Word: malthusians
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...world’s resources are not a Malthusian pie, but they are absurdly distributed. Consider the following: Europeans spend $11 billion per year on ice cream—$2 billion more than it would cost to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world's population. Moreover, Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion per year on pet food—$4 billion more than the additional amount needed annually to provide basic health and nutrition to the whole world...
Since 1980, when China began fully carrying out what is commonly known as the one-child policy, officials in the provinces have often resorted to draconian measures--forced sterilizations and late-term abortions among them--to prevent the country's population of 1.3 billion from expanding into a Malthusian nightmare. Government leaders credit China's stringent population control with helping spur economic growth by reducing the number of mouths that must be fed. But in 2002, as personal freedoms proliferated in other areas of life, parliament voted to ease the deeply unpopular policy. Instead of forbidding extra children outright...
Economic-development and family-planning programs have helped slow the tide of people, but in some places, population growth is moderating for all the wrong reasons. In the poorest parts of the world, most notably Africa, infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, cholera and tuberculosis are having a Malthusian effect. Rural-land degradation is pushing people into cities, where crowded, polluted living conditions create the perfect breeding grounds for sickness. Worldwide, at least 68 million are expected to die of AIDS by 2020, including 55 million in sub-Saharan Africa. While any factor that eases population pressures may help...
...exactitude of modern science save us from silliness in attempting to know what will happen next year, or next week, or even this afternoon. Economics is called the dismal science as much for being dismally wrong as for being excessively gloomy in its visions of Malthusian catastrophe and Kondratieff instability. Weather forecasters, with their satellites, high-altitude balloons and multidimensional computer models, still predict sunny spells just before the deluge, and blizzards just before the thaw...
...Malthus. We are emerging from a 10,000-year vacation from nature still not fully realizing that our own survival hinges on reducing the damage we do to Earth's natural systems. We may not drive ourselves to the complete oblivion of biological extinction, but I fear that the Malthusian specters of famine, warfare and disease will rise in the comparatively short run (the next few centuries), coupled with an accelerating loss of human cultural diversity and, ultimately, quality of life...