The world might run out of people (2019)
wired.com
wired.com
No, they don't. They predict it'll plateau at 11 billion by 2100, and believe that the fastest growth is behind us.
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Lin...
This is a pretty ridiculous statement from the article, considering the history of population growth. Growing from 7.8B humans to 11B in 80 years is a significantly reduced growth rate compared to historical data. It's even reduced growth on an absolute scale. Starting from 1930, we went from 2B to 6B humans in 69 years[1]. We added tripled the world population in a few generations. I think we'll be able to handle to slow, steady population growth of the 21st century.
We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century, and population growth isn't even on the list.
Edit: I finished reading the article. I would not recommend that course of action. The so-called "running out of people" scenario is that the world has between 8 and 9 billion people in 2100. While that is a significant change to the model, calling it "running out of people" is clickbait garbage.
I've been on the hunt for an apolitical assessment of what humanity's greatest challenges are. Anyone know where this body of work might be?
Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting one as a list of economists ranking cost-to-impact ratios. Something similar or adjacent?
No such thing exists. Such an assessment would be inherently political.
Income Inequality (go UBI!)
Climate Change (go Tesla?)
Authoritarian Rule (go...Democracy?)
Disease and Aging (go science!)
Racism and Religion (go education!)I am waiting for around the 2050s to see if/when the climate change movement goes against EVs in their current form. We're really just shifting all the polluting in time and place. Move it all to the front and back of the vehicle's lifespan, put a huge distance between the vehicle user and how the energy is produced, and we call it green because there's no smoke coming out of it.
In practice the numbers seem to suggest the overall change in emissions is not better - at least not in the type of EVs that are popular now (e.g. Teslas). A much smaller vehicle, with much less batteries, perhaps.
This is false. The emissions associated with producing an EV are on the order of 15 tonnes CO2 equivalent, vs. 10 tonnes CO2 equivalent for a fuel combustion vehicle (FCV):
http://tasri.org/upLoad/down/month_1710/201710242243229582.p...
Meanwhile the emissions associated with gasoline vary but are at least 0.25 kg per mile (EPA average 0.4 kg/mile):
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/P100JPPH.TXT?ZyActionD=Z...
Over the lifetime of the car -- at least 100000 miles -- that's 25 tonnes at a bare minimum. But EVs last longer than FCVs, so we should increase the range to at least 200000 miles and 50 tonnes CO2 equivalent (or 80 for a typical car), where EVs start to pull away substantially. Furthermore, the emissions associated with EV producing depend in part on fuel-derived electricity used in manufacturing, which can be reduced dramatically by switching to nonfuel electricity production.
Overall, EVs represent a massive decrease in pollution.
However, the most important things to solve are the problems we haven't solved: principally grid-level electricity storage that permits a higher fraction of electricity production from renewable sources. EVs, wind turbines and photovoltaics by contrast are technologies that are already applied in practice.
A 20 year old EV will still smell bad, have gunk you can't clean all over the surfaces, not communicate with your phone etc.
Maybe it will be true, but I don't think you should count your chickens just yet, certainly not by a factor of 2.
If your smelly 20 year old EV is still rolling someone will buy it for a couple hundred bucks and drive it until it fails.
How the claims of superior maintainability for EVs vs ICs turns out, well, we'll see. There's an awful lot on an IC car that can go wrong that will send a well-used one to the junkyard, since repairs are so expensive. But there's also a lot that are kept on the road by driveway mechanics that have more time than money... and the EV future will be less friendly to that. I can do valve guides in my driveway, but I'm not replacing battery cells.
Mechanics for decades have been complaining that "you can't fix these new computerized cars" when mechanically they are very similar to what has been produced for half a century, sensors and electronics just allow you (when properly working) to set and adjust on the fly...making engines more efficient and smoother running.
The "new mechanic" will be required to know most (if not all) of the same things as those of the past but will also be required to have an understanding of electronics repair and safety. I suspect due to things like microprocessor kits, robotics and such being more popular at a younger age that this will be a non issue. Sure...the current batch of mechanics may have issues but the next generation will (could?) consider it common knowledge.
I am sure in history someone complained that these automobiles can't be fixed as easy as replacing a horse. That is the issue with new tech...if you only know old...it seems like black box magic.
The "new mechanic" for the EV era will not exist if auto manufacturers make every digital tool proprietary and unavailable outside the dealer network, with phone-home to HQ for authorization.
Tractors and such start to get tricky and I am sure there are aspects of the cars which you cannot control but from what I have seen you can get by without a reader on older cars (flashing the obd light) but on newer ones you need a decent reader. Which largely are about $100 depending on how in depth you want to go.
On my VW I use the OBDeleven reader...but I believe there is a generic comparable one also. It allows you to test sensors, modules, even door switches/lights and the radio.
I understand the added complexity is confusing at times but really once you have a reader it is easy enough. Code readers are actually a fairly accessible and cheap addition to your toolbox.
I do agree though that the "black boxing" and DRM of hardware needs to be addressed. Especially in anything that is relied on. If you buy a machine you should get full schematics/docs/etc upon request IMHO...but that isn't really a common thing anymore.
Yes, read but sometimes you have to write to the ECU to update, reset or recalibrate some parameters and there's where the gotcha is since those writing operations are secured via challenge and respsonse and only available via manufacturer approved equipment.
Source: former automotive firmware engineer
It's a bit like 'reduce, reuse, recycle'.
Not having a car (possibly renting one occasionally, the inconvenience meaning that you use it less) is the best option.
After that is probably a family using an EV (e.g. with >2 occupancy).
After that is a single person using an EV to do loads of daft journeys (e.g. what sounds from over the pond like a typical 50+ mile daily round trip for work).
I had an EV for a while and sold it because I realised that it's ultimately just an excuse, like smoking "light" cigarettes. It still relies on a piss-take infrastructure of sprawl everywhere.
But we should definitely encourage them over ICE's.
Along with huge technological changes. Nowadays the technological advances are more or less plateaued themselves compared to getting from no factories to factories, no electricity to electricity, no computers to computers, no telecommunications to telecommunications, etc, no cars to cars.
Today we already have problems all around the world with the economy...
We had factories since the 18th century or so, but we had huge advances in the 20th century (from Taylorism to automation).
And the "rich have phones" in the 1920s and 1930s to "everybody has one" a little later meant a different impact...
I always roll my eyes at researchers who take a trend and then expand it to its infinite conclusion. The forces that are causing a change in the rate of growth may look very different once the dynamics inherent in a large population with lots of resource competition go away.
Also, if you look at the UN numbers, as another commenter said, they are NOT expecting a "population explosion". Indeed, they are seeing the rate of decline accelerating pretty much everywhere. The big difference is that the proportion of young people in places like Africa is enormous, so there is already a lot of "population momentum". It will take time for those huge cohorts to pass their way through the population pyramid.
[1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati... [pdf]
If that's anywhere like where I live, "lower class" means people that don't pay as much taxes but on the other hand end up having even less money left. Yet, lower class people tend to have more children and fertility has a negative correlation to income. Perhaps it's a matter of education and ambition rather than the economic challenge.
I wonder if some if it is also the capital intensity of children, the higher the monetary investment you bring (clothes, gear, schools, activities) the harder it is to have lots unless you have the money.
The government is practically killing the population in a Darwinian sense, discouraging intelligent and educated people to have kids and encouraging the others to. It is the way to the movie Idiocracy.
Yet we see the same tendency here. Lower income families tend to have more children despite earning less in net. So I think you have to at least consider the possibility that it has less to do with the financial hardships, at least in absolute terms of income, than with some correlated factors in your home country.
For example, the low income population here are generally less educated. Perhaps people end up more aware of the consequences of having children through education. Maybe there's an underlying factor that leaves people with both a propensity for academic achievement and an inclination towards having less children, like time consuming dedication to an interest or a career. Perhaps higher income parents have higher and more costly standards for their children.
I don't know what country you live in that the middle class generally ends up with less disposable money than the lower class through wealth redistribution programs, but it's not the case here or in many other countries where the negative income-children correlation can be observed.
I won't comment on darwinism or the idea of Idiocracy as a realistic outcome of any kind of selection process other than to say that it's stupid. If you are able to have children but won't, you have yourself to blame for nature selecting against you, if that's at all an issue to you.
Regarding to "If you are able to have children but won't", that applies to uneducated people; if you can have kids and you won't because you have not enough money to raise them properly, pay for education and health care (state health care it is free and almost worthless) then people decide not to have kids in such conditions. If you are uneducated, with drinking problems and you don't care about kids, you have as many as you can so you can drink all the money that you get. Not kidding and not exaggerating at all.
Reading this part made me think "which other country is like Romania?"
Sure enough, the author is from Bucharest, Romania.
We pay 25% for a pension that may never come. The state also computes pensions in magical "points" which means they can arbitrarily tweak in the far future how much of your current money you see back.
We pay "only" 10% in income taxes and some/many IT positions are exempt (so far).
Once we have our salary in hand, we pay 19% in VAT.
I'm guessing you haven't lived in Belgium, Germany or Scandinavia.
One year ago I got an offer to work in France, so I made a comparison: tax rate is a lot lower there for a similar income. At the same time inflation rate is higher in Romania, credit is a lot more expensive, corruption a lot higher, so the taxes are too high for what you get.
My dad's family had nine and he grew up in the city in a small house. I think religion may have some part in it for example Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon. It was quite common to have a dozen children. My mother's family who were farmers for awhile (then a restaurant) also has nine children.
Government financial support may also play a role. My country Canada has many social support systems that allow larger family sizes. I'm not criticizing it but the support is there for the children. It would be curious to see family size versus government support.
It's completely prohibited.
If all women are educated and in control, every child of the next generation will have an educated mother who decided to have children and those mothers will likely pass on the cultural traits that lead to this decision. The result will be a generation whose reproduction rate is much less impacted by education and being in control than previous generations who to a large part had mothers lacking education and control. Reproduction rates will stabilize as motherly role models adapt.
I understand where it is coming from, but I think it is oversimplified... Increased female education happens when a society is more educated. That is you could probably switch female with male and get the same results (which is also over simplified).
The reality is so many things are changing that is causing the birthrate to decrease and it's way to hard to blame it on one factor over another. You could probably argue that technology, wealth and what is the social norm in the society we live have a massive effect on the decrease in birthrate in western countries.
Now I live in Israel. The religious have an extremely large number of children and it has nothing to do with the female education level and everything to do with religion! In fact the females are often more educated than the men and are the ones with Jobs!. What is interesting though is the secular Jews, like my wife and I, usually have 3+ kids (we are at number 2). It's just the norm here and society caters to families with children
Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent.
Their biggest problem is that they are so good at farming that land prices around their communities go up and their children have to move farther and farther to afford their own farms.
They're also completely reliant on the larger economy to sell their goods, and are in no way self sufficient. Not to mention sky high rates of child and spousal abuse. Humanity moved away from sustenance farming for very good reasons.
The point is, not every one will stop having large families. I don't think we're in danger of an empty planet.
I'm not.
All available fertile land will eventually be farmed by the Amish (if the rest of us stop having kids.)
> And there is no way I'm going to live in a strict religious society.
What makes you think they would accept you? ;-P
Anyway, the scenario isn't armies of Amish forcing you to join them. It's you and me getting out-populated by them over time.
I'm pointing out that the premise of the article is flawed: not everybody is going to stop having kids.
I'm also pointing out that, as far as I can tell, and only slightly joking, the Amish are the "meek" who "shall inherit the Earth", which possibility I find amusing and though provoking.
The Amish population doubles every 20 years. Simple growth, over time, while everyone else's populations are near flat or shrinking? I give them a great chance.
That's faster than any other group that I could find. The Census Bureau publishes growth rates by race too - the Hispanic population is growing around 2%, the Black population is growing around 1.5%.
(I'm just hoping their attitudes on women and race improve.)
The world might have more people by 2100 but many countries, including US, Europe and others will be shrinking, unless they take aggressive action on immigration reform.
My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years).
Yup. Our economic system will ensure nobody produces kids, or at least, not more than one kid.
Although it's not surprising that controlling for education of women would provide a better model fit, it seems unlikely to me that this is the main causal relationship. I think logic and evidence suggest that the main driver of fertility is child mortality.
Humans appear to adjust fertility to maximize the probability that their offspring will successfully reproduce. Higher child mortality in a population tends to result in higher fertility as insurance against loss of a child [1]. Lower child mortality tends to result in lower fertility.
The human species would not be around today if we lacked a natural tendency to place utmost priority on offspring reproduction success. Parents must trade off the number of children they have versus the quality of care per child. Our current rate of child mortality reduction is shifting the optimal strategy to fewer children and higher quality of care per child. I see improved education of women (and men) as largely a consequence of this trend. I expect this will continue until disrupted by high-mortality events such as natural disasters, disease, or major wars.
Edit: It doesn't appear that it would make a difference, the low-end emission scenarios already have population growth similar to what is described in the article: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3
In the long term, sub-populations which choose to have more children will outgrow sub-populations which have fewer children. Until the growth is eventually stopped by external factors, like limited resources, famine, war, or strictly enforced government policies.
Many of the conditions that accompanied falling fertility rates in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are now evident in the developing world.
This may be a bit of a trolley problem. If population were indeed controllable by this one variable, where too little female education resulted in overpopulation and too much resulted in population collapse, would it be ethical to impose an upper and lower limit on it? Would it be ethical not to?
As a libertarian my default position is, that should be left up to those women. I don't believe that authoritarian measures are useful for human flourishing. But if I were convinced that this is an existential issue for the species I'd have to struggle between 1) maybe an authoritarian species shouldn't survive, and 2) ethics are ultimately in service to our survival and must adapt to that end.
The part that is a large spectrum is the desire of people (not only women) to have kids. I know educated people with 4 kids and people with the same level education with 0 kids, with all the intermediary numbers being present. I talked to women that are childless and they have various reasons for that, I talked to women that have 3-4 kids and they have various reasons for that, but the common theme is they all have made some informed decisions. For women without education having kids is mostly out of their control.
[0] In the original sense of the word.
Option 1) You could make it easier to afford and raise children.
I realize this seems a little extreme in a US context, so here is a more affordable option:
Option 2) You could encourage women to get an abortion if they're pregnant with a boy.
All we need to maintain the population is that each woman on average produces one new woman. Plus a few men, perhaps acting as sperm donors.
I jest, of course, but my point is that there's more than one way to be authoritarian.
so yes, that one variable is not a master switch. propagation has many, many avenues, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out in a myriad of other ways.
(Nowadays during the recent COVID-19 lockdown, pretty much every afternoon we see hordes of kids, roughly ages three to ten, riding bikes and scooters and skateboards back and forth on the street, although that's slowing down as the Houston summer weather sets in.)
It’s a real flex to have a gaggle of kids filling up a giant house.
Out of curiosity, do you have kids? They're a pretty labor-intensive "status symbol." <g>
But I also don’t have to own a Porsche to know why people buy them.
Status symbols aren’t just expensive to buy, they’re expensive to own, too. You think the orthopedic surgeon mows the lawn on their vacation cabin upstate every weekend? Or the big law litigator does the mechanical work on their Cessna?
No, those things cost a ton to store, maintain, fuel, and use. Same as kids. But then the status comes from putting in as little work as possible (through hired help) and only showing them off when you want. Send ‘em to boarding school, hire an au pair, etc. etc.
Another way to think of it. Look at things the working classes have out of need/desperation and that require tremendous amounts of work. The upper classes want those things for recreation/enjoyment/status and to do as little work as possible themselves.
If some of the forecasts are correct, we will hit a 5'C increase in overall global temperatures. the mass famines, dieoffs due to logistics breakdown, water scarcity, insane human migrations, wars over scarce resources etc. will be far bigger factor making most of these variables look like non factors.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01125-x
I think it will be lucky if even half/4B of humans survive 2100
"Despite a temporary drop in carbon emissions from the 2020 outbreak, countries turned to cheap fossil fuels to revive their economies after the crisis. Carbon emissions soared and temperatures followed, setting the stage for 5 °C of warming by the end of the century."
That's not a forecast, that's speculation. Might as well factor in WWIII while we're at it.
A lot of women are adopting "all or nothing" approach, aka "I'd rather live alone than with someone I am not attracted to".
There are various articles where women are interviewed and they report shortage of "attractive males" for relationships. Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursuing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest)
Meanwhile there are lots of women who have children with the guys they deemed attractive but that guy never commited as a husband or father, some of those are now struggling to pay their bills and raise kids as a single parent. Society has to come forward and help them raise their kids.
Maybe we should get done with traditional marriage and assume every country man or woman is father or mother to every kid existing within the borders of the country and pay for their maintenance and good upbringing as a community as a whole.
Maybe the cost of having kids is too high? And we need to lower it through incentives?
If we choose to not do this - where will the future tax payers come from when the present ones will be on retirement? We borrow from future. Today the taxes you are paying have been used already in past for the welfare of the previous generation. Tomorrow when you'll need welfare, you'll want to have fresh population supporting it.
You can bring in the immigrants but will they have the values which your community needs? Will it require a period of time before they are able to contribute to your society in a positive way?
I really don't think it has anything to do with #metoo. I'm a very outgoing millennial male, and I think this all boils down to a decrease in sociability, largely centered around mobile phones. When I go out, I never think about pulling my phone out, but I see countless people in social settings on their phones...not socializing. Men used to have to get over the fear of rejection but now there are countless apps that put that fear to rest and let people pursue behind the comfort and safety of a screen, even if it means lower success rate.
instead, I could take the view that there are too many people in the world, that having an aggressive population growth is actually a good thing, and that technology could fill in a lot of gaps we fill in by throwing unqualified people at it.
How can you predict if your partner will leave you in future when you decide to have kid?
do you have 0% control over it? hell no.
there is rarely a situation where you have 0 agency and if you incentivize certain types of behavior (by providing aid/benefits) you will get that type of behavior.
until then i had never been exposed to any of the evidence countering the "population bomb" hypothesis. not in education, not in media, not in personal discussion.