I have some interesting research on a speaker I'm thinking of hiring for a company event. Apparently, Gen Y, aka "millennials", are going to save our bacon. Their generation (born '85 to '05) is even bigger than the Boomers, and once they fully hit the job market their impact is going to be as big or bigger than what the Booms did in the mid to late 70s. It's just that they're not going to shop and buy and live like their predecessors. Fascinating topic.
Another interesting point: we currently have 7 billion people on the planet, and every day we produce enough food for 14 billion and end up throwing half of it away. We don't have a production problem in feeding everyone, we have a distribution problem (caused by governments).
Another interesting point: we currently have 7 billion people on the planet, and every day we produce enough food for 14 billion and end up throwing half of it away. We don't have a production problem in feeding everyone, we have a distribution problem (caused by governments).
I remember discussing this topic back when the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was taking place. I was in college then and we had been listening to the usual denunciations of Western greed and perfidy, but it was demonstrated to be a lie, because the United States and its allies quickly organized to transport incredible amounts of food and other aid to the area, only to have the food rot on the ships in port because the government wouldn’t let the largesse into the country. It was then I discovered that famine is more about political realities than agricultural challenges, real or imagined. And if you ask any of the millennials about the subject, they will be more likely to parrot what Paul Ehrlich said than to know what Norman Borlaug did.
P.J. O'Rourke (in "All the Trouble in the World", IIRC) pointed out that every famine in the last couple hundred years might have had a natural event as an origin, but has always been propagated by government (the Irish "potato famine" a prominent example).
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I have some interesting research on a speaker I'm thinking of hiring for a company event. Apparently, Gen Y, aka "millennials", are going to save our bacon. Their generation (born '85 to '05) is even bigger than the Boomers, and once they fully hit the job market their impact is going to be as big or bigger than what the Booms did in the mid to late 70s. It's just that they're not going to shop and buy and live like their predecessors. Fascinating topic.
Another interesting point: we currently have 7 billion people on the planet, and every day we produce enough food for 14 billion and end up throwing half of it away. We don't have a production problem in feeding everyone, we have a distribution problem (caused by governments).
Another interesting point: we currently have 7 billion people on the planet, and every day we produce enough food for 14 billion and end up throwing half of it away. We don't have a production problem in feeding everyone, we have a distribution problem (caused by governments).
I remember discussing this topic back when the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was taking place. I was in college then and we had been listening to the usual denunciations of Western greed and perfidy, but it was demonstrated to be a lie, because the United States and its allies quickly organized to transport incredible amounts of food and other aid to the area, only to have the food rot on the ships in port because the government wouldn’t let the largesse into the country. It was then I discovered that famine is more about political realities than agricultural challenges, real or imagined. And if you ask any of the millennials about the subject, they will be more likely to parrot what Paul Ehrlich said than to know what Norman Borlaug did.
Much of what we know simply isn’t so.
P.J. O'Rourke (in "All the Trouble in the World", IIRC) pointed out that every famine in the last couple hundred years might have had a natural event as an origin, but has always been propagated by government (the Irish "potato famine" a prominent example).
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