Posts Tagged ‘population’
“There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many.”*…
Ever since Thomas Malthus got it started in 1798, people have been warning that population growth, given enough time, would lead to famine and environmental destruction. There would eventually be too many mouths to feed. But now a new study, published in The Lancet, forecasts new threats to the economic and social order caused by precipitous population decline.
Damned if you do (it), damned if you don’t.
The world population is now 7.8 billion, up from 3.5 billion less than 50 years ago. Previous estimates suggested we wouldn’t reach “peak humanity,” the point at which things start going to hell, for generations. The most recent United Nations projections see population growth stopping at around 11 billion people near the end of the century. This new study from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington found that the population might peak at 9.7 billion around 2064 — much sooner than previously predicted — and then fall to 8.8 billion by 2100.
On the face of it, this seems like good news. There’s no doubt that fewer people would relieve pressure on the environment, especially if there were fewer meat-eating, car-driving, computer-buying people. Not as many people taking long-haul flights and buying houses means that a smaller portion of the earth will be devoted to filling the human maw. The authors of this new paper acknowledge that their findings are good news for those who seek to reverse climate change and save orangutans. Moreover, if the world met the UN’s sustainable development goals — educating kids, stamping out disease, providing access to contraception, and spreading prosperity — the planet’s population would likely fall even more abruptly. It’s now clear that improving people’s lives — not population control measures — have been key to driving down fertility rates.
In the future described by this study, richer countries like Japan could age into insignificance, while Nigeria might grow to become a vibrant power broker. By 2100, the populations of Japan, Spain, Italy and South Korea could be half the size they are today. The United States treads water in this projection, buoyed by immigration. Rich European countries like Germany and the Netherlands might stop restricting immigration and begin competing with each other to attract migrants.
So what’s the problem? Picture millions of confused seniors wandering around without enough youngsters to corral them. In 2100, if the paper’s projection prove correct, there will be five people over 80 for every one kid under the age of five, and fewer people with jobs than without. There would be a big increase in elderly folks grasping for pensions and healthcare as the number of taxpayers covering the cost of these benefits dwindle. Economies would sputter and choke…
The risks, spelled out: “The population bomb didn’t detonate. Turns out there’s a new problem.” See also “Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born.”
But to balance the dystopian sci-fi take in the title quote, this one, which would seem to suggest that fewer might be better:
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive. – Dune
* Fahrenheit 451
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As we study senescence, we might send well-armored birthday greetings to a man who did his part to combat population growth, Samuel Colt; he was born on this date in 1814. An inventor and the proprietor of Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company, he popularized the Colt 45 revolver (and other firearms) and made the mass production of revolvers commercially viable.
Colt’s manufacturing methods were sophisticated: his use of interchangeable parts helped him become one of the first to use the assembly line efficiently. But as impactfully, he was a pioneer in Barnum-like salesmanship and self-promotion. His innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements, and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer of advertising, product placement, and mass marketing.
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”*…
The good news is that, as a product of economic, social, and scientific advancement around the world, life expectancy is increasing and birth rates are decreasing. The other news…
The world is experiencing a seismic demographic shift—and no country is immune to the consequences…
By 2050, there will be 10 billion people on earth, compared to 7.7 billion today—and many of them will be living longer. As a result, the number of elderly people per 100 working-age people will nearly triple—from 20 in 1980, to 58 in 2060.
Populations are getting older in all OECD countries, yet there are clear differences in the pace of aging. For instance, Japan holds the title for having the oldest population, with ⅓ of its citizens already over the age of 65. By 2030, the country’s workforce is expected to fall by 8 million—leading to a major potential labor shortage… Globally, the working-age population will see a 10% decrease by 2060. It will fall the most drastically by 35% or more in Greece, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. On the other end of the scale, it will increase by more than 20% in Australia, Mexico, and Israel…
As countries prepare for the coming decades, workforce shortages are just one of the impacts of aging populations already being felt…
There are many other social and economic risks that we can come to expect as the global population continues to age:
- The Squeezed Middle: With more people claiming pension benefits but less people paying income taxes, the shrinking workforce may be forced to pay higher taxes.
- Rising Healthcare Costs: Longer lives do not necessarily mean healthier lives, with those over 65 more likely to have at least one chronic disease and require expensive, long-term care.
- Economic Slowdown: Changing workforces may lead capital to flow away from rapidly aging countries to younger countries, shifting the global distribution of economic power.
The strain on pension systems is perhaps the most evident sign of a drastically aging population. Although the average retirement age is gradually increasing in many countries, people are saving insufficiently for their increased life span—resulting in an estimated $400 trillion deficit by 2050…
In many countries the old-age to working-age ratio will almost double in the next 40 years. How should we prepare? “The rising ratio.”
* T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
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As we kick off the “Decade of Healthy Aging,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that Dracula premiered in New York. Directed by the great Tod Browning and famously starring Bela Lugosi (in what many consider still to be the definitive portrayal of the blood-thirsty Count), the film was based on the 1924 stage play Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which in turn is adapted from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The film was was both a critical and commercial success on its release, and has earned it’s way into the canon, having been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
“Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.”*…
Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Over more than 40 years, his books on the environment, population, food and energy have steadily grown in influence. He is now seen as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on development history and a master of statistical analysis. Bill Gates says he waits for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie. The latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.
You are the nerd’s nerd. There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like you. You dug up the astonishing statistic that China has poured more cement every three years since 2003 than the US managed in the entire 20th century. You calculated that in 2000, the dry mass of all the humans in the world was 125m metric tonnes compared with just 10m tonnes for all wild vertebrates. And now you explore patterns of growth, from the healthy development of forests and brains to the unhealthy increase in obesity and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Before we get into those deeper issues, can I ask if you see yourself as a nerd?
Not at all. I’m just an old-fashioned scientist describing the world and the lay of the land as it is. That’s all there is to it. It’s not good enough just to say life is better or the trains are faster. You have to bring in the numbers. This book is an exercise in buttressing what I have to say with numbers so people see these are the facts and they are difficult to dispute.Growth is a huge book – almost 200,000 words that synthesise many of your other studies, ranging across the world and exploring far into the past and future. Do you see this as your magnum opus?
I have deliberately set out to write the megabook on growth. In a way, it’s unwieldy and unreasonable. People can take any number of books out of it – economists can read about the growth of GDP and population; biologists can read about the growth of organisms and human bodies. But I wanted to put it all together under one roof so people could see how these things are inevitably connected and how it all shares one crystal clarity: that growth must come to an end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that…
The always-illuminating Jonathan Watts interviews the always-provocative Vaclav Smil: “Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’.”
Pair with “Minimal Maintenance,” the essay version of a talk by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. As Patrick Tanguay suggests: it is a “really excellent read which ties together maintenance, degrowth, libraries, museums, environmental justice, and architecture…[it] frames degrowth not as blanket anti-growth but as a critique of growth as an end in itself.”
See also Astra Taylor’s “Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?” and. for a look at the challenges ahead, The Economist‘s “The past, present and future of climate change.”
* Miles Davis
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As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying premiered on Broadway. A musical comedy by Frank Loesser, with book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert, it was based on Shepherd Mead’s 1952 book of the same name. It follows young, ambitious J. Pierrepont Finch, who, with the help of the self-help manual How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, rises from window washer to chairman of the board of the World Wide Wicket Company.
The play, which starred Robert Morse and Rudy Vallée, ran for 1,417 performances; it won seven Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle award, and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“Society is unity in diversity”*…
In less than one year, the 2020 census will record just how much more racially diverse the nation has become, continuing the “diversity explosion” that punctuated the results of the 2010 census. While less authoritative than the once-a-decade national headcount, recently released U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2018 make plain that racial minority populations—especially Hispanic, Asian and black Americans—continue to expand, leaving fewer parts of the country untouched by diversity…
From Brookings, a pre-2020 census look at the wide dispersal of the nation’s Hispanic, Asian and black populations: Six maps that reveal America’s expanding diversity.
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As we delight in difference, we might recall that it was on this date in 1814 that then 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key wrote “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” a poem– which provided the lyrics for the U.S. national anthem– in which he described the bombardment of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in Baltimore Harbor during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. Key was inspired by the large U.S. flag, with 15 stars and 15 stripes, known as the Star-Spangled Banner, flying triumphantly above the fort during the U.S. victory.
Indeed, he wrote lyrics beyond those most of us have heard: a pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist campaigner, Key wrote a (now mostly omitted) third stanza that promises that “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.”
“What goes up must come down”*…
For most of human history, the world’s population grew so slowly that for most people alive, it would have felt static. Between the year 1 and 1700, the human population went from about 200 million to about 600 million; by 1800, it had barely hit one billion. Then, the population exploded, first in the United Kingdom and the United States, next in much of the rest of Europe, and eventually in Asia. By the late 1920s, it had hit two billion. It reached three billion around 1960 and then four billion around 1975. It has nearly doubled since then. There are now some 7.6 billion people living on the planet.
Just as much of the world has come to see rapid population growth as normal and expected, the trends are shifting again, this time into reverse. Most parts of the world are witnessing sharp and sudden contractions in either birthrates or absolute population. The only thing preventing the population in many countries from shrinking more quickly is that death rates are also falling, because people everywhere are living longer. These oscillations are not easy for any society to manage…
Demographic decline– the end of capitalism as we know it? “The Population Bust.”
See also: “UN world population report predicts slowing growth rate, 10.9 billion peak by 2100” (source of the image above) and The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in a Post-Crisis World, by Ruchir Sharma.
* Isaac Newton
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As we ponder population, we might recall that it was on this date in 1845 that the first issue of Scientific American was published. Founded as a weekly by painter and inventor Rufus M. Porter, as a four-page weekly newspaper, its early emphasis was on a broad range of inventions ranging from perpetual motion machines, through an 1860 device for buoying vessels (created by Abraham Lincoln), to the universal joint which now can be found in nearly every automobile manufactured. It became the somewhat more substantial monthly publication that we know and love when,in 1948, three partners (publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr) who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, purchased the assets of the then century-old Scientific American instead and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine.
The first issue of Scientific American
