[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Well, it is my belief that most of the major issues we face as a species (pollution, global warming, hunger, poverty) are due to over-population.

Scope is important. Issues like pollution, hunger and poverty are local, not global - they affect specific areas, and over population isn't always the cause.

And "global warming" is still a matter of some dispute. If it is occurring (and that data saying so is open to debate), the question is how much is due to human action, and how much is a matter of long term climate cycles we have no control over. (Remember that in geological terms, we are are coming out of a period of glaciation, and that process began well before human activity could have had anything to do with it.)

But population growth tends to have a break in the form of simple economics. In developed nations, kids are expensive to have and raise, and you are faced with how many you can afford, not how many you might want.

It's lesser developed areas with largely agrarian economies and high childhood mortality rates that ten do be the growth areas, simply to have enough hands to do the work, and enough kids who will survive to adulthood. As such areas become developed, the problems will lessen.

I suppose if we could somehow better allocate corporate profits and use the money to solve our major issues we'd be okay for a while, but even then the population would continue to rise until it was a problem again unless the population issue was addressed as well.

I'm not sure how you would "better allocate corporate profits".

The nature and function of profits is badly misunderstood, even by folks who should know better. For instance, the usual question asked is "How much profit can we make?" It's the wrong one. The right one is "How much profit do we have to make to remain in business?" The answer to that question is sometimes higher than the optimistic estimates of how much we can make, because the correct answer is "enough to cover our marginal cost of capital".

Peter F. Drucker told a story in one of his books about a friend who was a dedicated trade unionist and socialist, who had achieved the highest status: he was elected as a workers council representative on his employer's Board of Directors. He found out the hard way some of his ideas about the amount of profits being made and how they might be redistributed were fanciful, and reality was a different matter.

But then, reality generally is, and suggestions like this tend to run into it.

The problem with the notion is that both development efforts and social welfare programs are ultimately paid for out of profits, and you must have profits to fund them. Too many attempts to "better allocate profits" have the effect of reducing or eliminating them, producing the sort of situation in the fairy tale about the goose and the golden eggs.

Maybe we should put all our scientific research into finding alternate dimensions we could move to or begin building generation-ships in space.....

And export the problems elsewhere? Generation ships won't help: if population growth is that great, you won't be able to ship people off of Earth fast enough. Alternate dimensions might not have that bottleneck, but are a bit beyond the current the current state of the art...
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Dennis