StableAlkynea year ago
Unbelievable that a nearly 30-year-old article is still (retroactively?) paywalled.
I personally think it's racism and eugenics.
I remember watching a documentary in grade school about overpopulation. When they wanted to convey the problem they always showed the same sorts of shots: seething hordes of mostly black and brown people in places like India and Africa. Meanwhile the scientists and other experts interviewed to argue the Malthusian case were almost entirely white men.
I recall even back then (9th or 10th grade probably) thinking this had a racist vibe, and I'm a white male who isn't particularly hypersensitive to such things. Strip off the intellectual veneer and it was literally a bunch of wealthy educated white men complaining about there being too many poor colored people. Wish I could remember the name of this doc, I bet it would come off even worse through today's eyes.
Of course today the new hotness is to panic over underpopulation and demographic collapse. That's got a huge undercurrent of racism too. Desirable countries can easily compensate for any concerns over population decline by importing population, but the depopulation zealots seem to freak out even more over that. We can't just let people immigrate... because... they never quite seem to finish the sentence but you know the reason.
Population panics just always seem racist. Overpopulation panics are about too many of the "wrong" people, while underpopulation panics are about not enough of the "right" people.
Growing up far away from the US, but still around western-ish culture, my experience was that overpopulation fears were primarily about resource shortage and creation of large poverty class within the same society; more recently, in context of immigration, about culture shifting to something that's alien or hostile to people living today (that's the "${immigrant group} isn't assimilating" complaint), and about housing and unemployment issues. Underpopulation, in the meantime, I see primarily talked as risk of there being not enough young people to fund old people's retirement pensions. It's a major factor why people I know in my generation all assume we won't get government-run retirement when we get old; the system will collapse due to negative population growth.
Might be a perspective of someone from the old continent, but those issues are rarely if at all viewed through a racial/ethnical perspective (immigration notwithstanding) - even the feared poverty class is just expanding within the same society.
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/s3fs-public/imported/KoreanPeninsula_Night_18Jan2021_VIIRS_lg.jpeg
That's North and South Korea from space. Those people are almost genetically identical. They're practically clones. Why is the South so much stronger economically and technologically?
Could it have to do with different ideas? The North is a mixture of a monarchist family cult of personality and Marxism, while the South is closer to a Western liberal democracy.
I'm sure you can find other cases of ethnically identical people have massively different outcomes, but this is probably the most obvious. You can see it from space.
These are a problem for people who want to discount the importance of ideas and culture in favor of genetic determinism. If genes are the most important thing, North and South Korea should not have such a large gap in outcome.
It's a lot easier to think of examples of over time. Europe went from being backward and poor compared to the Middle East and China to basically ruling the world in a few generations. That's too fast to explain with genetics. There are loads more examples like this: Japan's sudden industrialization, the rise of China in the last 50 years, etc. In all these cases you had people suddenly leaping forward in development without much genetic change. Why weren't they always so developed if it's genetic?
I'm not arguing that genes have zero impact, but I think ideas are much more significant. Humans are thinking beings. Most of our efficacy comes from things that are not heritable. Genes only give you the base raw material.
See this presentation about the growth in population in 3rd world countries and how immigration is completely incapable of addressing it in any meaningful way -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
The growth rates and population amounts are simply too high for us to effectively solve the problems of population growth with massive, intercontinental migration.
You also can't solve societal and cultural problems (of which the 3rd world and developing world has many) by massive migrations of those populations into first world countries. In effect, you end up simply importing those problems. There's plenty of history and evidence for this. There's never been a case in history where the population of a society is massively overtaken by foreigners and that society hasn't changed dramatically.
Cultures and societies are not interchangeable. They aren't equal. It's not racist to say this. You can find undesirable beliefs and traditions among all races and cultures. You cannot fix problematic cultures and societies by trying to emigrate people out of those societies faster than they can produce them. It's far easier to import and export ideas and cultures than it is to migrate people.
Correct. Unfortunately, the modern Internet meaning of the world "racism" encompasses everything, from actual racism, through ethnic, cultural, national differences, all the way to differences of opinion. In their original comment, 'api seems to have been using this extended meaning.
(My attempt at understanding this phenomenon: US is a boiling pot of nationalities, cultures and races from around the world; those distinctions end up blending together. In contrast, the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, had and has geographically-separated nations and cultures, and much less local population variety.)
For example, the reason documentaries in the 80s or 90s would, "When they wanted to convey the problem they always showed the same sorts of shots: seething hordes of mostly black and brown people in places like India and Africa. Meanwhile the scientists and other experts interviewed to argue the Malthusian case were almost entirely white men." - that's, IMO, not because of some innate racist views. Rather, it was showing what was familiar and accurate - the academic world in the US was predominantly male and white, while India and Africa were where international aid went. Nothing to do with race, everything to do with what the audience recognizes as the major high population societies suffering from starvation-level poverty.
Not only that. As you said, "cultures and societies are not interchangeable". Even beliefs and traditions that are, on their face, perfectly fine, can be a source of fear for the culture that ends up importing them. The culture you live in is yours, you feel safe and at home in it[0]. It's understandable to fear that, should the culture change too quickly, you may suddenly start feeling like an outsider, an alien, in your own home. You can adapt to changes only so fast.
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[0] - Mostly. Everyone has some smaller or bigger issues with their local status quo, but it's still a familiar territory one grew up navigating.
> Of course today the new hotness is to panic over underpopulation and demographic collapse. That's got a huge undercurrent of racism too. Desirable countries can easily compensate for any concerns over population decline by importing population, but the depopulation zealots seem to freak out even more over that. We can't just let people immigrate... because... they never quite seem to finish the sentence but you know the reason.
Agreed. Brexit is the first step in an anti-immigration wave that's poised to all sweep Western countries over the next decade.
Ahh, I smell Pinker Bullshit in the air. It is true that if you only measure things looking for positive change, you'll only find positive change.
We don't live in a utopia, but we also don't live in anything close to a Malthusian collapse.
It's hard to get middle class people in the developed world to see this because life has in fact gotten harder in many ways for them, but those are entirely self-inflicted wounds. The #1 problem is failure to build housing to meet demand, leading to housing cost hyperinflation. That's a policy choice, not a result of any hard limit. Other problems include spiraling university costs due to institutional inefficiency and spiraling health care costs for a variety of reasons, and these are also policy failures.
The rich world basically decided to make life hard on its working classes and young middle class people by perpetuating runaway cost disease in critical areas.
Overall the world is getting less poor.
Production increases and efficiency gains have been consistent. Yet the doomers continue to claim, "This time will be different". These factors aren't unknown unknowns. A casual observer of history can find similar trends throughout humanity's technological journey.
Fundamentally, we want to avoid population boom-bust cycles as those tend towards destructive outcomes (famine, war, disease, migration), and instead have a stable steady-state population structure that's pyramidal and gender-balanced, and neither increasing nor decreasing. Whether this is possible without increased authoritarianism is an open question.
Similarly, we want to ensure that all regions of the planet have access to the basic necessities of life, water and food and shelter, as otherwise the refugee and immigration crises will expand. This is where the climatic instability brought on by fossil fuel combustion will have varying impacts, with some regions being hit much harder than others. The solution is investment in resilient infrastructure (instead of wars).
Personally I like the idea of preserving a half-wild Earth, as a planet packed from one end to the other with nothing but human beings and their crops sounds a lot like a dystopian hellscape.
"This is an article about Julian Simon, who challenges the commonly held belief that the environment is going to hell. Simon argues that most important measures of human well-being have improved over time. He believes that resources are not becoming scarcer, but rather more abundant. For example, he says that air and water quality have improved. Additionally, he argues that deforestation is not a major problem. Simon believes that the environment will continue to improve as long as humans are free to innovate."