Looney Labs EcoFluxx Mailing list Archive

[Eco] Sustainability of Human Progress

  • FromDoug Orleans <dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateWed, 31 Jan 2007 11:21:49 -0500
John W. Cooper writes:
 > Human population growth is something that is totally out of my
 > control. My contributions to it happen to be as low as I can manage
 > (i.e. zero), but I can't fight billions of people following
 > billions of years of genetic cunning. It's troubling to me (I'm
 > sure most people my age are not troubled by this at all) that there
 > are twice as many people in the world now as there were when I was
 > a child. My only hope now is that there is twice as much brain
 > power to confront problems that have exponents in them.

Have a look at John McCarthy's "Sustainability of Human Progress" pages:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

I'm skeptical about a lot of what he says (and I would be interested
to see specific rebuttals), but there's a wealth of thought-provoking
stuff there.  One of his theses is that the planet can sustain 15
billion people "at an American standard of living", and that
"population will eventually be limited by a sense of crowdedness
rather than by material considerations."  Here's what he has to say
about having children:

  Population moralists criticize people who have large families and
  demand that they be taxed extra. Let me reverse the argument.

  People who have no children or only one are depending on my children
  (I have three) to support them in their old age, whereas I am
  contributing my share of people who will be working when I am older.

  The population complainers can say that their not having children
  economizes on natural resources. I say their not having children
  puts an excessive labor burden on my children.

  How can we compare these two complaints?

  Economics provides an answer. Natural resources apart from energy,
  amount to 4 percent of the GDP of the U.S., and energy amounts to 8
  percent, but these include labor and capital as well as the direct
  cost of the resources. In contrast to this, labor amounts to more
  than 50 percent of the GDP, and probably to 75 percent. Therefore,
  the burden the population complainers put on the next generation by
  not having children is much larger than the burden imposed by my
  children's use of resources.

--dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx