Pop 101―Poverty: Where We All Started

This video from the Population Research Institute[1] is very eye-opening. The fourth in their series, it speaks about poverty and why population control has not and cannot eliminate it.

Watch the video below then click here to view the research and the proof.[2] Overpopulation is a myth.
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TRANSCRIPT

When human beings first showed up on this planet, there weren't very many of us, and we faced a hard life of meeting our basic needs. Chances are early humans spent a lot of time hungry, cold, and without shelter—that is to say, poor.

According to the World Bank, poverty is when people are deprived of well-being as a result of low income, and people aren't able to get the basic goods that they need for survival with dignity.

How did any of the human race advance beyond poverty? We kept multiplying and we formed communities. In communities people stop spending all their time on simple survival, and are able to do things like divide up tasks, share resources, and pool their mental energies to come up with creative solutions to problems. These communities started with families, then grew into extended families, entire tribes, and then finally cities and nations.

So what effect has this growth had on poverty? According to demographers, a very good one. In fact, history shows that as our numbers have grown, so has our average standard of living. Scientists measure this standard in everything from per capita income, to average amount of calories consumed, even average height. And all of these averages have been increasing. 

Even though poverty still exists, the percentage of poor people has actually decreased as population has grown. The reason for this is that human beings are not simply consumers: we are producers. This is why, over the ages, we have learned how to do things like produce more food on less land, find better energy sources, and make sure that more people have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. 

And this is also why, though urban poverty is still a huge problem, statistics show that the poor who move to large communities actually have better chances of rising from poverty than they did in areas where there were fewer jobs and less opportunity. For this reason, poverty is a problem that is not solved by eliminating people. Poverty has always been a problem, even when there were scarcely any people on the entire planet.

People are the only proven way out of poverty: removing them will only leave the poor right where they started.

Think about it.▣

ENDNOTES

[1] http://www.pop.org

[2] https://overpopulationisamyth.com/content/episode-4-poverty-where-we-all-started