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Are people a problem? Malthus, Simon and Marx

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Santa Cruz Sentinel, Letters to the Editor, Jan. 11, 2004

Stop breeding frenzyRegarding "Choose Life" (letters, Jan 4.) what if Hitler’s and Saddam’s mothers had abortions?

The right to choose belongs to the mother. It’s a baby when the woman decides, not some guy or brainwashed Barbie blathering about sacred zygotes.

Overpopulation is caused by idiotic male pride for doing what cockroaches do — procreate. Men inflate their tiny egos by producing many children (overpopulation). Meanwhile, 800 million people starve and the natural world is destroyed by humans’ breeding frenzy.

Under global male supremacy, men farm the uterus. Fetuses (and ex-fetuses) enrich their institutions of finance, technology and military, whether "harvested" before birth (stem cell labs, fertility clinics) or 18 years (obedient automatic weapons-soldiers).

Bush cut funding for contraception women’s reproductive rights in poor nations to ensure malnourished women’s unwilling manufacture of consumer/worker/breeder/soldier units.

Without reproductive rights, women are men’s factory farms. Men fear women’s right to choose — it would disrupt the economy. What if they ran out of soldiers? And cheap workers? Women must be treated as subhumans (farmed animals) since women’s primary job is to manufacture men (rent the video "Rain Without Thunder").

Women’s rights are inseparable from animals’ rights. Aristotle and the Catholic Church both claimed women (and animals) have no souls.

ELAINE CHARKOWSKI

SANTA CRUZ

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Hardin

Population biology

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Malthus, c 1798

People are a problem

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The Core Principles of Malthusian thinking:

1. Food is necessary for human existence.

2. Human population tends to grow faster than the power in the earth to produce subsistence, and that

3. The effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.

4. Since humans tend not to limit their population size voluntarily ("preventive checks" in Malthus's terminology); population reduction tends to be accomplished through the "positive" checks of famine, disease, poverty and war.

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Poor are the problem

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Mumbai Rio

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Malnourishment is widespread

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People are an opportunity

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Principles of Simon’s thinking

• Growing population is not a problem—it is a stimulus to innovation and economic growth

• People solve problems, so that more people mean more problem solvers

• Scarcity induces innovation and substitution so that nothing will ever “run out”

• People are the “ultimate resource”• Sometimes called “Cornicopianism”

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Technological innovation

Substitution

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The World is Spiky: Population

Map by Tim Gulden, University of Maryland.From Richard Florida, “The World is Spiky,”The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005With permission.

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The World is Spiky: Light Emissions

Map by Tim Gulden, University of Maryland.From Richard Florida, “The World is Spiky,”The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005With permission.

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The World is Spiky: Patents

Map by Tim Gulden, University of Maryland.From Richard Florida, “The World is Spiky,”The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005With permission.

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The World is Spiky: Scientific Citations

Map by Tim Gulden, University of Maryland.From Richard Florida, “The World is Spiky,”The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005With permission.

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Basic Marxian principles on people

• Labor is the sources of all value• Capital seeks to produce and sell goods

that embody labor value• The worker has only labor to sell to the

producer, who then owns that labor• The producer seeks to pay the lowest

wage possible, given the supply of labor• A “reserve army of labor” suppresses

wages

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Labor surplus

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Malnourishment is both a consequence of food distribution and

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Income

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Hunger is usually due to lack of income to buy food

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The problem is not people