That sounds like a pretty good recipe for millions to starve.
There’s absolutely no reason for slightly-under-replacement birthrate to cause “collapse” while global population is increasing, because you can simply allow immigration from the high-growth areas. A lack of people wanting to emigrate to developed countries is not a problem I forsee happening anywhere in the next few decades. If you have trouble integrating adults into your economy, prioritizing families with young children and letting your own education system deal with that can solve that problem.
Of course, this has the potential to royally screw with the countries you are taking the excess people from, due to brain drain and so on. I don’t believe that’s an intractable problem, but it’s a sure thing that whatever the scenario, the developed countries, who have the power and influence to tilt the scales their own way, will come off best out of it.
In the 18th century, Thomas Malthus coined the term “overpopulation.” At that time, Europe was experiencing a huge population growth after coming out of the Dark Ages and various plagues. He theorized (as we do today) that if the population kept increasing at this rate, everyone would use up all the resources and everybody would starve to death. Sound familiar?
What’s also familiar is that scientists today are making the same mistakes Malthus made.
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Advances in science will not accommodate an increasing population: Wrong. Today, less than 5% of the US population grows all the food (and a lot extra) for the rest of the population. One farmer provides an exponential amount of food with today’s technology.
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The extra population will sit around and do nothing: Wrong. If the population in an area doubles from 1 million to 2 million, how many doctors, scientists and farmers will be added? People forget that doubling population usually more than doubles the production.
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Technological and scientific growth will remain steady and stable: Wrong. In Malthus’ time, in just a decade or two after he predicted the end of the world, Europe experienced the Industrial Revolution. Production, jobs, and resources increased faster than population for many years. Throughout history, production has jumped because of breakthroughs.
People have been crying wolf about overpopulation for at least 200 years (and probably a lot longer.) Currently, we have yet to see the kind of shortages they have predicted. Imho, overpopulation is a myth simply because for every person added to the population, they produce more than they consume.
Their scenarios are based on the best data they have available now; they’re the first people to say that they aren’t predicting the future with them. There’s a certain amount of validity to anticipating what will happen in the future based on what is happening now or what has happened in the past, though; if I drop something, I can anticipate that it’s going to fall to the floor. People and systems act in somewhat predictable ways. These scenarios don’t say, “John Smith is going to die of cancer caused by pollution in 2040;” they say, “If we keep polluting at the rates we’re polluting now, this model with these parameters indicates that we’re going to reach a global limit in a relatively short time.”
Every one of your points was addressed in the scenarios I read about; collapse still occurs in every scenario except one (with the conditions I already noted). One of the biggest problems with getting people and corporations to change behaviour is that once the evidence unequivocally says, yes, we’re completely screwed, we may have gone so far that we can’t recover from it.
Maybe you missed my point: overpopulation is a myth because history has shown that the definition of overpopulation is flawed. Overpopulation is defined as population being larger than the current carrying capacity of the habitat. History shows that the increase in population also increases the carrying capacity of the habitat because of the production added by each person, and the increased rate at which the higher population incorporates, invents, or produces new technology.
By the current definition, New York, Tokyo and Seoul should be seeing massive riots, starvation, and a population decimation instead of continuing to increase. In fact, because of the lack of resources in some areas, by the current definition, they should simply cease to exist.
On top of this, the current definition neglects to include the phenomena of cooperation. When populations become sufficiently large to experience shortages, history also shows that people will cooperate. You can see this happening today in the form of recycling programs, water use legislation, and hybrid car rebates.
They don’t, technically. They say, if we keep polluting at the rates we’re polluting now, and nothing else changes, then …
Something else always changes. Go back and look at the history of predictions. (Or don’t. It’s very dull.) They are always wrong. Literally always. There are no past predictions of any specificity that anyone can point to as heralding the world of today.
Maybe the predictions you’re referring to as meant as warnings rather than actual predictions. Maybe they are so general in their predictions that they will still look to have some validity after 50 or 100 years. Maybe they are actually right.
But I’ve been interested in futurology for a long time, some 40 years. Over that period I’ve become completely disillusioned. Future predictions are always wrong. They are wrong in the long term and they are wrong in the short term. Read the ton of books that came out just before 2000. If I paid you a dollar for every time they used the word Internet, you’d wouldn’t be able to pay for a single book. Yet there has been nothing that’s defined our culture more over the last decade than the rise of the Internet.
The 60s and 70s books about overpopulation and the destruction of resources all turned out to be wrong as well, in almost every important detail. You could say that they were right, just that their timelines were too early, but that misses the point of the scenarios that were postulated, none of which correspond to our reality.
You can say “but they have to be right sometime. Resources have to run out eventually.” I grant that in principle. Any reality will prove to be different, though.
I am not saying that there is no need to conserve resources, or no need to distribute resources better, or no need to find less polluting forms of energy, or no need to change consumerism because it’s just fine in all aspects. I’m saying that we should do these things because of what we know now about our current lives. There are past studies in piles in offices all over the world that are nothing but wasted paper. (I was involved in city planning for a while: I’m guilty.) You need something on which to guide your future, yet none are ever correct. It’s a paradox nobody has ever figured a way out of.
I don’t disagree with any of your points; I think the overarching, most critical point is that we’re coming up against global limits. It’s difficult to think that way because the earth seems so big, with so much for us to use, but it’s the reality that we’re seeing in numerous ways - extinction of species, overfished oceans, rain forests disappearing, crop land turning into deserts, cities running out of fresh water, etc., and most of the problems we’re experiencing are positive feedback loops - the problems make themselves worse.
That’s not entirely correct, though - the scenarios I read about have all sort of variables changing, not just one. I do agree that the reality will be different than any predictions, though. We’re making changes as we speak that haven’t been accounted for in any scenarios (some good, like people becoming aware of conservation and using it in their daily lives, and some bad, like an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico spewing oil). Also, the book I’ve read is actually an update from the original book that was published 30 years ago.
This is sort of where I fall in my daily life, too. The predictions are dire, but in my real life, I save money by reducing, re-using and recycling, driving a fuel efficient car, walking to Safeway instead of driving, etc. My husband and I are trying to make the best decisions we can, with the knowledge we have now.
I can only respond with the wisdom of Mr. Donald Rumsfeld.
Those scenarios are leaving out the unknown unknowns. That’s why they fail. That’s why they MUST fail.
I’m sure your general point is mostly correct, but this specific example confuses me. Just before 2000? Surely, that lands smack in the middle of the dot com boom. Are you saying there wasn’t a lot of hype about the transformative power of the Internet in that era?
Yep.
I’m talking about general books about what the future - that amazing 21st century - would be like. It seems impossible that the Internet wouldn’t be prominently mentioned but it’s true.
There’s some chatter about computers, of course, but you can search a lot of indexes and not find the Internet as a thing listed.
Don’t forget that most of the big Internet firms of today barely existed in 1999. Amazon was burning through money and was widely forecast to go bankrupt. Yahoo was a silly-named nothing whose big coup was buying Geocities. AOL bought out Time Warner, but not until 2000 and who took AOL seriously as the future? It was j
Ignore previous post.
Yep.
I’m talking about general books about what the future - that amazing 21st century - would be like. It seems impossible that the Internet wouldn’t be prominently mentioned but it’s true.
There’s some chatter about computers, of course, but you can search a lot of indexes and not find the Internet as a thing listed.
Don’t forget that most of the big Internet firms of today barely existed in 1999. Amazon was burning through money and was widely forecast to go bankrupt. Yahoo was a silly-named nothing whose big coup was buying Geocities. AOL bought out Time Warner, but not until 2000 and who took AOL seriously as the future? It was just those guys who littered the world with unwanted disks. They would never be anything. (OK, that one turned out right. But people bet $100 billion otherwise.)
In 1999, there were no big social media sites. Brick and mortar firms were failing miserably at establishing web presences. People either made ludicrous cyberpunk the-future-would-be-in-everybody’s-head predictions or assumed that physical habits wouldn’t change that quickly.
The incredible and consistent awfulness of predicting is forgotten by everyone except by a few specialist historians like me who go back and try to pry them out. Oh, sure, a few laughable predictions are kept alive, but the other 99% are just dull futures in multisyllabic pontification. (Try reading any city’s comprehensive plan of the past half century. Just try.)
You can test me on this very easily. Go to a used book sale and search out the pile of books that nobody will pay even a penny for. That’s where the 21st century prediction books reside. (Right next to “the Japanese are buying up the world” books.) That’s what they’re worth today.