Paul Spicker has used a fairly common way of arguing politically.   Create
an Aunt Sally.  Knock it down.   Argument dismissed.

Malthus was wrong 200 years ago.   Paul Erlich was wrong in 1969.
Therefore people who support OPT in 2007 are "stupid and foolish".    QED.

I wonder why this particular subject matter has so reduced the level of
debate.

Paul is arguing that members of Radstats need not burden their minds with
matters relevant to the level of population.   The market will take care of
the allocation of resources except in those cases (a few hundred millions)
where the world is denying resources to those who are starving.   Radstats
can go on refusing to debate questions about the level of population - as it
has done for the past thirty years.

Paul gives a good account of how economic theory explains how human
populations adapt to whatever conditions they face.   But he appears to be
arguing that this theory implies that we have no need  to take any notice of
the influence of levels of population on  the conditions people face.   

So why is there, for example, worldwide concern about sustainablility and
climate change?    Has the level of world population nothing to do with
climate change?


Ray Thomas
****************************************


-----Original Message-----
From: email list for Radical Statistics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Paul Spicker
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 11:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OPT.


David Gordon made a characteristically robust response to the  arguments 
about population and migration.  David commented that the idea of carrying 
capacity was falsified and disproven, and that claims to the contrary were 
"pseudo-scientific nonsense". Ray Thomas replied that "Dave Gordon seems a 
bit out of his depth in attacking the Optimum Population Trust ... Dave 
seems to be saying that everybody who supports OPT 'is very foolish and 
ignorant'".   We need to distinguish criticisms of an argument from 
criticism of a person.  The first part of Ray's reply attacks David as a 
person, not David's argument.  The second part assumes that David is 
attacking the people who hold the view, which as far as I can see he is not.

David's argument, if I understand it rightly, was
    (a) that the idea of "carrying capacity", used in this context, is 
bogus;
    (b)  that the arguments are a survival of Malthusianism, which has been 
repeatedly falsified;
    and that (c) that Paul Ehrlich, the leading patron of the OPT, has 
consistently been wrong about these issues.

The reason why the idea of "carrying capacity" is bogus in this context is 
down to basic economics, not biology.   The ability of humans to produce and

consume  depends on a range of factors, but the key concepts depend on the 
division of labour (from Smith) and exchange.  Ricardo demonstrated, as a 
simple matter of maths, that people are able to increase their productive 
capacity and consumption through the division of labour and exchange.  This 
is explained in terms of "comparative advantage", and it is fundamental both

to social exchange and to international trade.  Humans use the division of 
labour, exchange and trade to  increase production and capacity; to the best

of my knowledge, larks don't.  Because of this, the number of people who can

live in London,  the UK,  Europe or even the Northern Hemisphere has no 
direct relationship to the environmental constraints that would apply if we 
were individually self-sufficient and did not know how to share or exchange 
production.  There is a normative argument that some people wish to make 
against this; it has nothing to do with biological science.

David takes it that the argument is Malthusian.  The core of Malthusian 
arguments rests on the proposition that, given time, population has to 
exceed resources.  Malthus was obviously wrong - he was writing two hundred 
years ago, and it has not happened yet.  Neo-Malthusians think that he has 
to be right in time, and there have been a series of Malthusian arguments 
ever since - including e.g. the 1834 Poor Law Report, the eugenics movement,

"The population bomb" and "The limits to growth".  In every way, on every 
major point, the central tenets of Malthusianism have been falsified. 
Population does not increase exponentially.  Birth rates do not increase 
regardless of circumstances.  Resources are not fixed, and have consistently

expanded with population growth.   Famines, Sen has shown, are not caused by

food shortages but by denial of access to resources.

OPT claims that "failure to reduce population is likely to lead to a 
population crash when fossil fuels, fresh water and other resources become 
scarce."   I think that can fairly be described as a Mathusian argument. 
But birth rates do not rise with development; they fall.  Resources are not 
exhausted catastrophically, because this is not the way that an 
exchange-based economy works; scarcity changes relative prices and pushes 
people to move to substitutes. OPT's argument is bad science, bad economics,

and at odds with what we know about population growth.

The quotes from Ehrlich show how very wrong he has been, and the manifesto 
for OPT is a repetition of the same basic arguments.  I was unsure about 
whether Ehrlich could justly be described as OPT's "leading patron".  I have

consulted their website at http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.aboutus.html
<http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.aboutus.html> , and he can.

David and I have had some deeply felt disagreements in the past.  On this 
issue, however, he happens to be right.

Paul Spicker 

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