Everyone is arguing about all kinds of things, but they don't ever talk about their "Objective". How can you judge if something is right or wrong without first having an "Objective"? In this blog, I will expand on this concept.
Exactly what is the objective of our democracy? What is it all about? How can you tell if we are going forward or backwards? The only way that I know is to first agree on a simple objective and what should that be? You would thing that our objective was a bigger economic pie from what we see n the TV news, but that can not be it. My objective is a bigger piece of pie for the median person. You could also have the objective be the "Quality of life for the median person". It can't be the average, because if a rich King significantly raise the average. It has to be the median.
Let's first look at some history. Before Columbus discovered America the people in Europe were on the brink of starvation. Their quality of life had reached it's limit. The median family had to devote 100% of their time to producing food just to stay alive. The capacity of Europe to support a population had reached it limit. It may have gone a little past its limit such that 50 or 100 ears before Columbus discovered America the median family in Europe was actually better off. Their increase in population had pushed them past the optimum point and they were actually going down hill as the population increased. What the discovery of America did was to breath new life into the European quality of life. That was because of the discovery of the potato, corn and beans.
The reason that I want to point out the above facts is that the human race is now at another one of those points. The USA is wealth, not so much because of how smart or hard working American are, but the fact that we have all of these free natural resources. Notice that the richest countries around the world are those that have an abundance of natural resources and a smaller population. Russia has half the population of the USA and three time the natural resources. What about countries that have larger populations compared to the their amount of natural resources? Most are poor and are only going to get poorer.
If the objective is to have the highest or at least a high quality of life, it hat to be clear that it is a simple trade off between resources and size of the population. Millions or thousands of years ago the Earth's population was small and the limit was the based on the human ability. It was not until the population increased that the environment or natural resources became the limiting factor as now. Is the Green Movement going to save the Earth or the human race? It doesnot look like it to me if we continue to grow our population. Exactly where are we in terms of the size of our population compared to the Earth's carrying capacity? Did you ever think about that? If it was deer or rabbits, we would think objectively about the subject, but if it his humans we block out our normal logic.
I think that we have passed the optimum size population for the highest median quality of life and are now on the down trend. Look at California and it fantastic agriculture. What they did was to dam up most of the rivers and then drill water wells down in the valley. It looked great, for a while. Now the valley has dropped as water has been pumped out. It has to be clear that they can not keep on pumping water out of the ground for ever. What are they going to do? Drip irrigation is the new answer. How is that going to work? Over time the ground is going to be filled with salt as the water evaporates and the plants take up the water and leave the salt behind. It is only a matter of time. The wine industry is trying to use less water. How is that going to work out? California is going to produce less and less wine over time. That is how it is going to work out. I read that we us 25% of our corn to make fuel for our cars? How do you think that is going to end up?
The only alternative that will produce a long term solution is a reduction in the human population here on Earth. If you have a better one, I would like to hear it. The problem is that once we go beyond the holding capacity of the Earth, the solution is for the population to have to go lower than the 100% point to allow the Earth to recover. Once the Earth has recoverd, it may then be possible for the population to increase back to the 100% point.
What we should be talking about is how to reduce the population of the Earth in the least painfully way and what is that? We have to have fewer kids and have them later in life. I have explained the math behind this before, but I think you can follow the idea.
