6 ms·

Did you grow up in 18th century England and Mr.Malthus was your teacher?

• dogruck 9y ago
  Lol feels like it. Perhaps some day people will ask the same question about Al Gore?
  • matt4077 9y ago
    Maybe... And it would be just as foolish. These predictions of doom (Thomas Malthus, Club of Rome, Global Warming, Y2K) all have the 'problem' of being self-defeating: It's unclear to what degree they were wrong only because societies reacted to them. China's One-Child policy, or family planning as a major component of developmental aid, for example, may have been consequences of the prophecies of overpopulation.
• stale2002 9y ago
  Unfortunately, Malthusian logic is still around in the common era.
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    It's correct in the long long term. Population rates have stabilized because of birth control (in the first world anyway.) But in a few generations, people that are allergic to birth control, or genetically want large families or whatever, will dominate the population and growth will continue. There are some religious groups that calculate if they can get each of their members to have 8 children, they will become the majority of the population in like 2 generations. Fortunately even the best groups only manage like 3 or 4 per couple on average. But that only pushes it out a few more generations. And the groups that are the best at keeping their members from leaving, and the members that are the most loyal, will naturally be selected for.
    • dogruck 9y ago
      Are you assuming that the collective brain trust of that growing population will fail to innovate ways to feed themselves?
      • Houshalter 9y ago
        Exponential growth is unsustainable. After a few thousand years there won't be enough matter in our solar system. In any case technological progress has slowed way down in the past century. It would be foolish to bet on it saving us.
        • dogruck 9y ago
          You also seem to assume that societies continue to grow at an exponential rate while they simultaneously innovate. And I do not know what your talking about regarding tech progress. Are you kidding?
          • toasterlovin 9y ago
            If you zoom out far enough, all life grows at an exponential rate until it reaches the carrying capacity of its environment. Perturbations in the curve exist only to the extent that you are zoomed way in or the species you are looking at is struggling to avoid extinction.
            • dogruck 9y ago
              Yeah so easy forget that in the scale of Earth's maturation, Humans have just recently arrived.
            • stale2002 9y ago
              That depends an awful lot on how you define "carrying capacity". For example, I'd define carrying capacity as to include consumer preferences in how much they want to have babies. And if you include consumer preferences, well that changes the equation a whole lot. It means that you aren't necessarily going to get in a position where the stopping point is literally people starving to death. All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies. And there are a whole lot of reasons as to why 2 people might only want to have 2 babies, other than being forced to under the threat of literal starvation.
• kbutler 9y ago
  "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...." Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968 His first sentence appears to be correct - just not in the direction he meant. He's still making similar doom-laden predictions, and still getting paid lots of money for them.
  • GuiA 9y ago
    The battle is very much not over. Famine remains a major issue in many places all over the world. http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/ http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fac...
    • kbutler 9y ago
      Famine is caused by poor distribution, not poor production. From your link: "The world produces enough food to feed everyone." Further: "For the world as a whole, per capita food availability has risen from about 2220 kcal/person/day in the early 1960s to 2790 kcal/person/day in 2006-08, while developing countries even recorded a leap from 1850 kcal/person/day to over 2640 kcal/person/day."
      • GuiA 9y ago
        The quote from the post I replied to mentions “the battle to feed humanity”. Distribution is very much part of that battle; otherwise it could only be considered solved in the purest theoretical sense.
        • kbutler 9y ago
          Yeah, and you can also talk about specific nutrient needs, and really the obesity epidemic is also a part of the battle to feed humanity. But Ehrlich wasn't talking about any of that. He was specifically saying there was no way we could produce enough food to feed the population of the world in the 1970s, and we'd have to drastically curtail population to survive. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole."