The Daily Overdose of Logic for Tuesday, 1 November 2011: The Teeming Masses Become Ever More Teeming

The Overdose's absence on Friday was intentional; its absence yesterday most certainly was not. To wit: yesterday was the worst day I've had for Internet access in probably ten years--the law school, my apartment, and my preferred lunchtime watering hole all had essentially no usable access. Lame excuse, I know, but I doubt that anybody spent the whole day on the edge of his/her seat yesterday (and if you were, I strongly encourage you to get a life). --Ed.

I am not an old person, but I distinctly remember when the world population hit six billion. It wasn't that long ago--only twelve years--which makes yesterday's proclamation by the United Nations of the birth of No. 7,000,000,000 a really rather remarkable thing. The comparisons speak for themselves--there were fewer than one billion people when the United States became a nation; right at two billion when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a season; well under three billion when my parents were born in 1954. Even a relatively conservative estimate of the growth rate (and of my longevity) predicts that there will be over nine billion humans when I die, more than twice as many as when I was born.

Anyone familiar with my perspective on the world knows that, in my utopia, seven billion people would be about 6.99 billion too many. But my misanthropy isn't scientific in nature. From a practical standpoint, I don't think we have too many people--and I'm not sure why anyone does.

For reasons I really don't understand, the ghost of Thomas Robert Malthus continues to haunt us all. His conception of plague and famine acting as an insurmountable barrier to population growth surely made sense in the early 19th century, when that had indeed been the case throughout all of human history to that point, and Malthus himself was certainly a well-respected commentator in his time. Here we are, though, in the year 2011, and people--including some very smart people--continue to revere him and insist that the day when he is going to be proven right is right around the corner. And that's fucking stupid.

Because, you see, the last two hundred years of human history have proven Malthus utterly wrong. In two centuries, the number of people on this planet has basically septupled--and our collective standard of living is at an all-time peak. We live longer and have more food and more money than ever before. As compared to the year 1800, we have seven times as many people, but our economy is more than two hundred times as productive. This is all no matter of luck, either, but evidence of the genius of people like Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk and Norman Borlaug and, yes, Steve Jobs--innovators, in other words.

This is what Malthus missed--that humans are the only animals capable of so fundamentally altering the world in which they find themselves that they can both grow and prosper. We do that by curing disease and inventing new ways to grow crops and creating the personal computer. We do it by thinking of things of which other species are literally incapable of conceiving. Someday, perhaps, we will do it by some part of us leaving this world and venturing to another. We have always done it, and even I think we will continue to do it.

So don't worry when the population hits eight billion (or nine billion, or ten billion, or . . .). We can handle it.

In other insufficiently logical news:

America: Herman Cain has had his Anita Hill moment, but he's not handling it nearly as well as Justice Thomas did nineteen years ago. How convenient it is to suddenly regain your ability to recall details of an allegation against you late in the evening, on a television network where you know you'll get the kid-glove treatment! I'm usually pretty skeptical when allegations of criminal acts just happen to surface when a person is running for President (and I don't say that with the intention of downplaying the seriousness of sexual harassment), but Cain doth protest too much here. There might be something to this.

World: Remember when I said Greece isn't far from being a Third World country? Yeah . . . Greece isn't far from being a Third World country.

Drugs are bad, pt. 1: Prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined. Sad? Yes--but for me, it's also infuriating because it indicates just how fucked up this country's drug policy is. The precise reason so many people die from overdoses of these drugs is that they are legal. The list of decent justifications for the Drug War gets shorter every day.

Drugs are bad, pt. 2: Harvard University says alcohol increases your risk of breast cancer. You know what else gets shorter all the time? The list of good reasons to drink, which I do not do at all. (The weather is quite nice up here on my high horse, thank you.)

Colorado: Thanks largely to the number of Medicare recipients in This the Finest of All States more than doubling in ten years, Governor Hickenlooper (still the greatest name for any governor in America) faces a $500 million budget deficit in the coming fiscal year, which he proposes to close with cuts to state-funded schools. Or, in other words, the imposition of one government monopoly (health care for the elderly) is costing so much money that we have to decrease the funds available for another government near-monopoly (education) which is already producing abysmal results. (Sigh.)

Anti-depressant: We may be out of money, but we'll never be out of awesome weather.