No Population Bomb

While the author is correct in terms of population growth, he has missed one critical point. We are heading into a population bomb not because of continued explosive population growth, but rather because of dwindling energy reserves.<p>Industrialization and fossil fuels are what have allowed the population to exponentially grow this far. But now that energy is more expensive to extract, food is becoming more and more expensive. We're already seeing food riots in the poorer nations, and that trend will continue to grow, leading to a massive energy shock and die-off never seen before.<p>This trend could be slowed by massive adoption of alternative energy, but the only currently viable alternative energy (nuclear) is not likely to be exploited in a meaningful way any time soon, considering political and weaponization concerns. If we're really lucky, we'll discover a solar energy tech + energy storage system efficient and cheap enough to see us through before too many people die off, but that's a big "if".

The argument that 'everyone has been wrong so far' is not a solid one. The green revolution was basically pouring oil (pesticides) and pumping natural gas (fertilizer) into the fields. As oil flow rates are peaking this is an increasingly costly process, and as EROEI lowers on what's left we run into more problems. Same for NPK inputs - they are getting harder and more expensive (both $$ and energy) to extract. To a lesser degree (but of growing concern) all resources - we now mine 3-5% ores where we once mined 70% ores for example.<p>Exponential curves don't go on forever in the real world. Ideas don't replace energy, nor do they replace resources. Saying it hasn't happened yet so those who are worried about it are wrong is naive and logically flawed.

&#62; We are slowing down population growth because of education, gender equality, the rural-to-urban transition, and birth control.<p>Apart (afaik) from rural-to-urban transition, all of those are heavily promoted by people who are concerned about population growth.

Its not population that's the problem per se, its the average consumption of that population. The majority of which right now don't consume anywhere near as much as we do in the developed world, but its changing, and fast. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr/12/escalating-consumption" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr...</a>

Check out another talk by Hans Rosling where he visually demonstrates that 10 billion figure: <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.h...</a>

Even if you believe in the "growth rate leveling off as women are educated" thing, it still means in 30 years the world's population is going to be more concentrated in countries and cultures which today lag the most in virtually everything I like. Even within the US, few of the people I respect in tech have children (or want children), and then they do, it's 0-2.<p>I'd far rather live in a world with 10b Elon Musks, where each was contributing a huge surplus, vs. 3b sub-today's-median-ability, though, so it's not absolute numbers which matter.

Interesting article but a bizarre conclusion. We may not encounter another population bomb but we are in the process of living through one right now. "The longest period of exponential population growth for any organism… ever. " If that doesn't describe a population bomb, nothing does.

"If current economic development trends continue we should expect the average person's income in India and China (for example) to reach the same levels of the U.K., U.S.A., and Japan by 2048."<p>This is within my expected lifetime, and my children will be at the peak of their careers during that time. It will be a different world.<p>I'm reminded of Yancy Fry Sr.'s advice to Fry: "Someday, you may face adversities so preposterous, I can't even conceive of them."

"All this means that on the scale of hundreds of years our population growth may actually look like a very steep sigmoidal curve. But of course, in 2050 our planet and species will look very different than it currently is. There is a limit to what our models can predict about the future population. It could be that the human population plateaus and stabilizes. However, in a world with more energy, more geopolitical stability, advanced A.I., and a larger extraterrestrial presence, our species demographics may begin to change in unexpected ways. For now, we may simply be relieved that Malthus and Ehrlich were wrong. We will not encounter a population bomb."<p>So we can't predict the future, but the other guys' 50-year predictions "were wrong" [sic] and my 50-year predictions are right. Did I get that right?<p>His argument can be summarized as "Everything will probably work itself out. Trust me, brah. I'm a futurist."

There's no reason to believe that current prognostications about the future will be any more accurate than past ones, and many reasons to believe that they aren't.<p>The demographic transition can be viewed as a failure of our adaptations, made during times when birth control and sex education were unavailable, and children were useful workers instead of expensive luxuries, to the modern world. Some people's adaptations have failed harder than others. The people who have 0-1 kids are being selected out; those who have more than 2 are expanding. Future generations will be descended from the latter group, not the former. Unless you believe that fertility is completely invulnerable to selection, genetic or memetic, this must lead to increased fertility, just as selecting for bigger dogs would lead to bigger dogs.<p>There are already groups which are immune to the demographic transition - Hasidic Jews in the middle of NYC who have ~8 kids per couple, for example - and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change.<p>And if evolution did turn out to be false and the demographic transition turned out to be permanent, there's no reason to believe that fertility rates would magically converge at 2.0 (replacement rate). If they stayed below replacement rate, eventually the human race would go extinct. That's a far more dire prediction than any Malthus ever made. If they started going up again, is there any reason to believe that they would stop at 2.0?<p>And having read Malthus, I'd also bet that the author never has.

Is there an ideal long term human population level for the planet? If so, what is it? Will we need to create more incentives to have children to maintain it?

I spent some time a year ago or so reading Limits To Growth and Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows - according to those theories, 8-9 billion is too high anyway. Their best case scenario is less than that, with everyone eventually settling into a standard of living that is about analogous to eastern European countries today (which is lower than the standard of living in the US).

The author is correct, however he misses an important point: how painful population stabilization will be for some of us.

Population drives consumption and resource use. The clock has been ticking since the population exceeded the estimated ecological carrying capacity of the earth. In this sense, the population today puts us in a much more urgent situation than it would otherwise be.

Could someone clarify what the author means by "Women in developed affluent countries tend to have 2-3 children (or 0-1 children)"?<p>Does he mean that in some countries the range is 2-3 and in others 0-1? Or is it that there are two peaks in the histogram?

Really informative article. But comparing us to regular organisms is certainly a mistake.<p>I do believe the UN conclusion is correct by 2050 our birth/death rate will match and a decrease in population.

Plants of the Devonian period would like a recount on "the longest period of exponential population growth for any organism... ever" competition.

I like this subject. Both relating to too much, and too few people...<p>First, regarding absolute human numbers, we do have too much, mostly because we are rapidly using up fossil resources (not only fuel, but also fertilizers), and some important ones already peaked (phosphorous for example).<p>But I don't believe that making your population decline fixes things, it only create other problems, the solution for the problem that I mentioned last, is develop more technology.<p>Malthus was right on his diagnostic, wrong in the solution (please, stop blabbering that Malthus is some stupid dude that is wrong, even on school I heard that, more than once, by several different teachers in several different grades), Malthus was absolutely correct in his calculations, he only did not accounted for the mining of phosphorous (that is one of the major enablers of green revolution).<p>Now we are running out of phosphorous and energy, and our food will return to levels Malthus calculated, unless we figure new tech, I hope someone does so soon.<p>Now regarding declining fertility levels... This is a problem too.<p>In history, there are several accounts of prosperous civilizations that had declining fertility, and all of them collapsed (usually when fertility reached around 1.3 per women). Several of the current western world problems are related to that, the need of external wars to keep some income flow (alright, no major powers are at war... between themselves, but how much wars US, France, etc... are involved with other smaller countries and forces? Even Brazil that is not developed is currently participating in a occupation force in Haiti and in civil war, although the media refuse to count the latter), debt problems, specially coming from welfare programs and wars, economies that are following their population numbers (thus we have Japan for example with economy declining with the same speed that their population is), and a increase in far right and far left party powers (example: brazillian military dictatorship apologists never been stronger, Greek far-right went from having no votes in parliament to 7%, and a estimated 35% in next election, Japan also has a new far-right nationalist party that got some respectable votes, the rise of Tea Party in US and Democrats steering leftward...)<p>And some groups, know of all this, and have a plan to take over when they can... The most famous one being Al Quaeda (that is the Arab translation of the name of Isaac Asimov books The Foundation, and it was known that Bin Laden was fan of the series). Al Quaeda is clearly aiming to teach their followers to keep a high fertility rate, so that they can conquer developed nations when they collapse under their own bureaucracy and population decline.<p>All those advocating that to fix the first problem I mentioned (peek resources), don't realize that by doing that, other nations still have population increasing, some of them will collapse because of it and cause further problems for everyone (and most likely will ignore the attempts of developed nations to stop their own population decline), and other nations are increasing in population on purpose, knowing well of its military effects, and will use it against any fool that voluntarily decline his population and ends struggling to keep itself up.

Anyone have an idea how this thesis correlates with climate change? Any idea how climate change will affect population growth?

I wonder if the lower frequency in nation-state warfare is an effect of increasing education levels of females?

<a href="http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.ph...</a><p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/</a><p>"For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time."<p>-----<p>In the long term, there's no reason not to expect further exponential growth once human psychology and physiology are removed from the picture as the main drivers of whether or not population expands. The earth could support vastly more people than it does even with today's technology. Once it is possible to create intelligences very rapidly, and when there are non-human intelligence creators involved in the picture, I'd expect to see a vast explosion of sentience and colonization.

I agree with the conclusion-- we won't face a population explosion-- but...<p>Malthus was right and wrong. He was wrong about economic growth being linear (even then, it was a 0.5% per year exponential increase that just <i>looked linear</i>). The Industrial Revolution kicked in and now economic growth is (for the first time ever) faster than population growth. That change happened around 1850; until that point, per-person economic improvement was virtually nonexistent because population gobbled up any gains.<p>Economic growth has been faster-than-exponential as long as there have been humans. If you treat biological complexity or energy capture as the analytic extension of "economic growth" that goes back to the origin of life ~3.8 billion years ago: a faster-than-exponential curve that just happened to be very slow (but always getting faster) for 3.7999 billion years.<p>Now, we're also seeing population growth rates drop, due to causes cited by OP.<p>Malthus was right insofar as the stronger countries of Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Russia) spent the next 150 years viciously outsourcing their Malthusian catastrophes (probably without need to do so) to the weaker ones (Ireland, Poland) and other parts of the world.<p>Malthus didn't actually predict starvation. He predicted moral malfeasance (with his religious beliefs, this included birth control, although I wouldn't call that malfeasance) driven by population pressure, and that happened.<p>Humans are a mix of r-selective and K-selective impulses. Psychopathy is what happens when the r-selector within us is unchecked by K-selective conscience/fairness modules. The reason it is more common in men is that it conferred a stronger r-selective advantage in men (who could possess harems and "fan out") than in women (who are limited to about one child per fertile year, and 30 fertile years in a life).<p>Also, if you look at the "corporate paternalism" as more than metaphor, most people work in r-selective get-big-or-die gambits or large companies that have a lot of employees (children) but don't invest anything in them. Very few people work in K-selective enterprises that grow more slowly but invest in their people.<p>I don't think one can say, for sure, that the K-selector has won outright. I think that contest between the two sets of impulses still exists.<p>Much of how humans have imagined good and evil comes from the conflict (perhaps a neuroevolutionary arms race) between the r- and K-selective selves.

Anything called "The Ratchet" I have a hard time taking seriously.