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'The World Might Actually Run Out of People' (wired.com)
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.
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.
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.
Yep, makes total sense. We should put people who molest children in charge of stopping child molesters. We should put gang member in charge of stopping gang deaths. We should put people who award their friends large government contracts in charge of determining who gets federal assistance. After all they know exactly how its done and can best prevent others, right? They would never abuse that power and/or give themselves loop holes!
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).
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch