The shadow of the world's future, or The earth's population possibilities & the consequences of the present rate of increase of the earth's inhabitants

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1775636852

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-164018

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Knibbs, George Handley http://d-nb.info/gnd/1045010944

Title:: The shadow of the world's future, or The earth's population possibilities & the consequences of the present rate of increase of the earth's inhabitants

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Ernest Benn Limited

Year of publication:: (1928)

Scope:: 131 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

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Title:: Chapter IV. The world's cereal and food-corps and its mineral needs

Collection:: Economics Books

46 THE SHADOW OF THE WORLD’S FUTURE resources which our increasing knowledge and power have placed at our disposal. It is only too easy to make the advantages, which accrue through a more sensible use of our earth’s surface, disappear. Thus comparing the different standards-of-living which are characteristic of the various peoples of the earth at the present time, we see that there is no fixed limit to human desire for luxury. If, then, we consider the further possible expansion of the spirit of luxuriousness, we recognise that there is no unique solution to the problem before us. For there is no intrinsic limit to human desires, and the luxury of to-day tends to become the penury of to-morrow. It is because of this that the population-problem is not merely a mathematico-physical one. It involves our whole conception of life. Our social and our ethical traditions are real factors in the adjustment of communities to world-conditions. The evidence of this may be seen in a nation’s consideration, for example, of what may reasonably be expected by its citizens in respect of the standard-of-living to which it deems them to be entitled. Thus it immediately affects the solution of the migration question. One nation has experts who solve its population-possibilities on the assumption that its existing mode of living is to continue, whatever may happen elsewhere. Another people object to the rapid influx of others because it affects the non-economic rate, judged by world- standards, at which, for example, even unskilled labour is rewarded. The significance of the acceleration of the rates of production of the minerals and metals, before referred to, the rate at which forests are being exploited for timber wants and for paper, and indeed also that of the mere rate of human increase, is readily seen by considering the actual meaning of any such rates, in a suitable way. The rate of increase of individual

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