Have we underestimated the total number of people on Earth?
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Now how does China do it? I don't know.
in reality it's simple: stuff gets so much byzantine that any numbers coming out of it are just hallucinations.
And even if it is true. Even here in lets-say-civilised Romania, there's possibly a reasonable number of people who have emigrated but are still on the books. Because it takes effort to remove yourself, and little gain, so people don't do it. And the bureaucracy certainly does not do it by itself. They don't care in the slightest.
There are a lot of possibilities. A lot. The world isn't that simple.
And we have too much bureaucracy. This article is more about countries where they aren’t all covered by a bureaucrat. I doubt that’s China.
If you want wildly unreliable data, Africa is the place to go. The Democratic Republic of the Congo hasn't had a census since 1984, when the population was 31 million, while current estimates are in the ballpark of 100 million.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+population+numbers+wrong&t=n...
"We live in times where there’s always data to back up any conclusion—you just have to pick the right ones."
Every relocated person got money for the relocation. Even if there were not a lot of people living in the areas - families gathered together to fake the count and get a lot more money. Sad, but true.
Maybe this is statistically irrelevant, but seeing Poland and dams listed - I had to write this.
It is obvious that the earth is unlivable if there were 1 human per square meter. So where is the tipping point?
Additionally, quality of life goes down in terms of lack of solitude, increased competition for jobs especially among academics, increased rents etc.
Here's Nigeria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria
that population growth, combined with somewhat sudden climate change and droughts and famines, and ensuing armed conflicts, does look like a possible upcoming catastrophe, I'd say
While in China, Korea etc yes it's the opposite
Reminds me of https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger :
> After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order.
Because she never said anything even close to something like that: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/feb/26/viral-imag...
AUDI, VIDE, TACE
If we map humanity on to a similar system with the earth as the closed system there are some high level similarities that would suggest a similar end result. Exactly where we are on that curve is something that we will only be able to determine with hindsight.
What's different with humanity is that we have opportunities and the ability to re-engineer the system. Opportunities that bacteria don't have, so they die.
What we lack is desire for a long term steady state. Maybe we'll need to mutate into something else to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...
It’s worth knowing if you’re proposing an idea that’s been continuously proposed, and has been continuously proven wrong by time and history, that you might want to consider if there are other drivers that continually oppose your thesis. I think technology is sufficiently powerful we’ll be able to power our needs for another hundred years at a minimum if we try.
Perhaps both things can be truth - the criticism is right with no intervention, AND the interventions it hopefully causes make everything alright.
> Despite use of the term "Malthusian catastrophe" by detractors such as economist Julian Simon (1932–1998), Malthus himself did not write that mankind faced an inevitable future catastrophe. Rather, he offered an evolutionary social theory […]
1. subsistence severely limits population-level
2. when the means of subsistence increases, population increases
3. population-pressures stimulate increases in productivity
4. increases in productivity stimulate further population-growth
5. because productivity increases cannot maintain the potential rate of population growth, population requires strong checks to keep parity with the carrying-capacity
6. individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex, work, and children determine the expansion or contraction of population and production
7. checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence-level
8. the nature of these checks will have significant effect on the larger sociocultural system—Malthus points specifically to misery, vice, and poverty
100 years is virtually no time at all, I'm having a hard time believing you're not making a joke with your optimism being that you think we have at least that long.
These changes largely pre-date small recent drops in living standards, having taken place at the end of unprecedented runs of improvements in health and quality of life.
It's hubris to suppose humans are immune to natural laws that seem to apply to everything else.
On the other hand we have people panicking about population decline because 1) our economy (including many pension systems) is built on the obviously unsustainable paradigm of infinite growth and 2) some people have very unhealthy feelings about the relative proportions of arbitrary demographic groups because of race essentialist bunk-science that is still being regurgitated by people who benefit from sowing division along those lines to distract from themselves.
But the logistic growth function is used to model populations in animals as well. So the question is what is your counteragrument?
1. reality is more complex than the logistic function, but ultimately in fact we would reach some sort of saturation effect, e.g. by humanity moderating the birth rates.
2. reality is more complex, but infinite growth in an finite habitat is somehow possible (note, that infinity is a huge number)
If it is the latter I'd be very curious to see your mathematical model and your reasoning behind it.
On the topic of model complexity: the logistic growth function is a simplification and in reality one would have to incorporate at all kind of resources (and their geographical locations, renewing rates, etc) in a complex mega model. But I do not see how any model could sustain infinite humans. And if it can't it means there is saturation and that means the logistic growth function is a good mental approximation for populations.
Also see: https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...
That's why bad analogies are bad.
If I increase the size of the bucket, the the amount of water flowing over the top will also exactly equal the amount flowing from the tap.
There's also scale to consider: global warming is more like if my bucket was very soft, and I've stretched the plastic a little bit to give it slightly more volume (the analogy breaks down beyond this point).
The entrepreneurial spirit is a perfect example for this. We can talk about disruption all we want as if it means making the world better but ultimately we're looking at existing systems and seemingly saturated markets and asking "how can we add to this in a way that makes us money?". We are explicitly opposed to notions of zero-sum markets but the only way to have a non-zero sum is to add more to it and that extra something has to come from somewhere, even if it's an externality to the balance sheets. For the past century marketing has been defined by creating needs rather than addressing existing ones, selling more rather than just providing another option.
This fuels the economy but it's a horrible waste if you look at it from a detached impersonal global resource use perspective. Even trying to go against this system has been productized and can be bought as a subscription model at this point. We've unlearned any other way to do things because everything has been recuperated by the system we've built. It is indeed easier for most people nowadays to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current system and it being replaced by something better, fairer or more resource-friendly.
For example, we can survive an oversupply of food just fine. We absolutely cannot survive an undersupply of food: if you have a population needing a certain number of calories and you don't have it, then in about 3 weeks you no longer have a problem because they've died.
You get stuck with people who have money, who have everything they want, and people who don't have money who can't make any, becauae there is already a huge excess of anything that people who do have money would want.
Capitalism has no solution to this problem.