What Do Babies, Corn, and Taxes Have in Common..?

Economics has never interested me, unfortunately. But this book was so easy to read and present the information in such an exciting way that I was actually kind of excited to see what I could learn from it.

There were a lot of interesting things discussed in the book but one thing that stood to me out was the discussion of overpopulation. I was aware of the potential problem of overpopulation in humans but I had never really thought of an overpopulation in resources or either of them contributing to as many problems as they have. I didn't realize that the wealthy eat more and waste far more than the poor do. It makes sense though, since they have more resources and more things to waste. It also makes sense because people with more money can also drive cars, leading to more air pollution, creating a larger ecological footprint for those individuals. Since there are more poor than rich, you'd think that it would even out the waste but it doesn't. The rich end up having a larger impact on the earth with their wasteful habits. Those less fortunate with money tend to have more kids than those who can afford schooling and get better jobs, leading to the overpopulation in humans. But the wastefulness of the other side lead to over using resources and expecting depending on nature to provide resources and turn the waste into more resources can cause problems. These resources are good but it is possible to have too much a good thing. At one point, we had so much corn we didn't have anywhere to put it so we started feeding it to cows and pigs. The corn was not good for the cows, making them sick, so they needed drugs to feel better. Those drugs got into our water and food supply and you can figure out the rest... We also made other things that are bad for us for from the corn we overproduced, like high fructose corn syrup and ethanol, which we use to produce more corn that we didn't need. This is all in the book, but I wanted to reiterate the cycle of overpopulation in people as well as a simple crop.

I don't think we really think deeply enough about the production of certain things and what it does to us or the rest of the world. We need food to survive obviously but too much of a good thing becomes a terrible thing and lead to an increase in taxes.