From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Mar 12 2002 - 09:06:11 MST
On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 03:23:54PM -0000, steve wrote:
>
> This is clearly true, once you think about it. So one question is why are
> people not aware of this? I suspect one reason is the immense ignorance of
> geography that you find these days. I suspect another reason, particularly
> in places like N.America, is that people do so much travelling by flying.
> This gives you a distorted impression of both the size of the world and of
> how much of it is effectively empty. If you go on the Trans Siberian you
> soon realise there are huge amounts of MAMBA country (Miles And Miles of
> Bugger All). Steve Davies
I believe this is part of it (although ignorance of geography might play
a lesser part of it than biased examples). Another part is that
overpopulation fits into a "big narrative" (warning: postmodern concept,
use with caution!) where it ties in with a lot of other memes: the idea
that resources are always scarce, the idea that the end is coming soon,
various older but pernicious ideas that the "underclass" is breeding
like rabbits (Malthus was not a particularly humanitarian person, and he
has some rather unsavory followers), the eco-ideological story that
humans are not following the natural ways and hence doomed to an
ecological disaster and so on. The whole list of memes that tie in with
the overpopulation meme is very long, and quite unpleasant if you start
looking at where some of the ideas come from. But they form a kind of
self-reinforcing, quite strong structure that can be really hard to
overturn.
The new issues in population - the gradual decline of birth numbers, the
greying of population, population declines in some nations, migrations
and migration barriers - do not fit into this framework and are hence
ignored. This can be rather risky since even if overpopulation per se is
not the problem to watch for there are several other nasty issues we
better find ways of dealing with:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/Demo_Trends_For_Web.pdf
That report contains a lot of data to think about when envisioning the
near future for us - a lot of these factors are going to affect our
transcension. Just think about the consequences of a Japan and Europe
economically weakened by an elderly population and possibly more
conservative and insular, but still likely interested in cost-saving
medicine, youth bulges combined with high tech and the effects when
large populations make the transition from traditional economies into
the global economy. Lots of things to think about.
> So I guess the answer is rather simple: if you don't like it, move! There
> are plenty of other places to go.
>
> This is the other question - why don't they? I suppose there are many
> reasons but surely the principal factor is economics - the densely populated
> parts of the planet are where jobs (and hence income) are to be found, as
> well as many other services which require not just a lot of people but high
> density. Steve D.
As Marx (!) put it, the city saves us from the idiocy of the rural
lands. There are many economies of scale with cities, and hence they can
provide many things impossible to find elsewhere (Shops with equipment
for left handed people! Operas! Variety of restaurants!). Maybe advanced
telecommunications and telepresence can make people move out of the
cities, but I doubt it. A more likely way would be super efficient and
fast commuting.
But of course, seeing cities as *problems* is another part of the
overpopulation narrative. We should do our best to get away from the
diseconomies of scale that plague many megacities, but cities themselves
are wonderful things (Venice, Stockholm and New York are *artworks*!).
Spreading people out would not just remove complexity from our culture,
it would also remove much wilderness.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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