“As the Global Economy Sinks, Tensions Over Immigration Rise”, TIME magazine, 6/2. A report about the not-very-surprising fact that an influx of huge numbers of strangers will provoke resentment amongst residents in areas with high unemployment.
Some of these attacks can be attributed to simple racism, but it’s also reasonable to assume that the economic downturn is causing greater competition for jobs and rising frustration among locals.
[…]
And as economic pressures increase, the potential for conflict clearly grows also. “Traditionally ... migrants don’t compete for [the] same jobs as native populations,” says Pandya. “But the moment [those native-born] people think they have to find any job, they will be in direct competition with migrants. That’s where friction arises.”
But the article does not mention that conflict comes not only from competition for jobs, but for resources generally: food, health care, housing, etc. Moral lectures from do-gooders promoting “diversity” are irrelevant in this case.
“The more humans, the better”, Dallas News, 13 June 2008. An article from last year by an economist called Walter E. Williams which typifies the mindset of population growth proponents. Here he uses the argument (as I understand it) that “human beings are the most valuable resource” – more specifically, that human intellect is a valuable resource, therefore if there are more humans there will be more intelligent people who will be more “productive” and this leads to prosperity for all.
There is absolutely no relationship between high populations and economic despair. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, has a meager population density of 22 people per square kilometer, while Hong Kong has a massive population density of 6,571 people per square kilometer. Hong Kong is 300 times as crowded as the Congo. If there were any merit to the population control crowd’s hysteria, Hong Kong would be in abject poverty while the Congo flourished. Yet Hong Kong’s annual per capita income is $28,000. Congo’s is $309, making it the world’s poorest country.
People in Hong Kong live crammed into high-rise apartments (as shown in this Wikipedia photo), and a lot of the wealth generated is in the finance industry, which is ephemeral and can not be regarded as contributing to the intellectual development of mankind. The city is extremely crowded and has the usual environmental (e.g. pollution) and social problems resulting from nearly 7 million humans crammed into such a small area.
It’s the same story in many countries – government interference with mankind’s natural tendency to engage in wealth-producing activities. Blaming poverty on overpopulation not only lets governments off the hook; it encourages the enactment of harmful policies.
He does have a point about dysfunctional governments contributing to poverty (using the example of Zimbabwe). But governments are still needed to regulate businesses and “wealth-producing activities” as many of these are environmentally and socially harmful.
A science fiction author called John C. Wright (who converted from atheism to Catholicism) is another example of one in denial, as this blog entry shows:
Overpopulation and underpopulation are relative rather than absolute terms. In a capitalist society, every new baby born is a new pair of hands to work, and the labor adds to the sum of human happiness; in a socialist society, every new baby born is a new mouth to feed, and the consumption is a drain on the resources of the world.
The socialist view is correct; there are finite resources, including jobs, so at some point population will outgrow resources.
I am not saying there are areas of the world which are not crowded, or whose laws and customs do not allow for the exploitation of resources needed to feed and house them. Clearly such areas exist: one of them exists within an hour’s walk of my house. I am not saying there is not poverty. I am not saying the world population is not growing.
I am saying there is not overpopulation in the world. The mass famines predicted by Paul Erlich did not occure. The mass death predicted by Malthus did not occure. The steady geometric growth rates seen during industrialization, due mostly to decline in the infant mortality rate, cannot be projected as a simple exponential growth rate: such predictions are bad science.
The “Green Revolution” of agricultural technology enabled the impact of massive population growth to be delayed – but not eliminated! It has also been environmentally devastating, involving much use of pesticides, water and loss of biodiversity. Again, the Earth does not have infinite resources. There is also famine in some parts of the world because the populations here have destroyed their local environment.
When those predictions are used to scare people (I know a woman in my office who expressed reluctance to have a second baby, on the grounds that the world was too crowded) an evil is done, and real people are harmed in a real way.
I would say that that woman is showing some social responsibility, and should be applauded! One less mouth to feed and a little more resources freed up for others.
Policies to restrict human growth are reactions to a nonexistant problem, and have a high, terrify cost in human lives. Overpopulation is a fraud. In order to exploit the resources of the solar system in an efficient way, and usher in an age of wealth and prosperity the likes of which history has never seen, we need more people, not less, because people are the one resource without which all other resource lay fallow.
As I pointed out in my 4/2 entry, the argument that humans will expand into space, so we need to likewise keep expanding the population to enable this, is spurious as the technology for mass space travel is at least decades or centuries away. Also we are in an “age of wealth and prosperity” – but only for some! Many humans are greedy and selfish, so wealth is not shared around equally. Colonizing the solar system will not magically create some utopia.
