Quote:So what? Famine is as old a problem as the human race, yet somehow the human race is still around.Because the only things we want to avoid are things which drive us extinct? Just because something fails to kill us all off doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid it.
Quote:You seem to assume that an infinitely growing human population has inherent virtue, from what you wrote there.No, I regard mass starvation as an inherent evil. My ideal population for this planet is somewhere around 100 million - but if we had to get there by starving 6.4 billion, I'd say, to quote Ms. Palin, "thanks but no thanks."
There is good reason to suppose that the population of the earth will more or less stabilize in the next few decades thanks to demographic and social change. If that is the case, so long as we can get through the next while without mass starvation, we can avoid having to go through a Malthusian check on population at all. That's an enormous number of lives that don't have to be ended in a particularily painful way.
Quote:I understand the theory of demographic transition, there seem to be strong correlations in Europe, and the Chinese model of population restraint is an interesting problem/solution strategy to mull over.It's not just Europe. Japan, North America, Australia, NZ all look much the same. So do many places in Latin America. It looks like India is also over the hump, although not in all regions, and is not yet down to the low birth rate/low death rate point. It's more or less just the extremely poor, badly governed countries that haven't seen it happen yet - Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Quote:Breeding in excess of the land's capacity to bear the population remains a common human problem. Starvation is one symptom of that problem, conflict over scarce resources another. Thanks to our good Mr B, some nations or other warring groups can feed their troops ... perhaps better than others.Without him, they'd likely have already been using those desperate, starving masses to claw each others' countries apart for food resources. The greater the scarcity, the greater the conflict.
-Jester