For my heretical blurt of the day may I suggest that the world isn't overpopulated so much as mismanaged. I am truly agnostic on this and am happy to be corrected but it seems so much an article of faith that the world is overpopulated that I like to explore the other side of the proposition.
I know the Malthusian argument is that populations increase exponentially while food production can only increase arithmetically etc. He predicted that population would outrun food supply by mid 19th century. Paul Erlich tried again in the late 1960s with the same argument. Predicted hundreds of millions of famine deaths in India alone, unfortunately for his argument, just before India changed from a net food importer to a net food exporter.
At various times in the past I'm sure that it was "obvious" that the world was overpopulated. It must have seemed like that when there was only 1 bn world people, then 2bn etc etc. Who's to say that 9 bn isn't doable?
All I am suggesting is that perhaps the obvious isn't always true(don't we know about that on the stockmarket), and that the majority is just as likely to be wrong as right about anything(perhaps even more so given herd mentality etc)
The argument that the world is overpopulated ties in with the AGW argument on some level,"too many of us" or more likely "too many of them"!
If for example 10% of the the money spent worldwide on arms, gambling, entertainment, or porn even were spent on agricultural infrastructure would that eliminate any talk about overpopulation? I don't know but perhaps it might.
