Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Overpopulation

angelina_jolie_wallpaper_10.jpgIn the social circles I move in there is a lot of concern with overpopulation. Now, it is somewhat ironic to me that those who are concerned do not tend to breed so as to be virtuous…while others who are not so concerned, such as Sarah Palin (and also these ladies and gentlemen) make up for the balance (and some!) and render the valiant efforts of the concerned rather moot. In any case, I had a thought today…I remember when I was a small child that world population was between 4 and 5 billion. Today is between 6 and 7 billion. That is rather staggering…that my lifetime has witnessed the birth of billions. I’m not that old.


Of course I’ve read The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion. I was interested in demographics enough so that I actually used to read The Population Bulletin. But over the years I’ve gotten less interested in the topic. First, when it comes to civilizational collapse I think our psychological constraints and the consequent problems with irrational herds are more problematic than the risk of exogenous environmental shocks (the latter may trigger the former, but I am of the opinion that the former may emerge naturally even without exogenous environmental shocks; the real estate bubble and collapse did not occur because of the shock of new land supply!). Second, birth rates are dropping.
A quick back of the envelop using data you can find on Wikipedia suggests that the world population has increased by 37% in my lifetime, with the United States itself increasing in population on the order of 25%. The low, median and high projected populations in 2050 suggest that the increase between now and then will be 11%, 27% and 39%, respectively. Even the highest projected values show slower growth than in the last quarter of the 20th century (previous UN projects have tended to overestimate in the future because of the unpredictability of fertility drops). Here’s the rate of growth over the past 50 years or so:
800px-World_population_incr.jpg
I assume the “correction” in the early 1960s is thanks to Chairman Mao. Now that’s making a difference!

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