Overpopulation Is Not the Problem

> Pretty sure if the baby of a famous couple was kidnapped today, it would make headlines ...

The modern equivalent would be the kidnapping of a celebrity's child, by a stranger, for money. Such things happen every day now, but they don't become the focus of the world's attention. The Lindbergh kidnapping tells us something about the nature of the world before modern times.

> And random violent acts do often lead to reform.

Are you serious? Here is a list of school shootings from colonial times to the present:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...

The trend is obvious -- there's nothing resembling reform, and as time passes, the body counts keep going up. Why? The population has become too dense to meaningfully prevent instances of mass death by wacko. This problem can only get worse as population density increases.

> At the same time, evidence shows better status and education yields fewer births.

That's very true, there's no dispute about that. But because of natural selection, the low-birth-rate educated are replaced by the high-birth-rate uneducated, which changes nothing. Those who think that's too gloomy need only read the history of efforts to control bacterial resistance to antibiotics -- we know why this happens, and we have teams of scientists addressing the issue, but we don't seem to be able to do anything about it:

http://mrsa-research-center.bsd.uchicago.edu/timeline.html

> You take your gloomy point too far.

Do you think I take this too far? Wait until you see what nature does with it.

You started out somewhat promising, but then you use anecdotes to try to support your view. The big flaw with that is that your anecdotes are cherry picked to support your point, and are just as easily defeated with other anecdotes.

E.g. in Europe the story of Madeleine McCann, a girl that disappeared in 2007 is still regularly getting headlines, not just in the UK where she grew up, but elsewhere as well (I'm Norwegian, and regularly see her covered in the Norwegian press, for example).

When I wanted to look up the year she disappeared, autocomplete on google brought up her name by the time I got to "mad". A search for "madeleine" on google.co.uk brings "findmadeleine.com" in the first spot, and a picture of her and three headlines from the last two days related to her case, and a further 4 links on the first page.

Why? Because the parents have raised hell, and because of all kinds of intrigue (allegations of all kinds of things flying from her parents against the investigators; by some people involved in the investigation against the parents; and more).

Add to that fame, and the amount of attention the Lindbergh story got was "nothing special", especially given the circumstances:

In the Madeleine McCann case, there is no body, no real suspects, and there's been little news for the last 3-5 years or so.

In the Lindbergh case, after two months the baby was found, the subsequent investigation lasted for "only" two years, and then came the court case and trial. The whole thing was 4 years where there was a steady availability of actual new developments: The race to try to find the baby; finding the body; the hunt for suspects in what was now a gruesome baby murder rather than "just" a kidnapping; the court case, with a suspect that insisted on his innocence; the execution, with a suspect that still insisted on his innocence. Coupled with a famous couple as the distraight and grieving parents. It was an intense human interest story.

If anything, the Madeleine McCann case shows that it's possible to sustain media interest far longer than with the Lindbergh case, even for parents that were not celebrities, even today, as long as the human interest angle is there.

Syria is poor comparison: At some point when the number of people go up, our empathy dampens. That's nothing new - it's basic psychology: We can't deal with the numbers; we can't personalise it.

It's something e.g. aid organizations (like psychologists) have known for decades, when they parade some little malnourished girl in ads and ask us to adopt her, by name, rather than give us the raw numbers, that ought to be far more horrifying and get us to react far more strongly.

Showing that we are reacting even less to mass deaths would be big news, and requires rather more than some anecdotes.

> The child's parents were, a fact you seem to be ignoring in your analysis ...

Comparable modern stories don't get the same coverage, because they're now too common. That was my only point.

Charles Lindbergh was arguably the most celebrated man of his time. From wikipedia:

"Within a year of his flight, a quarter of Americans (an estimated thirty million) personally saw Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. Over the remainder of 1927 applications for pilot's licenses in the U.S. tripled, the number of licensed aircraft quadrupled, and U.S. Airline passengers grew between 1926 and 1929 by 3,000% from 5,782 to 173,405."

The Lindbergh kidnapping made headlines for years because of that celebrity status (and the sensationalism of the story and the trial), not because people back then were more sensitive to death.

As other people here have commented, the Lindburgh kidnapping happened 1932. What better argument can be made for that generation's forgetfulness about "mass death" (as you put it) than pointing out that WWII and its tens of millions of deaths happened after tens of millions died in WWI? If anything, we are much more vigilant now.

The problem with this thinking is a failure to realize that we are already taxing the Earth far beyond its carrying capacity. To continue supporting even our current population will force us to devastate our planet to the point that we won't recognize it in 50-100 years. What's the point of supporting more people if we bring them into a miserable world?

Certainly we COULD continue developing innovations that harness and shape the natural world to support continued human population growth... but that line of thinking doesn't give room to consider whether we SHOULD do that.

Should population growth be a goal? What about raising the standard of living of all those who are already on the planet - helping them move from mere sustenance to abundance, and the opportunity to explore the true wonders life has to offer?

Should we live in a world void of natural beauty? I don't think it's a fair trade to have a few more billion people on the planet if everyone then has to read about how beautiful the Earth was before we poisoned the seas, melted the ice caps and drained the soil of its nutrients.

We are at a point now where we as a Human race can and should be thinking about our population growth responsibly. To suggest that we COULD adapt to a future world taxed by overpopulation doesn't imply that we SHOULD follow that path.