Why Population Growth is Not a Big World Problem

I am probably going to get myself into trouble here but I am a firm believer that all the talk about world over population is a bit hysterical, and really is not a threat at all. It seems to be almost a maxim that the worlds plight is because there are too many people and if for example we did something to reduce the population in India, if there was more birth control etc then this would do a lot to reduce the overall suffering. I want to present a few arguments that may make you look at the whole topic in a different light.

The End of Empires

You may be aware that the world for the past 500 hundred years has been dominated by an Anglo Saxon empire, first through the British and then through the USA. It would be safe to suggest that that Empire has seen greater days and the crumbling financial system is really the collapsing of that Empire. 

Throughout history as empires were coming to a close, the ruling class would proclaim that there are simply too many people and in a way they were right, it would be impossible for them to keep control with this amount of people, whether that means there are too many people in the world is another thing. Why should this empire be any different? The widely held belief that humans are the parasites of the earth and we need to stop population growth in order to save the earth is just another version of the same (very convincing) song that has been sung throughout history.

So yes I would agree the current financial, political and social system probably cannot survive  with a population expanding as it is, but maybe it is the system that has to change. The one sure fire way to reduce population is to increase wealth, as people become wealthier the need to have so many children is reduced. The current system makes debt slaves out of the majority of the world. All currencies are controlled by a small number of bankers and the value of that currency can be wiped out overnight. See what would happen to the wealth of the world if we gave control of the money supply back to the people, if it was backed by something of value other than the word of failing governments.

There is a lot of talk about limited resources and that there is not enough to go around, yet the powers that are unwilling to unleash a whole range of free energy research that would practically solve the worlds problems overnight. As JP Morgan said about Free Energy - there is no way to stick a meter on it !!! See what would happen to the worlds population then.

Here is a graph of population growth over the last 2000 years. The picture for the last hundred is pretty scary and it seems like everything is way out of control. We must remember however that nature is never linear in the way we assume it is. Just because the line is going straight up now does not mean you can extend it out to the next 1000 years to get an idea of what the population will be then - trees dont grow up into space.

As a bit of a chart technician I look at the pattern of the chart, how it shoot up at one point. This is call a parabolic move. Charts are interesting because they reflect human behavior and certain patterns tend to indicate a high probability of what will happen in the future. In all markets a parabolic move is often followed by a sharp move downwards, this population chart should be no different to charts of the stock market or currency markets. Additionally as soon as there is a widely held view about what is going to happen in the future, 9 times out of ten 0 the very opposite happens. The price has to crash because there are no more buyers left because everyone has bought. Everyone has bought the idea of over population so as history so often has shown the opposite will come along and shock us all.