Do We Want More Humans or Less?

The number of humans on earth just passed the 7 billion mark. To mark the occasion, there was a Planet Money podcast about countries whose populations are declining.   Some of the countries experiencing declines in population are affluent, places like Japan and Germany, where every new baby is, in terms of resource consumption, equivalent to dozens of babies in poor countries. But the podcast was not about how great it is to see this decline in population. Oddly, in rich countries the lack of population growth is seen as a problem, and governments are actually giving many incentives to people to have more babies. It's a strange paradox that though the world cannot survive overrun with humans as it is, some countries feel they cannot survive without a continually growing population. The notion that rich countries need a continuously growing population is linked to the belief that we need a continuously growing economy. The problem with both of these concepts is that the earth can sustain neither.

I've often thought there was an integral connection between population growth and economic growth. Though I don't have a background in economics, my knowledge about environmental issues and my interest in the way they relate to other disciplines such as economics, have helped me understand this connection better. In this Planet Money podcast, they explain this connection that is obvious to many economists. Each new baby is not just another mouth to feed, it is another consumer, another worker. In an unsustainable capitalist economy like ours in the US, each new kid is an excuse to tap more resources from the planet. The extraction of more resources is required to grow the economy at such a rapid rate. So when populations slow, as is explained in this podcast, economies stagnate. There aren't as many people buying stuff, there aren't as many people to work the jobs that contribute to the wealth of the economy. As well, there are fewer taxpayers and less revenue to sustain government programs.

An Intro to this Blog: Thinking Across Disciplines

This is a new blog where I plan to discuss my thoughts on a number of different subjects in many different disciplines.  Through my history as a political and lifestyle activist, I have found it useful to have a knowledge that crosses boundaries between disciplines.  In a world with so many people and in a society that is by necessity so complex, we are forced to specialize in disciplines or occupations.  This specialization leads to a narrowing of perspective and we become unable to understand the world as a whole.  This is not all bad, because I believe that with the increase in complexity of our world as individuals our understanding of it has greatly increased.   Many of us can understand how our world works on a larger scale of complexity than our ancestors could, we can learn how we are negatively impacting it, and we can change.  

However, the complexity of what we have created with our vast population is still far beyond what any individual can understand.  We may view the world as a complex organism made up of many different specialized beings, each contributing to the survival of the whole.  Bees as individuals each perform a role that contributes to the survival of the hive.  But beehives are akin to well-oiled machines (though the perfection acheived by nature far surpasses that of any human invention), whereas the complex society of humanity is like a body where the brain doesn't know what the foot is doing. Things could be different.  We could be more like a well-oiled machine, but in my mind we are more like a free for all of individuals grabbing at resources to meet our basic needs or simply to make our lives more entertaining. 

Often I will be listening to the theories of a specialist like say, I don't know, an economist, and it will be obvious to me that this expert doesn't know the slightest thing about disciplines that directly affect economics.  For instance, I don't know how any economist can possibly understand economic sustainability without understanding environmental sustainability.  The two are vitally linked.  Just one example is the common misunderstanding among economists that constant economic growth is possible in a world with finite resources.  This also illustrates a lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics.

I don't claim to be able to understand everything in every discipline, obviously, but I instead point out the necessity of looking at things on a larger level to understand certain ideas.   Instead of staying so isolated in our knowledge, we need to have a cross-disciplinary understanding of our world, to see how these complex systems interact.  In this blog I will try to write about complex ideas that I feel are very important in problem solving for a world confronting a major crisis, as I believe ours is right now.