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First the news…

(AP) WASHINGTON – The nation’s population officially hit 300 million at 7:46 a.m. EDT Tuesday, when the Census Bureau’s population clock rolled over to the big number.

But there weren’t any wild celebrations, fireworks or any other government-sponsored hoopla to mark the milestone. Why bother? Many experts think the population actually hit 300 million months ago. (more…)

When I read this I was reminded about all the times I have heard people suggest that the earth is “running out of room” because of overpopulation. Here is a great article that I found that addresses that madness.

Is Human Population Really the Problem?

Jeff Lindsay

Newspapers have become overpopulated, so to speak, with warnings about human overpopulation. Such warnings have been issued regularly for decades – even centuries – with consistently incorrect predictions. On the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, was widely quoted. He predicted that by 1985, the “population explosion” would lead to world famine, the death of the oceans, a reduction in life expectancy to 42 years, and the wasting of the Midwest into a vast desert. He was about as accurate as Malthus himself, the Englishman who, in 1798, predicted catastrophic food shortages that never came.

The population doomsayers usually offer the solution of global government – BIG government – to determine, in Gaylord Nelson’s words, “the optimum number of people.” Ironically, where there is famine, the problem usually is not an excess of people but an excess of government, which leads to gross misallocation and misuse of resources as corrupt bureaucrats or dictators seek power more than the welfare their subjects.

Just what is “overpopulation”? How does one determine when a nation is overpopulated? There are no clear demographic indicators for this fuzzy notion. If population density is used as the criterion, then Bermuda and Monaco would be crisis zones, while Nigeria and Ethiopia should be paradise. Other factors, like population growth rate, also provide metrics riddled with inconsistencies. Yes, there are places where people lack resources and go hungry, but eliminating neighbors is not the solution to the condition of poverty. If we are worried about those who go hungry, let us recognize that the hungry are suffering from poverty, not from overpopulation.

But isn’t poverty directly related to population size or to rapid population growth? Absolutely not. The population control crowd is now embarrassed by the light of scientific study into the relationship between population and economic development. A wide variety of recent economic studies on this issue have shattered the myth that population growth is bad for a nation’s economy. Though rarely reported by the media, this has led to a remarkable revolution in the scientific (not the political) community. This scientific revolution is documented by Dr. Julian Simon, Univ. of Maryland, in Jay Lehr’s book Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Van Nostrand Reinhold Publ., 1992. Now the real scientific debate centers on whether population growth has a neutral or positive effect, but there clearly is no significant negative effect. (more…)