From: karsten@nic.gac.edu (Karsten Hendrick)
Newsgroups: alt.flame
Subject: Re: I'm not your man...
Date: 16 Apr 92 19:39:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: gacvx2.1992Apr16.133934.990

In article <1992Apr15.231716.25012@u.washington.edu>  writes:

> Your suggestion to improve food distribution is counter-productive.  By 
> increasing the food supply, you increase the number of people that can be
> supported, which increases the demand on the food supply.  Historically,
> the rate of food production has been linear while the rate of population
> growth has been exponential.  It is a mathematical theory that, given enough
> time, _exponential growth will always outstrip linear growth_.  

Wrong.  Wrong.  Right, exp growth does overtake linear growth.  
 
It's thinking like this that is screwing up the solution to the problem.
Most of the super-heavy population growth occurs in countries with very
poor food distribution.  The reason that so many people in those places
have children is because it is much harder to support oneself, and if
you and someone you are married to feel like surviving and actually
having some sort of life in their old age, they need to have lots of 
children to support them, because the average amount of resources that
the average person can accumulate in nations like India, Ethiopia, 
Somalia etc. is very limited.  You can go over there and tell those
people "Hey, you need to have less children, because there's only
so much food to go around," but their answer would be "Yes, and we
need all the help we can to get it, so if we can't have children, who's
going to help us get food?"  Kind of a vicious cycle, isn't it?  

This thing about food production being linear has been around since 
the middle ages.  It's hogwash.  Increases in technology have kept 
food production well abreast off what is actually necessary to feed 
the whole world.  The problem is not with production, it's with 
distribution.  The leader of some country decides his army needs 
helicopter gunships to fight the rebels that are fighting his government  
because the people aren't getting enough to eat.  So the money is 
spent on the army and soldiers, instead of food for all the starving
people.

What you don't realize is that countries with high employment rates
have less population growth.  Simply put, it is inconvenient for most
people who have jobs to have as many children.  It would create a lot 
of jobs in some third-world nations to distribute food and medicine to 
the population, and eventually, the rate of increase of the population
would go down. 

The overpopulation problems were politically caused, and 
can only be solved politically.  If people could support themselves for 
10,000  years in the same area without there being overpopulation or 
massive starvation, why did it start all of a sudden?  In many instances,  
people were forced to  abandon their hunting/gathering or pastoral existence 
to make way for modern agricultural practices not suited to their 
environment. Drought caused famine, the famine caused the overpopulation 
problem.  Now we all have a problem, which is being compounded by shallow
thinking like yours.

Karsten Hendrick
karsten@nic.gac.edu
karsten@lavatch.gac.edu