enigma wrote:

ya know, i don't give a rat's ass about the economy, since
that's a societal construct, but actual *resources* are
finite. just because more people makes procuring resources
easier & therefore cheaper still doesn't address the issue of
what we do when they run out... and they WILL run out.

The ones that we have now will run out if that's all we keep on using,
but what will also happen during that time is that we'll discover new
ways to use things that we wouldn't necessarily think of as resources at
the moment (for example, if we were having this debate a hundred years
ago, petrol wouldn't even be included as a resource on the list). So
looking at the things we can use as resources now only tells us part of
the story - we will, effectively, have increasing amounts of resources
to draw on as the years go by.

I still agree that it's not a good idea to increase population
willy-nilly, but going to the opposite extreme can also cause major
problems - if the population growth in a given country drops too
drastically below replacement levels, then a generation or so down the
line you end up with a population that's top-heavy with dependent
elderly and not enough people of working age to support them. When I've
seen figures (and the ones I saw were some years out of date, so this
may have changed), that seemed far more likely to be a risk in Western
countries, where population growth rates were consistently at or below
replacement levels (almost always below, on the figures I saw). Now, as
I say, the details of these may be out of date. But there did seem to
me to be a very consistent pattern that, in societies where women are
given the option of controlling their fertility safely and of living
productive lives of status in ways other than having children, the
population replacement levels have dropped to the point where the
country is more likely to run into future problems with replacement
levels being too low than with them being too high.

(None of which is to say that I think it's a great idea to encourage a
woman to have more children without taking into account that she might
have some preference of her own in the matter, because I don't. I just
hold that belief for different reasons.)


All the best,

Sarah
--
http://www.goodenoughmummy.typepad.com

"That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" - P. C. Hodgell