There is no overpopulation crisis. If anything, there is a coming underpopulation crisis. I know, I didn't believe it myself, until I did the research and the math. I'd had it drummed into my head for decades that the world was overpopulated and that was the cause of all human woe. I believed what I'd been taught.
But I'm also Pro-Life (if you haven't guessed by now) and at some point I had to be able to answer the question "if women don't have abortions what are we going to do with all the babies we can't feed?" The answer is that we will feed them, and love them as the gifts they are.
But don't take my word for it. Watch this overly cute video (and if you are so inclined videos 2 and 3 in the series):
How could Malthus be so wrong? As I mentioned earlier, his assumptions were wrong. First off, food production doesn't increase geometrically. Food is alive. That means it too reproduces, and at rates faster than people. In a free market economy when food becomes scarce, the price goes up, and that encourages more people to invest in, you guessed it, food production. It all works out!
Secondly, as our level of technology improves, so does the amount of food we can produce. Mechanical harvesters made a huge difference in the 19th century, and even today, satellite technology is improving crop yields and allowing us to farm land that wasn't usable just a decade ago.
As for the video's "outrageous" claim that the world can live in Texas, here's the math:
Texas has a land area of 268,820 square miles. That's 7.5 trillion square feet. Divide that by the current world population of 6.8 billion and you get 1100 square feet per person or 4400 square feet per family of 4. That's a 44x100 foot lot, which is about the size of the lot I grew up on (which was 50x100).
OK, we can house them, but how would we feed them? Look at India. India is self-sufficient in terms of food (it exports grain), feeding it's 1.1 billion on a land mass 1/3 the size of the USA. How many people could the US feed with existing farm land and existing technology?
The total area of the US is 3,794,101 square miles, of which 18.01% is arable. That's enough to feed 3.5 billion people using "standard" methods. That's using existing numbers for land use and for technology. If we wanted to we could farm more land than we do now. And that's not counting other countries. Russia could feed 7 billion alone (based on existing arable land in Russia).
Yes, I understand, some of us like meat, and that takes more land, but in this scenario the entire world (outside of Texas) is available for food production. Then again, considering how much I like steaks, perhaps we'd better move the people out of Texas and use it for beef!
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1 comments:
I think that one thing you are forgetting to consider is the increasing length of the line at Starbucks.
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