Weathermen and Economists have always had the best jobs. They get to be wrong over 50% of the time and still keep their jobs and their 401(k)'s. To add to that short list would be professors who churn out books filled with made-up data created to scare the bejesus out of us, then go on to enjoy the book tour, then the book is debunked yet they still have their cushy job and tenure.

Sucks to be us, eh?

Remember the book on overpopulation in the late sixties? Oh what was that called? Oh yes! The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich. He promised us we would experience famines between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. Promised that in the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in spite of any programs embarked on immediately. He discusssed his solution to the overpopulation: "compulsory birth regulation...through the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size." Go into any bathroom in the late sixties and throughout the seventies and you'd find that well-thumbed book there.

His book and Soylent Green are still used as the basis to shout " overpopulation!" in a crowded theatre and to blame innocent, everyday human beings minding their own business of creating all kinds of horrors like famine, global warming, climate change, poverty, crime. But with the advent of computers, computer models and crunching the numbers, overpopulation has been debunked. Over and over. Only to rear its ugly head whenever there is a dictator creating famine and poverty and wants to distract you from his culpability or a government that wants to tax you to oblivion.

Even though the New York Times rightly listed it as "one of the myths of the 20th century" in its January 1, 2000 Millennium Edition, it's a myth that just won't die.

As Abid Ullah Jan writes, over the years many researchers have authentically proved that the problem is not too many people at all. World population growth is rapidly declining. United Nations figures showed in 2003 that 79 countries that comprise 40% of the worlds population had fertility rates too low to prevent population decline.

Overpopulation, he points out, is a relative term. Over with respect to what? Food? Resources? Living Space? The data shows that no case can be made for overpopulation with respect to all three variables. It is true that the world has been experiencing a population increase that began in the eighteenth century. Population rose six-fold in the next 200 years. But this is an increase, not an explosion because it has been accompanied by a productivity explosion, a resource explosion, a food explosion, an information explosion, a communication explosion, a science explosion and a medical explosion.

The result is that the six-fold increase in world population is dwarfed by the eighty-fold increase in world output during the same 200 year period.

That is the part that the Overpopulation Hysterics always overlook. People change, grow and evolve. Systems are put into place to cope with larger populations. We are not a static humanity. We invent things. We are made up of both the mundane and divine. Yet the Population Alarmists can't get their mind around that. It's always just an endgame to them.

Paul Erlich started the overpopulation hysteria with his book that scared people with its prophesies of starvation, death and destruction. However, the exact opposite has occurred.

Fewer than half as many people die from famine each year now than a century ago, even though our population has quadrupled. Many of those deaths today are the direct result of politcal action by ruthless dictators and not a lack of food. As Abid points out, to put it simply "the hungry are hungry because they are excluded from the land or cannot earn enough to survive and not because of a natural limit to the amount of food that can be produced." Lord Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics pointed out that the so-called "population explosion" of the 20th century should be seen "as a blessing rather than a disaster, because it stems from a fall in mortality, a prima facie improvement in people's welfare."

Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 argues that famines in the Third World are not caused by actual food shortages but institutional failure. The great famine of Bangladesh in 1974 occurred in a year of greater food availability per head than in any other year between 1971 and 1976. Instead it was the Bangladesh Government that owned 40% of the industry and regulated with price controls and high taxes administered by a huge, corrupt, foreign-aid dependent bureaucracy that caused the famine. The problems were caused by that country's flawed domestic policies, not too many people. The same can be said of Africa today. It is like putting on golden handcuffs when you turn your own freedom and power over to a neglectful, soul-less, unaccountable entity called government.

The 7.0 earthquake that struck just off the coast of Haiti Tuesday hit a country that was in bad enough shape already. The poorest nation in the western hemisphere, Haitians have suffered in recent decades through multiple coup d’etats and the breakdown of law and order, as well as poverty and hunger. Obviously, a 7.0 quake is bad news in general, but it’s especially so for people who live in shantytowns and can’t count on their government for relief or support - thus was Big Salons headline Tuesday, a perfect real-time example of a country that doesn't need to be impoverished but is, due to nothing more than government corruption.

The West only enables evil and dictatorships when it calls government corruption "overpopulation" and "global warming". Call evil what it is. We don't live in a finite world; for every problem there are always several solutions which don't involve taxing the citizenship into poverty or paying farmers not to grow nutritious food.

John N. Doggett sums it up succinctly. "The problem is not that there are too many of us. We can produce enough food to feed 6 billion to 16 billion. The problem is that governments in far too many countries care more about maintaining political power than the well-being of their people."

Government corruption and callousness has turned many natural resource "rich" countries into poor countries. Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and the Congo are examples of natural resource rich countries whose corrupt, anticapitalistic policies have consigned most of their citizens to lives of grinding poverty. Chile, who used to be in those ranks, has moved on. Chile's war on corruption, investment in its people and downsizing of its government has made all the difference. If every country adopted the Chilean model, poverty as we know it would be eliminated by the end of this century.

What about the starving people? They do exist and their suffering is totally unnecessary. Doggett points out that not only the United States but Japan and Western Europe pay farmers not to produce food. If American, Candadian, Latin American and Western European farmers were encouraged to plant as much as possible and process as much as possible, the world would drown in food.

You want number crunching? If you gave every person on Planet Earth an acre of land, Europe, Asia, Africa and half of Latin America and North America would be empty. Antigrowth arguments that we are running out of land are just plain wrong. The vast majority of the planet's inhabitable surface is empty of human inhabitants. Demographers have calculated that the entire world population in 1984 could have fit into the state of Texas, allotting 1500 square feet per person.

So go ahead, have a baby! Have two!