Simon says: The reason there is poverty, unemployment, starvation and lack of space shouldn't be sought in the population size, but in society. The capitalist world has enough money to abolish poverty altogether (ruling out if we abolished currency as a system and used a system of shared resources, in which case the concept of poverty no longer makes sense). One of the principal reasons for unemployment is that automatization removes humans from the labor process (because it is cheaper to make automatised production - after all, robotic manufacturing plants do not demand wages). SDF says: This seems to me to reinforce a point I was groping for in this post: that one of the imperatives of corporate life under capitalism is that businesses need to externalize costs. Human beings, therefore, are a cost to businesses, because it takes so much to assemble one that is fit for servitude to an industry, and then the darn things expect to be paid a living wage. So the clever business executive would hope to use human beings up as quickly as possible, and then throw them away before they show up too prominently on the liability sheets.
Of course, as the corporate elite has discovered with respect to carbon dioxide, whenever you throw too much of something away, people are likely to discover it as a "pollution problem." Thus we have overpopulation as a pollution problem; we are throwing too many people away. The problem is not that there are 5+ billions in the world today, it's that about 800 million of them are malnourished despite records constantly being set in world food production. The cause of this problem, as authors like Jeremy Seabrook have recognized, is that the corporations, as they expand, simply throw people into their profit-making schemes as a human resource, and they are thrown away if they happen to be sitting atop the land without any connection to an immediate corporate purpose for that land. And the libertarians are constantly urging us on to conform to that corporate purpose or be labeled "lazy." Well, blaming 800 millions for being lazy doesn't make the problem go away.
Simon further says: Further, on the population growth I believe this is also a problem of society, not 'human nature' (I must warn against using that concept in political, economic or social discussions - it usually is a sign of having lost control of the debate and having to give in to the 'human nature' concept, which in itself is flexible and not absolute). In the Western world, we are taught that the nuclear family is good, two children an ideal. Children are viewed as a sign of success, for after all it is a sign of having enough money and personal resources to put offspring into the world. In earlier times, children were viewed as a simple, blunt necessity for survival - too many of them even a hindrance. So the urge to get as many children as possible is not necessarily a reflection of human nature, but more likely a result of the socially induced idea that children is a sign of success. It is that idea we must fight, and not its manifestation in the population growth. Attacking the manifestation of a problem in society is a tool of oppression, but what we have to do is to grasp the problem at the root (capitalism). That is the only way a just solution can be found.
SDF says: Usually the suggestion given in these sorts of narratives, after articulate descriptions of the problem such as the one Simon Kongshoj gives above, is that everyone be GIVEN an ADEQUATE STANDARD OF LIVING (such as you don't see NIKE giving its workers), so that families don't feel obligated to have eight children so that two will live long enough to nurse the parents into old age. I just thought I ought to add that lest it be lost in the parade of abstractions.
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