Dear Ken, At this stage, I would have to look up the reference. I recall that Buckminster Fuller once designed an arcology - a huge city complex - that would hold the entire world's population on the surface area of the Galapagos Islands. Not having the study at hand, I can't say whether an additional small percentage of the Earth's surface was dedicated to food production, or if he had worked that into his design.
Certainly the intelligent use of design increases the more markets are left free to operate. Unfortunately, there is a surviving movement that claims that all human activity is waste, that left to our own devices we'll all be destroyed, and that what is required is some sort of authoritarian regime to, well, you know, do all those things that central authority does so well - like murder, pillage, loot, rape. Gavage. That sort of thing. > all of the countries experiencing falling stock markets > have embraced strong population control measures, Um, okay, tell us about the United States, then. It appears to be experiencing a falling stock market right now, today. I suppose that could be related to the attempts to limit immigration with the big fence, but I don't think those attempts are actually working. What's a good figure for the USA population? 300 million? I think it very likely higher, since the USA bureau of census is entirely incompetent. >economic suicide? "Self-genocide" Yeah, sure. Assuming that productivity remains constant, an increase in population generates an increase in production, and is therefore an economic good. Since, in fact, productivity is not constant, but has been increasing significantly in recent decades, and shows a strong historical tendency to increase in a compounding fashion, population growth has a multiplier to economic activity - productivity. A facile equation: economic production = (productivity per person) * population So with constant population, one wants increasing productivity to make for economic growth. "Yada-yada-yada, warden," said Lenny Bruce. > One thousand men with only one woman are in danger of extinction. I don't think the female infanticide policy is Chinese bureau-rat made policy, but a signal of their ineptitude. Female infanticide is a cultural phenomenon, and hard to stamp out. As policies go, this notion that there is a "carrying capacity" to the Earth is a lot of nonsense. Given human ingenuity at living within a volume of space rather than just on the surface, the actual volume of Earth's crust which we can address is quite huge. Human adaptation to space has not been well-examined, since people seem to insist that weightless-adapted humans must be returned to a one-gravity environment. Nevertheless, the volume of space just including the terrestrial planets (Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Pluto) and terrestrial satellites (Earth's Moon, Deimos, Phobos, moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and terrestrial planetoids (main Belt, Earth crossing, and cometary bodies) and ignoring the actual volume of space in the Solar System itself is hundreds of times the volume of Earth's crust which we can address. While I think the "carrying capacity" of the Earth is probably in the tens of trillions of humans, the carrying capacity of the Solar System is certainly in the hundreds of trillions. I strongly suspect that the UN and International Monetary Fund and various related entities which insist that population control must be an element of governmental policy, is based upon some fundamental racism. Since population growth confers economic advantage, and since European and "western" populations are not growing as rapidly as, say, India or China or South America were in the first half of the Twentieth Century, "something had to be done." A bunch of short-sighted nonsense. Dangerous. Deadly even, but nonsense. Regards, Jim http://cambist.net/ --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use e-gold's Secure Randomized Keyboard (SRK) when accessing your e-gold account(s) via the web and shopping cart interfaces to help thwart keystroke loggers and common viruses.
