Is Development the Best
by Sheila Newman Friday July 23, 2004 at 04:09 PM

It was not until about 1750 that population overshoot became a long-term feature of any place in the world. Prior to that any long term population had to have stability. And it was not the 'third world' that got out of control in the first place. As to why it is still out of control, I think we can blame the economists. See why below.

Challenging Economic Cant about Population and Development : Sheila's Demographic Hypothesis notes

It was Great Britain whose population first blew out of control (most probably due in large part to the commercialisation of coal) and that was responsible for a lot of the peopling of what we now call the 'third world' by colonial immigrants. In turn those colonial immigrants brought the fossil fuel (industrial) economy to the third world and imposed, suggested, led or exemplified, a lot of cornucopian population rules about marriage, infanticide, contraception etc which they had adapted due to the abundance that came about with coal. Oil riches added to this confusion of previously workable local solutions to population overshoot.

The 'benign demographic transition' (BDT) model was first thought up by a bloke in the UN. It was never much more than a poorly formed hypothesis that does not work at all if you factor in fossil fuel commercialisation. The BDT was taken up by the economic growth merchants who also didn't understand the connection between fossil fuel and economic growth. They conflated high populations with high economic growth and erroneously supposed that high populations caused high economic growth, whereas the reverse was true. If they have since worked it out, they aren't saying anything because they have made the population machine a kind of primitive engine for their personal wealth accumulation.

The real equation should be:

Fossil fuel added to biomasse/flow energies > economic growth > more population
It is true that if you manage to master a huge population you can dig that fossil fuel out faster and make and consume more things and funnel the riches up the hierarchy via banks etc. So, in the short term, if you ignore the essential function of the fossil fuel in starting off and maintaining and accelerating the big population and the technology that enhances the ability of the population to channel energy, you can do more with a bigger "population engine".

But, if you don't have the fossil fuel in the first place, you can't have the big population engine. (And, when the energy available declines, the population also inevitably declines of course.)

India, China, Africa, Pacific Islands all ran on biomasse once and had learned to manage their populations.

The reason their populations and our consumption and populations are out of control is because the economic theory that dominates education and propaganda at the moment is the one that has substituted for fossil fuel the notions of 'human ingenuity', 'human destiny' etc because of its amazing ignorance of fossil fuel and energy dynamics, which easily compares to the information system promulgated by the church at the time of Galileo where, because the Sun revolved around the earth, Man dominated the universe.

Since Galileo managed to get the Earth to revolve around the Sun due to his superior human enginuity and his charmed destiny, the Church lost some of its pull over government, and was obliged to reinvent itself as modern economics.

The contrary theory is that eventually, through a process known as reganomics and thatcherism, which was entirely fueled by faith and tricks with mirrors, Economists were able to reset the Sun on its rightful journey around the Earth and restore Human Progress. In about ten years everyone on earth will have enough to eat and will be highly educated and we will have lost all human faults. There will be no war and the principal occupation of humans will be finding ways to do good in a world so close to heaven that few will choose to die, if indeed, death has not been ruled out entirely as an option. (Just joking about Galileo.)

Sheila Newman

*It was probably not until well into the 19th century that it began to assume nation-wide proportions, and then not until after the first oil shock (1973) that misery set in intractably on a global basis, but I have to look up the details after 1750.

Some References that demonstrate how the BDT is argued and relied on and which also give some history of its formation:

1. Pierre Martinot-Lagarde, The Intricacy of demography and politics: the case for population projections, http://www.iussp.org/Brazil2001/ s00/S07_P07_MartinotLagarde.pdf
2. Luis Currais, From the Malthusian regime to the demographic transition: Contemporary research and beyond, Economica, v.II, No. 3., June, pp 75-101

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