Overpopulation
Comments on “Population Pressure, Savings, Investment and Growth in the Islamic World: Some Empirical Evidence” by Dr. Hossein Pirasteh and Dr. Farzad Karimi. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Islamic Economics & Finance, held on 21-23 April,2003 in Bahrain - by - Asad Zaman -- see [link]
A zipped book on the subject of Myth of Population Explosion is attached below: FATAL MISCONCEPTION.rar
ANTI POOR QUOTE from:
Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on the principle of population, Vol. 2, Roger Chew Weightman, 1809, p. 353.
Chapter V. "Of the consequences of pursuing the opposite mode"
The book is also available online: http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html.
Malthus wrote in his, Essays on the Principle of Population (1826):
".. we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread too infrequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.
Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns, we should make the street narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague...
But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of of particular disorders"
[reproduced in Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus:The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (University of Illinois Press, 1980). (p.6)]
FROM AN EMAIL about OVERPOPULATION:
From you post at IEF-Review, i made a quick search over net and found a institute 'Population Research Institute' working on the same lines as you elaborated.
"Overpopulation is a myth. This myth has caused human rights abuses around the world, forced population control, denied medicines to the poor, and targeted attacks on ethnic minorities and women."
Its website is http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
(Over Population is A Myth)
Some interesting notes from the institute are:
1- If overpopulation doesn't cause poverty, what does cause it?
Ans: The thing to remember about poverty is that it isn't a disease or a “condition,” like the measles or a broken leg. Poverty is the state of not having what we need. It is a terrible state to be in, to be sure, but it is the state we all revert to when our support structures are removed. Poverty is like darkness: it isn't a thing. It's the lack of a thing.
Essentially, the only way that poverty has ever been defeated, anywhere, is by infrastructures that humans have set up. So, when poverty does exist, it is when these infrastructures either 1) don't exist, like in underdeveloped nations, or 2) are broken or have holes in them. Essentially, fixing poverty is about fixing bad infrastructure, not about eliminating people.
This is made obvious by the fact that the poorest nations in the world are often among the least populated. Take the Congo, for instance, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a meager per capita GDP of only $300. The Congo's population density is only 75 people per square mile, a fairly light population density. Compare this with the Netherlands, one of the wealthiest countries in the world with per capita GDP of $39,200. The Netherlands has a population density of 1,039 people per square mile. (these numbers come from the CIA World Factbook.
(Episode 4: Poverty where we all started?)