The earth, as large as it is, has a fixed number of resources, most of which are renewable. Oil, coal, ground water, and clean air, for instance, are all renewable resources; unfortunately it takes thousands of years to replenish even a small oil well or coal deposit. Because resources take time to replenish themselves, there is a fixed amount of oil, water, coal, clean air, wood, and topsoil that can be used in a given year.

Further complicating matters is the fact that humans do not consume resources with perfect efficiency. An engine, for instance, that is able to use eighty percent of the energy from the combustion of its fuel would be ridiculously efficient by current standards.

There also are resources we don’t currently use at all, resources we haven’t found a use for; oil is an excellent historic example. Before the widespread popularity of the internal combustion engine oil was far less valuable; experts in that time period would likely have limited their estimates of energy resources to coal deposits.

Just as there is a limit to the amount of resources available to us, there is also a minimum amount of resources each person must consume in a given year in order to survive. People must eat, they must have clean drinking water and shelter, and occasionally they need medical attention.

The amount of resources available per year (A) times efficiency of consumption (B), therefore, is equal to the minimum consumption (X) times the maximum sustainable population of an ecosystem (Y)￼. Similarly, to find average standard of living ￼ where Y is the current population and X is the amount of resources available per person, per year.

Basically, the more efficiently we use and distribute our resources, the more there seem to be, and the fewer people sharing a pie, the more pie each person can have.

There is little we can do to change either our endowment of resources, or the minimum amount of resources needed to sustain human life. What is vitally important, therefore, is the relationship between technological efficiency and population; as we use our resources more efficiently, our planet can support more life.

More importantly, however, is the fact that technological advancement in excess of population growth equates to people living better lives while population growth in excess of technological advance leads to a decrease in standard of living and, eventually, some combination of disease, starvation, war, or infertility – ultimately a decline in population growth – as we grow beyond our ecosystem’s ability to support us.

These declines can be easily explained. If people have just enough to survive and population increases, people will starve. Starvation weakens the body, aiding the spread of disease; disease, meanwhile, can lead to infertility and the absolute need for resources justifies violent means of attaining them.

Human psychology further complicates matters, as people measure their own well-being by comparing it to that of their neighbors. Most people in modern societies have no real concept of the minimum amount of resources needed for survival. A poor person in the United States, for example, may have plenty to eat, a decent place to live, and decent clothes, but would still feel poor because everyone else seems to have more.

This same principle can be extended to a middle class person in a rich neighborhood. The bottom line is that regardless of how high or low a person’s standard of living is they will inevitably fight to prevent it from declining. Furthermore, there is a surplus of people unsatisfied with their current allotment of resources, people looking to move up.

Therefore, population growth in excess of technological advance leads to catastrophe – a decline in population growth.

People from the poorest (agricultural) countries reproduce at a much higher rate than people from fully developed (urban) economies. They have developed based on the assumption that, first, more kids will lead to better productivity, which equates to economic well-being and, second, several of those kids will die during childhood. There is, therefore, a much greater emphasis on family and fertility. Because the main role of women is that of child-bearer they are less likely to be educated and far less likely to be accepted in a work environment.

Normally these cultural differences would be offset by a higher death rate that would decline along with the birthrate as the country developed economically. Despite cultural mores and the resultant high birthrates, population growth would be controlled. The natural processes mentioned earlier would ensure ecological equilibrium. Right now, however, industrialized countries are focused on controlling the death rate rather than helping poorer countries develop economically, resulting in the most rapid population growth in human history.

The governments of the industrialized world are seeking security, meaning re-election. They avoid unpopular public action. So they stop war when they can, they try to limit problems like mass starvation and widespread disease, they try to maintain stability to keep businesses and consumers happy by enabling trade, and they try to accomplish all this at a discount because the only thing businesses and consumers hate more than taxes is taxes intended to benefit someone else.

These are all good things but the long-term result of these actions could be very bad because the only way to address all these problems at a discount has been to ignore the root cause and treat the symptoms. It is the equivalent of a patient avoiding a simple but painful surgery in favor of daily medication with dangerous long-term side effects. Poor countries will become more populated and it will become increasingly expensive to treat the symptoms. At some point the weight of supporting so many people at a minimum standard of living will become so great that rich countries will have to either change policies or allow their economies to collapse.

Furthermore, the longer this trend continues, the more difficult economic growth will be. For a poor country too develop socially and economically without catastrophic damage to the environment while dealing with the problem of overpopulation is too much too ask. A cash-strapped country cannot simultaneously finance public housing, water purification, welfare, and health care while building roads, airports, sea ports, schools, and giving loans to would-be business people.

If rich countries continue to simply focus on prolonging life and preserving stability they will be forced to choose between allowing disease, starvation, and war to take its course in the third world or allowing the world economy to collapse. They need to act now, redirect some of their military spending to foreign development, force their businesses to pay foreign workers decent wages, invest in infrastructure and capital goods, and educate people from disadvantaged countries with the intent of returning them to their own countries.

Most importantly, however, women need to get a good education. Educated, urban women have more options and, therefore, have fewer children. Given a choice, some women will choose not to have kids, and those that have kids tend to have fewer when their income is less dependant on children as a source of free labor. Therefore, educated urban women reproduce at a slower rate.

Furthermore, educated women that stay at home and raise children usually raise smarter children.

What troubles me is that world leaders either ignore or fail to understand the consequences of their actions.

Developed countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, Australia, and most of Europe send billions of dollars in aid to underdeveloped countries to prevent people from dying of starvation or disease and spend billions more to maintain vast militaries to prevent war. I can understand these actions; no one wants people to die and these actions prevent millions of deaths.

If we continue down this path, however, it could mean a drastic decline for our entire civilization. I certainly am not suggesting we forget about the “third-world” or that we leave them to their own devices, but I am vehemently opposed to the idea of international welfare as a long-term solution to the problem of an unequal distribution of income between nations. The industrialized world needs to bite the bullet, making the investment needed to fix the root problem, poverty, before the symptoms get out of control and before we decimate .