I used to work with Jennie, I know about the adoptions, but it doesn't take away her hypocrisy does it? She contributes 6 other humans to our population then wants to limit others while one presumes all 6 of the extra people she has added have added more people to the population.

I'll give you a simple example, Spindoc, the Irish Potato Famine. The Spanish conquistadors brought the potato back from the Andes in the 16th century, but it took time to develop suitable varieties for Northern Europe due to day length issues. By the 18th century, though, potatoes were being hailed as a wonderful new superfood, able to feed 3 times as many people to the hectare as grain under Irish conditions.

The Irish responded by increasing their population from perhaps 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million by the 1840s. Then the late blight arrived from Mexico and completely wiped out all the potato crops, season after season. Normally, peasant farmers survive crop failures by using their savings from the good years or borrowed money to buy in food until the next harvest.

In Ireland, though, there was no hope that the situation would improve and borrowed money could be repaid. The Irish didn't have any resistant varieties, and large numbers of people were living on plots of land that were too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes. The situation was made even worse because the British, who ruled Ireland at the time, had commandeered large areas of the best land to grow export crops. 1 - 1.5 million people starved, and another 1.5 - 2 million were forced to emigrate. The food exports continued under military guard while people starved. Several hundred thousand people starved in the rest of Europe as well, and this was a factor in the Revolutions of 1848, but the other countries were less totally dependent on the potato.

There were various cultural factors involved that led to the disaster being particularly bad in Ireland, such as inheritance customs, unlike those in much of the rest of Europe, that required land to be divided among all the sons, so that all could marry and have children. You could analyse all this with your matrices no doubt. Nevertheless, the sustainability issue can be summed up as inadequate safety margins, with people totally dependent on a single crop.

Hi Divergence,

What a load of old rubbish.

The Irish potato famine was about agricultural storage techniques. When much of Europe moved to transport produce rather than “bury it” through the winter months, the Irish didn’t adopt either transportation of produce or new storage techniques.

They ended up creating “potato blight” in their stored produce and they starved.

Just where you get your ideological, reverse engineered clap trap from beats me. You need to read History and leave the bl**dy blogs alone.

Divergence

... utter bollocks. Much countryside was owned by an English and Anglo-Irish hereditary ruling class. No mention of absentee landlords who in the main were Protestant and who owned hugh tracts of land confiscated from Irish Catholics by Oliver Cromwell?

the anti-pops have turned political problems into biological problems and human history was recast as natural history. Is this some Diamond rats and steel thing?

Spindoc,

You really should check your facts before you make a fool of yourself. Even the Wikipedia article (look for Great Famine) will set you straight, although estimates of the toll vary with the sources. This is from Larry Zuckerman's book "Potato" (p.88)

"By mid-September the Irish Nation published a chilling account of what farmers all over the country had seen or soon would. The blight was striking with apparent caprice, despoiling one corner of a field while sparing another, or destroying all. It announced itself through livid patches covering the whole plant--roots, tubers, foliage--'until the haulms [stems] become a putrid mass...'"

The late blight was clearly attacking potatoes in the field.

Zuckerman points out that the attack of 1985 only destroyed about 40% of the harvest, with as yet relatively few deaths, partly because people sacrificed their pigs, which normally ate a third of the crop. The blight came back in 1846 and destroyed 90% of the harvest. The blight receded in 1847, but was as bad in 1848 as in 1846. Zuckerman goes on for a whole chapter.

There are also accounts in Noel Kingsbury's "Hybrid: the History and Science of Plant Breeding" and Julian Cribb's "The Coming Famine", and no doubt many other books that I don't have or can't find.

Here is a link to a paper on the late blight pathogen.

http://elife.elifesciences.org/content/2/e00731

Andras Smith,

It is you who are being selective with your facts. You don't mention successful countries with little or no population growth. The World Bank has figures for growth in GDP per capita (in real terms) for most countries over many years. I averaged the figures for Australia, Germany, Finland, and the US over the past 15 years: Australia 1.9%, Germany (declining population) 1.4%, Finland (miniscule population growth and immigration) 1.8%, and the US (high population growth, high immigration) 1.2%. Note that Germany and Finland didn't have a mining boom.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG

Has it occurred to you that those extremely low fertility rates in Southern and Eastern Europe might be do to economic insecurity and high unemployment, that you have your causality reversed?

You also don't consider the income distribution effects of your chosen path, that it redistributes income from labour to owners of land and capital. This graph shows trends in male wages in the US for different income groups

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4c-change-real-hourly-wages/

CEO to worker compensation ratio since 1965

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4-ceo-worker-compensation/

The average American male worker has been getting worse off since the 1970s in terms of wages. There is a lot more to the story than just mass migration of course, but it makes a significant difference to the groups that compete with immigrants. See the following chart and linked article by Prof. George Borjas (Economics, Harvard).

http://www.cis.org/north/borjas-charted-who-benefits-financially-immigration

If you have a special financial interest in the outcome of a debate and don't declare it, then you are astroturfing and deserve to be called on it. You haven't denied that you are a migration agent. Perhaps you would like to estimate your loss of income if immigration were cut to zero net? No wonder your panelists hate SPA. There are big bucks at stake.