Are you a selfish bastard?

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1355337]

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Didn't a large chunk of the aid money for Ethiopia in the 80s end up in the government coffers, paying for guns and whisky? Isn't giving then playing into the hands of the warlords?

Agriculture is plentiful at the moment, yes, but we can't fit all of the population in areas where the food is and to get all the food to areas where the food-poor populations are will require an ever-increasing drain on other resources (petroleum, etc). Additionally, by sustaining a starving population, you're contributing to an increase in that population, requiring more sustenance until you reach an over-population point anyway.

Yes, there is lots of food on the planet at the moment, but a sustainable population is not necessarily the same as the maximum population that the food alone could support and whilst it may be the humane thing to do, aspiring to that maximum population may not be the sensible thing for the species.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

If you extend your argument, though, then it becomes far more merciful to bomb the starving and end their misery more quickly and cheaply than sending assistance. (Albeit slightly pricier than doing nothing, admittedly.) And the only assistance the warlords would get from that would be the salvage value of unexploded ordnance... well, that and having their dirty work done for them, but doing nothing also works for them the same way.

Once you start considering Tough Decisions™ you start running into very strange logic.

Your argument is also predicated on a continual increase in population until it reaches its Malthusian maximum, whereas we've seen a dramatic drop in growth in Westernised countries (indeed, below replacement rate) after the post-war Baby Boom. Prosperity (and condoms/The Pill) may be better for limiting population growth than the politics of famine.

-- Steve will also remind folks that very few (if any) predictions made in Ehrlich's [i]The Population Bomb[/i] actually paid out; in scientific terms, the theory's a bust.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Putting the warlords aside for a moment as they seem to be in a win/win situation, I would argue that the cold hard logic is not that strange if you treat it purely as a mathematical exercise in supply, demand, resource consumption and population. Add the moral and emotional viewpoints back in and it gets a lot more complicated :)

I agree with your point about contraception though and I would say that that's the solution. Giving to a charity to feed the starving will decrease the infant mortality rate and increase the average life expectation in the affected area. Unless you change the mentality, education and availability of contraception too, you will just increase the number of people reliant on aid to survive, placing an increasing burden on resources.

Change the mentality of those people so that they don't believe they have to have ten kids to get two to adulthood and, as I said in another comment, you decrease the resources consumed and make the population more sustainable - possibly even self-sustaining in that area eventually. Feed starving people and you create more starving people. Change how the population thinks and breeds and you can create sustainability.

Andy has said that he didn't intend his original question to mean simply averting starvation in the short term but that's precisely what a lot of charities do. Even those working on longer term projects (e.g. clean water in Africa, etc) will still just create an environment that can sustain a few more before the local population outgrows it again and starts to starve.