“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843)
Catastrophism is Leftist Untruth #4. In that, we claim that the world is not running out of resources. And we claim that the average human has not been getting poorer, i.e. possessing less wealth or having a lower standard of living.
Take a look around you at your world. You will probably see a lot of things such as houses, hospitals, roads, cars, planes, computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, home theaters, all-terrain vehicles… these things are wealth. Are there less of them now than there used to be, ten or fifty or a hundred years ago, or more? If more, where did they come from?
Even some Rightists seem to believe that if the human population grows then there will be less wealth per human. The idea that we will run out of everything may ultimately be based on the premise that the average human will consume more than he or she produces. Resulting in a net loss of wealth per capita.
But if it is true that the average human consumes more than he or she produces, then explain how all the houses, hospitals, roads, cars, planes, computers, air conditioners, swimming pools, refrigerators, home theaters, all-terrain vehicles, and smartphones got here. If it were true that the average human consumes more than he or she produces, then we would perceive a continuous decline in the amount of houses, hospitals, roads, cars, planes, computers, air conditioners, and so on. Is such a decline what has been happening?
People create wealth and they create economic growth. Most people, that is. But the enemy of the growth of our wealth is indeed people: Leftists, and in particular government regulators.
"Does the average person produce more than he or she consumes?"
If you asked that question of economists, you would probably not get a true, clear answer. But a true, clear answer does exist.
The amount of messiness and nonsense that is Economics is in the 21st century is a measure of two things, at least:
- the immense amount of complexity in any real economy
- the dishonesty of Leftists (the vast majority of economists being Leftists, of course)
For example, to get a true answer regarding what is produced, economists measure productivity, which is a lie, as we show in GPD, Leftist Untruth #9.
So let’s ask somebody else.
What Glenn Said
"Does the average person overall contribute more than they consume in economic and financial terms?"
posed by https://www.quora.com/profile/Keith-Lyons
"If society as a whole consumes more than it contributes — we then have a society that is dying." Answer by Glenn Still, BBA in Business & Marketing, The University of Texas at Arlington,
That is a correct answer. What else could be true? And of course the obverse is also true: If people on average produce more than they consume then we have an economy that is growing.
(Oddly, in his answer Glenn goes on to try to define "average", when average, as the statistical mean, is one of the few words in the question that has a perfectly clear and unambiguous meaning: The sum (of what is produced) divided by n (the number of people). That’s the average.) Glenn went on, "It could be that half of the people do that and several more are about equal — then a smaller group contribute a huge amount more than they consume. So depending on the way you do the math it could be that your answer is yes or no." What!? Oh Glenn, you were doing so well…)
But in the end, Glenn bounces back, "But society as a whole must end up with a positive balance each year."
It’s simple. Of course it must. If the wealth of the society and the standard of living of the people are to grow, then it has to produce more than it consumes. And while terms like "wealth" and "standard of living" can be (especially if you are an economist) very hard to satisfactorily (to economists) to define, as a word like "death" is relatively unambiguous. As in: If the average person in a society produces less than he consumes then the society will die.
So, if a society continues to function or if it grows, then the average person is producing as much as or more than he or she consumes. And since no real society produces exactly the same amount year after year, then the true answer is: In a society that continues to exist, such as ours and every other society that continues to exist, and in the world as a whole: The average human being must be producing more than he or she consumes.
There it is.
Like it or not, there’s your answer. And a lot of people don’t like it. Because, for one thing, it proves that the “Destructive Population Explosion” and the famines and lowering of standard of living and so on was all untruth, from the very start. In fact, the opposite was true. As long as the average person produces more than he or she consumes — and this has been true for a long, long time and promises to be true indefinitely, as we will see — the more people we get then more wealth we will have and the better our standard of living will be.
Guess what: People are a good thing. Who would have thought? Certainly not Leftists, as we will see.
Fitting This Theory
Fitting this theory, many places have already gone through a “demographic transition”, in which poor, high-fertility countries become rich, low-fertility ones.
The “theory” mentioned in the quotation is obviously the fact that, indeed, the average person produces more than he or she consumes. Because that idea explains both:
— high-fertility countries becoming richer
— and the threat of low-fertility ones becoming poorer.
Right? Wrong. At least to the Leftists at the Economist.
Indeed, the article’s writer does realize that declining population will hurt nations’ economies, saying, “…the worse the [depopulation] problem becomes, the harder governments will work to combat it.” But since the publication is The Economist, their theory explaining why it is that
— more people make nations richer
— and fewer people will make them poorer
Is complicated. And Leftist.
"Leftist" in that The Economist does not want to admit that most people are good and productive. Leftists’ claims are the opposite :
• Miserabilism;
• Neo-nihilism;
• Catastrophism;
• Misanthropy;
• and throwing Population-Explosion bombs.
Those are the things that Leftists love.
Leftists love Population Control programs, even involving forced sterilization, infanticide, and tax-payer-paid-for late-term and partial abortion on demand. Eugenics was a Leftist program.
We won't go into the theory that The Economist uses to explain the cause of the depopulation threat, it’s complicated and suitable for Leftists (it was created by an economist whose most famous book was The Economics of Discrimination "which examined racial discrimination from the perspective of markets"). You can read about the theory in "Richer Societies Mean Fewer Babies. Right? A Guide to the New Economics of Fertility" The Economist (2022)
“GOVERNMENTS MUST TACKLE POPULATION…” reads a headline on the Population Matters website.
Population Matters warns that, “…as people escape poverty, their consumption increases. In Asia for example, meat and seafood consumption is expected to rise by 78% by 2050, due to increasing wealth and population growth.” https://populationmatters.org/mythbusting
So Population Matters, a member of IUCN (which is comprised of numerous NGO and government agencies) advocates extreme measures by government regulators to prevent people from escaping poverty, having better diets, and “increasing wealth”.
Subsistence? Who lived at subsistence level? Not most people.
If, say over the last 20,000 years, the average human being produced exactly the same amount of goods and services that he or she consumed, then the human population could not have increased. There would not have been enough food. But it did increase. With perhaps a very few exceptions, the human population increased in almost all of those 20,000 years. That could not have happened if the average person did not produce more than he or she consumed. And it could not have happened if the family system had not been a highly effective system of human interaction.
Who maintained a subsistence level and no more? Not most people. For 20,000 years, average people produced a bit more than they consumed, at least.
But then something changed. A lot.
Welcome to the Industrial & Free Enterprise Revolution (Why Malthus was Dead Wrong)
The emergence of the Free Enterprise economies and the Industrial Revolution made the average person immensely more productive than ever. Thus,
If Free Enterprise and the Industrialization are in effect, then:
1. The average person will produce much more than he or she consumes.
2. Therefore, all else being equal, a greater number of people = a much greater amount of wealth in the society.
The only things that can realistically prevent this from happening, from being true, are:
1. Exogenous disasters, plagues and pandemics, super volcanoes, asteroid strikes...
2. Government regulators, who are a sort of plague, of parasites, who often cause genocides, famines, and wars. (Wars are not exogenous disasters; they are, and can only be, caused and conducted by government regulators.)
As long as the changes as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, or some versions of them, remain in effect, and if we aren’t hit by large asteroids or meteors, or by super-volcano eruptions, or by global pandemics with high deaths rates, or invaded by homicidal extraterrestrials, or something else exogenous, then it is an undeniable certainty that the more human beings who are born and grow up, the more wealth will be produced, and the higher our standard of living will be. And he better off we will all be. That a “Population Explosion” would cause less wealth was always dead wrong, and the people who promulgated that idea probably knew it. They were mostly Leftists.
Momism
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only –and that is to support the ultimate career.
C.S. Lewis quoted in https://ollieadamson.com/economics/inflation-an-assault-on-the-family/
Of course, “Our most important resource is people” sounds corporate-slogan-ish. But it turns out to be a simple plain fact. The average person produces more than he or she consumes. The most valuable thing that a society produces is people. And who produces the people? Moms. Dads may help raise them. But mostly it’s moms.
Momism explains a lot. It’s no wonder that Marxists and other Leftists, who want to tear down the institutions of our society so as to replace them with controllist rule by Leftists, are so determined to destroy the family as the core subsystem of our society. A lesson from history is: Families work; Marxism doesn’t.
Acknowledgement of the value of parents, and mostly mothers, to a society is not mawkish “Mom and Apple Pie” sentimentality. It is to recognize the economic reality. The average person produces more than he or she consumes, especially if she’s a mom. Because people is a society’s most important product. The more the better.
The No Children Policy
Choosing to have smaller families (one, two or even no children) is exactly how we end population growth…
Population Matters (2022)
Was Scrooge a Leftist?
"If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the population.”
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
That quote is of course from near the end of the story, when Scrooge has undergone a change, after the visits of three spirits, and the ‘he’ referred to is ‘excess-person’ Tiny Tim.
Was Scrooge a Leftist? His original position on overpopulation would suggest so. But he is of course portrayed as being an arch-capitalist. However, Scrooge’s problem wasn’t that he was a capitalist. He apparently went on being a businessman after his big change of heart. He didn’t fire Bob Cratchit, close his business’s doors, become a politician, and run for office on the Labour Party ticket. He just became a very generous, good-spirited capitalist, apparently. “Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew…”
Who is worse? A capitalist who refuses to contribute money to the needy, or a Leftist, who produces nothing and uses the power of government to take money from others, promising to contribute it to the needy, while keeping most of the money, and using it to get more power?
Conclusion
Leftism is communitarian; it is governance-centered. Rightism is rightly people-centered. Being Right is being for equal individual rights for everyone. The true Left-Right difference can perhaps be most simply seen in the policies of the Left and Right towards people:
Left: More people is bad — Right: More people is good
Like most Leftist Untruths, their Overpopulation Lie, when flipped, points to a truth (as we discuss further in Flipping Leftist Untruths). In this case, not a pleasant truth. We will look into the future of The Depopulation Implosion: The Extreme Contraction of Economies in Right to the Truth.
In Asia for example, meat and seafood consumption is expected to rise by 78% by 2050, due to increasing wealth and population growth…
Will the Population Matters scrooges succeed in getting zero Tiny Tims being born, and prevent any Asian children who are born from getting more meat and seafood? It seems to be the path we are now on.
...the ability of an energetic people living in a free country to create wealth is almost infinite. We have the ingenuity to work our way around difficulties the carefree monetary policy of our government is creating. On the other hand, it does look like we may be entering a terminal death spiral like prior failed empires...
Alan Sewell, “How the Fed Rigs the Bond Market” Wall Street Journal (2021)
“God bless Us, Every One!” Looks like we’re going to need it.
Not a bad column; it gives me an opening to mention that President Biden's low unemployment numbers aren't actually a good thing in a recession. Productivity is basically Output divided by Input. If Input (in this case, labor capital) increases while Output (GDP, expressed as financial capital output) decreases the result is lowered productivity. Getting out of a recession requires we go in the opposite direction.