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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.
You change the laws so that childcare, health care for kids, lunchs, and college are all free, all without any paperwork and we will have a baby boom the likes you never saw.
Lots of Europe has free health care annd college; the childcare is becoming a thing too. The birthrate is still low. Your notion that people cannot afford children does not explain the size of poor people's families and immigrant families. It's not that people cannot afford children: it is that some cultures do not want them. Or, to put it another way, I know that many poor farmers in my family tree had ten to twelve children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that was before childcare, college, anything resembling healthcare or free lunches even existed. They got no handouts, and they were poor, and they bred. Demographics are not a result of economic changes but of a change in social values. Women's rights and the decline of religion are probably more important than the cost of college.
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).
There's good evidence that female education is the dominant factor affecting fertility rate. A stable government is generally necessary, but not sufficient, for high female education rates.
There are lots of examples of stable governments that had big population growth problems though. Bangladesh is the usual case study. The government tried all kids of programs aimed at reducing the birth rate and nothing much worked. Then the education department, completely independently, decided it would be a good idea for girls to go to school, and the fertility rate fell from one of the highest in the world to close to replacement.
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
My concern is not quite geometric population growth in the face of sustainable abilities to service that growth. We fail that that, and fail consistently, as the greed model thwarts any appreciation for what happens to the next generation. We kick it forward. We answer the call of our biology and have lots of children, eschew birth control and even abortion in the name of population sustainability, which creates constant profit growths for the greed model.
Except we don't. That's the whole point. The facts on the ground say the UN is full of shit (to no one's surprise) and you're wrong too (even less surprising).
The US's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1973, returned to above replacement in 1989, then dropped below again in 2011.
South Korea's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1984 and has never risen above it since.
Japan's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1975 and has never risen above it since.
Germany's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1971 and has never risen above it since.
I could go on for another 100 countries. Most never return to above replacement once they drop below it. The US is very unusual in returning even for a while, but first generation immigrants tend to have more children than natives and the US still allows more immigration (both legal and illegal) than practically any country in the world.
Everywhere that infant mortality drops below about 24 per thousand live births, the birth rate drops below the replacement rate. There is some variance depending on whether or not women are allowed/provided better than elementary education and depending on the local religion, but even in places with (nominally) very strong religious objections to birth control, if women are educated and infant mortality is low enough, the birth rate drops below replacement. Why this should be has not been definitively explained, but it is happening, across the entire world, and the correlations with education and reasonably capable medical practices are statistically significant.
Relax. The US (electoral college) elected Trump.
Wrong.
I know this is off topic but, the US elected him through the rules established during the founding of our nation so that the popular majority could not just dictate the rules everyone else must follow.
If you don't understand why those rules were chosen instead of pick our favorite person for four years, then you need to go back to history class and learn a little more about how governments prior to the US's worked; as the founder members did. Spoiler alert, the majority did some pretty awful things under the guise of improvement for all. Majority rule usually leads to mob mentality, which never fairs well in the end.
As far as the fox reference, I'd say he is more like a dodo bird; but I see where you were going.
Either way the current person of interest will be out of office at some point. The media will then either crucify or glorify the next person of interest for the next 4 years, and so on, and so on, and so on! Its what makes the world go around.
P.S. I'm still not sure hiring that hacker guy was the right move.
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems and devastating entire oceans and sources of fresh water....
Yes, yes, they were. In fact, even the indigenous folks of the North American content were doing it -- they hunted the Woolly Mammoth to extinction and they didn't even have running water or horses.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia