Thanks peaccenicked for the article on Malthus. Some cappies i know were using him as a source to say socialism is wrong because it attempts to prevent famines and wars and therfore people don't die as much, which in turn causes a huge population problem. (its really sicking they learned this in a unversity political course and yet have never read Marx. Seems like universities are just propaganda machines).
Anyways i found a good article debunking Malthus's view on over population further, here it is:
The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?
Project Syndicate ^ | March 2003 | J. Bradford DeLong
The UN recently revised its population projections. Some 6.3 billion
people now live on Earth. If fertility rates in relatively poor
countries continue to follow the trends set by today's relatively rich
countries, we are within shouting distance of the world's maximum
population-9-10 billion-to be reached in 2050-2100. But population may
well decline thereafter. Literate, well-educated women with many
social and economic options in today's rich countries have pulled
fertility below the natural replacement rate. The problem is not that
such women on average want fewer than two children; in fact, on
average they wish to have a bit more than two. But because many of
them delay childbearing until their thirties, actual fertility falls
short of what they desire.
A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we
have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist
who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the
resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the
millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of a shock to realize that the
age of the population explosion may be coming to an end.
Just thirty years ago, people like Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich
were telling us that the Malthusian Angel of Death was at the door.
They assured us that it was too late to stop the famines that would
kill hundreds of millions in the Indian subcontinent, and that
humanity's destiny in the 21st century was one of war and struggle for
the resources to feed national populations an extra crust of bread.
Today, however, the political flashpoint over food is not that there
is too little, but that there is too much. Developing-country
politicians and populations complain bitterly that the rich industrial
countries are growing too much food. "Exporting food is one of the few
ways we can earn the foreign exchange we need to buy modern industrial
technology," they say. "But your agricultural subsidy programs block
us from establishing any sort of comparative advantage in most
agricultural products. You say free trade is good in those
manufactures that you export-you say that enforcing property rights is
critically important for your investors-but somehow you go deaf when
the topic turns to a level playing field in agricultural trade..."
They are right. Not every developing country can grow rich by making
and exporting computer chips, or plastic toys, or bananas. Some need
to export steel. Others will have to export furniture or textiles.
Still others will have to export citrus, grains, processed foods, etc.
Yet there has been little forward motion in opening up world trade for
nearly a decade. Given the complexion of the US Democratic Party's key
constituencies, this is not surprising. On the contrary, what is
surprising is that President Clinton was so willing to swim against
the tide generated by his own labor/protectionist base in 1993 and
1994 and establish NAFTA and the WTO. It is also very surprising that
the post-2000 Republican administration of George W. Bush has been so
hostile to freer trade. Indeed, Bush has backed several major
anti-liberal initiatives: a steel tariff, the expansion of
agricultural subsidies, and a declaration that FTAA [Free Trade
Agreement of the Americas] negotiations cannot even consider the
impact of US agricultural subsidy programs on trade.
Blockages to world trade jeopardize global economic development.
Technology transfer is incredibly difficult. It may well turn out that
$4 worth of aid are a poor substitute for even $1 worth of exports,
because there are few better schools in which to internalize the
organizational forms and technologies built since the start of the
Industrial Revolution than the school of exporting.
If global development is at risk, then so is the final defeat of
Malthus. If the poorest countries stay poor, their rates of population
growth might fall much more slowly than the United Nations predicts.
Falling birthrates depend on a rise in the status of women, confidence
in public health, growing prosperity, and strong cultural cues to
convince people that there are other, better indicators of success
than a large family. The fact that most countries are completing the
demographic transition does not guarantee that all will. Perhaps
Malthus will rule again, in geographically small but densely populated
and immensely poor parts of the globe.
The world's high- and middle-income countries should not imagine that
the relatively rich can fence themselves off indefinitely from poverty
and misery in the poorest countries. Nationalism has long been a
powerful cause of political violence. Nothing is more likely to
strengthen nationalism and turn it to violence than a sense that one's
own homeland is being exploited-kept poor and powerless-by other
nations to satisfy their own selfish interests. The world today is too
small for any of us to be able to afford for any corner of it to be
left out of the conquest of Malthusianism.
J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of economics at the University of
California at Berkeley, and a former Assistant US Treasury Secretary.
Here's another intresting one, but i wasn't sure if i should post it or not because they did not back up their idea's.
Thomas Malthus predicted the world's carrying capacity was something less than 100 million. I was taught that he was so brilliant in high school, but I was shocked that no one asked why our world was sustaining 6 billion.
The essential assumption of the theory of natural selection holds that there is a fierce struggle for survival in nature, and every living thing cares only for itself. At the time Darwin proposed this theory, the ideas of Thomas Malthus, the British classical economist, were an important influence on him. Malthus maintained that human beings were inevitably in a constant struggle for survival, basing his views on the fact that population, and hence the need for food resources, increases geometrically, while food resources themselves increase only arithmetically. The result is that population size is inevitably
checked by factors in the environment, such as hunger and disease. Darwin adapted Malthus's vision of a fierce struggle for survival among human beings to nature at large, and claimed that "natural selection" is a consequence of this struggle.
Further research, however, revealed that there was no struggle for life in nature as Darwin had postulated. As a result of extensive research into animal groups in the 1960s and 1970s, V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a British zoologist, concluded that living things balance their population in an interesting way, which prevents competition for food. Animal groups were simply managing their population on the basis of their food resources. Population was regulated not by elimination of the weak through factors like epidemics or starvation, but by
instinctive control mechanisms. In other words, animals controlled their numbers not by fierce competition, as Darwin suggested, but by limiting reproduction.
Even plants exhibited examples of population control, which invalidated
Darwin's suggestion of selection by means of competition. The botanist A. D. Bradshaw's observations indicated that during reproduction, plants behaved according to the "density" of the planting, and limited their reproduction if the area was highly populated with plants.9 On the other hand, examples of sacrifice observed in animals such as ants and bees display a model completely opposed to the Darwinist struggle for survival.
In recent years, research has revealed findings regarding self-sacrifice even in bacteria. These living things without brains or nervous systems, totally devoid of any capacity for thought, kill themselves to save other bacteria when they are invaded by viruses.
These examples surely invalidate the basic assumption of natural selection-the absolute struggle for survival. It is true that there is competition in nature; however, there are clear models of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as well.
"I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and voilence and enjoy it to the full" - Leon Trotsky
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Gandhi
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