A blog that needs a response: Population bomb theory is a myth in a vacuum

Thanks to Bill Ryerson for alerting me to this blog entry on the Canadian Business website. You can leave anonymous comments by scrolling down to the bottom. See: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blog/tech/54806–population-bomb-theory-is-a-myth-in-a-vacuum

No sooner had I finished writing about how technology fears are stoked by supposedly learned people and the media than another example rears its ugly head. This time, with the world’s population exceeding seven billion people, it’s new worries of a population bomb.

For those unfamiliar with it, the concept is at least as old as Robert Thomas Malthus, an English reverend and scholar of the late 18th and early 19th century. Malthus believed that if the world’s population kept growing at its then-pace, humanity would run out of food and other resources and experience a catastrophe that would greatly thin out the herd to a more manageable and sustainable size.

Of course, it didn’t happen and it probably never will, despite vocal kvetching by modern-day Malthusians, simply because population growth does not occur in a vacuum. Everything else-particularly technology and the economy-grows alongside it. So far, this has served us very well, despite the increasing population.

The reality is that technology, economy and population are interlinked. The more a country has of the first two, the less it has of the third. A quick glance at birth rates confirms it-the rich, technologically advanced countries in North America and Europe typically have the lowest while those in Africa have the highest. Going by those figures, it’s obvious that the more prosperous a country is, the fewer children its people have, for reasons that are equally clear.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blog/tech/54806–population-bomb-theory-is-a-myth-in-a-vacuum