Letters: where did St Blaise go?

Too many not too few

Sir: I have to disagree with your article ‘The people problem’ (3 February). There is a ‘people problem’ in the world but it is – globally – not too few, but too many people. In my own lifetime the world’s population has approximately tripled. This rate of increase is manifestly unsustainable. It has only been sustained to date because of the globalised and technologically sophisticated world order we have developed, an order which cannot necessarily be counted on. Yes, population levels are in gradual decline in some relatively affluent countries. So what? Perhaps there may be too few young people, but your piece ignores one important piece of the jigsaw: technological change.

The view that economic output is fundamentally affected by the presence or absence of labour (an argument curiously resonant of Marx’s labour theory of value) leaves technology out of account. Advances in artificial intelligence and technology generally will mean human labour, whether by hand or brain, will count for less and less in the future. The problem may in fact be finding meaningful work for many people to do at all. A declining population is likely to help meet this challenge, even if it won’t nullify it. An expanding population will do the opposite. What we need is a steady-state population, neither rising nor falling significantly year by year. However it must be based on a sustainable base population, which we simply don’t have at the moment.

Michael Towsey

London

Gulf between

Sir: Anna Somers Cocks’s account of her time in the United Arab Emirates with the Art Newspaper (‘Arabian nightmare’, 3 February) reminds me of my brief sojourn in 1996 as the first editor of the Sharjah-based daily the Gulf Today. Asked to produce an international publication, we were proud of our groundbreaking reporting on social issues, such as inbreeding and labour abuses.