Ian Morris Quotes
Development has to rise if population is going to increase, Otherwise people will starve and all kinds of other problems.
Ian Morris, Historian & Archaeologist, Presentation, C-SPAN Book TV, March 31, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
From a technical and production point of view, there is no practical limit to population size that is imposed by food production. We can produce sufficient food for the world even if population increases dramatically. None the less, even today we have some starvation and much malnutrition problems. These however are political, economic and tend to be distributional. We can produce the food. Morris does NOT advocate large population growth. Although food need not be a problem with an expanding population, job availability, medical care, energy, land, natural resources, ethnic hatred, migration, violence, and other problems are produced by population growth.
See {621891} for a similar view.
The relationship of population increase economic growth is a critical one. If an underdeveloped country manages to have a 3% annual economic growth rate and also has a 3.2% population growth, at the end of the year, the average person is actually poorer than he was the previous year. South Korea, China, Thailand and India implemented successful population control and family planning programs before they were able to take advantage of economic development. To modernize, the country must be able to have a surplus of funds which can be invested in roads, schools, hospitals, and other facilities which can produce even more growth later. Too many new mouths to feed, clothe and care for can be a barrier to development even if the economy is reasonably good.
Although the Premier recognizes the importance of environmental protection it is difficult for China and other developing countries to make the necessary trade off’s at the expense of slower growth which means continued poverty. Even in the United States with all its affluence, slowing economic growth for environmental reasons is politically very difficult.
What is also neglected very often is that America and the other developed nations exploited and destroyed much of their own environment in the process of developing yet they express concern that the lesser developed nations will do what they do.
Ian Matthew Morris is a British archaeologist, historian, and academic. He is currently Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
