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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (739953)

9/17/2013 9:05:02 PM

From: TimF

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Brumar89

Respond to of 1577178

...This idea of catastrophic population growth is idiotic. Accelerating population growth is a trend that is not a trend.

There is absolutely no trend towards out of control population growth. In fact, the trends actually run in the opposite direction, with birth rates and population growth rates falling such that most demographers foresee an Earth stabilizing around 9-10 billion people and possibly falling in population after that. Since Dan Brown uses senior UN officials in the book to agree that population growth will result in disaster, I will use UN figures. These are from a 2005 UN population report.

First, population growth rates have been falling for decades and will continue to fall. They are falling in every part of the world.

A cynic might argue that this is due to death and disease, but in fact birth rates are falling everywhere

This data is about 10 years old but Wikipedia summarizes the most recent UN data and shows this trend has continued (TFR is total fertility rate):

World historical TFR (1950–2015)
UN, medium variant, 2010 rev. [2] Years TFR

1950–1955	4.95
1955–1960	4.89
1960–1965	4.91
1965–1970	4.85
1970–1975	4.45
1975–1980	3.84
1980–1985	3.59
1985–1990	3.39
1990–1995	3.04
1995–2000	2.79
2000–2005	2.62
2005–2010	2.52
2010–2015	2.36

People focus on the amount the world population has increased over the last 60 years to produce shock numbers, but the real stunner is the drop in fertility rates -- nearly in half, which is really astounding. I still have my treasured first edition of Ehrlich's Population Bomb. It is hilarious reading, all the more so because he gets everything so wrong, yet the media still tends to take him seriously.

The recurring theme in Inferno is that man's greatest problem is that he has successfully tackled many diseases and thus increased life expectancy, and it is this longer life expectancy that will be the roots of mankind's Malthusian downfall.

However, exactly the opposite is true. There is a ton of scientific work that says that longer life spans lead to lower fertility rates (the other thing that most contributes to lower fertility rates is economic growth). Here is a chart right out of the UN study linked above showing a clear inverse correlation between life expectancy and birth rates. Correlation is not causation, but this is backed by a ton of other empirical evidence to support causation.

Wow.

There is no trend towards accelerating population growth -- the trend is in the opposite direction, to deceleration. And folks who have underestimated man's ingenuity in feeding larger populations have always turned our to be wrong. Ehrlich said there was no way --- absolutely no way -- India could feed an additional 200 million people by 1980. Well, in 2013 it feeds an additional 800 million people to a better standard that the country was fed in Ehrlich's time. Hell, we could probably feed an additional half billion more just by repealing laws that put a significant amount of America's food production into automotive fuels...

coyoteblog.com