[1]: http://population.io
Well that is depressing.
I thought it was weird as heck, but when I researched it showed they had 4x for heart issues against the general population in america.
https://stanfordhealthcare.org/stanford-health-now/2015/sout...
"China, India and Africa are (and have been for a long time) the most populous regions in the world"
Actually, according to that data, Africa only overtook Europe in population between 1980 and 1990. I remember when that happened, because I'd always assumed Africa had far more people. They will, but it hasn't been for 'a long time'. It was quite recent really.
Even today it's regions do not rank amongst the most populated regions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density (with the exception of the Nile delta)
Historically Africa had very little population growth compared to the tiny population that survived the "out-of-africa" exit.
I would speculate: part of the reasoning for this would be the lack of domesticable livestock, and why that would occur in the place where humans had evolved from simple inefficient sapiens.
Increasing population pressure is actually already causing desertification that make it worse.
The later 2100s in these charts now look to add several more billion and growing, almost all in Africa. Or from Africa; migration from poorer and overcrowded countries means Europe will probably be majority African by 2100 and have several hundred million more than shown in these charts also.
The post-2008 revisions of UN projections are quite sobering about the future and sustainability of humanity. We are not on a path to sustainability. We are cratering full speed toward a potential Great Filter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Cheers, Fritz
http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve-proble...
You mean due to the process discovered by Fritz Haber.
It isn't the case that if he hadn't discovered the process in 1909 that in 2016 the human species would still be without it.
But there many studies that claim carrying capacity is much higher than current population, and that the projected 16 billion simultaneous living humans is within capacity.
It seems like whether we have a soft landing at the end of the oil age could dominate any calculation. The ability of renewables to scale up is only just crept past the starting line of a long, but necessarily urgent race. I'm not very enthusiastic about the odds.
- During World War II, US had more people then Germany, France and UK combined. This certainly enabled deployment of massive armies on many front and huge amount of weapon production.
- Japan's population suddenly started rising and overtook many western countries. Its increased productivity might be the reason why this tiny country felt it can take on the world.
- India and China are odd balls. India had massive population since very early times compared to European countries.
-Somewhere in 1870, US population crossed a threshold and became the most populated western country.
-Population for 2100 AD is estimated at 10 billion.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
But looking forward maybe 800 years, if there are alleles which tend to make people more likely to want and have kids then I would expect the prevalence of those alleles to increase and the birth rate to rise again. When I look around at my social groups most of the people I know enjoy sex but there's a lot of diversity in how much people are interested in having kids. I don't have any basis for saying if that's a heritable trait or not. But if it is heritable then I'd expect people like that to be the majority before all that long and in the long term population growth to become exponential again.
And in the very long speed of light limitations mean that the resources available to humanity can grow cubicly at best so if exponential growth resumes Malthus will be with us again at some point.
Otherwise evolution will always exceed its limits and produce a crash. Malthus explained it all mathematically 200 years ago, even before Darwin documented the mechanisms.
This is demonstrably not true. Look at Japan and western Europe: declining population. Its a function of economic situation (no need for more than 1-3 children) and female reproductive choice. If we give that to the world, the population problem goes away. The mathematics of population dynamics work for animals, roughly, but the assumptions don't hold for humans because of the changes in behavior.
It's pretty well understood that population growth curves are logistical, rather than exponential (e.g., https://www.britannica.com/science/population-growth/images-...)
The appearance of exponential growth is always temporary.
As the population increases, negative feedbacks reduce the population growth rate. Examples of these feedbacks include cost to raise children, reduced dependence on large family for security in old age, etc.
Estimates of the "replacement fertility rate" are about 2.1 per woman in a developed society (higher in less-developed societies). Many first world countries are already below this rate, and without immigration, will have declining populations as their native populations age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
Malthus and his disciples have been wrong for 200 years.
Paul Ehrlich in particular, because he used to like giving short-term dates for his predictions, so we could watch them slide by. Then he decided time was different to him than to an "average person".
“How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach a conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?” -- Steward Brand, former disciple of Ehrlich
My only complaint is that the graph 5 should have been ordered by the population growth rate because as it is now leave a bit distorted general picture.
I would rather say that the population growth that is only taking place outside of western democracies (with some minor exemptions), is the main reason behind the loss in living quality, as the explosion of the world wide population living below acceptable western standards puts the pressure on the wages all over the globe.
Being it through imported goods made in a country with much lower wage standards, or through stagnating wages of low skilled jobs due to immigration (please note that I just state that somebody new in some society is most of the time in more difficult position and is more willing to accept an offer considered not acceptable for longer time residents).
I understand that many societies value highly a human life but as irony had made the human life less valuable around the globe though this worldview.
That kind of immigration is the only kind available and it isn't going to help anyone support higher standards of living in the short term.
I'm pretty in favour of open borders as an immigrant myself but that statement could do with some supporting evidence.
Imagine a society with 100 people. A working adult can create 50 widgets per year, and there's 15 kids and 5 retirees. The economy produce 80 * 50 = 4000 widgets per year, which gives a per capita income of 40 widgets. You can have whatever tax, welfare, or income redistribution policies you like, but there's only 4000 widgets to go around.
Great. Now let's say 5 new kids are born, the 15 existing kids become adults, 30 adults retire, and the 5 existing retirees die. Bonus: we got 3% better at making widgets, so a working adult makes 51.5 widgets. We now have 100 people, 5 kids, 30 retirees, and 65 working adults. Total widget production = 65 * 51.5 = 3,347.5 widgets per year, or a per capita income of ~33.5 widgets. Again, policies can change the distribution, but not the total number.
What we're seeing is that if an aging workforce lowers the overall workforce participation rate, as a society, we get poorer. If productivity increases, as a society we get richer. It's just a question of which change is larger, and in the US (and Europe, and much of Asia) the answer is the aging workforce. The demographics are clear and brutal.
The most critical metric is the ratio of current workers to retirees; that number is climbing and is going to continue without a policy change that somehow reduces the number of retirees, or increases the numbers of workers. Large scale skilled immigration might do the latter, but failing that, we're basically out of ideas.
This article spells it out fairly nicely I think: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-10/innovatio...
1. Corruption in Zimbabwe. Commercial farmers have been abandoning productive land and the country is getting poorer.
2. Communism in Cuba, Venezuela, SE Asia, and other regions over the past fifty years has ruined developing economies and made them worse. Most of those governments have fallen and things are improving again, but communism certainly has the power to ruin a country.
I'm sure there are others. Technological progress has give us a strong underlying upward trend around the world lately but sufficiently bad government can occasionally reverse the benefits of progress temporarily.
