'The World Might Actually Run Out of People' (wired.com) 478
An anonymous reader shares a report: By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations. But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end." But Empty Planet is not a book about statistics so much as it is about what's driving the choices people are making during the fastest period of change in human history.
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end." But Empty Planet is not a book about statistics so much as it is about what's driving the choices people are making during the fastest period of change in human history.
OK, you lost me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most trusted world authorities - the UN?! The same UN that puts Sudan on the "Human Rights Committee"?
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
All extrapolation on this level is meaningless.
In three decades, we will have invented technologies that we cannot now imagine, and they will change our incentives, and our culture, in ways we cannot now understand.
We will adapt to whatever happens in whatever way seems to make the most sense, which cannot be predicted from where we sit now, completely ignorant of the very changes that will drive that adaptation.
The only thing we know for sure is that the rate of change is faster than it has ever been. Making all long-term predictions useless.
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. And perhaps most obviously, a reduction in population almost certainly means a redution in population density and personal stress, both of which reduce fertility rates in many/most mammals.
Even a 99% reduction in population from current levels wouldn't be real a problem (aside from the logistics of supporting a shrinking, elder-heavy population), in fact a return to 1800-level population would eliminate virtually all of the major problems our species is currently facing. And trying to project current trends into a world with with 100x more land and resources per person than today, along with the benefits of much-better-than-modern automation? Sheer foolishness.
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it? Right now the vast majority of the global population is stuck in economic conditions that pretty much preclude them making any contribution to the advancement of science or technology. If we eliminated all of that poverty as the population shrank, we could reduce the population to a small fraction of its current size without affecting the number of contributors significantly. After that point, yes, advancement would likely slow - but so would the need for the many advancements needed just to try to solve the problems created by the last round of advancements.
And of course there's the fact that technological progress is arguably advancing exponentially, and much faster than the population is growing. In which case you could potentially reduce the number of scientists and engineers quite rapidly while the pace of advancement continued to increase, though obviously more slowly than it otherwise might.
It's also not entirely clear that technology actually has much to offer in terms of improving standard of living. At least not once you've established a reliably adequate food supply and reasonably effective medicine. Does the existence of TVs, cars, cell-phones, etc actually improve our quality of life, rather than just changing it in a value-neutral manner that's marketed as an improvement? How would you even begin to objectively answer that question? Technology certainly gives us more options, but as numerous psychology studies have shown, having more than a relatively small range of options actually tends to reduce happiness and satisfaction.
Finally, the things that definitely *do* improve happiness - comfortable shelter, good health, art, and spending time with loved ones - we've had the technology to provide that to everyone with minimal effort for at least a century, and have chosen not to do so, instead creating a rat race where billions of people sacrifice those things to work long hours at jobs that they hate, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't care about. Perhaps a few centuries or millenia of slowed technological progress would give us an opportunity for our cultural and social technologies to catch up with our mechanical ones.
Re: (Score:3)
I do not, but that wasn't what you proposed. You said corporations would collapse, I said no, we have plenty of evidence that they could do just fine at much smaller scales.
You are correct that technological advancement would probably slow (though it also seems to be self-accelerating as well, which might even outpace population declines), but I don't see that that is necessarily a wholly bad thing - we're currently proceeding at a breakneck pace that most people find quite stressful to adapt to.
And when y
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe not to support your business unit, but are there really fewer than 100 such business units on the entire planet?
I think there are less than ten. We're quite specialized.
It's not like we'd be left in the dark ages just because of us. It would just become more expensive to run computer systems because you'd have less efficient backups. It's quite trivial in the grand scheme of things but that's my point. With so many people, we can afford to do very, very narrowly focused things and that's why we're rich. The more we specialize, the more efficient and productive we become, and that is what leads to growing prosperity.
Re:People don't change (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't change.
People might not change but their environment surely does. Up until recently, most humans lived in mud huts and were one poor harvest away from starving to death. Half their children died before age 5. And by "recently" I mean 50-100 years ago, compared to 10,000 years of recorded history.
Compare that to today. About a billion people today live in dire poverty, out of 7 billion. A billion people is a lot but having "only" one seventh of our population in that situation is revolutionary. We've never been this wealthy or healthy, historically speaking. And being healthy and wealthy definitely changes how you behave.
Please don't misinterpret me. I'm not saying six billion people are living in McMansions and have trouble deciding which sports car to drive to work. Most of the world is still pretty poor compared to my neighborhood in California. All I'm saying is they're much better off than the subsistence farmers throughout most of human history.
Re: (Score:3)
Guy 1: What are you doing in bed with my wife?!
Guy 2: Do not worry sir, this is not what you think. I'm a genetics engineer!
Re: People don't change (Score:5, Informative)
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems and devastating entire oceans and sources of fresh water....
Yes, yes, they were. In fact, even the indigenous folks of the North American content were doing it -- they hunted the Woolly Mammoth to extinction and they didn't even have running water or horses.
Re: People don't change (Score:5, Informative)
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems
Yes they were. North Africa was known as "the breadbasket of the Roman Empire". Today it is the Sahara Desert. Destructive farming practices destroyed millions of tonnes of topsoil. They also exterminated many species, including the North African Elephant [wikipedia.org].
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is like saying the Onion or The National Enquirer are the most trusted sources for news.
Re: (Score:2)
Well... Aren't they? I trust them.... For what they claim to be...
They don't try to market themselves as reliable news when they are satire and tabloids, unlike many of the "long established" news outlets do. Everybody knows what they are and they don't claim to be something they are not.
Re: (Score:2)
I have to say, I have seen more than my share of incidents over the years where the average masses actually do think the stories in those publications are real. Hell, even real news outlets have self burned repeating Onion stories as fact.
Re: (Score:3)
That, and Duffleblog, the military equvalent of the Onion. The problem with Duffleblog is that people these days know so little about the military that even some of the most outlandish stories look like they COULD be true.
Re: (Score:3)
What's more worrying are the multiple times Onion articles have proven to be merely prescient and published a few years early, rather than actually wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean Joe Biden isn't worth voting for? Damn.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most trusted world authorities - the UN?! The same UN that puts Sudan on the "Human Rights Committee"?
It's probably not a bad idea to have one of the worse offenders actively involved in trying to find a solution.
Re: (Score:2)
A "solution" being more akin to the "Final Solution" than what most people might mean, perhaps.
The violence will end when everybody currently being ethnically cleansed is dead. Peace in our time!
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you were joking, but the lads/lasses out there doing "ethnic cleansing" aren't going to stop when the current victims are all dead - they'll just find someone else to enjoy the benefits of being "ethnically cleansed".
And when they run out of those guys, they'll turn on each other....
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, these are extremes, but you get the point. And yes, there are counter examples; like putting a hacker in charge of you security (I'd still watch them like a hawk).
Re: OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Informative)
Relax. The US (electoral college) elected Trump.
Wrong.
I know this is off topic but, the US elected him through the rules established during the founding of our nation so that the popular majority could not just dictate the rules everyone else must follow.
If you don't understand why those rules were chosen instead of pick our favorite person for four years, then you need to go back to history class and learn a little more about how governments prior to the US's worked; as the founder members did. Spoiler alert, the majority did some pretty awful things under the guise of improvement for all. Majority rule usually leads to mob mentality, which never fairs well in the end.
As far as the fox reference, I'd say he is more like a dodo bird; but I see where you were going.
Either way the current person of interest will be out of office at some point. The media will then either crucify or glorify the next person of interest for the next 4 years, and so on, and so on, and so on! Its what makes the world go around.
P.S. I'm still not sure hiring that hacker guy was the right move.
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's why Brexit is important; England doesn't really want to lose whatever independence it still has.
That is nonsense. Every country in the EU is completely independent. You can have any law you want, unless it contradicts an EU law. And there are honestly no EU laws a sane person would want to contradict ... so go figure.
The proclaimed loss of independence is just propaganda.
Re:OK, you lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably not a bad idea to have one of the worse offenders actively involved in trying to find a solution.
On the other hand.
It's similar to putting a mobster in the white house. How is that experiment going?
The correct analogy would be if a mobster was an advisor to the President. (not a mobster being the President). A mobster could give interesting advice to the President. Naturally, if you put the mobster in charge of the country it would cause chaos, government might even shut down.
Idiocracy (Score:4, Funny)
Evidently the UN team never watched Idiocracy. Carl's Jr Or perhaps they are part of it. Mountain Dew.
Perhaps their study found that AI will perfect a fidget spinner more enjoyable than eating or Sex. Taco Bell.
Or we'll get so politically correct that we all get assigned to one night of Rehab. Carl's Jr.
See you in 500 years.
Re: (Score:3)
Perhaps the problem is the other possible sources of information.
It could be that the UN actually *is* more reliable than the alternatives.
Re: (Score:2)
Once the decline begins... (Score:2, Troll)
And at the current rates, everyone will own an iPhone and a Tesla. Only good times ahead people, we just need to wait.
Re: (Score:3)
"...it will never end."
I had a problem with that statement. That's a pretty impossible statement to make. We don't even know what will happen in a generation, or two generations. To say "it will never end" is absurdist.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a trend.
It's a downward trend.
Projecting that trend forever, this is what will happen.
It's like saying I got paid today, and I'm now getting $2,000/day versus the earlier trend, and so in a year and some change I'll be a millionaire.
Re: (Score:2)
It's like saying I got paid today, and I'm now getting $2,000/day versus the earlier trend, and so in a year and some change I'll be a millionaire.
Even better. Your pay is increasing at a rate of $2000/day/day. In just a few short weeks, you'll have all the money in the world.
Re: (Score:2)
"...it will never end."
I had a problem with that statement. That's a pretty impossible statement to make. We don't even know what will happen in a generation, or two generations. To say "it will never end" is absurdist.
The Sun will end.... Life on earth WILL end, all of it. Our little solar system will end... The 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us these things. I won't be here to see it, but I KNOW it will happen.... Everything ends.
However, I'm with you, I don't think the statements purposing the demise of human life will be true in the time frames they suggest for the reasons they suppose. There are too many unknowns and the principle that individual humans generally want to survive and will adapt to the conditions
Re: (Score:3)
Nah, that happened eons ago. You're a simulation running in a low-entropy computer run in slow-time, power by a black hole farm. You're good for 10^100 years or so.
population decline will not exist everywhere (Score:2)
...because you need 1) stable, accountable government 2) increasing wealth out of poverty conditions
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The number of places like that have grown over the last 100 years. Once it covers enough of the population of the earth, the decline will being.
Re:population decline will not exist everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
And you vastly underestimate the access to health care and education in the "shithole countries". The world view of the West often is stuck in the 1970ies and 1980ies and has not gotten much update since then. 80% of the world population now has better health care coverage than Western countries in the 1960ies, when the baby boom came to an end, and the average time a girl somewhere in the world of today visits school is eight years. And thus, the baby boom for 80% of the world has actually ended.
Health care and women's education are the main factors that drove reproduction rates down, not stable governments or wealth. They do help, but are less important than you think.
Re: (Score:3)
From your own post it seems stable government is key.
You mention areas with civil unrest having high rates for example. You also mention functioning schools.
Re: population decline will not exist everywhere (Score:3)
You think those things would've happened without stable governments?
Re: (Score:2)
Health care and women's education are the main factors that drove reproduction rates down, not stable governments or wealth. They do help, but are less important than you think.
I was with you until the last bit here.
How negative the population growth is may have only a little to with the gov't -- I do not have an opinion on that.
But those remaining regions of the world with significant positive population growth are all places suffering wars and civil unrest, so it is not mystery as to why food, education, healthcare are in short supply. It is not really credible to deny gov't has a lot to do with the continued population growth, based on the actual data on hand.
Re:population decline will not exist everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
There's good evidence that female education is the dominant factor affecting fertility rate. A stable government is generally necessary, but not sufficient, for high female education rates.
There are lots of examples of stable governments that had big population growth problems though. Bangladesh is the usual case study. The government tried all kids of programs aimed at reducing the birth rate and nothing much worked. Then the education department, completely independently, decided it would be a good idea for girls to go to school, and the fertility rate fell from one of the highest in the world to close to replacement.
Infinite supply (Score:5, Funny)
At least there will always be an infinite supply of hype and silly speculative "news" stories. They'll be just as insightful when the writers are all robots.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They'll be just as insightful when the writers are all robots.
And the headlines might be less sensationalist and click-bait-ey. I, for one, welcome our journalist robot overlords.
Re: (Score:3)
And remember children . . . Delicious Nutritious Soylent Green is made from All Natural Ingredients!
Cool. (Score:2, Funny)
Iâ(TM)m done worrying about shit. Deforestation? Cool. Plastic filling the oceans? Bitchen. Millennials getting fat-cancer? Rad. Mass-shootings? Sucks to be you not having a gun with which to return fire if you wanted to live, Nuclear annihilation? Wake me when its over.
What is this bullshit about? Human extinction even without nukes? Excellent. All of you can fuck off, as a species. I simply am out of give-a-shit at this point. This life has been exhausting, to tell you the truth.
Today,
Both wrong... (Score:3, Funny)
Riiight. And I have this bridge for sale. (Score:2, Insightful)
A journalist and a political scientist... sure seems like the right team to look into this.
It took us what, 200 years to go from around 1B to 7B. Unless we have a nuclear war, or a plague - and even the latter ain't gonna kill 90%, it's not going to happen.
As it is, we know - 1:1 correlation - that the higher the educational level of the woman, the lower the birthrate. HOWEVER, the idea that 80+% of humans will just not want to reproduce is ludicrous. Even if the world is in such bad shape that folks don't
Re:Riiight. And I have this bridge for sale. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not about to dive into the crazy numbers, but it's not that unreasonable a prediction. It won't go down to zero as then the conditions will change and people will change their behavior again.
We can all basically say that most of the developed world is in a condition of low birth rate and that includes most of Asia as well. North America, Europe, China, Japan...
That's a huge chunk of the Earth on the 2 kids or less bandwagon. You can probably throw in a whole bunch of other places like Brazil and parts of Latin America as well.
You then have to factor in the social changes going on throughout the world. Women's rights and what not are being found in even the most remote places on Earth. In often doesn't manifest itself in ways you think. Remember that Malala Yousafzai girl from tribal Pakistan who shot to fame fighting for education. These issues really are reaching even the most remote areas.
I'm from a conservative Muslim background, which I guess people still see as patriarchal, but even there we see the issues. Men and women alike not wanting to get married or limiting children. Even in a place like Saudi Arabia where you might picture the most patriarchal, the fertility rate is close to 2.
The idea of being the head patriarch to huge numbers of kids isn't appealing to many men in most countries. It's seen more as a liability today, perhaps limited to the truly wealthy or very remote regions.
You also take into account technology which means a lot of kids to work the farm or provide for the family is lessened.
Anything can happen in the world, but you can easily see how in one or two generation we could be facing population stabilization or even decline. It doesn't sound implausible at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Remember that Malala Yousafzai girl from tribal Pakistan who shot to fame fighting for education.
Dude, she was literally shot.
Re: (Score:3)
". It won't go down to zero as then the conditions will change and people will change their behavior again."
I think that's the 'trigger' here. The headline is absolutely ABSURD to suggest that the world is going to 'run out of people'. LONG before that happens, as you said, the future population would act to prevent that in some way.
From subsidies to encourage childbirth up to the desired steady-state, or perhaps new family unit structures will evolve to change the way child rearing responsibilities are dis
Re: (Score:2)
Education reduces birthrate where educated people can see that things are going bad. Make the world a better place and educated people will want kids again. And educating more of the population is how to make the world better.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that's what they are claiming. They are asserting that peak population could be as soon as 2050 and enter a steady decline thereafter.
I'm not qualified to say if it's accurate or not, but it certainly seems pretty plausible.
Even if the average women has only two children, if she starts a family at 25 instead of 20 then that will start to cause a drop, and once that turns around in given country it'll take a lot of effort to overcome - even the scandinavian countries that have a very strong soc
Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
People LIKE the process of making children and most of us like raising children, but it is very expensive: 233k in 2015, excluding college education.
Follow the money. Governments don't provide proper incentives to compensate us for it.
You change the laws so that childcare, health care for kids, lunchs, and college are all free, all without any paperwork and we will have a baby boom the likes you never saw.
Population starts going down, that is the kind of thing we will do.
Right now, immigration from poor countries to developed countries tends to stop us from having those kinds of laws. Partly because of racism, partly because the immigration means the problem is not as severe.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You (or your parents) could fund a similar program for many of the world's poorest villages.
If you don't give away more money than someone does, you have no right to complain about them not spending more on charity.
The problem is not rich people not being charitable, it is the laws that allow them to get rich without paying their fair share of taxes.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
So, 67 percent take home gives me a tax rate of 33 percent.
You either have a shit job where the tax rate is lower.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
You change the laws so that childcare, health care for kids, lunchs, and college are all free, all without any paperwork and we will have a baby boom the likes you never saw.
Lots of Europe has free health care annd college; the childcare is becoming a thing too. The birthrate is still low. Your notion that people cannot afford children does not explain the size of poor people's families and immigrant families. It's not that people cannot afford children: it is that some cultures do not want them. Or, to put it another way, I know that many poor farmers in my family tree had ten to twelve children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that was before childcare, college, anything resembling healthcare or free lunches even existed. They got no handouts, and they were poor, and they bred. Demographics are not a result of economic changes but of a change in social values. Women's rights and the decline of religion are probably more important than the cost of college.
Re: Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
First, those programs do work, they raise the birth rate. And those programs are NOT designed to raise the birth rate, just make it easier to raise a kid.
Second, when you fund half a road, you don't get much traffic. I am talking about making child raising cost you $0 in order to increase the birth rate, not reduce it so it isn't quite as expensive. Huge difference - as in the difference between a space program and a jet aircraft program.
Third, It is true that social values do determine birth rate, but you do NOT understand how. Our social values have not changed so much that we don't want children.
Instead what has happened is that women have realized that having children is a lot of work (translation: not paid enough for the work) and limits their career prospects (translation they can't afford a nanny and business does not encourage part time work etc.) The decline of religion crap is bullshit. Religion did nothing more than try to trick people into having more children by preventing contraceptives.
Besides, we control the culture that you are so sure is stopping us from having kids. Your core argument supports my core argument that the problems are solvable. Yes, the end result would be a new culture, but it really is not relevant to the argument at hand. Either a new culture would come first to create the laws, or the end result of creating the laws I suggested would be a new culture.
They don't actually (Score:2)
Proclaiming you don't want kids is pretty taboo in virtually all cultures. You're labeled as selfish and there's the risk that when you screw up (pun not intended) and have one anyway the kid will find out they're not wanted.
For the childless it's kind of annoying to be constantly subsidizing kids an getting nothing for it. Now, if you're planning to retire you need those kids to wor
Re: (Score:2)
None of the shit you've listed is free, and in fact the more stuff you try to make "free", just means that everyone else has to work more to provide all of those "free" things. That takes time, some of which those people might otherwise use to raise a family. In its quest to make everything free, the government invariably does a shit job since it doesn't
Re: (Score:3)
Appears you followed the money all the way back to the government's printing press, and not a step further.
Also: I so want to get my rocks off tonight, but my god, the paperwork.
Paperwork is proportional to crowding, which is a manifestation of scarci
Kinda like dinosaurs? (Score:2)
Going extinct because of the 100% compliance in condom use?
Re: (Score:3)
A journalist and a political scientist (Score:2)
...who've written a book together. No ulterior motives there.
Linear extrapolation (Score:2, Interesting)
People everywhere say they want two kids, and Indian girls have smartphones, so researcher concludes that population will decrease. How lame.
First, you can't trust self-reporting. Second, most people don't have two kids and then go get sterilized. They can therefore have more kids.
Second, you can't make the horse drink. People with all of human knowledge at their fingertips often ignore it, and go with their feelings instead.
Third, people's current desired number of children is based on current conditions.
Nothing new here, just old news rehashed (Score:2)
https://www.brookings.edu/blog... [brookings.edu]
In the early 20th century, global population grew more rapidly than ever before. Then came a dramatic reversal as population growth began to slow. It appears very likely that the human population will soon stabilize and may even start to decline. Fertility rates are dropping as women become more educated and gain better access to birth control. As fewer babies are born, the average age of the population increases; thus, our planetâ
Trends don't last. Unless they do. (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words, this trend of population increasing won't last forever.
But, this new trend that I'm looking at will last forever. I don't know about the book being promoted, but the article doesn't mention running out of people.
Trending on changing trends. (Score:5, Interesting)
The slow down in population especially in "1st world nations" is due to many factors which are not environmental, or resource base.
* The availability of cheap, safe and effective birth control.
* The microeconomics costs in having a child.
Currently our economic model, while on the large scale more population is better for the economy on the whole. It is a hindrance to the family, as a child is expensive and can set a middle class family back years in terms of money. This combined with birth control has turned raising a child as something almost considered a Hobby for a lot of people. In rural countries, a child become a member of your workforce, thus becomes an economic strength to your family.
I can see the population dropping for a while, but as we are starting to see in ageing countries like Japan and France, additional intensives to try to increase child birth.
In terms of resources, our technology to increase output still seems to be able to keep up with growth. Sure we get some Hippy dippy stuff with people complaining about GMO, preservatives, and radiation treatment. But we have the ability to feed the world for a while.
Comes down to modernization (Score:2)
Hell,I had a close friend try and get a vasectomy in the 90s and no doc would do it. He ended up with a kid he didn't want. Vasectomies are reversible now (mostly) so if he did the same thing today he'd have no problems.
Basically,
Hans Rosling predicted that years ago (Score:4, Informative)
12 billion will be the top.
Until then, every watches TV, posts on Facebook and tweets instead of having sex.
PS. If you haven't watched his TED talks, you should do so now, they are amazing.
So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
So what if human population peaks at 10B, 11B or 20B. By definition it has to peak sometime, at least on Earth. The planet cannot sustain 500 billion people concurrently, at least with current technology and practices. And even if it could, it couldn't sustain 500 trillion people. There has to be a limit. Maybe we're close. Maybe we're not. We still potentially have a ways to go. We could build floating cities, and use all land for crops. We could turn the Sahara and other deserts into farmland. We could build floating farms to grow even more food. All that could allow for more people, but there will be a limit. I suspect there will be a pandemic sooner or later that will wipe out 90% or more of the human race. Then those left will start over again. By the time they build civilization back up, it will happen again. Rinse and repeat.
Re: (Score:2)
No we can't. Why do people think this stuff? The real world is not scifi.
Re: (Score:2)
People are stupid and like to come up with fantasy scenarios as to why everything is fine.
Re: (Score:3)
The peak is way below the limit (Score:2)
The thing about peak population is that the peak is reached not because of resource constraints, but because of the natural human inclination to have fewer children when people are healthy and have good access to education. Since all of that has been ramping up continuously we are in no danger of hitting resource limits.
Food Supply (Score:2)
Animals generally maintain their population to a level that consumes the available food supply.
Current food-production levels can support roughly 12 billion humans (We waste about half of the food that is currently produced. We're definitely different from other animals in this respect)
While it's true that most late-stage industrial societies are currently running birth rates that are below replacement level, and that the most likely "peak-population" scenario is probably 9-14 billion people, sometime arou
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. And it is not only food, although a lot of people seem to have that simplistic and unrealistic view. Realistically we are probably somewhere at 2x to 10x the population that is long-term sustainable on this planet.
11 billion by end of century? I don't think so. (Score:2)
The world's population growth must inherently be a logistic curve, not an exponential one, since the world has finite resources to supply a population.
I expect that the world population will stabilise at about 10 billion people or so perhaps going slightly above that figure but tending to oscillate near it indefinitely.
Cycles come, and cycles go (Score:2)
What you see will generally be reproductive cycles that go up and down based on many factors, from food to the overall environment, and available resources. We already see a decline in birth rates for those who are middle class and above, while those who are poor have the genetic pre-disposition where the less likely offspring are to survive, the more children they will have. Pollution, global warming causing a reduction in available food, and things like that are the larger causes for concern, because
Sounds like BS (Score:2)
Sure, the natural regulating mechanisms may finally start to work and reduce the human race to a sane size for this planet, which is probably somewhere around a few 100M. But there is no reason to not expect that at that level things will stabilize.
Prediction is likely correct (Score:2)
That isn't what the U.N. says at all (Score:2)
World Economic Collapse (Score:3)
If it's true, we're heading towards a complete world economic collapse. The world's economy is built on debt we assume to paid by future generations. When the population no longer grows, the resulting social upheaval will be immense. The concerns from global warming are trivial in comparison.
Re:World Economic Collapse (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan is the canary in the mine, in my mind, regarding social stability and an aging population.
Very old population (26% of population above 65 in 2014, # of elderly surpassed # of children in 1997, and this bit of info: " and sales of adult diapers surpassed diapers for babies in 2014.").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At some point, Nature will do its thing (Score:3)
Like all overpopulated species, Nature will take care of it.
It won't be pleasant or pretty, but it will happen.
Folks will either start starving to death / dehydration or a disease will wipe out a significant number due to high population density.
You see it in any species who overpopulate an area. Too many mouths to feed and not enough food / water.
The resources just aren't there.
Is it such a bad thing? (Score:3)
Capsule Explanation of the Issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Every country that undergoes industrialization shifts into a negative growth pattern eventually, with only some extremely limited exceptions (e.g. the high birth rate among the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel keeps that country in growth mode).
Early in the process government policy can distort this (the high birthrates encouraged in China and Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s) but as industrial society touches more of the population this rate inevitably falls. China pushed this along in the 1970s with its "One Child" policy, now abandoned, but China will not shift back into positive growth, the normal process of falling birth rates has taken hold.
But industrialization is not the only process that brings down birth rates, and may only be an enabling factor, rather than the true driving force. Bangladesh is the poster example for this. A conservative Muslim nation, that is one of the poorest in the world, it is now below the replacement rate. It did not take industrialization or becoming wealthy to do it, it was entirely the choice of the female population there. This phenomenon was entirely unexpected, until it happened, That is what this book is alluding to - educating women brings down birthrates by itself, and may be why it correlates with industrialization and wealth in the first place.
If you look at UN population projections by region you see every region in the world is projected to peak in population during this century and begin declining. Except for one, Africa. Continuous growth is projected there. What this book is arguing is that female education will bring down the birthrate there also, like it did in Bangladesh. The difference between UN and author projections for population in 2100 is due almost entirely due to differences in population projections for Africa.
I think the authors are likely correct in this regard.
But is the world population fated to shrink away to nothing now?
We don't know of a trend that will reverse it at present. Some countries are already heavily affected by declining (and aging) populations - Japan, Italy, Russia, Serbia (perhaps the lowest birthrate in the world), for example - and none of these has found a way to halt it yet.
But the Industrial Revolution was not predicted, the Green Revolution was not predicted, the fall of birth rates with industrialization was not predicted, and the fall in the birth rate of Bangladesh without industrialization was not predicted. That some future change in world human societies might stabilize populations globally certainly cannot be ruled out. It may be simply that no society currently affected by declining population has yet undergone a sufficient and necessary transformation - providing enough support and incentive to make higher rates of child-bearing attractive.
You missed the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly, demonstrably, populations reproduce and continue to exist barring extinction events like asteroid strikes, famine, and plagues.
Social changes, where it is too expensive to raise children so couples frequently have only a single child. If your birthrate falls below 1.0 and nothing convinces people to reverse the trend then the scenario is quite realistic.
It's all bullshit futurist conjecture and there is zero evidence to support it. So while it is a plausible possibility, it is not a cause for concern.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The dystopic stench of the premise certainly sounds like a post-apocalyptic Mad Max tome. Nonetheless, population overgrowth, poor management of resources, plastic in every bite of fish you eat, climate change causing lots of misery, yeah, the conjecture has some plausibility.
My concern is not quite geometric population growth in the face of sustainable abilities to service that growth. We fail that that, and fail consistently, as the greed model thwarts any appreciation for what happens to the next generat
Re:You missed the point (Score:5, Interesting)
My concern is not quite geometric population growth in the face of sustainable abilities to service that growth. We fail that that, and fail consistently, as the greed model thwarts any appreciation for what happens to the next generation. We kick it forward. We answer the call of our biology and have lots of children, eschew birth control and even abortion in the name of population sustainability, which creates constant profit growths for the greed model.
Except we don't. That's the whole point. The facts on the ground say the UN is full of shit (to no one's surprise) and you're wrong too (even less surprising).
The US's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1973, returned to above replacement in 1989, then dropped below again in 2011.
South Korea's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1984 and has never risen above it since.
Japan's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1975 and has never risen above it since.
Germany's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1971 and has never risen above it since.
I could go on for another 100 countries. Most never return to above replacement once they drop below it. The US is very unusual in returning even for a while, but first generation immigrants tend to have more children than natives and the US still allows more immigration (both legal and illegal) than practically any country in the world.
Everywhere that infant mortality drops below about 24 per thousand live births, the birth rate drops below the replacement rate. There is some variance depending on whether or not women are allowed/provided better than elementary education and depending on the local religion, but even in places with (nominally) very strong religious objections to birth control, if women are educated and infant mortality is low enough, the birth rate drops below replacement. Why this should be has not been definitively explained, but it is happening, across the entire world, and the correlations with education and reasonably capable medical practices are statistically significant.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. Biased post much?
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, without actually reading the book, it's hard to completely rule out that there isn't some sort of meaningful argument in there, but on the face of it, it does seem pretty retarded. If there's an unfavourable trend occurring, then as a society, we tend to note that trend and do something about it. If population is growing too fast, we undertake education programmes to teach people about contraception and so forth. Conversely if the birth rate is too low, we provide incentives, for example through
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Has Rosling said the same thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Population bomb making a comeback. (Score:2)
You're still an idiot
Re: (Score:2)
This is journalism and people wanting to sell a book. It is not Science.