Daniel Quinn is the author of “Ismael,” “My Ismael,” and “The Story of B”. These books present some interesting ideas, including the concept of the population-food supply race. I mis-stated his point slightly in the “overpopulation?” thread. Here’s a better statement of it–
If the population of the world is 5.8 billion, and we’re producing enough food for 5.9 billion, pretty soon the population will be 5.9 billion. If the population is 5.9 billion, and we’re producing enough food for six billion, pretty soon the population will be six billion. And so on. We keep struggling to increase the food supply, and population keeps increasing to use up that food supply. As long as the world’s food supply keeps increasing, the world’s population will keep increasing. If one nation’s growth rate slows with the result that it is producing more food then its population needs, that food will go to fuel growth elsewhere in the world.
Here are some links to a Daniel Quinn website and relevant pages within its Q&A section–
Hazel, we can grow enough food to feed about 6X the current earth population and about 7x the animals, using American diet. Poor distrubution channels is the cause of hunger, aided by government activities that curtail such distribution.
Capacitor, the fact that we can increase the food supply is exactly the point. We can indeed increase the food supply, and then increase it some more; we can keep increasing the food supply. And as the food supply increases, the population increases. And as the population increases, we use up more and more open space, drive more and more species into extinction, create more and more pollution, etc., etc.
Oh, man, who wants to send capacitor a copy of Ishmael?
Look, bro, the problem is that feeding people allows them to multiply. Then you have more people wanting food, and you have to increase the intensity & efficiency of your agriculture, and of your distribution, and there are resources that go into that, and the system gets more and more fragile.
People like you that say, “Well, we could feed everybody,” seem not to realize that fixing those “poor distribution channels” uses petroleum. It ain’t free.
Nor do you seem to get that human population numbers will change as a result of your actions. Feeding the hungry allows them to live, and multiply, and then you’re feeding their more numerous children.
What people like Quinn (and me) are getting at is this. In the long term, we’re better off having periodic starvation–famine–at human population level x than letting the effects of humanitarian aid increase the population over several generations until we finally hit a crisis and have a famine at human population level 5x!
This is the flaw in Quinn’s arguement. Increasing food supply does not cause population to rise in a deterministic manner. It could, of course. Among animals and humans before the onslaught of technology, it certainly had that appearance. When the principal activity of a species is food-gathering, a limit on food inhibits population growth that an increase in food relieves.
However, looking at humans in the current technological period, we discover that people are not interested primarily in food gathering, since the majority of the world can be assured of some level of food supply. Interest has shifted to other pursuits.
In both the U.S. and Europe, where advanced technology has been established for many years, the birth rate is already below the replacement rate needed to sustain the population. All current growth is due to immigration. Even among the third world countries where the technology has been more slowly introduced, birth rates are falling.
The interaction between humans and technology has changed the old determinist equations. There is no reason to believe that (barring government interference) we will breed ourselves out of food.
tomdebb, organized famine has a nasty habit of affecting people like me more than rich people, so don’t wait for me to endorse something like that. It also affects worse the farmers growing the food, witness the Ukraine in Stalin’s time the potato famine in Ireland, and the Dust Bowls of the 1930’s. The small farmers were forced out, followed by corporate conglomerates, propped up by governments in the form of subsidies.
And are you implying that the hungry shouldn’t be allowed to live and have a fruitful life? I heard that somebody said bluntly “The wrong people are having the children.” This is similar to what you are arguing. What does that supposed to mean? We need more White children and less children of color? You better watch what you say now.
Even better - instead of letting millions of human beings die slow, horrible deaths, we could set off some nuclear weapons in certain high-density areas - New York, Los Angeles, London, etc, - to cut down on the amount of useless, non-food-producing mouths to feed. If we take care to clear out outlaying areas, we could easily kill off some 200 million people quickly and efficiantly within a matter of hours, striking a major blow against world overpopulation.
It’s a modest proposal, true, but it might just work.
Geez, this preview is not working right. The beginning should have said, “Also, tom…”.
Thereis the problem Hazel. In your ideal world, we gotta kill someone or group. Should I kill you because we don’t need excess women? How about me cause we don’t need more people of color ‘not knowing what to do’ with ourselves? How about someone else because he is over 60? The point is let dying come naturally. One never comes out good trying to deliberately jigger a dramatic increase on the mortality rate.
Capacitor, Alessan, neither I nor Quinn are suggesting that we need to increase the death rate.
We’re simply pointing out that when the world’s food supply increases, the world’s population increases. Struggling to increase the food supply in order to end world starvation, malnutrition, and hunger does not work. You start out with X number of people. Such and such a percentage of them are on the ragged edge of starvation. You get to work and increase the food supply. The population increases to the level allowed by the food supply increase. There are still a lot of people on the ragged edge of starvation. You get to work and increase the food supply… and so on, over and over and over again. The population/food supply race cannot be won.
Tomndeb, I don’t see the relevance of you statment that people in the developed world are no longer primarily interested in food production. Or of your statement that birth rates are below replacement level in some developed nations. If one area of the world is not consuming all of the food it produces, that food fuels population growth somewhere else. Also, please see the item by biologiest Alan Thornhill that I linked to in the OP.
No, Alessan, that’s NOT what I’m saying. I said, “If one area of the world is not consuming all of the food it produces, that food fuels population growth somewhere else.” It was the next to last sentence of my post.
I’m saying (or rather, I’m quoting Quinn as saying) that as the world’s food supply increases, its population increases.
It’s not necessarily a matter of birth rates. Please note that currently, birth rates are declining, but the world’s population is still growing. Please read the brief item by Alan Thornhill that I linked to in the OP.
What Quinn says is that throughout human history, as food supply increased, the population increased. It seems unlikely that this will suddenly change.
The relevance?
The relevance is that we can look at the actual world and see that the statement is false, both in its premise and its conclusion.
Developed countries are at below replacement rates. Rather than fueling growth in undeveloped countries, as undeveloped countries become developed. their birth rates fall. The longer a society has been exposed to 20th century technology, the more likely that society will breed below replacement levels. As more nations enter the 20th and 21st century in terms of technology, the birth rate will fall much faster.
Thornton’s essay fails on that very point. He makes much of the fact that we have been seeing a falling birth rate, yet the population is increasing. He has chose to ignore where and why it is falling, and by how much.
He claims that the birth rate has fallen by so much in so many years and that we would have to force the rate to decrease much faster to break even. In fact, we don’t have to “force” the rate to decrease at all. Every nation that has achieved high technology has achieved low birth rates without any interference. By combing all the birthrates into a single number, he has persuaded himself that the numbers cannot drop fast enough. Had he taken the time to analyze the numbers by region, he would have noted that birthrates in developed countries are much lower than he has claimed for the “world average” and that every decade more countries join the “developed” club and their rates begin to look like the already non-replacing numbers of Europe and North America.
The UN has issued estimates for world populations that include near-future and far-future projections. The far-future projections show that the world population will begin to decline within a couple hundred years. The near-future projections have had to be revised downward every few years since the 1960s because we are already not growing as fast as it was thought we would.
The “more food = more population” scenario has been disproved for humanity in the 21st century. If it were not true, the U.S. would now have a population of 340,000,000 without immigrants rather than the current population that is almost 60,000,000 fewer including 25,000,000 immigrants.
The practice in which Quinn and Thornton have engaged is a fallacy that Mark Twain commented upon when he noted that people who extended the rate of erosion on the Mississippi were predicting that New Orleans and Cairo, Illinois would one day link up as a single city as the river got shorter. It is the sloppy application of a theory that wanders too far from facts.
They are happy with their premise, that works on squirrels and rats, (more food = greater population) while they ignore the reality (more food + 20th/21st century technology = population decrease) that can be seen by looking at actual real life data.
As for
Are you farming? Do you, personally know any farmers? Do you understand that the percentage of farmers in the U.S., once over 95% of the population, is below 10% (and that generously includes week-end truck farmers and pumpkin growers with a single non-food crop each year)?
I’m confused. If it doesn’t have to do with birth rates, what would it have to do with? I can only guess you mean longevity, since the only other way I can think of that would increase population would be the addition of beings not already on the planet, and as of yet alien life forms are not included in the Census.
elfkin477, the point Hazel was making is the one that she directed me to, as posited by Alan Thornton. If you open up her first link and scroll to the bottom, you will find a further link in which Thornton lays out his argument.
Basically, if the population increased by a birth rate of 5% and we started with 10,000 people, we would wind up with 10,500 people. If the birth rate then dropped to 2%, we would still wind up with 10,710 people–a net increase. On the much larger scale of the Earth, Thornton believes that we cannot reduce the birth rate fast enough to compensate for the number of people who are producing children.
In a purely mechanistic mathematical world, he would probably be right. As I have indicated, I disagree with several provisions of his premise and I think his conclusion is wrong, but he does not have a foolish or unsupportable argument. He is just ignoring too much information to get the right answer.
If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say that this was probably due, primarily, to access to 20th century contraceptive technology (including vasectomies and tubal ligations).
Does this model hold up well for countries that are predominantly Catholic, where contraceptives are frowned upon or forbidden?
So Ireland (where they only overturned the contraception laws in the last two years) is barely ahead of the U.S. and every other European country with a (traditionally) large number of Catholics is actually below the U.S.
When we move out to less developed countries, the rate goes up, but that matches the model I predicted. (I deliberately included Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. They are, actually among the countires that have had the longest exposure to technology, but the political systems of Argentina and Chile have created enough chaos to offset some hoped-for technological advances and Brazil is still very much a third world with a thriving aircraft industry in a few limited locations. Despite this, their rates are actually relatively close to that of the U.S., while technology deprived countries such as Bolivia run around 28 per thousand.)
The US produces more food per capita than any other country in the world. Does the US have the highest growth rate? No. In fact, if it weren’t for our high levels of immigration we’d be only a little above replacement. All that food that the US produces creates fatter Americans, not more Americans. In fact, we can see that the countries with the LEAST amount of excess food are the countries with the HIGHEST growth rates!
People are perfectly willing to avoid the scenario of producing children until the whole family is on the edge of starvation. I believe that the key is gender equality. When women are empowered to make their own reproductive choices they often choose not to be pregnant every moment of their adult lives.
This food=growth hypothesis is false on it’s face. Totally, 100%, absolutely wrong.
The principal thing that Thornton is ignoring is that people are mortal.
It is trivial to set up a simulation of population change in Lotus 1-2-3 or other spreadsheet program. Do so, and notice how long it takes for a “baby boom” to work its way through the population, even if the crude birth ate immediately thereafter drops to the replacement rate. OTOH, it eventually does (depending on how you’ve chosen your lifespan).
I eventually realised that I made a classic Malthusian argument above. While I feel it’s legitimate, I’m not sure whether to say Quinn & Malthus agree on this. The primary argument in Ishmael is more as follows:
Society is happier when it is smaller, and thus the ratio of the hungry to the resources that feed them is greater. At this point in our race’s history, there is no advantage to further population growth, & it will only make us miserable.
You may think that it’s your call, and you should know what makes you happy or miserable. But we’re talking about the lives of future generations, not your own. A child must be stopped from doing every fool thing he thinks of in his ignorance (e.g., drinking from a polluted stream); both to protect others (e.g., the neighbor kid, the neighbors’ cat) in the interest of preventing misery he is too foolish or ignorant to foresee. How much more must our generation be governed, and warned against causing misery that won’t even be our own: the misery of future generations and the misery of other species.