Malthusian Catastrophe, The role of technology

There is a lot of talk in the news and in informed circles that the earth is rapidly approaching a population crisis.
The Earth simply cannot support the rapidly growing population. We need to immediately start reducing population increase.

Here is my comment:
Thomas Malthus is considered the quintessential source for information regarding overpopulation. He has written several papers on potential overpopulation. An excerpt follows:

"I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
...
Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio."

Now, Malthus has predicted the point at which the general populace will begin to suffer.
Can anyone tell me why he is wrong?

It hurts to be expatriated from something.This is what some of the Catholics heave to deal with in the referencing to their church hierarchies.
Their church hierarchy says, that birth control is wrong.

They held what is known as an encyclical on birth control and you know what, the church discussion board making this decision for the people was right, birth control is wrong and immoral?

Maybe people should start sending their diaper bills, their pediatric doctor bills and all other bills associated with how good Catholics are supposed to produce, to the Pope.
I mean it, send him a few million doctor bills, or bill collections because your having trouble supporting your extra big family because the pope says so to the Vatican.

There is no responsibility there, because this is a nonresponsable religious sect, telling the people what they should do with their personal lives.

This effect is repeated by many other cultures. But having a certain amount of people as a population, usually does come from somewhere.

Now you try and go to government and ask them, “Can we send some people to aliens that the U.S. and other countries know, to outerspace, to live on other planets”?

The answer they will give you, is “Oh’ there’s no such thing as aliens to take your extra numbers to other worlds. You’ve got it good here, government will take care of all”!?

This is bull as the people themselves, can not win either way.

Its not the peoples fault, it’s the encouraging and deciding influences that are pushing populations to be big.

How does your response have anything to do with Malthusian Catastrophe or technology?

PuckSr, your Malthusian catastrophy scenario has long been negated. Rapid technological advancements caused his two sticking points to become a joke. Overpopulation is no longer considered a potential problem.

Well, the man was totally correct, but like most of his peers, he forgot to take improvements in technology into consideration.
With modern fertilizer, modern understanding of argiculture and improved crops, food isn't a problem for the earth, though we're still having problems getting it everywhere. Fun fact: If everyone were to turn vegetarian, we could feed a population over billion, without increasing agricultre land usage.

He was however correct that we're heading into a population problem, but mostly based on consumption of natural resources and energy shortage. Of course, that is asuming the technology doesn't change.

I know Malthus has been wrong numerous times, but I'm honestly still worried about ecological collapse. Our economies allow us to find alternates and we use technology to overcome natural barriers. But we're still rather dependant upon ecologies which we're massively overconsuming.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's possible to use technology to get over these hurdles. That said, I think that husbanding these resources is still the game-winning scenario, because the technologies will progress in other areas.

For example, we're overconsuming fish. There are technological alternates available (farmed fishing, algae harvesting, etc.), but we don't know the ecological consequences of seriously collapsing many, many fisheries. Instead of overfishing and then moving to algae farming, it might be better to NOT overfish and explore alternates without being desperate.

Another way Malthus was wrong was that we use technology to find (and exploit) resources where we couldn't before. We're seeing that will oil, where steam-injection (for example) allows us to pull more out of a oilwell than ever before. That said, I think that even if we have protected natural areas, we should still be able to find sufficient resources in the non-protected areas: but it will be hard to convince people to do so. They'll want to exploit the easy resources in the protected areas instead of using innovation to continue harvesting in the nonprotected areas.

Malthus didn't plan on parents deciding fewer children lead to greater prosperity between the couple either.

Sorry to abandon this thread...
midwestern, I think you misunderstood my original post

I think Malthus is wrong.
It was actually the topic of a paper I recently wrote.
Malthus failed to account for an important variable: The ability of technology to increase our energy producing ability.

His malthusian catastrophe limit was based on the idea that we had a finite level of energy. History has demonstrated that this assumption is false. Increases in energy can aid in our ability to produce food, water, and support more people.

I wanted to argue that the malthusian trap is not applicable to species capable of continually producing technology to manipulate energy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

He entered Jesus College Cambridge in 1784. (Coincidentally around the time Iceland's Volcano previously erupted ) He had a bunny lip. He wrote an essay about overpopulation - people breeding like rabbits to the detriment of the privileged educated arskokrazy ability to naturally select what they want. He influenced Economists, `Darwin - Natural selection' as-well as the eugenic society.

I think people like T Malthus and H Spencer had friends who were deeply saddened by human disasters like famines, wars, poverty, and other suffering so they tried to come up with reasons that such events were natural and inevitable. Spencer actually believed intervening in human disasters was bad because it would prevent natural selection from weeding out the weak. I don't know why he didn't think that human culture had already made it possible to protect wealth "weaklings" from disaster while ensuring that strong paupers would not gain access to the resources they needed to cope with their lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Vowel_Shift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International...Alphabet#Vowels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

The `great vowel shift' baffles every traveler to this day with absurd contradictions. In Malthusians time only the wealthy were educated adequately to properly understand such illiterational spelling. With education the wealthy were able to rise beyond the bulk of their population by exploiting the labor of their dumbfound uneducated masses

This post has been edited by vadgbottler on May 25 2010, 04:54 AM

relevance?

The relevance is to your post my fair lady. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Caused by Contra-Dictions from `The Great Vowel Shift' We could call them Counter-Diction of expected pronunciation

You thought I meant language culture? I was talking about social-economic class-status. In other words, it's not like every upper-class family sends its kids out to fend for themselves in the same conditions as "the masses." So, Spencer and Malthus told people that human disasters were inevitable and natural, and shouldn't be intervened with, but they themselves were part of a class who were insulated from raw nature by social-economic culture.