Implications of the Financial Crisis

The Seattle Catholic ^ | November 16, 2005 | William F. Clark

[SteveTor]

Within less than 20 years, theistic religion will become the developed world's primary organizing and motivating force — not through orderly growth, but suddenly and by default, as today's wrongheaded social patterns and perspectives become untenable. Atheism in particular is about to fall victim to its own errors, while Roman Catholicism is uniquely positioned to gain tremendous stature. Historians may one day refer to this event as the "Theistic Revolution." .... The resulting "baby bust" is about to destabilize nations, because the most self-sufficient members of society are not replacing themselves with similarly capable citizens who can support pension programs in particular and civilization in general. As economies are undermined, it will become impossible for most people to ignore moral and religious issues any longer: pain will have opened their minds.

[SteveTor]

The financial collapse may hasten the change described in this article.

[Jeff Head]

OBAMA, THE STOCK MARKET, AND ENERGY

[Eagle Forgotten]

I stopped reading when I came to the part about population:

There are now increasing numbers of otherwise responsible, healthy, financially secure couples who have chosen not to have children.... The resulting "baby bust" is about to destabilize nations.... The condemnation of artificial contraception, which is the most distinctive and controverted point of Catholic moral doctrine, will be vindicated spectacularly. The credibility and influence of the Catholic Church will skyrocket.

Most of the world is already overpopulated and yet population keeps increasing. If this author is counting on underpopulation to boost the standing of his church, he'll be waiting a long time.

Besides, if your argument against birth control is that it's bad for the economy, that's simply a prudential argument. It's completely different from the classical Catholic position, which is, as he states, a matter of "moral doctrine."

[Philo-Junius]

There’s a strong difference between saying much of humanity lives in squalour, and saying most of the world is overpopulated—which is manifestly untrue.

Most of the world is essentially empty, to begin, and those parts which are antisocially managed, resulting in what some call “overpopulation,” are better described as “overgoverned,” since it is the abuses of those in power which perpetuate the suffering of the less powerful in those environments. One might consult “The Mystery of Capital” by Hernando de Soto to better understand why this is so.

Overpopulation is a statist myth perpetuated by elites who rely upon the suffering of others to maintain their hold on the resources of their ill-governed governments and social systems.

Overpopulation results when the governing elites lose confidence in their people, and attempt to dissolve them in order to create another.

[Eagle Forgotten]

Overpopulation results when the governing elites lose confidence in their people, and attempt to dissolve them in order to create another.

No, overpopulation is fundamentally an imbalance between people and resources. I agree with you that there's plenty of bad government in the world, and bad government can exacerbate the problem. Even good government, though, can't change the facts of nature.

For example, a small population can easily find enough fresh water. Your local river probably suffices. As population grows, you build reservoirs, and dig more wells to tap aquifers. Then population keeps growing -- you need to build more and more elaborate reservoir-and-aqueduct systems, and drill even deeper as the aquifers are depleted. But once you've done all that, population is still growing, so now you have to go even further afield to find even more sources of fresh water.

Let's assume there's no corruption. Let's assume that, at each stage, the best alternative is selected. That means that the available alternatives get steadily worse as the process goes on.

Some American cities have had to impose a moratorium on new water or sewer hookups because they just can't expand their systems fast enough to deal with population growth.

Getting back to the OP: We can argue about the nature and causes of the overpopulation problem, but, for the foreseeable future, that problem will be with us. The Catholic Church can't count on boosting its membership through mass outrage at an underpopulation problem.

[Philo-Junius]

Most water shortages come down to inefficient irrigation systems, a classic example of government mismanagement of resources.

One can conceptually imagine a human population level beyond that sustainable by the proper management and distribution of the Earth’s resources, but back-of-the-envelope estimates put that number around 25 billion, a number the planet, by all demographic estimates, will never reach.

[Philo-Junius]

And proposing that some cities built in the American desert southwest having to manage their growth at all is evidence of overpopulation is precisely begging the question. Of course, if property developers are allowed to do whatever they like without oversight resources will become increasingly unavailable to the less well-connected. That’s the typical arc of elite abuse of the less-powerful.

[Eagle Forgotten]

One can conceptually imagine a human population level beyond that sustainable by the proper management and distribution of the Earth’s resources, but back-of-the-envelope estimates put that number around 25 billion

If you mean a human population in which everyone is just barely at the subsistence level, with no one starving to death but no one enjoying any level of comfort beyond that, I think even 25 billion is too high.

More importantly, if you mean that people around the world achieve their ambition of bringing themselves up to the contemporary American standard of living, then even the current population of more than six billion is far too high. For example, to bring the entire current world population up to the U.S. level in per capita consumption of petroleum would require approximately quintupling total annual petroleum production. You could make Sarah Palin the new World Energy Czar with instructions to "Drill, baby, drill!" and, although she could increase production, she couldn't quintuple it. Still less could she maintain that pace as proven reserves were depleted.

Over the next few decades, as global population increases, and as some countries like China press their industrialization, we'll face increasing competition for a supply of natural resources that's inherently limited. Contrary to the linked article, no one will be wishing that population were even higher. No one will be hailing the Catholic Church for its foresight in opposing contraception.

[Philo-Junius]

There’s nothing special about petroleum as an energy source; substitutes are being brought along every day. By the time the population of the world can afford a car there can be enough alternate-energy cars, unless global birth rates are stampeded to a birth dearth which condemns the currently less developed parts of the world to get old before they can get rich.