In the third world, all other things being equal, you must have an ongoing fertility rate of 2.33 simply to maintain a population.
The global fertilty rate at present is 2.56 according to the CIA. It is expected to drop below 2.1 by 2050, probably sooner. At that point, the population momentum (see my last post) ceases, and population contraction starts, when the increased longevity has fully played out (it already has.)
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