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| Jan 19, 2010 3:08 am |
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Population - Feeding Ourselves - World Government - |
John Stephen Veitch
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Thank you Ken for your contribution.
So we discovered how to control disease and that allows large numbers of people to live in a small space. We have used that knowledge to increase BOTH human life span and the total human population.
While I agree that if everyone was happy to live like a Chinese peasant, that the total number of people living on the planet is not our major problem, the fact is that people are not prepared to live like that.
Chinese peasants and Indian slum dwellers and Ethiopian farmers all expect to earn good incomes and to have the luxuries of modern life, commonly available in developed countries.
When I was learning economics one of the key papers was "Development Economics", and it was strongly anticipated that with modern "economic knowledge" that within a few years poverty would be consigned to history. It was a simple matter of investment. The model was the reconstruction of Europe after WWI.
What's more, we were told that we ourselves could expect in a few short years to work a 20 hour week, and to retire at 50. The expectation was that depressions were the result of economic ignorance and that prosperity for all was an achievable objective.
Thirty years later where are we? Here in New Zealand and also in the USA, the average person is poorer, and has less economic opportunity than his father had. Real wages in the USA have been falling for all of the last 30 years. (Here too.)
What's the problem? I suggest it's limits; limits to growth, we are trying to get more and more out of less and less, and we've been trained not to see the barriers preventing our "success".
We have a problem. It's not possible for all the people in the world to live in developed counties, and to be wealthy in the sense that Americans have been wealthy for the last 50 years. It's not even possible for Americans to live like that any more.
What's more, we're in the process of discovering that trying to be "richer and richer" is destroying the environment inside which the economy operates. When populations were small and when population concentration was low, the environment used to clean up human waste as a free service. But once cities and industrial plants become common alongside a river for instance, the ability of the river to cleanse itself vanishes. Suddenly, the cost of doing business rises. Suddenly, the "free water" citizens expected to have, becomes expensive water to provide.
I don't believe that individuals and private companies can solve this problem without strong government. What's more, government at a global level is essential if we are going to solve the problems without resource wars.
I think it's quite unlikely that this will occur. So we are faced with the model of self destruction established on Easter Island, repeating itself. We'll proceed into some sort of global meltdown, world population will fall to something like 1.5 billion and then the sort of solution you would like to see, Ken, will be viable.
John Stephen Veitch; The Network Ambassador
Open Future Limited - http://www.openfuture.co.nz/
Innovation Network - http://veech-network.ryze.com/
Building an Open Future - http://openfuture-network.ryze.com/Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch (new win) |
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