Divergence

I don’t deny that there was an economic dimension to migration to the USA, especially during events like the Irish potato famine and the failed harvests in Europe in the late 19th century. But there were lots of other reasons – to found religious communities and escape persecution, political freedom, coercion (slavery, transportation of criminals, indentured service), adventure, social mobility…

Yabby
I’m not arguing that population growth causes prosperity. I’m arguing that the economic, technological and social revolutions of the past 250 years caused a reduction in death rates and improvement in life expectancy. This caused a one-off shift in population levels as societies moved from having high mortality and birth rates to low mortality and birth rates – know as the demographic transition. For as long as death rates are lower than birth rates, populations grow.
See demographic transition here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

This phase is pretty much complete in rich societies such as Australia, where birth rates are now below replacement rates of about 2.1 births per woman. They are also well advanced in developing economies, where birth rates are falling, but have not yet caught up with (still falling) death rates. Until the two match up, and until the population profile of developing countries returns to normal (at present an unusually large proportion of the population is of child-bearing age) further population growth is, for practical purposes, unavoidable.

Dagget,

Even if your data for Manchester are right, conditions in a particular place at a particular time are not necessarily going to tell you what’s happening on average and over time. There have been many estimates of life expectancy in England, the UK, and Western Europe. All, to my knowledge, show rapid improvement over the 19th and 20th centuries. Here are some more:

http://ftp.iza.org/dp585.pdf
http://www.princeton.edu/rpds/papers/pdfs/cutler_deaton_lleras-muney_determinants_mortality_nberdec05.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VC6-4N2D67K-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4e52e88a46805005d531ed07d37e583a

I challenge you to find any serious academic paper showing that average UK life expectancy did NOT increase in the 19th or 20th centuries.

And as Clownfish points out, other objective welfare measures – literacy, infant mortality, height, diet etc – improved too.

Rhian, this snippet from your URL matters:

*Improvements in contraceptive technology are now a major factor. Fertility decline is caused as much by changes in values about children and sex as by the availability of contraceptives and knowledge of how to use them.*

Sure, people in industrial societies have the means to purchase
contraception, many in the third world do not have that option.
If we look at what women in the third world are actually saying,
many would prefer less children. So the point is, why not
assist and provide them with that option? Why wait until they
are an industrial society and can afford to purchase their own,
in perhaps a hundred years?

Talk to a few oldies who had 12 kids or whatever. They will tell
you it happens when you have sex and no pill was around in those
days.

Yes, the advent of the pill has had a dramatic effect on population
numbers in the West. So has the legalisation of abortion.

Many third world countries lack these options. Either women can't
afford contraception or abortion is commonly banned, due to such
influences as the Roman Catholic Church. We in the West luckily
told the RCC to get stuffed, some time ago. Politicians in the
third world are perhaps still more gullible, when it comes to
buying their ticket to heaven.

So unlike the claimed rubbish posted by MO, my point is- give
third world women the same choices as Western women and you might
be amazed how they might choose to reduce their family size, which
is one of the reasons they are on the poverty wheel in the first
place. They are seemingly quite aware of that, but people will
have sex, its a human instinct.

So my basic argument is about choice for third world women. For
just sending more boatloads of food, without family planning,
only creates even more starving little babies

Exactly which century/ies in human history were without the four horsemen of said apocalypse - pestilence, war, famine, death? Are the Unsustainable Poppers deliberately trying to sound like those late night bible phrophecy infomercials who see armageddon in the occurence of earthquakes, tsunamis and the stock market crash? And then ask for your money so that you might be saved.

Mil-observer sounds knowledgeable, but he cites no sources and says vague things like "Studies show very convincingly how Rwanda's 1994
genocide arose from policies associated with ethnic-based state power structures,". I'd give the piece, off-hand, the same credit as a competently written journalistic piece by a journalist offering an interesting "take" on a vexed issue -- the sort of article you feel quite impressed by, but are not surprised to see contradicted in next week's articles or news. e.g. deaths due to hunger might be masked if when persons in weakened condition were carried off, according to the doctor's certificate this was credited to various diseases even though these diseases would not normally have killed them.

Mil-observer wrote, "Perhaps the most sinister aspect of such claims are [sic] that they are at odds with one overwhelming fact: Rwanda had no actual widespread death toll from a malnutrition crisis prior to the Rwandan genocide. Therefore[sic], details of organization and logistics contradicted such claims of a Rwandan 'finite resources' problem before the mass murders."

So the claims are sinister even before they can be disproved, and the disproof is that people were not dying in droves before the killing began. It is a hard-hearted person (sinister?) who doesn't believe people are in pain from hunger until they actually die. It is also dubious that uprisings motivated by hunger/scarcity don't occur until deaths are numerous. Indeed people who are actually starving are unlikely to have the energy for an uprising. There was no uprising during the Irish potato famine. Conversely, many people, perceiving their circumstances steadily declining, might get angry take action long before they were in danger of starving. The pain of hunger begins long before death. (Ask any dieter.)

Mil-observer's argument reminds me of Dickens's comment in Oliver Twist:

[TBC]

[Continued]

Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died, four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait [snack] of air.

Similarly the philosopher, mil-observer, refuses to believe that anyone actually dies of hunger, or rebels because of hunger. And to the extent he admits that there was serious hunger, he insists that it was only fatal because of less than optimal distribution of food within the country, factional leaders, etc. He implies it should have been easy for the president to remove food from regions or an ethnic group that were/was already hungry in order to feed their former enemies whose case was worse. Such logic would mean that no one ever dies from scarcity of food, only from sub-optimal distribution. In a sense that is true. The level of starvation that bred desperation might have been staved off for perhaps another half generation of continued population growth had all other circumstances been ideal. (But when was distribution ever perfect?) Like Dickens's philosopher, mil-observer can be suspected of refusing to face the underlying cause.

"Mil-observer sounds knowledgeable, but he cites no sources and says vague things like 'Studies show very convincingly...'"

Thereupon MS proceeds to make generalized counter-claims by citing no sources, asserting no claims of specific fact, and saying vague things like "everybody knows the story of a philosopher..."

Is this a sock puppet/reincarnation of dickie?

And why the hell does MS give a special reference of authority to men named "Dieter"?