Stephen More
This week mankind reaches a new demographic milestone: 6 billion people living on the Earth.
A recent New York Times story wails that if the world's population isn't curtailed soon, the globe will start to look as poor and crowed as Calcutta. Ted Turner says mankind is breeding like "a plague of locusts" and urges couples over the world to limit themselves to one child. Zero Population Growth laments that the population of the U.S is about twice the size it should be in order to protect the environment.
After all, every objective fact and environmental trend is running in precisely the opposite direction of what the widely acclaimed doomsayers of the 1960s - from Lester Brown to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome - once predicted. Birth rates around the world are lower, not higher, today than at anytime in at least a century. Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950.
Yes, it is true that in just this past century the number of human beings on the planet has just about quadrupled. But as the current issue of National Review points out, the simple and benign explanation is improved health and more wealth. Consider the trends in life expectancy, arguably the single best measure of human well-being. From about the time of the Roman Empire through about 1800 average human life expectancy was less than 30 years.
In the U.S. today, life expectancy is 75. Even in poor countries, like India and China, life expectancy has risen to above 60. We have doubled the number of years of life in just the past 200 years.
Meanwhile, infant mortality rates in the U.S., and across the globe, have fallen by about tenfold in just the last century. A century ago, if a woman had three children, the likelihood was that at least one of them would have died at birth or before the fifth birthday. Nowadays the probability of childhood death is less than 1 in 100. As the late, great doomslayer Julian Simon taught us, increased population is a consequence of mankind's victory over death.
The doomsayers fret that man is copulating uncontrollably like John B. Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats in a pen, who multiply until they die off from lack of sustenance. Thanks to unbridled human copulation, "we are adding another New York City every month, a Mexico every year, and almost another India every decade," writes environmental author Bill Mckibben. Yet, we are nowhere near running out of room on the planet.
This week mankind reaches a new demographic milestone: 6 billion people living on the Earth.
A recent New York Times story wails that if the world's population isn't curtailed soon, the globe will start to look as poor and crowed as Calcutta. Ted Turner says mankind is breeding like "a plague of locusts" and urges couples over the world to limit themselves to one child. Zero Population Growth laments that the population of the U.S is about twice the size it should be in order to protect the environment.
After all, every objective fact and environmental trend is running in precisely the opposite direction of what the widely acclaimed doomsayers of the 1960s - from Lester Brown to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome - once predicted. Birth rates around the world are lower, not higher, today than at anytime in at least a century. Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950.
Yes, it is true that in just this past century the number of human beings on the planet has just about quadrupled. But as the current issue of National Review points out, the simple and benign explanation is improved health and more wealth. Consider the trends in life expectancy, arguably the single best measure of human well-being. From about the time of the Roman Empire through about 1800 average human life expectancy was less than 30 years.
In the U.S. today, life expectancy is 75. Even in poor countries, like India and China, life expectancy has risen to above 60. We have doubled the number of years of life in just the past 200 years.
Meanwhile, infant mortality rates in the U.S., and across the globe, have fallen by about tenfold in just the last century. A century ago, if a woman had three children, the likelihood was that at least one of them would have died at birth or before the fifth birthday. Nowadays the probability of childhood death is less than 1 in 100. As the late, great doomslayer Julian Simon taught us, increased population is a consequence of mankind's victory over death.
The doomsayers fret that man is copulating uncontrollably like John B. Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats in a pen, who multiply until they die off from lack of sustenance. Thanks to unbridled human copulation, "we are adding another New York City every month, a Mexico every year, and almost another India every decade," writes environmental author Bill Mckibben. Yet, we are nowhere near running out of room on the planet.
'형설지공 > 경제경영' 카테고리의 다른 글
| 해방이후 경기순환 8번 있었다 (0) | 2001.01.26 |
|---|---|
| [하버드논문 논쟁] "개도국 재벌해체 시기상조" (0) | 2001.01.26 |
| 1900년대 청주의 변천사 (0) | 2001.01.26 |
| 노사관계 변할 때다 (0) | 2001.01.26 |
| 자본주의 경제 성장의 원천 (0) | 2001.01.26 |