Quote: (05-31-2013 10:05 PM)basilransom Wrote:
Quote: (05-31-2013 11:42 AM)solo Wrote:
But like Gates says, how is giving vaccines to children that couldn't otherwise afford it (for instance) a bad thing?
If you were a hardcore Malthusian, you'd say higher survival rates aggravate problems created by overpopulation.
The infrastructure in Africa is not improving, yet the population continues to increase. If you feed someone and they go on to have ten children, you've just made the problem five times worse. When people have trouble creating prosperity for themselves, multiplying the population isn't going to help. Bread without birth control means more suffering. Starvation, territorial aggression, disease... none of these are helped by an increase in population density.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/...wanted=all
Actually to say overpopulation is Africa is a huge problem is just flat out not correct. For one the carbon footprint when you compare the collective carbon footprint in Sub-Saharan African to that of the United States and Europe, there is no comparison, the West consumes more by leaps in bounds. Therefore when people say we run the risk of running out of resources it is because they are being consumed in an unsustainable manner by richer countries. Africa clocks in at an extremely low numbers with respect to population density at 66 people per square mile! To put that number in perspective the UK has a population density of 634 people per square mile. If the population of in Africa doesn't consume much at all, that could only mean that the rich countries are indeed the ones that are overpopulated, since they disproportionately hog all the resources.
In fact even as European countries struggle to cover the population replacement rate their demands for resources are getting higher and higher!
Instead what I think you might be getting at is population density in urban areas, but when you think about what big cities are for it makes perfect sense. They are hubs for a variety of interests and types of economics activity. Ever been to Los Angeles? Manhattan? San Francisco?London?Paris? Cities like that have populations way over what they were originally built for. Africa(for the most part) is underdeveloped like hell sure? But it certainly is not overpopulated by any stretch. Most of problems Africa has come from poor governance, which is by default an extension of the interference of outside forces for the gain of the aforementioned resources. Getting favorable natural resource deals often involves subverting governments to install puppet leaders and this dynamic is certainly not exclusive to Africans as history tells us......