The event I attended was “Is the World Overpopulated and How Would We Know?” by Steven Landsburg for Adam Smith week. Mr. Landsburg is a well known and respective economist that was a pleasure in getting to listen in on one of his talk, because my economics class is currently reading one of his many book “The Armchair Economist”. The talk began with him saying we know when there is something that is too much or too little is when the cost of your actions spill over and effect other people you this is when you have too much. With pollution there are too few volunteers picking up trash in parks, because it does not benefit them as much as it does the other people who do not volunteer. We have to look at the incentive of the decision makers. People make these incentives based on the cost and benefits that there actions have. Mr. Landsburg continued on to answer his question, is the world overpopulated by making a chart. He states in the end that making this chart is the only productive way to think about the problem. The decision makers who control the population is parents. Parents before having a child look at the cost and benefits (while looking at this Landsburg ignored the benefit of the gift of life, only the children already alive).
Landsburg did mention how the Industrial Revolution began this major population change. I thought this was interesting because those are one of the three assumptions that we have discussed in our class. Steven Landsburg answered his question that there is no overpopulation in the world. He argues that we need more people because this creates new ideas that allow could better (or worse) the economy and we need diversity around the world (engineers, doctors, and farmers). As long as that are decisions being made are not spilling over onto other people then there is no problem. After his talk, I took some time to reflect on what he said. Instead of completely denying his information, I put myself in his shoe and wondered where he was coming from. As an environmentalist, I could not fully agree on how he believed that overpopulation does not exist. He only contributes to the fact how much the United States has improved but does not recognize the cases for other nations that do not have the same well-being as we do. There are many social problems that are not being talked about only because they don’t involve the U.S but that is not how I think it should be. Waters are contaminated because our companies are extracting the resources from these Non-OECD nations. To me, this is a very anthropocentric view when dealing with the population because it does not take into consideration the planet as a whole. It focuses more on the human benefits and cost but does to me the cost is not seen as to the extreme as they should be. Although I have some disagreements about this talk I did enjoy hearing Steven Landsburg’s perspective and did learn a lot about economics from his talk.
