This is quite interesting. Does anyone else think that the unsustainable unpeople unaustralia lobby are acting like a cult? Text book group think. Bader Meinhoff, Red Brigades, the Weathermen - actually these guys are probably pinups for the anti-growth, anti-capitalism, anti-women, anti-society lobby.

This is all Kanck's fault. There wouldn't be such hysteria if she hadn't sent that media release, which has been held up to ridicule across Australia. If you want a laugh, check out Chris Berg's blog in The Age on Kanck.

We're all rooned and we'll certainly all die in a thermonuclear war or the seas will rise, fall, heat or cool and scorpions will rise out of the earth.

These whackos have a monopoly on the truth. Please let the genetic line end with you.

Thankfully, Divergence stolen a fair bit of my thunder in her previous post.

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It's instructive that so much of the pro-population-growth posts consist of personal attacks and so little consists of substantive arguments.

Cheryl wrote, "There wouldn't be such hysteria if she hadn't sent that media release, which has been held up to ridicule across Australia."

I don't think Sandra Kanck can be held responsible for the words put into her mouth by others. Could you please tell us what specifically in Sandra Kanck's media release at http://www.population.org.au/index.php/media/media-releases/media-releases-2009/333-end-population-growth-to-achieve-climate-targets and included above you take issue with?

I am not quite sure why Cheryl assumes that everyone here, who argues against population growth is a member of Sustainable Population Australia, and why, if they are, they are behaving like members of a cult.

That seems to me to be far more the case with the population boosters.

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Even if Rhian's point stands, I don't see how it deals with the fact that the increases in living standards has been made at the expense of the destruction of natural capital.

One serious problem with the spreadsheet Rhian has linked to is that it uses the flawed GDP as a measure of human prosperity.

The GDP measure, whether gross or per-capita, disregards any activities that don't involve monetary transactions and assumes that every monetary transaction necessarily results in an overall improvement in prosperity.

So a good deal of activity in societies that don't use money is disregarded, whilst the destruction of buildings by bushfires and their consequent reconstruction, as one example, is regarded as adding to prosperity.

These assumptions are clearly absurd, and that is why even Simon Kuznets, who devised the GDP in the 1930's for use by the administration of US President Roosevelt, warned against the misuse of the GDP by economists in the way they have been in that spreadsheet.

Sandra the real culprits in this anti-human population growth canker are the greens led by bob brown and the abc.s tony jones et al in their promotion of global warming and mans/womans over population of their garden planet.

*the real culprits in this anti-human population growth canker are the greens led by bob brown and the abc.s tony jones*

Err not so Dallas. For instance anyone who has read my posts on OLO,
would know that I am no fan of Bob Brown, don't vote green and don't
even class myself as "left".

What it comes down to is a number of points, the first being a basic
understanding of biology. If its not sustainable, eventually it
falls over and collapses. Secondly biodiversity cannot be valued,
for without biodiversity, you won't have a humanity. That is all
pretty basic stuff. Perhaps the planet will one day spin with little
but ants and cockroaches on board, for they are the ultimate survivors.
I won't be around to know or care, but it would still
be a bit of a shame, if human stupidity drives the whole thing to
that point. The problem is, we only have one chance.

Secondly, for me there is a bit of a moral as well as quality
of life argument. Will this really be a better place, with ever
more humans and concrete, at the expense of everything else?
What about other species and their right to a bit of the planet?

Right now, our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are being
shot for bushmeat, to feed the ever growing African population.
As population grows, their future is doomed. Gorillas face the
same fate and so do Orang Utans. Those are just our closest
relatives. I'll let you explain to the great grandkids, why
our generation wiped them out, along with a host of other species.

Thirdly, the problem of an ever growing human populatin would in
fact be quite easily solved, if we listened to what those third
world women are saying. As the head of African Population Studies
pointed out only this week on tv, Ugandan women don't want 7 kids.
Yes they will have sex, but the provision of some basic family
planning utensils is all they need, but often cannot afford.
Its hardly rocket science to provide these things

Daggett

We’ve been over this ground before, so I’ll be brief. Economists cheerfully admit the limitations of GDP as an economic welfare measure, but being imperfect doesn’t make it useless, it just means it should be used judiciously acknowledging its limitations. A better measure might be real per capita consumption, but it’s just not possible to estimate that over the geographical and historical range covered by Maddison. Real per capita GDP is in my view a better measure of welfare than real wages over the very long term, as it is broader and has more meaning for periods when very few people were employed for cash wages, and when the nature and content of work changed dramatically.

Furthermore, the objections you raise have less force with Maddison’s estimates than some modern uses. In particular, for older periods Maddison is estimating the volume of output directly rather approximating it through monetary transactions as modern GDP estimates tend to do. Offsetting this of course is the fact that such long-term estimates are far less accurate than modern statistics, and Maddison would be the first to admit the limitations of his data. But to my knowledge, no-one has come close to producing a better estimate of global long-term welfare.

Maddison also tracks life expectancy, which is less susceptible to the objections you have raised, and also shows a pattern of gradual improvement until the industrial revolution and rapid improvement thereafter.

Anansi

I’d agree with you 100% that we should support people in developing countries who want to limit the number of children they have. But I think that how many kids they have should be their choice, not ours.

Divergence, your sense of irony is truly dazzling. You accuse me of "generalising from a tiny and quite atypical sliver of human history", and hit back with ... "real wages for building workers and agricultural workers in Tuscany, Italy from 1370 to 1860"!

Actually, that's a good case in point of Malthusians carefully selecting their data to falsely bolster their argument: Here we have a specific date range - starting from a population crash that would inevitably briefly spike incomes for the chosen occupations astronomically, and ending just as modernisation was probably just taking off in that particular region. Nicely done, indeed.

You might also mention that Ehrlich was not just wrong about food production: His predictions about other resources were also spectacularly wrong - or did gold really run out in the 80s, and everyone's just been covering it up?

Oh, and world grain production peaked because the developed world started cutting back, because it had more than enough to eat - the developing world, meanwhile, continues to increase production, resulting in a net plateau. Places like Europe, have since embarked on environmental programs like reforestation - I might also mention how wrong the green lobby was about acid rain, too - so development has benefitted humans and the environment.

"when we look at the problems over time, the environment and economic prosperity are not opposing concepts, but rather complementary entities: without adequate environmental protection, growth is undermined, but environmental protection is unaffordable without growth" - Bjorn Lomborg.

Anansi, I'm not freaking out about reducing population growth at all - perhaps you should read my earlier points about Australia, especially. I'm just freaking out about the deep-greens and their misanthropic agenda. I'm also deeply disturbed by the taradiddle that is promulgated as unquestioned dogma, and its potential for disastrous, if well-meaning, decision making (see the point about the Exxon Valdez).

As I said, the best form of birth control is prosperity and education. I think it is disturbing that the mostly urban, western elites who dominate green agendas so vehemently wish to deny such benefits to the developing world.