Popcorn: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Save the World: Breed Smaller People

An article in the January-February issue of The Futurist magazine,1 titled “Short is Beautiful,” strongly advocated an unusual solution to the alleged problems of overpopulation and mankind’s excessive consumption of the world’s resources: breed a new human race of dwarfs!

According to Thomas T. Samaras, a “consultant in configuration management” and the article’s author, “shorter people use fewer resources [and] produce less waste…” Among the many advantages enjoyed by shorter, smaller people over their bigger brothers and sisters: “They are more efficient, require less space, and are stronger pound for pound.” Smaller people require less “food needs and resources [and] produce less waste and pollution [thereby] reducing the green-house effect, erosion of arable land, and loss of tropical forests.”

Bigger people on the other hand, require “more food and water, fertilizers and pesticides, more land for farms, homes, factories, and shopping malls…more medicines (which are prescribed on the basis of weight), more energy for heating and cooling…transportation…food production and delivery, and waste disposal, and more resources for materials to make almost everything, from…clothing to cars and houses.”

Samaras noted a new “dangerous trend developing” among people in the world’s developing countries: as their standard of living rises and their access to more and better foods and medicines increases, so too does their height and size, This, he says, will be “another source of trouble” for an already overburdened world.

Pointing to Japan, where the current “crop of youngsters” are 3”–5” taller than their grandparents, Samaras predicts that as a consequence the Japanese “will pay a high price in terms of huge construction, material, land, pollution, waste management, and medical costs” in the near future. Samaras warns that “Unless developing countries take immediate action, they will follow Japan’s path and will thwart economic and societal development .…”

Accordingly, Samaras argues, mankind needs to control not only the numbers of people on Earth, but also ‘“their physical size.”

To prepare the world to accept the new “tiny is better” philosophy, Samaras advocates instructional programs “in schools and in the media, providing a more favorable view of smaller stature.” School textbooks, television and movies would all portray the benefits of smaller size. Additionally, “government, business, and environmental planners could [would?] identify the impact of larger or smaller people on future projects and long-term planning.”

Samaras sees the “United Nations, the National Institutes of Health, universities, and state health departments,..play[ing] critical roles…in educat[ing] government leaders on the harmful ramifications of increasing stature .…” Eventually, the stage will be set to “facilitate a progressive reduction in human size.”

As a first approach, Mr. Samaras has already contacted a “nutrition theorist” who believes that we can “reduce the average height of people by 6”–8” through dietary restrictions.” Ultimately, an “average height of 4’ to 4’6” would be the smallest” Samaras would want to get to!

But fear not — according to anecdotal “evidence” presented by Samaras, short men may “even be better lovers.” Unfortunately, Samaras did not report on the sexual prowess of short women.

Cornucopia!

“Imagine a train more than 20,000 miles long, with over two million box-cars full of corn. The train would reach from New York to San Francisco more than six times.

“That’s the size of the U.S. com crop as predicted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Crop Reporting Board. In stark figures it comes to 4,577,864,000 bushels.”

Pretty incredible, huh? But the language quoted was written 25 years ago about the 1969 U.S. corn harvest!2

The 1994 U.S. com harvest was more than twice the size — over 10.l billion bushels, a new all-time record and more corn than was grown in the entire world just 25 years ago.3 To carry last year’s corn harvest more than 4.4 million box-cars would be required in a train stretching over 44,000 miles — more than one-sixth of the distance to the moon!

But corn wasn’t the only record U.S. crop. New records were set in both rice — 138.5 million hundred weights (CWT) milled basis — and soybean production (2.5 billion bushels), while the U.S. wheat crop of 2.3 billion bushels was “only” the fourth largest in history.4 The corn, rice and soybean crops also achieved new record yields per acre.5

Meanwhile, Lester Brown and his Worldwatch Institute, Paul Ehrlich and Zero Population Growth, Werner Fornos and his Population Institute, and David Pimentel and the Carrying Capacity Network, continue to bemoan the alleged loss of productivity of U.S. farmland and predict future famines.