Did half of the world's population make the lives of the others better?

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"They can not give up a simple, but obviously wrong, idea that humans are no different from the flock of deer when it comes to reproduction"

(Ronald Bailey in his book "The End of Doom")

In the wonderful part of Marvel's film series The Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos, the most powerful and brightest villain, begins a very special campaign to collect the infinite stones, each of which controls one aspect of the universe (reality, time, space , Power, mind, and spirit). Once he combines these stones together in the grip of his hands until he possesses mighty powers that allow him to control everything, here Thanos intends to use them to implement the most catastrophic plan in cosmic history since the great explosion began 13.8 billion years ago. The other half to live in peace!

A simple Thanos argument, clearly presented in a scene when he says: The population of the universe is growing steadily and uncontrollably, means that the day will come and the population of the universe will outweigh the amount of resources available, so chaos will prevail when everyone fights over those resources. With a simple approach we can come to the conclusion that this will be the end of life. Here Thanus says: Perhaps he is not the only one who knows that fact, but he is the only one who can work towards its implementation.

Ghost of the End

That, of course, is a very crazy idea, but you will not believe the number of believers around the world, especially in the modern era. In order to understand this, let us contemplate one of the chapters of Chapter VII of the well-known book, which is one of the fundamentals of contemporary economics: "An Essay on the Principle of Population and its Impact on the Progress of Society", published in 1789, Thomas Malthus, a population researcher and English political economist, says:

"I believe that I am building two fair assumptions, first that people are in basic need of food, and secondly, that gender sentiment is necessary, and will remain the same, so I say that the power of population growth is much larger than the ability of the Earth to grow resources The growth of the population, if uncontrolled, will increase with geometric rates, while resource growth is increasing at arithmetic rates, and with a simple comparison the first power of power will appear on the second. The effect of these two unequal capacities Beta, this involves making a strong and periodic control over the evolution of population growth. "

In the following paragraphs, Maltoth says that exceeding this rule will lead to a severe conflict over resources, which in turn could lead to violence, extreme poverty, endless famine, epidemics and general social corruption. (3) The population growth chain every 25 years takes the pattern: 1, then 2, 4, 8, and so on. 16, 32, 64, etc. This is because of the high rates of reproduction. Every father and mother has a larger number of children, and nature will not grow at this rate, but at a regular gradual rate, such as the series of natural resources: 1, 2, 3 , 4, 5, 6, etc., in the same time period.

As you can see, there is a clear difference in the rise in the rates, but perhaps you will be surprised when you know the difference in the 30 th cycle of the game, where the rate of growth of resources given to us by the land will reach only 30, because they increase regularly, but the cycle of population growth at the same stage Will become 2 billion! That is why Maltoth dreaded the consequences, imagining that we were bound to come to the end of the world, perhaps life as we know it. In the period in which Maltoth lived, there were only about 1 billion people.

Let us make it clear that the idea of ​​Maltoth was a little deeper than that, meaning that he did not talk that both rates would remain absolute, but the idea was for the population to swell at the dividing line between famine and famine. - is the official and permanent state of human society, only simple survival laws will at some point reach humans to this fluctuating limit, and with each increase in the amount of natural resources people will continue to reproduce, so everyone remains on the edge continuously, but the problem of that edge is They are always at risk, with no epidemic, or disruption of us Or political or social pressure, there is a catastrophic chance of famine spreading, so Maltoth imagined that humans would never live in a Cycle of Misery.

What is the relation of potato to politics?

But Thanos' mistake, among many mistakes, was that he was the only one who had the desire to work on a crazy plan to reduce the numbers of people. For example, between 1846 and 1851, Ireland faced its major harvest, the Potato Famine. The cause was a serious mushroom called "late blight" whose roots could be traced back to Mexico and Peru. The potato crop, which was the main food of the Irish people at the time, was more susceptible to the country's poor climate and soil. During that famine, one million people died, one million emigrated, and the country lost a quarter of its population in total. It is one of the worst disasters in history.

But during the famine itself, important factors were brought to bear on the suffering of the Irish people. At that time, the country was subject to British colonialism, which established a policy of non-intervention by Ireland's colonialist Charles Trivilian. The policy included not giving aid to Ireland and not allowing aid to come From anywhere else, Britain also used Irish land to grow crops other than potatoes and export them to Britain at low prices. Of course there were degrees of religious hostility from the British towards the Irish at the time, but there is another point.

Where the number of Irish people increased significantly before the famine years, which some British thinkers called to imagine a crisis of maltotheism. British political behavior towards the crisis can be understood in quotations of Charles Trevelyan, who said: "God's dispensation is what sent the disaster to teach the Irish "The real evil we must face is not the physical effect of famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverted, and distressed character of people."

Charles Trevelian means here that the ignorant Irish, those who live like monsters - as some have called them at the time - are the real evil and not the famine that steals their children on a daily basis! At that time, John Mitchell - the sentence that later spread to Irish wisdom to date - said: "God sent the agricultural scourge, and the English made the famine." In May 1997, Tony Blair delivered an apology to the Irish people, the first official acknowledgment that the British had a role in the famine.

In the modern era, the Maltese idea emerged again in the late 1960s, with research and public literature predicting a nearby population catastrophe, with the maltosic propositions that we talked about earlier. But at the top of this new mountain of terrifying threats is the book "The Population Bomb," by Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. The main reason for this new onslaught was the progressive evolution of the world's population, to understand that, let us reflect on our story, the story of mankind.

Bomb population

In the year 1 AD there were about 8 million 250 million people. It took about 1,600 years to become half a billion people, but the subsequent increases were not the same. In just 200 years, the world's population doubled. We are now at the point where Thomas Malthus was terrified. At that time the new world opened up and large amounts of food (potatoes, wheat, corn) came into the old world. On the other hand, many people traveled to North America, A few people have been expecting a rise in birth numbers. In the same period there was an agricultural revolution in East Asia, which also caused a rise in food production, and thus births.

At that point, population growth took a more dramatic and dramatic curve. 9 It took only 130 years to multiply our numbers to 2 billion. This was after the Industrial Revolution, which in turn developed transport. Resources moved to humans everywhere. The number of human beings occurred only after 44 years in 1974, when the world had 4 billion people. It was the period in which the new Molotovian revolution that we talked about was born. After that period, it took only 12 years for every billion additional people, The present moment, where the world has 7.7 billion people!

Again, fears of a steady increase in human numbers have emerged, with some predicting that we will inevitably reach the stage of famine, as Maltoth pointed out in his book. The media were filled with tense conversations: "The numbers of people are clearly increasing each week. If we can not Of the control of our numbers, the famine, poverty and violence resulting from lack of resources compared to the population will do, here shows Paul Earlch, who was working mainly in the biology of butterflies and then happened to visited India and surprised by the size of the population density there, to say - while walking heavily in the morning programs And the evening television: - The world will not listen More than a decade or two in the face of growing population, at one moment will fuse the population bomb and collapse everything, but Ehrlich predicted that Britain will not exist by the world 2000.

"The battle to feed all these people is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will die to death despite any development programs," Ehrlich says in his book. The problem is that everyone at the time thought that we were already in a population crisis. Erlich's proposals were simple but strict. They included legal coercion if citizens did not adopt policies to reduce population and punish any bodies, companies or individuals promoted against means of population reduction or Children in one family, with financial awards for marriages that decided not to give birth, and taxes on those who gave birth to larger numbers than prescribed by law, it came to proposals to develop chemicals in water that reduce the fertility of individuals!

Erlich's ideas spread outside the United States to almost every place in the world. During that period, India carried out sterilization campaigns, 10 involving women with more men, millions of cases, most of them compulsory, and the rest because of state promises of money, In Bangladesh, 11 cases of sterilization reached 50,000 a month. In China, 12 the one-child policy that prohibits women from having children more than one child has been severely restricted to levels that have led to the spread of abortion and the infanticide of children. In societies that prefer the boy to the girl.

In China, for example, it was possible to return 50 million cases of girls to girls, while at the same time developing a new problem related to the difference between the number of men and women, it became (13,14,15) 100 women for every 117 men, Of the 30 million men there are no women in return, which may severely affect the social structure of the country, and also a new problem called (4.2.1), because Chinese law requires the individual care of parents and grandparents, which means that one child of a family When he grows up he will have to take care of parents, and four grandparents (two for each of his parents), which carries a lot of costs, The country from 12% in 2013 to 34% in 2050.

7.6 billion error!

Well, let's catch some quiet breaths and then make a leap into the contemporary world. In 2018, with 7.6 billion people on the planet, we would not have any maltouth or irish or any of the theorists of the tendency to imagine that anyway To this extent or to this year, they were all wrong, the population grew and exceeded all expectations, and we did not fall captive to hunger. [1] On the contrary, we distribute food to the poor on holidays, "The number of hungry today is 800 million people, it is a huge figure, but the lowest in our history for the population, in those The point may be wondering why, what was wrong with both Maltoth and Earl?

Ronald Bailey says in his book The End of Doom: "They can not give up a simple, but obviously wrong, idea that humans are no different from a flock of deer when it comes to reproduction." In fact, All the reasons for this error. Maltoth was looking at the rabbits when he imagined that we would inevitably enter the cycle of misery. When you put a bunch of rabbits in a limited farmland, the rapid reproduction rates compared to the production of the land would inevitably intersect, but Maltoth did not know That simple and wonderful fact that we are not rabbits, but ... why What are we not rabbits?

Because of this man: Norman Borlaug, an agricultural engineer and American proponent and Nobel peace laureate in 1970, Borlogue is the father of the Green Revolution, who brilliantly managed in the 1960s to achieve a dangerous discovery: With a shorter leg that will provide the energy used to produce larger schnapps, Borlug produced wheat varieties that, in the most severe climatic conditions, could produce four times the normal production.

In India, for example, as population grew, the Indian government embraced the idea of ​​Borluj. In addition to the new technology, other factors included greater investment in the agriculture sector and its markets, giving greater profit to farmers. In India, in 1968, the government issued new postage stamps, with a difference in production between 1951 and 1968, to celebrate the wheat revolution, but I have little hope of this date, it is the same year that Erlich published his book "A Bomb Population ", in which he said that India would not be able to feed themselves in any way possible, because of the steady increase in population numbers.

In the 1980s Paul Earlch was still a believer. Here, the University of Maryland professor of business, Julian Simon, challenged him to enter a simple bet. The bet required Erlich to collect in a small basket what he liked from raw materials and then wait For ten years to see if prices have risen or fallen, according to Earlsh supposed to increase prices of those materials, because the rate of population growth is greater than the rates of production. Before Ehrlich bet, he chose nickel, chromium, tin, tungsten, copper, but lost it, and was wrong for times we no longer know how many, the prices of those raw materials fell after ten years in October 1990.

Norman Borlug is a model of the idea that Thanos, Maltoth, or Ehrlich did not realize. The nature of the economy is not zero-sum game. [19] Zero-Sum Game says that if there is a five-point winner, there must be a five- , The result is always zero. Although resources may be limited, their main limits are not as much as they are in our ability - the human beings - to innovate in their use, our ability to invent, to invent new ideas to deal with our resources that opens the door to greater progress and prosperity for human beings, We have deepened the science and technology, and the more we communicate together, the more productive we are for revolutionary new ideas, such as the Borlog innovation. Every extra person in this world, then, is not only a deaf unit with a mouth that needs food and drink, but it is also a mind that can think.

On the other hand, Maltoth has imagined that population numbers will increase as resources increase, but we do not see this clearly in developed countries. On the contrary, as the country progresses and its living standards rise, The world, far from the natural resource growth trajectory, is taking a steady trend. Beginning in the middle of the last century, population growth rates have begun to decline from about 2% per year to 1.09% per year for 2018. We expect that by 2050 we will reach stability, The population will reach about 10 billion people and some believe it Will never reach 12 billion (unless we decided to go to Mars).

The recent significant observation suggests that solving the problem of population growth may not be forcing people to have fewer children. Compulsive sterilization policies have shown the futility of this experiment, but the main solution, as Michael Schreemer puts it, is to raise poverty through The establishment of democratic governance, free trade, secure access to safe contraception, and education and economic empowerment of women. Those who promote the fatal idea that "people are the cause" were always mistaken in their perceptions, or perhaps only decided to choose methods of dealing with tyranny wherever they were Solved by putting the blame on the peoples. What we know, and economic data confirm, is that when the Green Revolution came, the most developed countries were the 22 poorest and the most populous.

Do some die for the rest?

Several years ago, the FDA adopted a new type of fish for human consumption, where scientists had successfully modified the genes of an Atlantic salmon using the CRISPER technique for genetic editing. The new production was a larger fish in size, with a clear margin, and marketing was twice as fast as the smaller natural fish. The new fish consumes less food and can be raised on farms next to the cities they need and we save transportation costs. This is just a sample of what technology can help us achieve. From progress, the Crisper revolution opens new doors day after day, intervening in everything from food to disease, that may be the next green revolution.

No one would ever imagine, for example, that we treat bacteria via antibiotics, polio, mad cow, smallpox, malaria. In his book "Have bacteria triumphed?" Hugh Bennington, professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, asks: Why are the fears still surrounding us, even though our history of disease is a triumphant, unbeaten journey? Why spread and received all this acceptance? We do not know the reason specifically, but imagine that fears are a popular commodity, and talk about it brings a lot of audience and therefore a lot of fame to the speaker, for this reason may find that some may ignore the scientific views that open the doors of optimism based on practical evidence against the promotion of misery, We do not say that there are not many contemporary dangers facing our world, but we say that some promote the dark side only. Yes, this may be true, unfortunately misery is good, just as the theory of conspiracy, false science lies and false news received widespread attention from the public.

In the past years 24 the maltological allegations have re-established the land of debate, and it does so whenever our human societies are more fragile and less human. Its promoters took advantage of the climate change and economic chaos that began in 2008, which are already serious problems that deserve attention and attention. But that idea came to feed some frightened minds from the world of 10 billion people with the same false expectations and the same disastrous solutions.

Although our history with food has proved wrong, it has nevertheless received the acceptance of many, especially since the world is in a period of despair, desperate to the degree that prevents us from seeing the progress we have made within three hundred thousand years of our history on earth, From misery, human beings lose their faith in their humanity, which may once again allow the passage of the most dangerous conviction in human history, the one that dictators have long used to justify murder under the name of justice and to justify torture under the name of the greatest good. Live the rest "!