Are you a selfish bastard?

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1355337]

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Playing devil's advocate for a mo.....

What if a population is incapable of sustaining itself. Should it should be allowed to decrease naturally and thus we shouldn't give to charity to try to prop up unsustainable population levels? I.e. if you can't afford / can't source enough food, to feed your kids then you shouldn't have had them in the first place and shouldn't expect anyone else to help you out.

If I donate part of my income, am I only making things worse by sustaining / expanding (if they then have kids too) an ever-increasing overpopulation problem?

Is not donating at that point selfish or practical on a global scale?

I'm not saying that's my personal viewpoint but this article on the impact of overpopulation on the environment got me pondering applying the same issues to charity. There are (or most likely soon will be) too many people. Is not giving for the sake of the planet rather than the individual the ultimate selfless act?

[andrewducker]

There's enough food to feed everyone, easily.

It's just not evenly distributed.

Also, you're dividing the world into "us" and "them" - an inherently selfish thing to do. If you're fine with that...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure that's true any more. Last time I looked about 5y ago we'd just had the first year where total calorie ouput was - just - less than total requirement. Be interested if you dig out figs with the Long Dry affecting Ozzie output, EU floods,, biofuels, and population nudging 7bn.

Capacity is still high enough, but we'd need to eat less, and less meat. Trend is all wrong there tho' with the BRIC protein shock. But I've not seen good data so don't know how big these have got.

(The main point stands tho' - most starvation is about other factors.)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Paul Erlich has much to answer for.

For consideration, most famines around the world have nothing to do with overpopulation; they're results of political disruptions in the flow of food, sometimes exacerbated by bad luck with weather. Indeed many famines in the past century were deliberate attempts at "weaponising" hunger, notably in Ethiopia and Somalia. (And the Ukraine in the '30s.) So witholding food aid in many cases isn't "letting nature restore the balance", it's playing into the hands of warlords.

Add in that agriculture is so fruitful now (though perhaps not in a petroleum-poor future, though that's arguable) that major agricultural nations pay subsidies to growers so that they don't go broke; the US has price supports, France direct subsidies, Canada rations production of many food products to prevent gluts. There's no shortage of food on the planet, just uneven rates of production.

-- Steve can't agree that giving food aid is a cruel prolongation of the problem of overpopulation.

[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.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with this.

I would much rather give to a charity whereby I knew they were doing something useful and semi-permanent like putting in a well, or developing agriculture.

I don't think throwing food at people solves anything. They need contraception information, education and skills.

[andrewducker]

I said "to help starving people", not "throw food at people". I'm assuming the money goes towards projects to reduce both short and long-term starvatin.

Also, see the two other replies to the comment.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'd spend the money on politics, not directly on the poor. I took your question to include that option.

[andrewducker]

That was my intention. Some people seem to have read it as "hand cash directly to the poor." which was not my intention at all.

[avatar.livejournal.com]

Edit the post? (not the poll, since you can't)

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I'm keen on less people in the world, and yes, I am prepared for that to perhaps mean and mine - though obviously I'd rather it wasn't :-).

I hate crowds, I hate too many people, so any not-drastically-destabilising population reductions can be seen as desirable from that point of view.

Of course stick real starving people in front of me and I suspect I'd be moved to try to sort it out if I at all could (and by longer term strategies rather than short term fixes).

Is I recall, the evidence is that if you remove the worry that your kids will die off young and give access to decent contraception (especially if it can be of the long term and 'hidden' i.e. female controlled) and education then birth rates plummet. So I suppose patience is the key...

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

I was just saying to is_not_well that if you put a starving kid in front of me, then yes, I'd feed it, but, as in my reply to anton_p_nym above, at that point you've resolved the geographic issues of person needing food and the food itself being in different places so that person is then sustainable.

Totally agree with the comment on infant mortality, education and contraception. Improve the chances that two kids will survive to adulthood from two born rather than two survivors from 10 born and you drastically reduce the resources consumed to get two more adults.