mil-observer,

Where did I ever blame individuals? People call this sort of situation a Malthusian trap precisely because people really do have litte or no choice. If the State won't look after you and you can't trust the financial system, you will want children to support you in your old age, and even more children if the ones you have are likely to die. If the people in the next village are likely to try to massacre you, you need lots of young men for defence. If you have to go further and further for water and firewood, then children can help carry some of the load so you have time to grow food or earn money.

If you don't like examples with colonialism, which I admitted was part of the problem, consider the Anasazi, the Maya kingdoms, the Sumerians, the Greenland Vikings, etc. You might read Steven LeBlanc's "Constant Battles" and Jared Diamond's "Collapse".

China seems to be getting out of the trap with coercion, but so far, development is the only way to help people get themselves out of it without compulsion. Even then cultures can be slow to change. (Consider fertility rates in Saudi Arabia.) Unfortunately, development requires quite a lot of resources per person. This graph shows environmental footprint (consumption) against rank on the UN Human Development Index. No country is giving its people wonderful lives on a tiny footprint.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Highlight_Findings_of_the_WA_S0E_2007_report_.gif

It doesn't help the debate if you call me a Nazi or I call you an innumerate fool. Let's play the ball and not the man. It is amusing, though, that you want to heap blame on the baby boomers, as if some postman who happened to have been born in 1950 ia the cause of your problems.

Rhian
As a whole I don't really disagree with anything that you have said. In some of the detail though while man has always strived to increase or improve the material conditions of his/her existence, we can diferentiate between say advances in medical and food technology as being different to the attaining of wealth.

Do we really need all those material possessions to strive for happiness which is really what mankind strives for through those advancements. A focus on the attainment of wealth can actually work against human development and happiness in many areas like work/life balance, psychological health and of course the environment.

Thinking futuristically, I would see a world where the wealth is more evenly spread. Noting of course that it would be almost impossible for absolute equality.

When we have an economic system that is not sustainable (for the most part) and actually encourages material accumulation as a worthy goal one minute and then works to decrease spending the next - it does seem a bit hodge podge and we have created a difficult instrument which requires precision fine-tuning and one that relies on expansion.

Humans are smart for the most part and we are capable of achieving great things and learning from our mistakes. There even appears to be talk of more regulation even in free-market USA since the financial crisis.

mil-observer
It would be impossible to discuss issues of sustainability or the environment without looking at the impact of population. To ignore it would be counter-productive. Technological development, frugality and being smarter without thought to population issues is to ignore a major aspect of the issues we are facing.

I am not sure how this relates to religion. It seems on OLO there is a propensity to use religious association with anything that someone disagrees with or labels like Malthusian. If anything de-population as you put it, is sorely under considered in issues of this nature.

Divergence, it seems you're losing it badly – try to connect with other people's recorded thoughts and opinions when debating. It makes the situation more honest and thereby much more enlightening. I never claimed that you ever did “blame individuals”, just as I never dished out any of the blanket labels, and never said anything about “some postman who happened to have been born in 1950”. A pity that such imagination as yours there cannot consider innovative ways of accommodating fluctuating populations.

I merely referred to feudal, eugenicist psychos because such are the priests of a strange quackery that is a logical consequence of Malthus' simplistic head counting. The vile quality of a Malthusian worldview is that it compels brutal suppression of innovation, local initiative, and even more brutal determinations over “who eats and who doesn't” (as John Passant put it succinctly in a related OLO thread the other day. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8150&page=0).

Your over-reaction seems to prove that I was too restrained in expressing my warnings about just where your Malthusian faith is headed. As for my supposed ad hominem tactic, you extrapolate several obvious misrepresentations from my text, thus expressing a dishonesty worth ad hominem dismissal.

pelican: on Rhian's support for the notion of sustainable economic growth, you refer to an economic system that is monetarist and which, in practice, often acts against actual productivity. Within the prevailing monetarists' claims to efficiency, takeovers and mass retrenchments are deemed profitable, as are practices which cannibalize infrastructure or raise prices while scrapping expanded services and R&D. Such circumstances describe actual degeneracy, not growth.

To put the challenge crudely, do you believe that “economic growth is best represented by $1 turned into $10, or 5 grain seeds become 6? If you believe the monetarists' symbolic notions and their preoccupation with figures, rather than the evidence of actual physical production, then any discussion will "lose touch" in a closed system. Reflection on monetarism seems apt, because Malthusians would hold similar, or at least very compatible, views about supposedly finite resources, while ignoring humans' infinite creative power.

I'm rather surprised the name "Herbert Spencer" has not yet arisen.
It was Spencer after all who -on reading Darwin's legendary piece- coined the term "Survival of the Fittest". He pointed out that the 'rules' of the laissez faire marketplace were very similar, if not identical to, Darwin's theory of evolution.
In other words, Capitalism is absolutely 'natural'.
This is quite probably true; however I would like to demonstrate a connection between this 'natural' system, and one of my favourite things.
Beer.
In a closed system, like a brewers vat, wonderful little organisms called 'yeast' go forth and multiply. In just a few days, these little buggers eat all the available sugar, and excrete alcohol.
Then they die, poisoned by their own toxic excretions.
Of course, in a more open system, this very natural consequence is generally avoided, by "Regulators"; predatory organisms which keep populations stable, and prevents them from sharing the fate of the yeast.
I would suggest our very natural Capitalist system has pushed us in the same direction as the yeast, both physically and economically.
In the absense of natural predators, we must regulate ourselves, for the sake of our offspring.
Surely as rational beings, we can find a more 'humane' method of regulation than killing each other off in endless wars, and enduring endless boom and bust economic cycles.
And as our population becomes more and more dominant, our world comes to look more and more like a closed system.

It is funny how socialists try and claim the environmental high ground.

All the socialist states were the worst polluters Soviet Russia, china, and all the satellites.

With capitalism and democracy brought pressure not to harm the environment.

The green movement itself is not a rational movement, tending to focus on populist perception as taswegian noted its phobia of nuclear has to a large extent been responsible for the huge reliance on coal.

We will eventually need to choose for ourselves nuclear or global warming.

As regards Herbert Spencer, certainly he was one of the first to believe that Survival of the Fittest related to man not the animals.

It is also interesting that Spencer was a follower of Hegel rather than Immanuel Kant.

It is also so interesting that Marx also was a student of Hegel.

So what a mixup we have of true history, when we find Adam Smith the father of the free-market telling us to make sure we know the difference between need and greed -

So looks like we need to be sure what the word success really means, just as freedom also like faith contains the same connotations.

Reckon we could blame most of it on the English language, possibly done deliberately to help capitalism get along, as was said years ago by the group who wanted to bring in Esperanto as the major global language.

Cheers - BB.