The EMO-tings of a First Year Law Student!

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." --Thomas Malthus

Not quite.

It became official today. Somewhere between 7.00 and 8.00 AM Eastern Daylight Time the population of the United States hit the 300,000,000 mark. The Census Bureau which counts each one of us every ten years to update the figure must have some very sophisticated computer models that calculates both the population growth rate via natural births and immigration and the death rate and breaks down to the second how many more of us are added in order to pinpoint this exact date and time. Interesting if they can actually figure out who this distinguished individual is and where it actually occurred.

Consider; the country didn't pass the 100,000,000 mark until 1915, and 200,000,000 until 1967. We'll surpass the 400,000,000 mark sometime in the middle of this century. I think half of them will have moved to California by then making the word 'affordable housing' something of an oxymoron.

Could this be too much of a good thing?

According to many, it already is.

If you listen to the pessimists, and I am not one of them for the record, the world is overpopulated, stupid and lazy people breed too often, the price of bread, and gas, and housing is so much more expensive all because of them. Marxists, environmentalists, xenophobes, isolationists, socialists, racists, elitists, and of course politicians have been saying this in many different ways for years. Perhaps the loudest, and most intelligent of them all was Thomas Malthus, a Britician political-economist who specialized in population studies before demography became the established discipline.

From his most famous work 'An Essay on the Principle of Population' Malthus writes "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."

Malthus formula rested on the nexus between the growth in population and the growth of the food supply. A simple and sensible calculation it was, if people grow faster than there is food available, people will suffer and die and therefore there was a limit to how many people the earth could sustain. This is what is known as carring capacity and while it certainly is true that only so many of us can exist and only so many resources used and consumed at once, Malthus doom and gloom scenarios never quite seemed to pan out.

Why is that?

Maybe because Malthus and his likeminded fellows today think first in terms of fixed outcomes, fixed amounts of land, fixed amounts of oil, fixed amounts of water and air, and soil and commodities and that the total output is therefore fixed as well and one day going to run out. Truth is, most rations and shortages beyond the temporary hurricane or earthquake that halts distribution in and out of a locale for a very short period of time, are not caused by acts of nature or a lack of resources, but of politics.

Two famous academics once made a bet, the noted economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich in the late 1970s about whether or not an index of essential raw materials and commodities to sustain human life would become more abundant or more scarce in the future. Amidst the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the general malaise that characterized the Ford and Carter years, Ehrlich, claiming future scarcity, seemed to have the better argument than Simon, claiming future abundance. The loser was to pay the winner $1000. The 1980s came and Ehrlish, happily wrote a check out to Simon.

Ehrlich, like Malthus, and like the many environmentalists, anti-capitalists, and seal-the-border folks who think 300,000,000 of us is already too many, what they forgot or overlooked was that fixed resources are only fixed in a moment in time. Our capacity to adapt as a people, to become more efficient, to develop new methods and technologies that increase our capacity is the X factor in any formula or calculation when it comes to enabling not just more people to live and to live live well, but to live longer and better than ever before. Simply put it is the human element that is most important.

Check out the following for more interesting stuff;

http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malthus
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-easterbrook8oct08,0,7276145.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary