The crazy thing is that we not ever see 10 billion at this rate. Globally we are down to 2.1 births per woman, and the majority of nations now have a birth rate below 2, meaning most countries are below replacement. And even the positive birth rate countries are rapidly trending downwards (with the exceptions of Uzbekistan, Kahzakstan, and Iran).
It will be very interesting to see how the population J curve flatlining affects global society. We live in interesting times.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't. Does QE get credit for former colonies like Canada though? If so that might help.
If you start counting what we'd usually call dictators, there definitely are bigger ones. The monarch/dictator line gets a little blurry and subjective/political I believe.
Elizabeth was the Queen of England, the Queen of Canada, the Queen of Australia, etc., etc., it's the definition of being a Commonwealth Realm. So, at the time of her death, she had about 150 million subjects.
Given that all the countries with more population than that have a constitution and not a sovereign, it's safe to say yesterday she was the most prolific monarch alive.
States that recognize the British monarch as head of state: 67 mil (UK) + 38 mil (Canada) + 26 mil (Australia) + 5 mil (New Zealand) + others less than mil people = 136+ mil
So pretty close, but this appears to be a correct statement.
The Pope is the monarch of a tiny city state, not of all Catholics. The idea that the Pope has any temporal authority whatsoever is the stuff of anti-Catholic fever dreams.
If I remember correctly, the plan is that UK TV channels cancel all entertainment programs for the next ten days, so I look forward to more people going outside for the end of summer.
Even so, it's a different era now. When Diana died, the TV and radio were certainly very different for a good week thereafter. Nowadays, even if most TV and radio changes its schedule, there's Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, BBC iPlayer, 'catch up' services and all the rest, so you could very easily not be exposed to the national mood in the same way.
Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span? Especially if we go back to 1922. Mass communication, mass travel, etc. were all non existent.
Like the first radio stations had just started broadcasting when she was born, now we're all discussing her passing on a communications network that connects the entire globe. Possibly some of us while on flights from one side of the world to the other.
> A mix of June and 19th, Juneteenth has become a day to commemorate the end of slavery in America. Despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than two years earlier on January 1, 1863, a lack of Union troops in the rebel state of Texas made the order difficult to enforce.
> Some historians blame the lapse in time on poor communication in that era, while others believe Texan slave-owners purposely withheld the information.
That last mile problem, getting news from telegraphs to people's homes, was solved by newspapers. e.g. The Daily Telegraph[1] is specifically named for that purpose.
They were printing reports from all over the world.
As an example the modern sporting event the Tour de France was started by a newspaper in 1903 and was reported on daily. That wouldn't really have been viable financially without mass communication. In fact the race exists solely to generate those reports.
There's a very good book called The Victorian Internet that covers early mass communication if you're interested[2].
I would argue that the biggest change came to her parents' generation more or less.
They were born without electricity, and everything it brought, and without cars or planes, and they lived to have pretty much all modern comfort and watch a man on the Moon on TV.
> Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span?
I don't think so. My grandmother was born in 1900 and died in 2003. Cars, airplanes, electricity, radio, TV, computers, space ships, etc..., all were invented or became commonplace in her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth was born between the birth years of my parents, who didn't remember the "horse and buggy days".
Agree with you. The world today is not much different from the world my grandmother left behind, born ~1900 died ~2000.
Arguably it's not particularly different now than, say, 1995 - 2000, which is the half decade of web search indexes (AltaVisa = 1995) and banner ads (1998 = DoubleClick IPO).
Travel, media, appliances, transportation, Internet, perhaps even music and fashion, haven't as fundamentally changed since then.
I would say that massive adoption of smart phones and social media have been pretty big.
It may not be as big of a leap as no computers -> personal computers or no internet -> internet but I wouldn't say that the world is "not much different" than 2000.
Social media in particular has the potential to be extremely disrupting to society. There are things which seem possible that would have been unthinkable in 2000 like the fall of American democracy. And that sort of societal shift requires more than just the internet. It requires a hyper-online society which is enabled by smartphones and social media.
What surprises me is how little technological progress appears to have occurred in the last decade (ie. 2010-2020). I think you'd be hard pressed to name a decade in the past 50 or even 100 years where the technology available to the masses has advanced so little. Note that I'm excluding things that are still mostly at the research stage, like deep learning, advanced language models, etc., since I don't think those have had much effect on people's lives yet.
First Google hit for technology invented in the 1970s:
The Floppy Disk. ...
Portable Cassette Player. ...
The All-In-One Personal Computer. ...
The Cell Phone. ...
The VCR. ...
The First “Real” Video Game. ...
Digital Wristwatches.
As for social media, "Eternal September" was in 1993. In fact, I noted my grandmother's perception that people putting their thoughts out there was disruptive. In her mind that, like radio or TV that she saw get invented, this was obviously going to suddenly be everyone. So you're saying she was right. But she'd already seen it in the last millennium.
As for "fall of American Democracy", actually, the 1960s and early 1970s didn't feel a whole lot different from the recent summer of discontent, and remember that the LA Riots were 1992. And for someone around since 1900, 'fall of American democracy' was, at several points, not "unthinkable".
In any case, "social media" hundreds of years ago was called "pamphleteering" and, for example, contributed to French Revolution:
I think a lot of this depends on where you are standing. In the West, 1900-1990 was a huge difference in life and how it was lived, and less so between 1990 and today.
In many other places of the world 1900-1990 had much less change in day to day life, whereas 1990-today has been a huge change.
The massive changes have just finally been getting spread around to everyone (still unevenly of course)
My Russian great-great-grandmother was born in 1898 and died in 1998. She witnessed tsarist Russia, communist Russia and democratic Russia. That was quite an experience. I always was kind of jealous because she could compare the regimes first-hand.
That's quite a way to put it. Someone living through 1908 - 2008 would've also witnessed the start of Putin's autocratic Russia as he manoeuvred to keep power despite ending his second term.
Dont underestimate recent changes. Your grandma never saw a smartphone, modern electric car, online food ordering, Netflix nor went on a Tinder hoookup. :)
My great grandmother was born in the Habsburg Empire, her daughter in Nazi Germany, her son in communist Poland, she died in modern polish republic. And she never moved an inch, that's how many different rules and governments had southern poland in her lifetime.
She remember the poland of poles in rural areas and germans and jews in the cities, which is how the entirety of eastern Europe looked like up to the urals. So many different languages spoken by populations for centuries.
She never saw a car or listened to a radio as a child and definitely did not have electricity at home till ww2 ended. When she died there were videochats.
I would argue for 1870-1970. Flush toilets, motors and light bulbs, communication networks ( phones in houses, radio ) did not exist before 1870, but were rapidly being deployed in the decade or two before the Queen's birth in 1922..
A book by Robert J. Gordon from 2015, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," goes through this in great and fascinating detail. The life of an everyday American in 1870, starting off with the chamber pot and ending with an early bedtime by candlelight, was hard to even imagine by 1940. As he lays it out , life in that year would be familiar to us: toilets and plumbing, mass media via radio & hardcopy webpage (i.e. newspapers), worldwide communication from home (telephone), refrigeration, etc.
My grandmother (1900 - 2000, ish), considered "email" (instant letters) and individual people's ability to "publish" on the web for the world to create and consume what any individual thought, as radical and important.
She considered company websites as fancy brochures, but thought individual access to almost free global publishing was astonishing.
I tend to agree with you, if only for that fact that in the span of a single lifetime an individual, as a child, could have stood and watched man fly for the first time, and then as an adult see man land on the Moon.
I'd say the time from 1830's to about 1930's was the era of greatest change.
The introduction of trains in the early 1800s literally changed the DNA of England. As people started to regularly traveled 100's of miles away from their villages.
The transatlantic cable was carrying millions of messages by the late 1880s.
American history tends to be written in a bubble. Some people in the U.S.A. were using chamber pots in the 1870s, by the 1870s London had a sewer system.
Too often the U.S.A. plays up a fantasy pioneer past. While in the U.S.A. people tend of talk of the 1860s as a time of pioneers and wagons, in large Western European cities Maxwell's Equations were being discussed in mathematics departments.
> Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span?
1870-1970 (or about that range) probably would be bigger change. That would cover time from before commercial light bulbs to commercial computers[1] and man on the moon. Societally it would include WW1 and the series of Russian revolutions leading to wave of other revolutions in Europe[2], and major advances in Womens' suffrage[3] among other things.
[3] "The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote. Dutch women won the vote in 1919, and American women on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage
On the margin, we're comparing 2022 to 1922, 2021-2022 to 1921-1922, &c. There's little question that this span overlaps substantially, probably 80+%, with the 100-year spam of greatest change in humanity, but I think there's a strong argument that, pretty say, 1914-2014 > 1922-2022 (which amounts to that the changes of 1914-1922 were more substantial than those of 2014-2022). Where exactly the optimum is, of course, hard to say, though I do think the 2000s have been on the whole exciting enough that that the next serious cutoffs would be around 1905 or 1903, and not likely in between.
It's always vague statements like that, or something to the effect of "she witnessed some pretty important events", or "she lived for very long". What did she do exactly, of note, in these 75 years? I still don't know.
The UK monarch doesn't rule over most Commonwealth countries. The monarch only rules over the 15 Commonwealth Realms. For example, India and Pakistan are now republics and the monarch doesn't have a role in their governments. Canada, by contrast, is a monarchy and Commonwealth Realm.
The Commonwealth of Nations an association of countries, but the Commonwealth of Nations does not control the government of any member country (even ceremonially). India and Pakistan are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, but are not Commonwealth Realms.
It's mind-boggling to me to think about how long 70 years of reign actually is. How many world leaders she has seen come and go. How much the world changed since then.
I was indeed counting from the declaration of independence and was trying to round to the nearest natural fractions, but you are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
Nope, you were closer to correct. The Constitution isn’t the founding of America: the Union formed first under the Articles of Confederation but our first act as a Union separate from the UK was the Declaration of Independence.
Thanks for the correction, I retract my objection. We could also start counting from when the Articles of Confederation came into effect (1781), which lies approximately between 1/3 and 1/4 ;)
Maybe, but I think effectively it really was the Declaration of Independence. It would take some time for independence to be effectually achieved, but consider a counter-timeline where we lost the war: the Declaration would be a minor footnote at best in British history (which it pretty much is) and also not the start of the history of the Union. It’s because we won that the United States of America is a meaningful idea to anyone.
The Articles of Confederation wouldn’t even be a footnote, just a dusty document in someone’s library, maybe, and the Constitution would never have been written.
Spoiler: "Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t even have a driver’s license. As Queen, she doesn’t need one." but "as an Army driver during a war, she knew how to roll along Scotland’s winding roads."
The king/queen's passport situation is also weird. British passports ask for passage "in the name of Her Majesty", but she theoretically doesn't need one since she can ask herself.
Not to disagree, just to say the phrasing IIRC is that HM 'requests and requires' (that the bearer of the passport be allowed to pass 'without let or hindrance', and so on).
Same as passports; they're issued in her name, thus she doesn't need one.
It's also true that she cannot be prosecuted for any crime except that of treason against the British people, but that's contestable. Since crimes are prosecuted in her name.
"Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary."
But theory is not practice. In practice, if King Charles shivved someone in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, crowing about how he can't be prosecuted, what would happen would probably be something like:
- parliament would try to pass a law saying that we were a republic now (or that harry becomes king or whatever)
- charles would refuse royal assent
- parliament would amend the bill to remove the requirement for royal assent for primary legislation and then claim they'd pass it using itself
- people would point out that this is clearly invalid and self-referential
- it would go to the UK supreme court, who would twist themselves into knots to conclude that it's actually fine, because they know as well as anyone else that that's the only conclusion that wouldn't result in riots and the collapse of the state as a liberal democracy
- all the institutions who matter would agree that we're a republic now
You are taking an extreme example. How about if he sexually assaulted an underage girl a la prince Andrew and denied it happened? The same thing that happened to Prince Andrew would happen, ie nothing. The royalty is above the law unless they do something unbelievably stupidly obviously bad and admit it. And it that case they would just claim that one particular royal is crazy and give the power to the next in line.
A passport is document used by other countries, so that really depends on other countries humoring U.K.
She perhaps didn't need one because other countries didn't insist on it when traveling, not because it is issued in her name.
Also the office of Her Majesty is distinct(and all other titles) from the person the queen herself. Monarchs are quite used to that idea, and that is how they award themselves other titles for example.
Same reason why royal name is assumed on ascension and does not have be birth name or her actual birthday is not when royal birthday is celebrated and myriad other things like that .
Argh, and she was so close to overtaking Louis XIV as the longest reigning monarch in history! I was really hoping we'd beat the French.
But seriously, this is a momentous day for Britain and the world. She was a titan of public life, known to billions. The world will never be the same without her. I don't know what these means for Britain but I expect it will be quite destabilising.
The many-many crisis' going on, the strikes, the incredibly unpopular ascent of a new prime minister and now this?
Definitely destabilising.
I suspect a collective mourning and unity of the country followed closely by civil unrest the likes of which hasn't been seen in living British memory.
1,809 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 437 ms ] threadIt will be very interesting to see how the population J curve flatlining affects global society. We live in interesting times.
At current continual growth rates (assuming the decline comes to a dead stop and remains steady), we will see 10 billion people late 2044.
If the decline of the last 10 years continues indefinitely, humanity would go extinct around 3913.
https://www.politico.eu/article/queen-elizabeth-death-plan-b...
Is there another monarch alive with this many subjects?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_heade...
The Dutch royal family, by contrast, have a bit more privacy.
If you start counting what we'd usually call dictators, there definitely are bigger ones. The monarch/dictator line gets a little blurry and subjective/political I believe.
Given that all the countries with more population than that have a constitution and not a sovereign, it's safe to say yesterday she was the most prolific monarch alive.
Might be worth pointing out that not all Commonwealth countries are part of the Commonwealth Realm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_realm
India has been a republic since 1947 and is a member of the Commonwealth.
States that recognize the British monarch as head of state: 67 mil (UK) + 38 mil (Canada) + 26 mil (Australia) + 5 mil (New Zealand) + others less than mil people = 136+ mil
So pretty close, but this appears to be a correct statement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Like the first radio stations had just started broadcasting when she was born, now we're all discussing her passing on a communications network that connects the entire globe. Possibly some of us while on flights from one side of the world to the other.
Telegraphy had allowed current news to rapidly flow around the globe for decades.
That kind of improvement benefits poor people.
It’s like the opposite of tariffs or sanctions: the people at the top are unaffected.
> A mix of June and 19th, Juneteenth has become a day to commemorate the end of slavery in America. Despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than two years earlier on January 1, 1863, a lack of Union troops in the rebel state of Texas made the order difficult to enforce.
> Some historians blame the lapse in time on poor communication in that era, while others believe Texan slave-owners purposely withheld the information.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/abolition-of-sla...
They were printing reports from all over the world.
As an example the modern sporting event the Tour de France was started by a newspaper in 1903 and was reported on daily. That wouldn't really have been viable financially without mass communication. In fact the race exists solely to generate those reports.
There's a very good book called The Victorian Internet that covers early mass communication if you're interested[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
They were born without electricity, and everything it brought, and without cars or planes, and they lived to have pretty much all modern comfort and watch a man on the Moon on TV.
I don't think so. My grandmother was born in 1900 and died in 2003. Cars, airplanes, electricity, radio, TV, computers, space ships, etc..., all were invented or became commonplace in her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth was born between the birth years of my parents, who didn't remember the "horse and buggy days".
Arguably it's not particularly different now than, say, 1995 - 2000, which is the half decade of web search indexes (AltaVisa = 1995) and banner ads (1998 = DoubleClick IPO).
Travel, media, appliances, transportation, Internet, perhaps even music and fashion, haven't as fundamentally changed since then.
It may not be as big of a leap as no computers -> personal computers or no internet -> internet but I wouldn't say that the world is "not much different" than 2000.
Social media in particular has the potential to be extremely disrupting to society. There are things which seem possible that would have been unthinkable in 2000 like the fall of American democracy. And that sort of societal shift requires more than just the internet. It requires a hyper-online society which is enabled by smartphones and social media.
The Floppy Disk. ... Portable Cassette Player. ... The All-In-One Personal Computer. ... The Cell Phone. ... The VCR. ... The First “Real” Video Game. ... Digital Wristwatches.
Remember that mobile phones were already "StarTac" sized in 1996:
https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/the-evolution-of-ce...
As for social media, "Eternal September" was in 1993. In fact, I noted my grandmother's perception that people putting their thoughts out there was disruptive. In her mind that, like radio or TV that she saw get invented, this was obviously going to suddenly be everyone. So you're saying she was right. But she'd already seen it in the last millennium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
As for "fall of American Democracy", actually, the 1960s and early 1970s didn't feel a whole lot different from the recent summer of discontent, and remember that the LA Riots were 1992. And for someone around since 1900, 'fall of American democracy' was, at several points, not "unthinkable".
In any case, "social media" hundreds of years ago was called "pamphleteering" and, for example, contributed to French Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer
In many other places of the world 1900-1990 had much less change in day to day life, whereas 1990-today has been a huge change.
The massive changes have just finally been getting spread around to everyone (still unevenly of course)
She remember the poland of poles in rural areas and germans and jews in the cities, which is how the entirety of eastern Europe looked like up to the urals. So many different languages spoken by populations for centuries.
She never saw a car or listened to a radio as a child and definitely did not have electricity at home till ww2 ended. When she died there were videochats.
A book by Robert J. Gordon from 2015, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," goes through this in great and fascinating detail. The life of an everyday American in 1870, starting off with the chamber pot and ending with an early bedtime by candlelight, was hard to even imagine by 1940. As he lays it out , life in that year would be familiar to us: toilets and plumbing, mass media via radio & hardcopy webpage (i.e. newspapers), worldwide communication from home (telephone), refrigeration, etc.
She considered company websites as fancy brochures, but thought individual access to almost free global publishing was astonishing.
The introduction of trains in the early 1800s literally changed the DNA of England. As people started to regularly traveled 100's of miles away from their villages.
The transatlantic cable was carrying millions of messages by the late 1880s.
American history tends to be written in a bubble. Some people in the U.S.A. were using chamber pots in the 1870s, by the 1870s London had a sewer system.
Too often the U.S.A. plays up a fantasy pioneer past. While in the U.S.A. people tend of talk of the 1860s as a time of pioneers and wagons, in large Western European cities Maxwell's Equations were being discussed in mathematics departments.
1870-1970 (or about that range) probably would be bigger change. That would cover time from before commercial light bulbs to commercial computers[1] and man on the moon. Societally it would include WW1 and the series of Russian revolutions leading to wave of other revolutions in Europe[2], and major advances in Womens' suffrage[3] among other things.
[1] e.g. PDP-8 and S/360
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1917%E2%80%9319...
[3] "The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote. Dutch women won the vote in 1919, and American women on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage
Actually 1926 but yes, a lot of history in those nearly 100 years.
The Commonwealth of Nations an association of countries, but the Commonwealth of Nations does not control the government of any member country (even ceremonially). India and Pakistan are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, but are not Commonwealth Realms.
a small but crucial distinction
It's mind-boggling to me to think about how long 70 years of reign actually is. How many world leaders she has seen come and go. How much the world changed since then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-reigning_monar...
Winston Churchill born in 1874 and Liz Truss born in 1975 were her first and last Prime Ministers.
(2022 - 1952) / (2022 - 1789) = 0.30
You're right if one starts counting from the declaration of independence, however, yielding 28.5%.
The Articles of Confederation wouldn’t even be a footnote, just a dusty document in someone’s library, maybe, and the Constitution would never have been written.
This monarch and the following one will also witness great changes and they may play some role in it.
>>Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t even have a driver’s license. As Queen, she doesn’t need one
Didn't know that either.
It's also true that she cannot be prosecuted for any crime except that of treason against the British people, but that's contestable. Since crimes are prosecuted in her name.
I wouldn't assume anyone to be as bold as Mr Cromwell was.
But theory is not practice. In practice, if King Charles shivved someone in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, crowing about how he can't be prosecuted, what would happen would probably be something like:
- parliament would try to pass a law saying that we were a republic now (or that harry becomes king or whatever)
- charles would refuse royal assent
- parliament would amend the bill to remove the requirement for royal assent for primary legislation and then claim they'd pass it using itself
- people would point out that this is clearly invalid and self-referential
- it would go to the UK supreme court, who would twist themselves into knots to conclude that it's actually fine, because they know as well as anyone else that that's the only conclusion that wouldn't result in riots and the collapse of the state as a liberal democracy
- all the institutions who matter would agree that we're a republic now
She perhaps didn't need one because other countries didn't insist on it when traveling, not because it is issued in her name.
Also the office of Her Majesty is distinct(and all other titles) from the person the queen herself. Monarchs are quite used to that idea, and that is how they award themselves other titles for example.
Same reason why royal name is assumed on ascension and does not have be birth name or her actual birthday is not when royal birthday is celebrated and myriad other things like that .
But seriously, this is a momentous day for Britain and the world. She was a titan of public life, known to billions. The world will never be the same without her. I don't know what these means for Britain but I expect it will be quite destabilising.
May she rest in peace. Long live the king!
Definitely destabilising.
I suspect a collective mourning and unity of the country followed closely by civil unrest the likes of which hasn't been seen in living British memory.