The greatest problem confronting the world must surely be population growth? After all, look what we’re doing to the planet; look at the Global Financial Crisis; look at our overcrowded cities; look at the water shortages; look at global warming ….?
Although this is an intuitively appealing argument, in what way does limiting populating growth begin to answer the corruptions into which Western civilisation has degenerated, where finance, insurance and real estate have been mounted on an altar to which the poor and dispossessed and, increasingly, the middle class are required to genuflect before consideration is given to the needs of the citizenry and sustainable wealth creation? Do not the 1.5 billion cattle that occupy 100 times more land than the 7 billion people on the planet pose a greater environmental threat?
Is the drift of population to the world’s great cities healthy? Is not the drift associated with the promotion of rent-seeking by errant tax regimes? Would the drift (in search of jobs?) be arrested if, instead of taxing people for working, we were to capture publicly-generated land rent, the annual value of locations? Would not the higher revenues drawn from cities act to reverse this drift and the rape of city hinterlands as Megapolis feeds upon itself at a terrible coast to rural and regional areas?
Although the Reverend Thomas Malthus was proven wrong and shown to have the cart before his horse, insofar as population growth has been found to decline with economic security, this hasn’t stopped the emergence a neo-Malthusianism which holds that populations must adapt to pathological environments before the health of the planet may be restored. This must be our starting point is their claim. But they are wrong.
I don’t know what constitutes a sustainable population but – like Bill of Rights advocates who fail to have peoples’ right to share equally in the rent that flows like oil from land and natural resources as priority one – zero population growth advocates are misguided. They’re akin to so-called ‘Productivity Commissioners’ who refuse to see that taxation does indeed destroy, and that land-based revenues conserve.
Having dashed out these thoughts earlier today, I’ve subsequently found this from George Monbiot which expresses much the same sentiment about population.