‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?_r=1
Posted on 10/19/2010 6:43:41 PM PDT by neverdem
Overpopulation panic is back. Concerns about a world too full of “filthy human children” motivated eco-terrorist James Lee when he held employees of the Discovery Channel hostage at gunpoint in September. But the deranged Lee is far from alone when it comes to worrying about overpopulation. The May-June cover of the progressive magazine Mother Jones asked, “Who’s to Blame for the Population Crisis?” British journalist Matthew Parris wrote an op-ed in September in the London Times asserting, “If you want to save the planet, stop breeding.” Parris further coyly suggested that we study “China’s example, for lessons good and bad.”
But on World Population Day in July, British journalist Fred Pearce argued that “population is not the problem.” Pearce’s relatively sanguine article at the environmentalist website Grist provoked Robert Walker, former head of the anti-gun group Handgun Control and now executive vice-president of the Population Institute, to respond at the same site with an article titled “Of course population is still a problem.”
Walker asks Pearce what he evidently thinks are deep questions: “Looking ahead, Fred, will these countries [with anticipated population growth in Africa and Asia] be able to feed themselves? Will they have enough safe drinking water? Will their lands be deforested or their rivers polluted? Will their maternal mortality rates and infant mortality rates remain unacceptably high? Will they be caught in a demographic poverty trap? Will they become failed states? If you have good answers to these questions, please let me know.”
Let’s take a stab at providing good answers to Walker’s questions.
Will the world be able to feed itself in 2050? As it happens, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences) devoted its September 27 issue to analyzing the issue of global food security through 2050. One of the specially...
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Still, people like what they are used to. Sticky rice is, of course, as tasty as any rice, but the loose rice works better with gravy. I have a bag of Japanese sweet rice and can instantly whip up a batch of mochi
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?_r=1
Which is why Africa is so free. Oh, wait.
Central African republic, population density = 21 per square mile.
United States of America, population density 72 per square mile.
Quite the opposite. Look at all the densely populated areas, the UK, in the Netherlands. They developed democracy.
As for the US, the least populated area is in the central part of Alaska where most people live on reserve. I wouldn’t exactly call that free.
It’s really simple. Adam Smith. Population concentrations diversify and increase productivity. The wealthiest areas and nations generally have a high population concentration.
Remember Smith and his pin makers? You aren’t going to locate pin makers in Alaska. Also, Alaska is a net consumer of taxpayer dollars from the lower 48, and is a bad example. They could not sustain their current standard of living without assistance from elsewhere.
Another example is the Dutch. They have very high population density, but have embraced economic classic liberalism and liberal democracy. If population density created poverty and despotism, we would expect the opposite.
You are right that population density creates more poverty, in the sense that there is more inequality. The rich get far richer than the poor. The question then becomes relative poverty. The numbers show clearly the opposite effect. They show that while the ‘poor’ as a percentage of the population grows, the amount of money necessary to be considered poor goes up. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Look, I know this is counterintuitive, but this is the honest truth. Economics requires population density in order to prosper. Economics induces severe market forces on rural areas to encourage people to move to the cities.
We have been surrounded by the greatest urbanisation that the world has seen, and you are arguing that this is contrary to market forces?
I understand your argument, but it is simply, flat out wrong. If the quality of life were truly higher in rural areas, than more people would move out there. Why don’t they? I am a country boy myself, but unfortunately I need to work in order to eat and to live and to raise a family, and I cannot do so where I am from. I have suffered un and underemployment for the last two years in order to attempt to make it work.
Who said anything about racing to a billion? If you’d rather have 150 million Americans than 300 million Americans, then go out, kill someone and get back to me. If we each get one American apiece, that goal will be accomplished.
I have read clash of civilizations. Most important point to take out of it is that we reside in the remnant of the Greeks/Romans, and how this worldview is directly contradictory to Islam and most of the world.
Much of what we take for granted today comes from them.
My point is that the West is already killing people, one in three to maintain the status quo. This is exactly what abortion does, point and kill one out of the next three people that you see.
As for numerical progression, what’s the average growth rate of the United States? Precisely how many years would it take to reach 1 Billion Americans?
122 years at 1 percent average growth rate per year. That’s slightly on the generous side. At 0.95 percent growth, which is slightly low, it would take 130 years. So in 2150 you’d see an America with one billion people.
Of course, that assumes that the rate does not change over time which is rather unlikely.
Liberals like to talk about limiting population but somehow, they never get around to discussing the environmental impact of 2 million new immigrants every year.
Control freaks like Robert Walker not only have a lot of free time on their hands but a lot of free money as well. Guess where a lot of that money comes from?
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