Vox : The case for adding more and more people to the Earth
By Dylan Matthews | Updated Jun 13, 2019, 9:06am EDT
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18617894/repugnant-conclusion-population-growth-philosophy
Ordinary human lives are worth living. But if you want to continue with humanity, then you of course want to continue as long as possible.
But why should we do that? The simplest explanation is that we should maximize the sum total of happiness in the universe, and that by going on, generation after generation, we accumulate more happiness.
B u t : he thinks life quality decreases with population growth.
Wrong, it is not population growth but capitalism which necessitates labour reducing production.
Food overall available is dependent on arable land and similar resources, and not dependent on labour reducing or labour intensive production methods.
These only decide how close or far from growing food most people live.
If 90 % are farmers, each farmer is growing food for himself plus one ninth of himself. Ten men can epitomise this, one is not a farmer, nine farmers grow food for tenth man, and that means nine farmers grow food for one ninth of him each.
If 10 % are farmers, each farmer is growing food for himself and nine more.
If 1 % are farmers, each farmer is growing food for himself and ninety-nine more.
Somewhere between latter two extremes, farmers become miserable, stressed, conjecture depending and yet not conjecture deciding, and some countries have really unhappy farmers. That's not what we want.
Somewhere between former two is better.
In Sweden of our Swedish Empire era, we had ten farmers growing food for themselves in peace time, but also nine of them for the tenth in war, when he went off to serve in the army. At all times, the ten would also grow food for the parish priest (or not really priest, since we were unfortunately Lutheran) as well as for people in towns and cities.
Doubling the population does not mean same ten cannot grow food for same amount of people, but doubling portion in cities does.
Pushing people back from cities is a bad idea, but pushing them into them away from country-side an even worse one (well, also depends on how it is executed). So, no, it's not amount of people on earth that decides how much food is transported long ways from field or garden to mouth and intestines.
A good quality of life as per portion of country dwellers and as per buying local can be maintained even with a large population. Until, of course, fields get scarce. Refer to how Allan Savory thinks green fields can be preserved and increased.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Antidius of Besançon
17.VI.2019
It is also 262 martyrs of Via Salaria under Diocletian, as well as monday after Trinity Sunday, and here is the tip by Allan Savory again:
Allan Savory: Comment transformer nos déserts en prairies et inverser le changement climatique
TED | 4.III.2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
Sound's in English even if title is automatically translated./HGL
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