I would imagine humanity has hit the asymptote of the natural growth curve. War and famine were the only forces that kept population in check. And those are dramatically reduced in modern era.
Where do you get this war and famine being a control from? The information wasn’t even hard to find, war claimed 100m+ and famine 128mil. 228mil dead from these actions over 100 years vs 7.8billion. Is this an excruciatingly slow sink?
Prior to 1960, famine and war did limit population for thousands of years.
Famine was an ever-present issue since virtually everybody on earth was a farmer, and one bad crop could be fatal to their family. That's still true today in much of Asia.
The data period you're referencing is skewed by the US policing the globe since 1945, preventing major wars.
Ironically, the country thought of as a new superpower, China, today imports about half of its food. So they face remarkable food insecurity in 2021, and rely on their top adversary for much of it.
What made you think to begin your plot for percentage of human lives claimed by war and famine at 100 years ago? 100 years ago IS modern times. We had electricity, automobiles, tractors, trains, modern agriculture, artificial fertilizer, etc by then.
But also, you are off by a great deal for the 20th century. World War II claimed 80 million+ lives. World War I 40 million+, alone. Not even factoring for civil wars, Vietnam, African wars, and violent purges in USSR and China.
The population wasn't 7.8 billion 100 years ago. You have to plot your data as a function of time. You can't fast-forward to present time population and compare with past death counts to arrive at a percentage.
This is quite a bit subjective. If the statement was from prior to 100 years ago then that's my mistake. Perhaps we should say specific periods instead of subjective terms.
> The population wasn't 7.8 billion 100 years ago. You have to plot your data as a function of time.
If the claim that population is controlled via wars and famine, then the current population of 7.8 billion was not effected by this. The evidence is in that large number. Not that 228 mil is a low percentage of 7.8 billion, but that if this is in fact a sink then it's inefficient.
> But also, you are off by a great deal for the 20th century. World War II claimed 80 million+ lives. World War I 40 million+, alone. Not even factoring for civil wars, Vietnam, African wars, and violent purges in USSR and China.
Thanks for the updated data. And I agree that if we rewind more through history this may have been true. If modern times means >=1500 then ok. Modern times to me means some percentage of my life given the rate of change of the world I've experience as well as other factors.
The future you are celebrating is basically Idiocracy. Low fertility rates in the West and East Asia are a very bad thing for the future of our species and the planet.
This is what I was trying to say too. These low-IQ countries you speak of - they don't care about pollution and even if they did - at their current development stage they couldn't afford to. Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing. It doesn't take a genius to realize what impact on global warming that's gonna have.
Not if developed countries (who caused an overwhelming majority of global pollution, especially CO2) show the example by becoming sustainable economies.
Then the carbon-burning Base of development will be understood as a temporary stage of development like the demographic transition.
> Then the carbon-burning Base of development will be understood as a temporary stage of development like the demographic transition.
I honestly would believe that more if companies made long term investments and bought out infrastructure in EMs and converted it to be more clean[0], rather than rely on some kind of indirect status signaling:
"The proposals will include a shortlist of existing coal-fired power plants across Asia to buy and retire well before the end of their life cycles and replace them with clean energy.
"We have not settled on a precise size [financially], but would expect the pilot to acquire several coal-fired power plants at a minimum," ADB Vice President Ahmed Saeed told Nikkei Asia.
HSBC is also part of the initiative which involves scouring the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia for coal-fired power plants to close a decade or more early.
The initiative was first reported by Reuters this month. BlackRock and Citi are also working on the scheme, according to the report. The companies did not respond to requests for comment."
There’s a misunderstanding here. I don’t « celebrate a future with low fertility rate in the west and high fertility rate elsewhere ». I celebrate a future with a steady state demography everywhere.
I just think (and I believe that this is well documented) that countries post demographic transition tend to stabilize their population, and this is a good thing. I don’t think that some countries are inherently « low IQ ». I just think that they lack development, and that in several decades they will reach the education and fertility rate of western countries.
Also an American saying African countries are trashing the environment is quite a hard pill to swallow if you have a look at carbon emissions, and carbon emissions per capita.
> if you have a look at carbon emissions, and carbon emissions per capita.
You can argue about emissions per capita until you're blue in the face, but the fact is that global warming is a zero sum game and projected 4 billion population of industrializing Africa will have a significantly bigger impact than USA's stable 300 million.
We have one planet, one atmosphere - at this point we are completely contained. If that's not a definition of zero sum game, then I don't know what is.
And the population of South Africa is 58m, so clearly they can ignore it since the effect of the US is significantly bigger. You can conveniently slice any population such that the population you are part of is smaller and therefore your effect (and responsibility) is minimized.
The original post was criticizing the use of emissions per capita. Now you are saying that really you were talking about a change in emissions per capita. Seems different to me.
The point of such declining population articles is not one of taking sides on increasing vs decreasing population.
The point of such articles to examine what kind of society we are building. Are people feeling comfortable to produce the next generation? What challenges exist in production and raising of children? And finally, how many producers (young) to consumers (old) exist in society.
These are interesting questions, one that a lot of millennials associate with. E.g. Society appears to be designed such that marriages are obsolete for millennials, producing a child is a burden and the future appears bleaker for individual humans.
That said, a declining population is good for the planet, so long as we are not stuck in a death spiral. Immigration is America's life saver. Other countries are not so lucky.
Absolutely. One of the best things about the US is that we have a culture which is adept at integrating immigrants. The US will stave off demographic collapse because of this.
The solution is to look at our culture and systems of governance and employment and understand what can be done to enable and encourage more people having children.
Bringing in more people is just a lazy fix and does nothing to fix the underlying problems.
Counterpoint: The world has enough people (7.5B on track for 11B by end of century). Stop subsidizing children with pro natal policies, and pay people who choose not to have children (the three most impactful actions you can take to mitigate climate change is drive an EV or no car, eat less meat or no meat, and have less kids or no kids).
Population growth cannot continue forever, nor population stability at an unsustainable aggregate consumption level.
Frankly, there is a larger understanding among young people that it’s irresponsible to have a child unless you’re financially stable with a good space for a home. Turns out that _most_ young people (outside of the software biz, of course!) don’t make enough money to support themselves plus a kid, plus a home with space good for raising kids. And they don’t feel outward pressure from their parents or religion to have a kid nearly as much as they used to.
And beyond that, poor mental health and knowledge of what kids can be like also means young people just don’t feel ready to raise a kid for quite a while.
These factors won’t go away without serious changes in how our economic system works.
I would also ask if it really matters that the birth to death ratio is more than one. One seems like a good baseline to maintain.
People have silly cultural expectations about what is necessary to support children. I just saw a documentary about a Congolese truck driver with five kids. He made $120/month, and his goal in life was to keep them fed -- literally. If I were willing to take the expectations surrounding that man, and adopt them for myself, I could easily support two dozen children.
> Yeah that’s not how you build functional adult in modern society,
I'm not quite sure anyone has a monopoly on a definition of what this could be, and very much subjective to various forms of "cultural hangups" that might be prevalent around the world at any given time.
1) If not handled well that can make a huge mess. see Germany 5 years ago for example
2) If the people immigrating aren't well educated or capable of communicating with the rest of the people but are allowed to vote then malicious politicians can use that to distort the democracy which is pretty dangerous.
3) There are some pretty nasty cultures there. I'm not about to go preaching that we have it totally right but some of the stuff going on in Asia and Africa is totally unacceptable.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadhttps://ways-to-die.com/people-died-war/
https://ourworldindata.org/famines
Famine was an ever-present issue since virtually everybody on earth was a farmer, and one bad crop could be fatal to their family. That's still true today in much of Asia.
The data period you're referencing is skewed by the US policing the globe since 1945, preventing major wars.
Ironically, the country thought of as a new superpower, China, today imports about half of its food. So they face remarkable food insecurity in 2021, and rely on their top adversary for much of it.
But also, you are off by a great deal for the 20th century. World War II claimed 80 million+ lives. World War I 40 million+, alone. Not even factoring for civil wars, Vietnam, African wars, and violent purges in USSR and China.
The population wasn't 7.8 billion 100 years ago. You have to plot your data as a function of time. You can't fast-forward to present time population and compare with past death counts to arrive at a percentage.
Here's an incomplete list of famines in human history, many of which caused civilizations to collapse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
This is quite a bit subjective. If the statement was from prior to 100 years ago then that's my mistake. Perhaps we should say specific periods instead of subjective terms.
> The population wasn't 7.8 billion 100 years ago. You have to plot your data as a function of time.
If the claim that population is controlled via wars and famine, then the current population of 7.8 billion was not effected by this. The evidence is in that large number. Not that 228 mil is a low percentage of 7.8 billion, but that if this is in fact a sink then it's inefficient.
> But also, you are off by a great deal for the 20th century. World War II claimed 80 million+ lives. World War I 40 million+, alone. Not even factoring for civil wars, Vietnam, African wars, and violent purges in USSR and China.
Thanks for the updated data. And I agree that if we rewind more through history this may have been true. If modern times means >=1500 then ok. Modern times to me means some percentage of my life given the rate of change of the world I've experience as well as other factors.
This is absolutely the only way to be long term sustainable on a single planet.
https://ourworldindata.org/exports/historical-and-projected-...
"There were strong negative correlations found between national IQ and three national indicators of fertility."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Many of these same high-fertility/low-IQ countries are trashing the environment, as indicated by plastic pollution: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
The future you are celebrating is basically Idiocracy. Low fertility rates in the West and East Asia are a very bad thing for the future of our species and the planet.
Then the carbon-burning Base of development will be understood as a temporary stage of development like the demographic transition.
I honestly would believe that more if companies made long term investments and bought out infrastructure in EMs and converted it to be more clean[0], rather than rely on some kind of indirect status signaling:
"The proposals will include a shortlist of existing coal-fired power plants across Asia to buy and retire well before the end of their life cycles and replace them with clean energy.
"We have not settled on a precise size [financially], but would expect the pilot to acquire several coal-fired power plants at a minimum," ADB Vice President Ahmed Saeed told Nikkei Asia.
HSBC is also part of the initiative which involves scouring the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia for coal-fired power plants to close a decade or more early.
The initiative was first reported by Reuters this month. BlackRock and Citi are also working on the scheme, according to the report. The companies did not respond to requests for comment."
Still in the word soup/lip service stage.
[0] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Climate-Change...
I just think (and I believe that this is well documented) that countries post demographic transition tend to stabilize their population, and this is a good thing. I don’t think that some countries are inherently « low IQ ». I just think that they lack development, and that in several decades they will reach the education and fertility rate of western countries.
Also an American saying African countries are trashing the environment is quite a hard pill to swallow if you have a look at carbon emissions, and carbon emissions per capita.
You can argue about emissions per capita until you're blue in the face, but the fact is that global warming is a zero sum game and projected 4 billion population of industrializing Africa will have a significantly bigger impact than USA's stable 300 million.
In a zero sum game, if one country looses, then the other wins.
In global warming, if one country looses (because the atmosphere is f*ked), then the other also looses.
The point of such articles to examine what kind of society we are building. Are people feeling comfortable to produce the next generation? What challenges exist in production and raising of children? And finally, how many producers (young) to consumers (old) exist in society.
These are interesting questions, one that a lot of millennials associate with. E.g. Society appears to be designed such that marriages are obsolete for millennials, producing a child is a burden and the future appears bleaker for individual humans.
That said, a declining population is good for the planet, so long as we are not stuck in a death spiral. Immigration is America's life saver. Other countries are not so lucky.
Bringing in more people is just a lazy fix and does nothing to fix the underlying problems.
If there are problems with society, we should fix them for their own sake.
Population growth cannot continue forever, nor population stability at an unsustainable aggregate consumption level.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/our_overcrowded_planet_a_fail...
And beyond that, poor mental health and knowledge of what kids can be like also means young people just don’t feel ready to raise a kid for quite a while.
These factors won’t go away without serious changes in how our economic system works.
I would also ask if it really matters that the birth to death ratio is more than one. One seems like a good baseline to maintain.
I'm not quite sure anyone has a monopoly on a definition of what this could be, and very much subjective to various forms of "cultural hangups" that might be prevalent around the world at any given time.
1) If not handled well that can make a huge mess. see Germany 5 years ago for example
2) If the people immigrating aren't well educated or capable of communicating with the rest of the people but are allowed to vote then malicious politicians can use that to distort the democracy which is pretty dangerous.
3) There are some pretty nasty cultures there. I'm not about to go preaching that we have it totally right but some of the stuff going on in Asia and Africa is totally unacceptable.