Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
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- EXT – Growth Solves
- Adaptations will contain overpop as long as we maintain growth
- EXT – No Overpop
- Population growth is self-correcting
- Malthusian Logic = Immoral
Overpopulation Answers2AC – A2: OverpopulationGrowth provides the tech to limit population growth Kenny, ’11 (Charles, senior economist on leave from the World Bank as a joint fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center for Global Development, Getting Better, p. 68, bgm) Rapid technological advance and diffusion are key to the global escape from the Maithusian trap. Technology has allowed massively increasing global agricultural production, and it has also allowed a growing percentage of economic output (even in the poorest Countries) to come from manufacturing and services, providing other sources of wealth than farming. It has freed economies worldwide from the constraint of land as a limiting factor of production The global expansion of economies rich and poor and the growing share of services and manufacturing in those economies are signs that the ideas and inventions required to increase output are spreading worldwide even while the institutions required to increase output per person have remained comparatively concentrated in rich countries. Another set of technologies that have spread are a range of simple health practices that have played a considerable role in reducing mortality, as we will see, and this reduced mortality has been a spur to smaller family size worldwide. These advances regarding mortality have taken place in Africa as much as elsewhere and so Africa, too, is on a path to significantly lower population growth. No overpop Lomborg, ’12 (Bjørn, Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, “Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now,” Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug, Vol. 91, Issue 4, ebscohost, bgm) WHAT OF the other factors in the analysis? Their devastating collapse was predicted to occur just after 2010, so it may be too soon for that to be definitively falsified. But the trends to date offer little support for the gloom-and-doom thesis. The growth in industrial production per capita to date was slightly overestimated by The Limits to Growth, possibly because resources have gotten cheaper rather than more expensive and more and more production has moved into the service industry. But mainstream forecasts of long-term GDP growth, a plausible proxy, are positive as far as the eye can see, in sharp contrast to what The Limits to Growth expected. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, the only major group to have set out informed GDP scenarios through 2100, estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over the century and increase 24-fold in the developing world. The amount of population growth was somewhat underestimated, mainly because medical advances have reduced death rates even faster than expected (despite the unforeseen HIV/AIDS crisis). But the population growth rate has slowed since the late 1960s, unlike the World3 predictions, because birthrates have fallen along with development. And predictions about the last two factors, agricultural production and pollution, were way off--which is important because these were the two backup drivers of collapse if a scarcity of resources didn't do the job. Global per capita food consumption was expected to increase by more than 50 percent in the four decades after 1970, peak in 2010, and then drop by 70 percent. Calorie availability has indeed increased, if not quite so dramatically (by somewhat more than 25 percent), but the collapse of the food supply is nowhere in sight, and there is every reason to believe that the gains will continue and be sustainable. Malnutrition has not been vanquished, and the absolute number of people going hungry has in fact increased slightly recently (in part because some crops have been diverted from food to biofuel production due to concerns about global warming). But over the past 40 years, the fraction of the global population that is malnourished has dropped from 35 percent to less than 16 percent, and well over two billion more people have been fed adequately. The world is nowhere close to hitting a ceiling on the usage of arable land; currently, 3.7 billion acres are being used, and 6.7 billion acres are in reserve. Nor have productivity gains maxed out. The latest long-range UN report on food availability, from 2006, estimated that the world would be able to feed ever-more people, each with evermore calories, out to midcentury. EXT – Growth SolvesGrowth checks population growth – less pressure to have children McCarthy, ’01 (Kevin, senior social scientist at RAND, Ph.D. in sociology, University of Wisconsin, “Global Shifts in Population,” http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5044/index1.html) In Stage 4, the situation in the developed world today, there is a rough parity between births and deaths. Correspondingly, the population grows very slowly--if at all. Once a Stage 4 equilibrium of low birth and death rates is reached, immigration becomes the driving force for additional population growth. Underlying the parity between births and deaths in Stage 4 are a number of behavioral changes. Particularly important is the shift away from a fatalistic view of demographic behavior that sees life's circumstances as a matter of fate to one that sees them as a consequence of free choice. This shift allows individuals to consider how many children to have, what kind of lifestyle to lead, and where to live. Rather than seeking to have many children, parents place more emphasis on having a few well-educated ones, and family sizes decline. Childbearing is sometimes seen as obstacle to self-fulfillment, and significant numbers of couples refrain from having children. While this model is based on the Western European experience, it also provides a useful point of departure for understanding overall patterns of population growth in the rest of the world. In fact, the only major difference between the pictures in developed countries and less-developed parts of the world concerns the pace of decline in mortality. In the West, this decline and the subsequent drop in fertility were tied to improvements that took effect over approximately 100 years. Since these decreases were relatively gradual, the pace of population growth was also gradual. In the developing countries, however, mortality declined sharply with the rapid introduction of medical technology and improved sanitation. As a result, the pace of population growth in the less-developed world has been much more rapid. Cap solves overpopulation Norton, ’04 (Seth, Professor of Business at Wheaton College, You Have to Admit It’s Getting Better, pg. 159-160) The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and rule of law compared with countries that have high levels of those measures. Formal analysis of the data indicates that these differences are not merely random." The link between these institutions and fertility partly reflects the impact of economic growth-by encouraging economic growth, these institutions indirectly affect fertility. But there also is evidence that these growth-enhancing institutions affect fertility for other reasons. Many developing countries have poorly specified or poorly enforced property rights. When fuel wood and fodder are not owned and formal laws of possession do not govern their harvest and use, people do not hear the full cost of their consumption. They have an incentive to appropriate resources at the fastest rate possible, often leading to exces- sive harvest. This condition is generally labeled the "tragedy of the commons." What better way to capture open-access resources than to have as many gatherers as possible? Higher fertility is a way to do this.Theodore Panayotou (1994, 151) observes that "most contributions by children consist of capturing and appropriating open-access natural resources such as water, fodder, pastures, fish, fuel wood, and other forest products, and clearing open-access land for cultivation,"This, he continues, makes "the number of children the decisive instrument in the hands of the household: The household's share of open-access property depends on the number of hands it employs to convert open- access resources into private property."Yet this could "become devas- tating for the resource, the community, and eventually the individual household." Adaptations will contain overpop as long as we maintain growthBailey, 10 (Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. October 19, 2010, Reason, “The Eternal Return of Overpopulation” http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/19/the-eternal-return-of-overpopu, jj) Will the world be able to feed itself in 2050? As it happens, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences) devoted its September 27 issue to analyzing the issue of global food security through 2050. One of the specially commissioned research articles projects that world population will reach around 9 billion by 2050 and that in the second half of the 21st century, “population stabilization and the onset of a decline are likely.” This should allay Ryerson’s concern that the world’s resources are not infinite and therefore “cannot support an infinite population of humans.” So okay, infinite human population growth isn’t likely, but can the Earth adequately feed 9 billion people by 2050? Well, yes, suggest two other of the Royal Society articles. A review of the relevant scientific literature led by Keith Jaggard from Rothamsted Research looks at the effects of climate change, CO2 increases, ozone pollution, higher average temperatures, and other factors on future crop production. Jaggard and his colleagues conclude [PDF], “So long as plant breeding efforts are not hampered and modern agricultural technology continues to be available to farmers, it should be possible to produce yield increases that are large enough to meet some of the predictions of world food needs, even without having to devote more land to arable agriculture.” Applying modern agricultural technologies more widely would go a long way toward boosting yields. For example, University of Minnesota biologist Ronald Phillips points out that India produces 31 bushels of corn per acre now which is at the same point U.S. yields were in the 1930s. Similarly, South Africa produces 40 bushels (U.S. 1940s yields); Brazil 58 bushels (U.S. 1950s yields); China 85 bushels (U.S. 1960s yields). Today’s modern biotech hybrids regularly produce more than 160 bushels of corn per acre in the Midwest. For what it’s worth, the corporate agriculture giant Monsanto is aiming to double yields on corn, soybeans, and cotton by 2030. Whether or not specific countries will be able to feed themselves has less to do with their population growth than it does with whether they adopt policies that retard their economic growth. Another article looking at the role of agricultural research and development finds that crop yields have been recently increasing at about 1 percent per year. In that article researchers estimate that spending an additional $5 to $10 billion per year would increase food output by 70 percent over the next 40 years. Note that world population is expected to increase by about 33 percent over that period. What about safe drinking water? Water is more problematic. The researchers commissioned by the Royal Society run a model that projects that competition for water to meet environmental flow requirements (EFRs) and municipal and industrial demand will “cause an 18 percent reduction if the availability of water worldwide for agriculture by 2050.” Interestingly, the amount of freshwater withdrawn for municipal and industrial use was 4.3 percent in 2000 and is estimated to increase to 5.9 percent by 2050. So the main competition for agricultural water is maintaining flows for environmental reasons. Since water is now often unpriced and subsidized, it gets used very inefficiently. As water becomes scarcer farmers and other users will have incentives to adopt water sparing techniques, such as drip irrigation. In addition, researchers are close to developing drought tolerant crops. The study also notes that water stressed regions will be able to “import water” in the form of food produced in areas with abundant water. With regard to deforestation and polluted rivers, the answer is probably yes for many of the poorest countries. However, speeding up economic growth and technological improvements will dramatically lower the risks of these undesirable outcomes. As noted above, enough food to feed 9 billion can be grown on land currently devoted to agriculture. With regard to water pollution, it is one of the first environmental problems that poor countries begin to clean up as they grow wealthier. A recent study found that in every country where average annual per capita income exceeds $4,600 forests are stable or increasing [PDF]. In addition, technological progress offers the possibility that humanity will increasingly reduce its future demands on nature by a process of dematerialization [PDF], that is, obtaining more value while using less material. Maternal mortality rates have fallen substantially—from 422 per 100,000 live births to 251 per 100,000 live births—over the past 30 years, according to a study published in The Lancet this past April. Sadly, the study noted, “More than 50% of all maternal deaths were in only six countries in 2008 (India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo).” Oddly, some activists opposed the publication of The Lancet article, fearing that the good news would stifle their fundraising. The world’s infant mortality rate has never been lower. Most countries, even very poor countries, continue to experience declines in infant mortality. Walker’s last two questions about poverty traps and failed states are related, but not in a way that supports his implied points. As Wheaton College economist Seth Norton explains, "Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law.” He adds, "The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures." Fertility rates are high in failed states like Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Yemen, because of the lack of rule of law which inexorably generates poverty. Norton persuasively argues that such places are so chaotic that it’s like living in giant open access commons. In those cases people often reason that more children means more hands for grabbing unowned and unprotected resources for the family. Such anarchic places would be particularly ill-suited to implementing the kind of population control policies Walker favors. According to research published by the Royal Society, it looks as though the world will be able to feed 9 billion people by 2050, perhaps even allowing some farmland to revert to nature. Water is a problem, but economic and technological solutions show promise in ameliorating it. But more importantly, Walker and other overpopulationists get the causality backwards. Poverty is the cause and high fertility is the symptom. Poverty traps and failed states which result in high maternal death rates, starvation, pollution, and deforestation are not created by population, but by bad policies. Working to spread economic freedom and political liberty is a lot harder than self-righteously blaming poor people for breeding too much. But it's the only real option. EXT – No OverpopTheir economic models are wrong Kenny, ’11 (Charles, senior economist on leave from the World Bank as a joint fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center for Global Development, Getting Better, p. 62-63, bgm) Malthus’s other propositions don’t hold anymore, anywhere, either. He argued that there was an arithmetic relationship between rising incomes and population increase. He also argued that rising populations would inevitably cause a proportionate fall in incomes. In real life, there doesn’t even appear to be a strong association between the two anywhere on earth-including Africa, which is most often the target of Malthusian concern. Looking across African countries suggests that there is no significant positive link from GDP per capita growth to subsequent population growth. And countries where incomes rise fast don’t see life expectancy increase much more rapidly than countries where income has increased more slowly (a topic we’ll look at in greater detail in Chapter 6). At the same time, there is no significant contemporaneous negative link between population and GDP per capita growth-countries where more babies are born don’t see declining incomes as a result. Once again, this provides scant evidence to support a theory that the region is caught in a Malthusian cycle. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that countries (rich or poor) that see improved child health see lower income per capita, as Malthus would have predicted. If anything, the evidence points the other way, toward a positive causal relationship between health and income. Improved health has also been behind the global decline in fertility rates. Average global fertility fell from5.3 to 340 births per woman between 1960 and 2005, a decline that has now spread to every region, including Africa. Twenty-three countries in the region saw rising fertility between 1963and 1967. Only one did in the years between 1998 and 2002, and the average fertility change across the region has been increasingly negative since 1973. It appears that what dominates the birthrate is no longer static custom but an increased expectation that children will survive and improved options regarding the decision to get pregnant. Once again, the driving force behind this change has been improved health innovations that have spread worldwide. And once again this suggests that, the world over, demographic and economic trends no longer fit a Malthusian model of change. The population bomb is a dud. Population growth is self-correctingBill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 2003, 20:21 Vision, pp. 324-325 Moreover, the likelihood of a population explosion appears to be receding. Part of that, alas, is due to the devastation being wrought by AIDS in Africa. But mainly it is because fertility levels are dropping sharply in most poor countries and all rich ones. The current rate of world population growth is thought by the United Nations to be 1.2 percent a year, below the twentieth-century annual average. The latest “medium variant” forecast from the UN for world population in 2050 is 9.3 billion, with an annual growth rate by then down to 0.47 percent. (“Medium variant” assumes mainly medium levels of fertility, along with other factors affecting births and deaths.) Even those figures could prove to be overestimates. Such is the sensitivity of long-run demographic forecasts to small changes in birthrates and mortality that they could be underestimates, too. And 9.3 billion is a huge number of people. But on optimism’s side is the evidence that, all over the world, people seem to react to better welfare and improved chances of survival by having fewer children. And they react to the challenge of population by finding new ways of growing food, new ways of making a living. Much depends, therefore, on whether the welfare of the poorer countries will in the future improve, or whether economic growth might pass them by and be limited to the richer nations. Malthusian Logic = ImmoralTheir scholarship is immoral and wrong – we should err toward affluence Kenny, ’11 (Charles, senior economist on leave from the World Bank as a joint fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center for Global Development, Getting Better, p. 69, bgm) Again, fears spread by tomes such as Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and its many children have justified policy directions that would have appalled even Malthus. We have seen that he was in fact in favor of inoculations, for example, but in the late 1960sformer World Bank president Robert McNamara discouraged financing of health care unless it was closely tied to population control. Otherwise, he believed, it would contribute to the population explosion. The decision to deny health care for those living today on the assumption that doing so would improve lives of others in the future suggests astounding faith in the moral and empirical basis of a deeply flawed economic model. This same lesson should apply to neo-Malthusian concerns regarding global sustainability. We should strenuously avoid the mistake that we sometimes made with population policies of sacrificing the health and well-being of poor people today on the basis of forecasts and estimates of potential impacts tomorrow. Our response to concerns of global sustainability should include the adoption of a Hippocratic approach: The threat should be confronted, but not at the cost of depriving poor people alive today of their access to basic human needs. We may not know the secret to rapid income growth for poor countries in Africa or elsewhere, but we do know that the beliefs of a long-dead English parson hold little relevance. While populations have grown worldwide, the threats of both starvation and ill health have receded. The next chapter discusses evidence regarding improvements in the global quality of life in greater detail. 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