Sunday, March 4, 2012

Population Equilibrium - Is Poverty and Starvation Even Solvable?

The camera pans over and a child comes on to the screen: emaciated, skin pulling itself tight to bones, eyes large, cheeks empty.  We all feel it; the desire to reach out and change something.  But there are more children like this born every day; will our efforts even make a difference? 

In biology we see any organism's population is constantly trying to reproduce itself; numbers are only kept low because of predators, lack of food, and disease.  Humans, it turns out, didn't like dying, and they had the brains enough to avoid it; through agricultural and medicinal tech we've gone from 1 billion people 200 years ago to almost 7 billion people today.

We've done a great job raising the bar; we haven't eliminated it.

So the question I pose to you is -can we actually solve extreme poverty?  Or is this just the way life is? Will there ever come a point where everyone has enough?  And what will get us there?

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