Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf
Wishful thinking, not supported by evidence. The US is a prosperous country, and has been for many decades. So are many countries in Europe. If this theory matched reality, shouldn't we be seeing significant population declines by now? Yet every census shows continued growth.
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The devil is in the detail.
The growth in population in a lot of Europe is due to migration - the EU has added a number of countries in the East (the former soviet block) and those people can then move freely into the richer west once their country joins - they target the UK and Germany as destinations as well as France and Italy.
55% of the UK census growth is
down to migration. The second main source is people living longer - we have that issue of an ageing population too.
"Local" people (say 1-2 generations here) are having fewer kids and having them later. Even the number of Jedis in the UK is
on the decline which is bad news if the Empire Strikes Back
Combine census data from the west and the east of the EU - the population is stable. I suspect if you combined census data in the US (including illegals) with Central / South America then the population would also be stable if not falling.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf
More questions than that. As for instance, why should we raise their standard of living? How does anyone's standard of living get raised in the absence of resources? What exactly is a standard of living? Who has a higher standard of living, the urbanite living in a few square meters, but with lots of techo-toys, or a Mongolian herdsman living in a yurt?
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Good questions well put.
The simple answer is that "we" shouldn't. We also shouldn't need to. China got going on it's own and is about to outrun the EU and the US inside of 25 years - thats impressive. Same for India but they have very poor infrastructure - mostly the stuff we Brits left behind and they kept running - which will hold them back.
Africa has the potential to do to China and India what they did to the first world in the last 2 decades, which in turn will make them richer with no effort from us except to buy their stuff - which we will by default like we do with China's.
I'm happy to pay for something though - forget AGW, the fact that loads of kids don't have safe drinking water whilst the president of their country has a fleet of 50 Mercedes limos (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabenzi) is disgusting on a world scale. I would pay for that to be sorted - And I hate taxes.
