Weblog by Carl

Found in a comment at VodkaPundit:

... Check the CIA World Factbook: China has 9,326,410 square kilometers of land, and holds 1.3 billion people. Do simple math--population divided by square miles--and you'll find that China has a crushing population density of less than 140 people per square kilometer.
 
Hong Kong, the richest and most prosperous city in that nation, and also one of the most populous, holds 7 million people in 6,294 square kilometers, for a population density of 1,112 people per square kilometer.
 
By comparison, the State of New York in the United States has a population density of 155 people per square kilometer, i.e. denser than China's. And New York City, has a population density of 10,292 people per square kilometer.
 
You could fit 8 billion people--more than the entire world population--in one Canadian province and be less crowded than that.
 
Overpopulation is a myth. Not one single democratic nation (democratic as defined by Freedom House, which is a source recognized and used by political scientists) has ever experienced a famine. We currently produce more than enough food to feed the entire world population easily. The only reason anyone starves is oppressive governments, not overpopulation or anything else...

It's a promising argument, although I think it needs work. Hong Kong and New York aren't vaccuums within which they're self-sufficient, but they're still successful communities. I cannot claim to understand the way dense-population economies function.

The commenter has his own blog entry about the issue.