The population of the entire world could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space about the size of Jacksonville, Florida.
Ninety-seven percent of the earth’s land surface is empty.
If you allotted to each person 1,250 square feet (which is quite a bit), all the people in the world would fit into the state of Texas.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, world food supplies exceed requirements in all world areas, amounting to a surplus approaching 50% in 1990 in the developed countries, and 17% in the developing regions.
Problems commonly blamed on ‘overpopulation’ are the result of bad economic policy. For example, Western journalists blamed the Ethiopian famine on ‘overpopulation,’ but that was simply not true. The Ethiopian government caused it by confiscating the food stocks of traders and farmers and exporting them to buy arms. That country’s leftist regime, not its population, caused the tragedy. In fact, Africa, beset with problems often blamed on ‘overpopulation,’ has only one-fifth the population density of Europe, and has an unexploited food-raising potential that could feed twice the present population of the world, according to estimates by Roger Revelle of Harvard and the University of San Diego. Economists writing for the International Monetary Fund in 1994 said that African economic problems result from excessive government spending, high taxes on farmers, inflation, restrictions on trade, too much government ownership, and over-regulation of private economic activity. There was no mention of overpopulation.
The government of the Philippines relies on foreign aid to control population growth, but protects monopolies which buy farmers’ outputs at artificially low prices, and sell them inputs at artificially high prices, causing widespread poverty. Advocates of population control blame “overpopulation” for poverty in Bangladesh. But the government dominates the buying and processing of jute, the major cash crop, so that farmers receive less for their efforts than they would in a free market. Impoverished farmers flee to the city, but the government owns 40% of industry and regulates the rest with price controls, high taxes and unpublished rules administered by a huge, corrupt, foreign-aid dependent bureaucracy (Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun).
The world’s population is expected to max out at around 8 billion by 2050. Then it starts to decline.
That’s when the real trouble begins.
February 11th, 2010 at 1:46 am
Man o man, the overpopulation myth is the one that gets me the most I think, it is probably the most overtly racist one – look at all those teeming masses of dark people (have you seen the way Ehrlich wrote about being in India? I’ll track down the quote and post it) they will overrun the earth with, so irresponsible, having all those children. It is also the one that most exposes the hypocrisy and misanthropy of the environmental movement, because they know that affluence lowers fertility, but we couldn’t do that could we, can’t ease your suffering, anyways it is better to be poor. You are so much more in touch with nature than us in the west.
It also amazing to hear feminists talk about the need to control womens bodies, I guess only in the third world eh, they must be less than human, not deserving of the right of choice that you fought so hard for.
And witness this, from a woman with two children.
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2314438
I guess she must know that the rich in china can buy their way out of it, doesn’t she. And that the Chinese are quietly reversing the policy due to their massive gender imbalance.
Anyways I am going to expand this into a full post on my blog…
Great work as always Ray.
Oh yeah I thought it was gonna max at 10b?
February 11th, 2010 at 7:22 am
Nine billion, ten billion — what’s a billion? small potatoes, I think.
February 11th, 2010 at 11:04 am
Great link, hilariously relevant, I wonder what would happen if we took humans off the fertilty standard and they became a fiat life form? Maybe we could create a central human production centre and it would just create more fully formed human workers whenever the government required it. I am sure we would see human inflation.
As for what we will do when the global population is decline, the Japanese have that one figured out already-as they are already experiencing it intheir own xenophobic country.
http://www.zygbotics.com/2009/03/27/robot-nurses-to-care-for-japanese-elderly-within-five-year/
So Ray – how do I turn that into a link in this comment? I haven’t figured that one out- I tried copying and pasting from word but no dice.
February 12th, 2010 at 7:12 am
It’s very difficult to show you in the comments how to turn that link into a comment because the moment you insert the code in the comment box, it doesn’t show up as code; it shows up as a hyperlink. Try this:
a href=”FULL URL ADDRESS BAR ADDRESS HERE”>Your link word here
You must leave the quotation marks there.
You must add at the very beginning, before the a href, a bracket like this <
Then, at the very end you must put in another bracket, just like the one above, then /a
Then you close the bracket with this: >
And that’s it.
February 12th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Thanks Ray!!
I’ll try this out next time…
February 14th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
‘The population of the entire world could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space about the size of Jacksonville, Florida’
Now why would they want to do that?
More seriously, overpopulation is a myth. In parts of Europe (not the UK) they are worried about potential steep population declines. It may be that this will turn out to be a myth too but all the evidence suggest that economic development is the best contraceptive. When children are your pension policy plus social security provision and plenty die in childhood, you will have LOTS.
February 14th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
rabbit wrote:
Ha-ha! Why, indeed.