Population Growth Problematic for States

To understand anything about the population, one must know what the term demography means and what it is. "Demography is the study of population change and characteristics." Any population can change in matters of size and/or composition. Demographic measures are accounted for by three main components. The three components are birth, death, and migration. The equation for population change is P= (+) births (-) deaths (+) in-migration (-) out migration.

There are positive and negative outlooks on human population growth. Along with outlooks, there are many different perspectives on population growth as well. There are two main types of people with viewpoints. Cornucopian has optimistic viewpoints while Malthusians has pessimistic viewpoints.

The relationship between population and society has been a reflective topic since the beginning of many cultures. Confucianism in China and even Plato in early Greece have discussed the needs for a balance between the population and its resources. Thomas Malthus, an influential thinker from the end of the eighteenth century, "published his essay about the principle of population in 1798." His perspective on population growth was that reproduction desire would eventually lead to starvation and poverty. Meaning that the more people there are the more mouths there are that need to be fed. Therefore, more resources are going to be needed. The rapid increase in population would outrun the pace of food production because of the need of more food. The lack of control over growing populations would result in environmental destruction. The destruction would become unstoppable. Thomas Malthus saw the result of more people being a competition for natural resources through wars, famine and resource depletion. Malthus and neo-Malthusians, the people whom he influenced, advocated delayed marriage and abstinence in a way to reverse the negative effects of population growth. Today's neo-Malthusians attempt to limit family size by using contraceptives.

On the other hand, the perspective of the Cornucopian was that population growth would be valuable in relations to economic growth and prosperity. They believe that the need of society, such as natural resources, can be taken care of by technology advances. They view more people as a good thing because there are more brains to create new ideas to generate technology. The technology ideas that they create are ones to improve people's quality of life.

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