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Laws of Development: Population

 

                                                                                                October  2, 1999

Overpopulation has been a phenomenon of life. Mostly it was solved by the rules of demand and supply. Famine has been the force that has restored the balance between population and food supply. In fact, the population of the world has increased with the increasing capacity of man to produce food. Maybe this correspondence has been recognized in demographic studies and anthropology. This is a physical fact about population.

There is another and opposite fact about it. When a nation is capable by virtue of resources, education and organisation, the greater the population the stronger it is. Before coming to the strategy nations can adopt, we must analyse population from all possible angles. It is true POPULATION is a problem to overcome POVERTY and it intensifies poverty.

Problem for poverty.

            A country with a high density of population has risen high in the scale of prosperity as seen in the Netherlands. Even in Jakarta the population has not dampened the process of development, rather it has hastened it to an extent.

Population is strength for the strong.

            Population can become a non-issue even as other material resources can become non-issues. A material becomes a resource by mind recognizing its value or creating it. The value lies in the mind, not in the material. For nations below the LINE, population becomes a problem. Not only population, even vast territory may become a problem as it did with Mexico in the last century.

            The line decides the character of a resource. The resource by itself has no character. Above it is an endowment, below it becomes an encumbrance.

            Evolutionarily population exerts the pressure the society needs for changing. In that sense, it is one of the external sources of pressure on man to awake physically.

Population is a non-issue.

Population exerts evolutionary pressure.

Artifical control of the population is effective, but its psychological effects are not always desirable. Physical control shifts the pressure to the vital. In that view control of population leads to evolutionary growth.

Effective, undesirable control. Control is evolutionary.

            Even when absorbed into nation building or personal career growth, the excess of energy does not seem to have desirable expression.

Excess spills over. Even growth cannot fully absorb the excess.

                The most populous nations in future becoming the most powerful nations is a possibility. Population is power. More than the numbers, the age group in which the higher numbers will emerge will determine the nature of the problem. Not the numbers, but the age groups.

            As the rural population of the 18th and 19th centuries became the urban population of the 20th century, the 21st century may be one of senile and juvenile population. Migration into old age and teenage.

            Population can become immaterial even as the size of the territory became immaterial to democracies that do not initiate wars.

Size does not count, nor the numbers.

What matters is the quality, not the quantity.

            Controlling the population is useful and necessary, but in a wider view, control is that thing we exercise because it is possible. Population is a physical problem like floods or predators. To control is good for now. But let us remember that it is floods that enrich the soil by their sediments.



story | by Dr. Radut