The UN thinks we could hit peak births in 2014
vox.com
vox.com
[1] http://esa.un.org/wpp/Excel-Data/fertility.htm
[2] http://esa.un.org/wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2012_Volume-I_Com...
Projections of world population come to much smaller total population figures now than they did when I was a child. Fertility rates have dropped much more than many people could imagine over the last few decades, and are below replacement rates in many developed countries.
The interesting thing about this to me is that it implies we will also reach 'peak energy' which is to say that once everyone in the planet is at the agreed upon 'median' lifestyle/perks we will have a fixed number for the amount of energy we need from that point forward. Kind of weird thinking about a planet with humans in equilibrium.
I get that it's in the context of population though.
See the average consumption of gasoline/diesel fuel for cars in Europe especially over the last 3 decades. And to make things even more impressive, graph out the average horsepower, weight and overall features added to cars in the same time frame. A car these days uses 1/3 the fuel it used to use in 1980 while having probably 2x the horsepower and 10x as many features, many of which have greatly improved passive and active security.
Of course, not all improvements are good, but the overall trend is nice.
This does have the effects of suppressing demand for fuel that you note, but the financial effect is that the money remains in-country and can be spent on other things.
Unless the US were to suddenly double its fuel taxes, a likelihood I estimate somewhere between nil and never, the only way US fuel prices would hit $9-$10/gallon would be for the cost of extracting oil to rise to that extent -- probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $200-300/bbl prices.
There you start running into the question of just what you're getting for your barrel of oil in terms of economic output. $GDP/BBL runs from a low of around $490 in India to nearly $2800/bbl in Sweden. It's around $1000, for most of Europe around $1500.
My thought is that there's a lot of marginal economic activity in China and India which will cease if the cost of oil doubles. Quite possibly elsewhere as well.
Price matters, but so does cost.
My grandfathers Wartburg from soviet era takes 7 to 10 liters on 100 kms. Most modern cars have around 5 liters on super-economy mode. Sure they are much heavier and saver, but overall fuel consumption is not much improved.
You should also calculate energy needed to produce and maintain the car. Wartburg engine has only 7 moving parts and can be disassembled and fixed with screw-driver. Most modern cars are thrown away after 10 years, because it is too expensive to maintain them.
I think we could easily reduce energy consumption 5x by making simplier and lighter cars. I am not saying to give up computers and other modern stuff, but keep it standardized and replaceable.
And most modern cars are not thrown away, they are sold as second hand cars in my country or other developing countries :)
I doubt that. Reminds me of a concept of Malthusianisms [0].
Some quotes:
Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.
Why does it cost so much to buy something to wear to a wedding? Because if it didn’t, the fashion industry would invent more extravagant ‘requirements’ until it reached the limit of what people could afford.
Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium.
Let's use an example from that page to deconstruct that:
> Why can’t everyone just agree to a family-friendly,
> 40-hour workweek? Because then anyone who chose to
> work a 90-hour week would clean our clocks.
What has been demonstrated repeatedly through history is that that once the 'need' it met the behavior stops. And the example at hand here is population growth. Why do "industrialized" populations have a lower population rate than "pre-industrial" populations? They both have functioning genitalia, they both have time. But when you can't count on being able to work until you are 70 and being able to live off your savings until you die, you really really want family that is younger than you so that you can move in with them. But when you don't perceive a 'need' for children to support you in your golden years, many people forego the obvious cost and bother of having them in the first place. There is no sudden new use for children that substitutes in.
Affluent parts of the world aren't running out of fresh water, they can recycle it or desalinate it. When the costs for doing that are connected with the water they choose to use it differently (like not watering a lawn in Las Vegas for example). We're low on water in California at the moment due to weather, not due to outrageous consumption by individuals.
Similarly with energy, we use less and less. Our stuff gets more efficient, our use gets more refined. From a 350 watt tube TV in the living room to a 50 Watt LCD to a 5 watt tablet/phone. We still consume news and entertainment but we don't consume it using the same methodologies at the same energy costs.
People make extrapolations and hold technologies and attitudes constant, it has been shown time and time again that you always get the wrong answer if you do that.
We get might become more efficient and need less energy to do the things we are doing today, but may need to produce more for newly found applicationspurposes as well. Let's hope we will be able to produce more energy from less ressources.
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o...
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_d...
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv
* http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...
The 'magic washing machine' talk is beautiful. One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from it.
And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books."
Me? I'm worrying.
There are a number of countries getting wealthier which don't have falling birth rates. Most are oil exporting.
Tom "Do the Math" Murphy discusses this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-populat...
Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, especially.
Appearing in The London Times in May, 2009, now only available through The Internet Archive:
"Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation"
http://web.archive.org/web/20100106010617/http://www.timeson...
"Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.
"Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.
"'This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,' said the guest. 'They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.'"
Emphasis added.
More on this by me: http://redd.it/237yxs
Providing access to birth control so women can take more control over their lives, and in the process providing health and economic stability should be lauded. That is the reason most sane people support the work of Bill and Melinda Gates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_China
Or how about this paper on the role of abortion in population control
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3709011
No nation desirous of reducing its growth rate to 1% or less can expect to do so without the widespread use of abortion. This observational study, based on the experience of 116 of the world's largest countries, supports the contention that abortion is essential to any national population growth control effort. The principal findings are: Except for a few countries with ageing populations and very high contraceptive prevalence rates, developed countries will need to maintain abortion rates generally in the range of 201-500 abortions per 1000 live births if they are to maintain growth rates at levels below 1%.
That said, a number of people with a strong expressed interest in population control, for example, the Ehrlichs, include family planning, but not forced methods of population control (e.g., forced abortions or sterilization) among the methods they advocate. See for example One With Nineveh.
Ehrlich does note on page 189:
"By the mid-twentieth century, abortions were being performed legally in some other [non-US] parts of the world. In the SovietUnion and eastern Europe, contraceptives were often unreliable and usually unavailable, so abortion was the primary means of birth control."
A few paragraphs later:
"Abortion is a difficult issue for most peopple, and most people would prefer to see safe and effective contraception widely available to, and used by, all sexually active individuals. If this were to happen, the abortion controversy, perhaps the* biggest source of ethical dispute in our society today, could go away."
His primary focus though is addressed in the following section: "Influencing Reproduction Decisions", largely via education, incentive policies, and family planning services, principally other than abortion.
I neither know nor care whether they are the world's largest funders of abortion, although that link only says that they gave money to Planned Parenthood for work other than abortions.
I'm not even going to try and parse your last sentence.
By the way, Planned Parenthood does abortions "in house", so it's not like they have any budget line items for "abortion" anyway. Unless they're doing activity-based costing, their budget is for things like [abortion] advertising, [abortion] lobbying, [abortion] facilities, [abortion] equipment, [abortionists] salaries, etc. Melinda Gates could conceivably fund their entire budget while claiming shamelessly that the funds were "not for abortion" and "earmarked for other expenditures".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...
Has a lot of similarities to a per capita GDP map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...
The stronger your country's economy, the fewer babies you have.
While the naming is amusing in this case, it's a technical term that simply means that that, as your income rises, your propensity to have children decreases)[1].
The cookie-cutter explanation for this is that the opportunity cost for having a child is very high if your income is high; the opportunity cost of having children (particularly additional children beyond the first) is very low if your income isn't so high to begin with (and even lower if you make the assumption that lower income → lower costs for education, etc.).
[0] Here's an article providing another explanation, though the "standard" belief is that children have a negative income-elasticity http://econweb.tamu.edu/jlindo/AreChildrenReallyInferiorGood...
You have to be careful about causation and correlation there. It should be possible to curb population growth even before you get high levels of economic development by educating girls, rather than waiting for economic development to bring empowerment for women to decline to have lots of children.
It's a nuanced issue to be sure.
"Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse." Gee. Must be nice to be a billionaire.
Violence for example is one, and Steven Pinker makes a great argument for it in this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
Its hard to see these patterns if you just rely on news/anecdotal evidence as your barometer for whether the world is becoming a better place, because the news reports whatever will get views, and nothing gets views like bad news.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094262
However it's interesting to note that he's far less sanguine talking in private:
Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation
http://web.archive.org/web/20100106010617/http://www.timeson...
"Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.
"Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.
"“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”"
More:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237yxs/gates_bi...
Over the last 20 years, the real disposable income of Americans and people in the wealthiest Western European countries has decreased or stayed the same, and claims that the world is much better than it was are difficult to swallow if that's your context.
However, the percentage of the world's population that is desperately poor has significantly decreased, famine is much rarer, infant mortality and child morbidity is way down.
You say it must be nice to be a billionaire, I say it must be nice to be a citizen of one of the world's wealthiest countries. To someone starving to death, or someone who has lost 3 out of 7 children in infancy, the lifestyle of a middle class Englishman or American must be scarcely distinguishable from that of Bill Gates.
After all, our children don't routinely die, we always have enough to eat, we have shelter, we're not in a war zone. Yeah, unlike BG, we're not flying anywhere in a private jet but that must seem like a paltry distinction to someone trying to live through a famine.
I agree that developed countries - still a large part of the world - are deteriorating.
- Debt, of all citizens and particularly of young adults - Waste - I think there's some giant plastic floating garbage dump in the pacific - Pollution - Most water bodies in the US are polluted (mercury). Haven't been to china, but I hear it's not a fun place to breathe. - Food quality (cheap carbohydrates == diabetes for a big portion of the population). Also, how much toxicity do you want in your fish? Do we want to all be beta testers for Monsanto, just to stay alive? - Food sustainability (pesticides - which eventually get resistant weeds, synthetic fertilizers, over fishing, corn-fed cows) - Food cruelty (factory farming) - Energy Sustainability - Pretty sure pumping unknown chemicals into your water supply (phracking) is NOT good. - Population - There's still the fact that perhaps 2 may chinas may come into the world due to population growth, which doesn't seem like an optimistic outlook. - Traffic - how much time do we sit commuting in mega-sprawls vs previous generations - Mobility - how many of us have the option to stay close to our family when finding work (helps when raising kids), vs having to relocate for a megacorp - Child care - how many of us raise our own children, vs have both parents work
So if we're doing a lot of things that are unsustainable, I don't see that as 'good'. I see that as 'bad'/negative. Maybe we will improve technology in the future, but past performance does not guarantee future results, and it most certainly doesn't mean we can all pat ourselves on the back for being so great ("improving the world").
So yes, I'm US-centric admittedly, but un-qualified rosy (or negative) generalizations piss me off, because you're probably not looking very hard[1]
I will probably read all of his letter some time, but it shouldn't have to be so off putting. Hopefully he doesn't try to sell his "fake meat" crap. You know what? If the world was so better, we wouldn't really have to eat that shit, would we? The same with veganism. Carbs are awful for your teeth. I also don't think most humans are designed to eat carbs, and I've lost enough weight myself to never want to eat them again. So if we all have to eat mass cheap carbs, to stay alive, things are not 'better than they have ever been'.
Let me take just a few of the point you make:
>> "cheap carbohydrates == diabetes for a big portion of the population"
Ok. How about looking at it another way? Cheaper food means less people starving and dying young.
>> "how much toxicity do you want in your fish? Do we want to all be beta testers for Monsanto, just to stay alive?"
If it's a choice between eating toxic fish and living off it for many years or dying or course I want to be beta tester for Monsanto. I despise the company and am all for healthy sustainable food but for a lot of people it's a choice between eating and not eating.
>> "how much time do we sit commuting in mega-sprawls vs previous generations"
You have to sit in traffic in a 'mega-sprawl' and previous generations had to work their ass off on a farm from 6am to 10pm. You drive your nice, air conditioned car to work, or take cheap public transport while people in poorer countries dream of having a job. You have it easy.
You entire position is based on that of a comfortable person living in the US ignorant of the fact that when someone talks about the world they are not only referring to you. His statement was about the world. Here are a few of his points from the letter to save you reading it:
1. the percentage of very poor people has dropped by more than half since 1990
2. Since 1960, the life span for women in sub-Saharan Africa has gone up from 41 to 57 years, despite the HIV epidemic. Without HIV it would be 61 years.
3. The percentage of children in school has gone from the low 40s to over 75 percent since 1970.
4. Today there are only three countries left that have never been polio-free: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria.
5. A baby born in 1960 had an 18 percent chance of dying before her fifth birthday. For a child born today, the odds are less than 5 percent. In 2035, they will be 1.6 percent.
The main reason I posted the link was the following point:
Drops in child mortality have been shown to lead to drops in the number of births. In countries where your child is likely to die at a young age you have many children to 'compensate' for the likely loss. If you can be quite certain your child won't die or measles, polio, malaria etc. then you won't have as many children.
[0]: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
It had tremendous untapped natural resources, a wealth of coal and oil (it was the worlds leading exporter of oil until the late 1940s), and the social structures to allow mobilization of those resources.
Population isn't enough, and can be a curse. Europe saw a tremendous economic boom following the Black Death, largely because financial and real capital was concentrated in fewer hands, and populations were reduced below carrying capacity.
Education isn't enough. Drop a highly educated individual into the heart of Africa or slums of India, and they may do well compared to the locals, but it'll be a small fraction of what they'd be able to accomplish in the US or Europe, or by being wealthy and in India.
The role of resources, particularly agriculture and energy, in economic growth, are highly discounted by contemporary economists.
Hell, you can even get an expert on poverty and a Nobel prize winner on stage saying with an absolutely straight face that economists cannot explain growth:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf57z/econ_pau...
> Population isn't enough, and can be a curse. Europe saw
> a tremendous economic boom following the Black Death,
> largely because financial and real capital was concentrated
> in fewer hands, and populations were reduced below
> carrying capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
As I recall, James Burke's Connections discusses this tangentially at least once (several times as I recall -- it somewhat traipses back and forth across history a bit).
So as modernity attacks the desire to reproduce (with abortion/birth control, modernity, education, distraction, late marriage, etc.) we end up eliminating people who are vulnerable to not reproducing. The only people left will be ones who are resistant.
So my overall point is, even though the population growth rate may be slowing down, it doesn't mean it'll slow down forever. There are already resistant strains at low frequency in the population now - they will increase in prevalence and become the majority; they'll continuously suffer defections, some of whom will be high achievers due to not spending the time to reproduce, and the mindset that allows them to break away from conventionality - but as long as they don't reproduce, they'll be gone eventually.
The same argument (falsely) applies to homosexuality. Since homosexual people don't pass on their genes, surely they must be bred out of the population? Well, estimates put the rate of homosexuality between 1% and 10%, so that didn't really turn out the way the purely-genetic argument would predict. It's just more complex than pure genetics.
The argument about homosexuality is similar to asking why amazon hunters keep getting killed by jaguars - you could "disprove" evolution by asking "why hasn't evolution just selected the ones resistant to jaguars?" But it's because getting as close to danger as possible is an effective strategy. That's one of the more reasonable genetic explanations for for why homosexuality still exists, too.
Populations of people that think birth control is a good idea and are quite happy to defer their children until later in life still reproduce in sufficient numbers to remain the majority in developed countries, especially assuming that many offspring of reproductive fanatics will end up "defecting" and behaving according to the prevailing social norm rather than their parent's preferences or inherited instincts.
Given the continued reproduction of people who think birth control is a sensible idea, women should have careers and more than three kids is a headache, I think heritability of desire to have large families would have to be almost deterministic for us to start to worry about hyper-fertile people taking over.
Being "reasonable" and "planning" are just extremely maladaptive in the current world. For example, reproduction in this population is completely dwarfing reproduction of highly educated, self-controlled, non-criminal groups: http://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/...
The majority of world population wouldn't be able to afford it, even if it got really cheap, like 100USD per clone, only a small percentage of the population could afford it to really have 50 clones, even if it became a trend that would not have a huge effect.
A person can already decide to have more than 10 children in most cases, basically for free, potentially even with monetary benefits (Canada, Europe, ...).
Just have the next big pop star talk about how great it is to have many children and how everybody should do the same.
Or lets have a big debate about the awful effects of overpopulation.
And surely, more fun ;) When you're poor, that's about the easiest thing you can do to help pass the time ... which is why there's all this evidence of increasing wealth/women's rights results in fewer births.
Cloning or alternative strategies leave it up to just one person - so no agreement or negotiation is necessary.
Really I am just curious the justification.
If you want to fix the problem with polluting energy sources, then you fix polluting energy sources. There is precisely nothing about population which is relevant to energy policy in the current environment. The places of the world with the largest population growth are not at all defined by having aggressive infrastructure projects.
Bearing in mind that, again, the largest energy consumers in the world - western nations - are all well into having low or negative population growth within their own borders.
Also please note that this should be the insensitive not forcing people, or taking any unfair rulings.
Who's lives are made better: everyones I guess (except those who enjoy big crowds). Expatiation of infrastructure? Not needed. Extra inflation of fossil fuels (while we still use them) due to more consumption, reduced well limited.Also helps on population (while still burning stuff, and using non degradable products like plastic). You will also be able to afford not living in a apartment easier since there is just more room for everyone. Ground prices reduce (there are cases where the house you build on the ground are as expensive as the ground itself !)
There are probably some advantages at population increase, but I can't think of any at the moment. But I'd like to hear them.
I'm more thinking along the lines, why do we need more population ? (Well of-course some might want to have more children and we should let them.)
Belgium is not contributing in any significant way to world population growth. The 0.1M Belgians born each year are basically cancelled out by the 0.1M Belgians who die in the same period.
You say "China good, Belgium bad" but in fact China's population is growing more than twice as fast as Belgium's (0.5% per year in this decade; much higher in the previous one). In absolute terms, China contributes 300 times more to world population growth than Belgium (2012's natural population change was +6,690,000 in China, compared to +22,000 in Belgium). And that's without taking into account that "families are believed to be hiding tens of millions of babies to evade the one-child policy" in China according to the very article we're supposedly discussing.
And so I am pleased to present you with this award for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Hacker News Comment.
Please do not call what China has done, good.
Try to talk to Chinese parents (especially mothers) who are affected by the policy. First, they are all, in my experience, willing to talk about it, even eager. Second, every one of them has said basically the same thing: It is a difficult policy but necessary, and beneficial for China overall.
Difficult: Most mothers' experience is related to not having the children they wanted to have. Abortions too. They often look like they are about to cry when they talk about it. It's definitely tough, and many are deeply scarred.
Beneficial: In an overcrowded country, the up side is obvious. (The mothers I have met are mostly middle or upper class, so it is a biased sample.) They connect the policy with the radical improvements in quality of life. Not just consumerist measures of quality of life, but also education and all that goes with it (that's another discussion, but it includes a happier home life due to improved equality and rights).
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...