Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

(09-16-2017, 10:39 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: > Wars, even crisis wars, do not generally result in a reduction in
> the number of people. For example, the US had a higher population
> in 1865 than in 1860, despite the terrible toll of the Civil
> War.

It's more nuanced than that. The entire US may have increased in
population during the Civil War, but that includes regions that
weren't involved in the war, and had plenty of farmland growing food.
But particular regions were wiped out, and it would be an interesting
research project to determine whether those regions are correlated
regions that lacked food. I would guess that there is a correlation,
since urban areas with highly dense population would be the easiest
targets of a war, and would also be the places where food is the most
scarce.

Here's a graph of the population of China from 200 BC to 1700 AD.
Every time the population goes above the line, people are starving --
until the next war kills enough millions of people so that "food
technology" can catch up, and the population falls below the line.



In my 2010 article on the Mongol invasion of China, I wrote about
this:

** 6-Dec-10 News -- Mongol invasion of China in 1206 has impact today
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e101206

I quoted the "Chinese Malthus" who figured out that population grows
faster than the food supply.

And that's the whole point. The population grows faster than the food
supply. Both grow exponentially, but the population grows faster.
(This has to be true, because if the population grew slower than the
food supply, then there would be excess food and people would have
more children, so the population would grow faster than the food
supply.)

So there's really no choice. There has to be something -- wars of
extermination, disease, famine -- at regular intervals to redress this
imbalance. And that's why it has to be true that generational Crisis
wars have to kill off enough people so that everyone else can be fed.
However, the exact mechanisms that bring that about have to be
researched.