I left this answer:
Actually, the question implies a reversal of cause-and-effect—that high population growth causes poverty. Not so. Poverty causes high birth rates. Rising prosperity leads to decreasing birth rates. The answer to why this is so is covered in depth in The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century by Ronald Bailey. I highly recommend the book for this and other reasons.
Obviously, the path to prosperity requires the adoption of certain social and political conditions, namely free market capitalism, individual rights (including property rights), rule of objective law, a government strong enough to protect rights but restrained enough to preclude rights violating, and a constitution that pulls it all together.
Related Reading:
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century by Ronald Bailey, Chapter One
1 comment:
Without reading Ronald Brailey, I say this: If you're in poverty, have kids. They'll care for you in your old age, as you cared for your own parents. If you're prosperous, you can care for yourself in old age. Don't bother having kids.
Economic prosperity doesn't require increasing population, not by reproduction nor by immigration. It doesn't require increasing population, period. Even under DECREASING population (up to a point, maybe), there can be great economic prosperity, maybe greater than under static or increasing population. It's quality that counts, not quantity.
But, concerning immigration in a FREE country (not in the U.S., today, any more than in any other country, today), this doesn't mean keep out the uneducated and unskilled and admit only the already highly productive. It means bring 'em all in, LEGALLY (details omitted, here).
And it means private interests exporting our way of life economically (by markets), backed by government diplomacy when needed. If the overseas thugs kick back forcibly, kick back forcibly so our way of life can keep spreading to the whole world, to our own benefit on the home front. Then, why would anybody in the world have any conception, any notion, of anything but such a way of life?
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