Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyOw9IgtjY (prefferably all parts)
Featuring the famous, mind-blowing analogy of THE BACTERIA IN A BOTTLE. Part 3 of Dr. Albert A. Bartlett's lecture on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy."
Could you summarize? I don't want to get Rickrolled.
Actually, I'm just not a fan of watching interweb videos, I'd prefer to read the arguments.
Here's a link to read a transcript, of, I think the same speech.
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David Z
"The issue is always the same, the government or the market. There is no third solution."
He basically does the math and concludes that at the current rate of population and consumption growth, the planet will be out of oil in less than a century.
His solution? He advocates population control, although he offers no realistic means by which this could be achieved, or why does anyone have the right to tell others how many kids to have.
It's quite possible there is an excess of consumption and growth, an excess relative to real productivity, of course, courtesy of the trade cycle.
-Jon
To darkness I condemn you...
Sounded like a charming fellow, until this:
I’ve listed some of those things that we should encourage if we want to raise the rate of growth of population and in so doing, make the problem worse. Just look at the list. Everything in the list is as sacred as motherhood. There's immigration, medicine, public health, sanitation. These are all devoted to the humane goals of lowering the death rate and that’s very important to me, if it’s my death they’re lowering. But then I’ve got to realise that anything that just lowers the death rate makes the population problem worse.
There’s peace, law and order; scientific agriculture has lowered the death rate due to famine—that just makes the population problem worse. It’s widely reported that the 55 mph speed limit saved thousands of lives—that just makes the population problem worse. Clean air makes it worse.
He can't be serious, can he? Do people actually subscribe to this sort of belief?
Yes, people believe all sorts of idioitic and irrational things. I am related to many of these people. Unfortunately.
If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North
xSFx:He basically does the math and concludes that at the current rate of population and consumption growth, the planet will be out of oil in less than a century.
A modern day Malthus! :D
Yours in liberty,Geoffrey Allan Plauché, Ph.D.Adjunct InstructorBuena Vista University
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"(Who watches the watchmen?)-Juvenal, Satires VI.347
Yeah... so, we should force people now to live (or die) in abject poverty, so that 780 years into the future, people will be marginally more comfortable. I'm not sure how anyone can take that argument seriously. But they do.
I don't think there's an overall population problem, there's a resource allocation and quality of life problem.
And then you wonder why people would "red bait" you.
Resource allocation? Quality of life?
Gimme a break.
liberty student: And then you wonder why people would "red bait" you. Resource allocation? Quality of life?
Yeah. In large part because of government intervention: protectionist measures like tariffs, bans, quotas, anti-dumping laws, etc.; the entire tax and regulatory structure; and so on and so forth. Does pointing this out make one red?
Again, the issue is the state, not the consequences of state action. This is the red problem. An inability to keep their eye on the ball, the latent obsession with owning the state through popular democracy to steer social progress and interaction.
If I'm wrong, please spell it out for me. Is the problem the state, or the consequences of the state?
Geoffrey Allan Plauche:Does pointing this out make one red?
No, it screams "Get a real job!" because only dreamers living at home or in a basement, working at best a minimum wage job, pine away for better resource allocation. if you want to allocate resources differently, get off your duffs and produce resources to allocate!
Marxists take issue with resource allocation and the quality of life of the proletariat. Anarchists take issue with the coercive state that effects everyone, including the petite bourgeoisie
The other day, I was excited to hear from a statist acquiantance of mine that he had come around to adopt one of my positions: the freedom of people to smoke cigarettes anywhere the owner of the property allows.
Sadly, he had terribly scary reasons for doing so. "If more people smoke, that means more people will die at an earlier age, which is exactly what we need. Not only will it help to solve social security, but it would free up all resources that older people wastefully consume while helping to relieve some of the population problems we're facing."
Hell, maybe the government is going about this all wrong! Seems to me that the government should be subsidizing ads encouraging people to smoke, not leading them away from it! The thought process of some people is absolutely mind-boggling.
liberty student: And then you wonder why people would "red bait" you. Resource allocation? Quality of life? Gimme a break.
You're setting up a straw man. My reference to resource allocation refers to the fact that resources are currently misallocated as a result of state intervention, it's not a call for the state to redistribute resources. My reference to quality of life refers to the idea that perhaps is what's important here is whether people live prosperous and comfortalble lives rather than population levels. The idea is that it would make sense to aim at making resources readily available to raise the bar of population sustainability rather than concentrating on lowering population levels. There is nothing even remotely "red" about such thoughts, but unfortunately you seem to have a tendency to not understand what I'm saying.
Geoffrey Allan Plauche: liberty student: And then you wonder why people would "red bait" you. Resource allocation? Quality of life? Yeah. In large part because of government intervention: protectionist measures like tariffs, bans, quotas, anti-dumping laws, etc.; the entire tax and regulatory structure; and so on and so forth. Does pointing this out make one red?
Exactly. I don't get how what I said could be construed as some sort of state-socialist rhetoric.
Well, let's look at it this way: In highly industrialized countries, state regulations and healthcare may be artificially extending the survival rate of people who would die off due to natural selection if left to themselves. In effect, it may be distorting the market in life-spans. The prohibition of deadly drugs could very well prevent the premature deaths of addicts who would freely choose their own deaths in absence of interference. Socialized healthcare makes calculation of how much healthcare to produce impossible, so socialized schemes may be over-producing healthcare at the expense of goods and services that consumers would prefer to be produced. Again, this is an example of the state interfering with people's own self-determination of the probable length of their own lives.
However, on balance I think states tend to have a negative effect on population growth. After all, just look at the entire 20th Century... Hundreds of millions dead at the hands of their own states, and millions more at the hands of foreign states. Also, the amount of crime that is committed directly as a result of prohibitive state action is something that cannot be ignored. Perhaps the ultimate problem is high time-preference? If we, as societies, had lower time-preferences (which would decrease over time in a truly free market), we would have more of the foresight to know not to overpopulate the planet, thus freeing up the planet for longer periods of human life.
"Nolite confidere in principibus"
~ Psalm 146:3
Again, the issue is the state, not the consequences of state action. This is the red problem.
It only makes sense to point out the negative consequences of state action (I.E. a lower quality of life and more limited access to resources in the context I was talking about). There is nothing "red" about that.
the latent obsession with owning the state through popular democracy to steer social progress and interaction.
This isn't implied from anything I've said. You're simply grasping at straws to attack a misconception.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. The two are interrelated and both are important in context. It makes no sense to have a criticism of the state that doesn't include its negative consequences. It makes even less sense to proceed to defend such negative consequences or express absolute indifferance towards them. Poverty and starvation are real problems in and of themselves, and pointing out that in large part the state is either a cause or enhancer of the problem is only the libertarian thing to do.
No, it screams "Get a real job!" because only dreamers living at home or in a basement, working at best a minimum wage job, pine away for better resource allocation.
You continue to go on unrelated personalized tangents like this that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
if you want to allocate resources differently, get off your duffs and produce resources to allocate!
So you choose to ignore the degree to which the state warps resource allocation? Pointing it out is "communist"? Jesus christ on a stick, that's silly.
Marxists take issue with resource allocation and the quality of life of the proletariat.
One need not be a marxist of any sort to think that the negative effects that state intervention has on workers and people at the bottom right is...well...negative! In fact, I would gander that this is a connection that a marxist is not likely to make, since marxists have a naive view of the state that causes them to be willfully blinded to the degree to which it is the cause of the very problems that they are concerned about. You're creating a straw man and jumping to sweeping conclusions based off of little more than antedotes. Apparently in your book giving a *** about the conditions of such people in any way or context whatsoever constitutes a red heresy.
My point, which I didn't get a chance to articulate before you immediately jumped on what I said, was that I'm opposed to the idea of deliberately lowering population levels and think it makes a lot more sense to concentrate on making resources more readily available to people so that populations can be sustained to begin with - to raise the bar of population sustainability through economic means rather than lowering the amount of people. I don't think there's an "overpopulation problem", the real problem behind what's called "overpopulation" is artificial limits on the availability of resources. The real problem is that a lot of people in certain areas live in shitty conditions that are mostly the result of central powers.
The problem is not overpopulation but overproduction of stupid people...
Putting the pun aside, all these "population planners" need to do is to take a little time off their schedule (I bet they have PLENTY of free time on their hands) and look at what happened when central planning was enforced, for one reason or another. You have Mao wiping out sparrows because they were believed to be cause behind Soviet China's dismal agricultural performances (because Socialism cannot go wrong, you know...). You have Stalin and his murderous gang of accolytes coming up with "five years plans". You have Mussolini and his pathetic "battle for the grain". You have Siad Barre and his forceful "civilization" of nomadic tribes. Finally you have a succession of Socialist government in India trying to "reduce fertility rates" or China and the terrible "one chil policy", which is slowly being abandoned, thank God. An history of resounding successes for mankind I may say.
Oh, by the way, I was being sarchastic!
Yes, it's time for the Dr Goebbels show!
Brainpolice:You're setting up a straw man. My reference to resource allocation refers to the fact that resources are currently mis-allocated as a result of state intervention, it's not a call for the state to redistribute resources.
Right, but you have no sure way to know how resources will be allocated under a free market, and the distribution might also end up being "mis-allocated" based upon wherever your preferences for society fall. If the state could allocate resources correctly, and everyone's standard of living went up, then the state (and it's coercive power to provide such prosperity) would be ok? Of course not.
Brainpolice:My reference to quality of life refers to the idea that perhaps is what's important here is whether people live prosperous and comfortable lives rather than population levels.
There are a lot of theories and studies on the correlation between breeding and prosperity. I believe they are intertwined.
Brainpolice: The idea is that it would make sense to aim at making resources readily available to raise the bar of population sustainability rather than concentrating on lowering population levels.
"To aim" = "to central plan"?
You do realize that when anarchy arrives, if you want to enjoy a high standard of living amongst 6+ billion other people, there is going to be intense competition for land, resources, jobs and opportunities? Right now, you sit at the top of the heap. Its a benefit of first being a westerner, and second an American. There are legion of third world serfs producing goods in return for subsistence, and not what any of us would recognize as a standard of living. They aren't genetically inferior, and they certainly don't lack cultural or moral values necessary to compete. You turn them loose, allowing them to compete, and survival in an anarchist world is going to favor those who can produce, not those who consume.
Everyone complains about how the state steals from them, but all of us are guilty of benefiting from the state's ability to rob from other countries through the WTO, unbalanced trade and corruption.
In a free market, where consumers compete for the best price, and the resources to buy goods, only the strong and determined will enjoy the highest standard of living, and I imagine most westerners will see their standard of living fall in the absence of a coercive state to keep them fat, happy and narcissistic.
It is amazing how Malthus's original theory of geometric growth in population growth and arithmetic growth in food production means that the world will result in starvation keeps getting rehashed. Even Malthus rejected this original thesis later in life. What this theory misses out is that people respond to changes in circumstances rather than continuining as robots. Human Action is the key!
Interestingly, the economist Julian Simon wrote a book called "The Ultimate Resource", the ultimate resource being human ingenuity. He argues, therefore, that the more population there is, the better!
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