And, here's the answer to the resource shortage question. Although, one might say the resource wars have started and the cost of resources rising will put an economic strain on the world, as oil is today.
7 Billion Is Overpopulated? It's Just A Start
Posted 06:59 PM ET
http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=590346&p=1
Human Capital: Earth now has 7 billion people. Are we overcrowded? About to outstrip our resources? Should we prepare for the catastrophic population bomb we've been warned about? No, no and no.
In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul R. Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb," an unnecessary alarmist book that warned of famines in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.
Ehrlich, still honored and respected for reasons we don't understand, likened humans to a cancer that must be cut out using "brutal and heartless decisions."
Ehrlich, of course, advised governments to impose population growth limits. One solution included "the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food," doses of which "would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size."
Those folks would have gotten off easy in Ehrlich's world. He suggested that Indian males who had three or more children be sterilized, with help from the U.S. government "in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments."
Despite it being a tome of gloom and barbarism, Ehrlich's book became a best-seller, which is odd since he did nothing but repeat the false theme that Thomas Malthus and the rest of the doomsayers have been saying for centuries.
It makes no sense to us why so many want to believe predictions of mass human tragedy, especially when the end-of-the-worlders such as Ehrlich have always been wrong and spectacularly so.
Naturally, the misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers have latched onto the anti-humanity message to support their Earth-first, people-are-invaders radicalism. While humans are consumers, we are not predators. Nor are we parasites (though some in the Occupy Wall Street crowd might fit that description).
Humans are in fact a resource, an infinite form of capital. We have had an uncanny way of using our minds to overcome all of the environmental challenges we've faced and there's no reason to think that won't continue as long as the Ehrlichs don't succeed in stamping out large portions of the population.
No one honest or decent person can say what the right number of people is for this planet. But overpopulation at 7 billion isn't a concern. Ehrlich inadvertently proved that when he predicted that a population much smaller than the 7 billion living today would be living miserably poor and hungry lives by now. It didn't happen.
Population growth is no plague. It is an opportunity.
More people mean more minds able to solve problems and sustain human progress.
Imagine a world with hundreds of Norman Borlaugs, Thomas Edisons, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, not just a handful of them, moving medicine, agriculture, communications and high tech forward.
Think of men and women such as these finding answers to our most vexing issues.
In contrast with the academic and left-wing pessimism about population growth, there exists a cogent argument that our planet is actually underpopulated. We are headed toward a world with a population that's growing old — and peaking in 25 years.
We will be looking for help that won't be there as birth rates fall and life spans increase. Under these conditions, who'll pay taxes to fund the aging population's pensions? Who's going to care for its medical needs?
How will a shrinking labor force provide the goods and services the older population demands in its extended retirement years?
And how will it pay off the staggering debt that keeps growing in so many nations?
We understand that 7 billion sounds ominous. Who can grasp such a number?
But while 7 billion might seem like a teeming crowd ready to devour the Earth, it's not. There's no population bomb to worry about. Worry instead about how population bombers, so wrong for so long, get into academe and other places of influence — and stay there.
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