Re: population: real problem, or capitalist plot?

Paul-

I've been reflecting on this debate and I have seen the light -- like the
figure/ground reversal that happens after you stare at one of those dual
image things for awhile.

You are right.  I was wrong.  (I have become sensitized to the problem of
dogmatism, and I would hate to be a hypocrite.)

I reread the appropriate sections from Sanderson's "Macrosociology," and I
have concluded that Boserup's theory is misnamed.  Population pressure is
a constant, as you say, so the key feature of Boserup and Carneiro's
theories has to do with the environment within which the human population
is located.  This is already explicit in Carneiro, though,
(circumscription in a fertile river valley surrounded by desert, for
instance) so I don't see the problem in that case.  In the case of
Boserup, perhaps the theory should be renamed the "population/technology
spiral" to indicate the successive ratcheting that takes place every time
new subsistence technology is introduced.

RH