“Overpopulation” is a word we don’t hear much these days. Once upon a time (like 30 or 40 years ago) we worried that too many people would put too much strain on our planet’s resources, and a whole lot of us thought it might be a good idea to limit populations or even to reduce them.

Have you noticed that traffic is worse than it was back in (insert your favorite year here)? That’s because there are a lot more people in the U.S. today than there were back then, and they drive farther to work then they used to. More people = more cars = more traffic.

What about high oil prices? And fears about running out of oil? If we had fewer people we wouldn’t need as much oil.

Starvation in Africa? Fewer people there would mean that available agricultural resources would be under less stress. And less population pressure would mean fewer wars and fewer war deaths.

Meanwhile, back here in the U.S., why do companies need to be bigger each year? What’s up with all this “growth” stuff, anyway? Why shouldn’t more companies concentrate on being smaller and doing their jobs better instead of going for sheer size? There was once a saying: “Quality is more important than quantity.”

Why don’t more managements worry about putting out better widgets instead of more widgets? And in the process of making fewer but better widgets, wouldn’t there be room for higher unit profits? Apple seems to get this; I am not in love with Apple in many ways, but it’s a company that seems to realize that it’s better to put out a premium, high-markup computer than to see how cheaply it can make tons of crappy computers.

Please note that Apple seems to earn a nice profit by applying this philosophy.

When it comes to immigration, do we really need to have a whole lot of new people in our country? I keep hearing employers say they can’t grow unless they have immigrant workers. So why grow? Why not stay small or get smaller, pay American workers a little more, and be happy with a lower-stress life?

Without constantly trying to stack more people on top of one another, we’d save a lot of money on growth-oriented infrastructure, and we wouldn’t be moving toward a culture where a few people live in homes with more bedrooms (and acres) than people, while a growing percentage at the bottom of the economic pile are forced to squeeze increasing numbers of people into small apartments.

Fewer people means more unspoiled wilderness. It means less-crowded beaches. It means more trees and parks for each of us.

To me, quality of life beats quantity of life every time.

But I freely admit that I lack ambition. All I’ve ever wanted is a relaxed, pleasant, reasonably humble, low-stress life even though I live in a world where that kind of life seems a little harder to achieve every year.

As Kurt Vonnegut often said, “So it goes.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 8:20 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.