Great(?) minds since the era of the Roman Empire have written panicked documents about the subject, but overpopulation is a myth; and a little bit of research can easily produce some honest, accurate figures. For instance:
If you allotted 1250 square feet to each person, all the people in the world would fit into the state of Texas. Try the math yourself: 7,438,152,268,800 square feet in Texas, divided by the world population of 5,860,000,000, equals 1269 square feet per person. The population density of this giant city would be about 21,000…somewhat more than San Francisco and less than the Bronx. —Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun, Professor of Economics, Humbolt University
Also for instance: If you allotted 1250 square feet to each person, you’d have a lot of starvation, because there’s no way you can come close to feeding a person with 1250 square feet of crops. Space to put the people themselves has never been the issue, except in poorly-thought-out science fiction. The issue has always been resource consumption, and of resources other than living space.
Not a bit. Mathus was proven wrong long before any of these things existed. He was wrong because food does not increase “arithmetically”. Food is created by humans. As the number of humans increased, the food production kept pace. This has nothing to do with energy intensive farming, new hybrid plants, or cheap fertilizer (also irrigation from underground aquifers).
It is a result of the fact that humans, not nature, make our food.
In any case, those people are not suffering from Malthus’s feared outcome, that not enough food would be produced because population would rise faster than food production. That has not happened. There is enough food produced to feed everyone. The main problems are political, logistical, and economic.
A few more thoughts on “we’re running out of X … EVERYONE PANIC”. Let me call this a “non-Malthusian apocalypse”.
People love doomsday predictions. They like to make them, they like to shiver when they read them. Don’t know why this is so, but any tabloid newspaper will demonstrate the case.
However, very few of the non-Malthusian apocalypse predictions of doom and disaster have come true. This does not seem to bother the people who make them. Paul Ehrlich has made nothing but failed predictions, he has a 100% record of calling them wrong. Does this bother him? No way, he just gets more rabid and makes new and even more dire predictions. Unfortunately, John Holdren, Obama’s new “science” advisor, is a friend and co-doomsday predictor of Ehrlich’s. Neither of them seem to learn from having made a long string of asinine predictions which didn’t come true. Although perhaps that’s what it takes to make it to the coveted “science” advisor’s spot, what do I know?
Most of these predictions seem to have been made by the famous “extend the line” technique. This is where you take some data, fit a trend line to it, extend the trend line for twenty or fifty or a hundred years, and say “OMG, IT’S GOING TO BE HORRIBLE!!”.
The missing link in the majority of these projections is that when things run short, prices rise. When prices rise, people respond by either producing more of what’s in short supply (e.g. when food get short, people grow more), or finding substitutes for whatever is in short supply (e.g. replacing expensive copper with cheap glass to move information around the planet). This has made the doomsday predictions worthless.
In the early part of the 20th century, for example, there were predictions that we would soon run out of magnesium … extend the trend line showing increasing magnesium use, compare it to the proven reserves, and the conclusion could only be an INEVITABLE MAGNESIUM CRISIS!!
However, humans are endlessly inventive, and in the event, someone figured out how to extract seawater from magnesium. End of the problem for centuries at least.
Will we continue to be able to find substitute and new production methods? I think we will, although of course there is no guarantee. As my dad used to say, “Imagination is free.” The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of obsidian. It ended because we found other ways to do the same job that didn’t require obsidian.
The key to many of these challenges, of course, is energy. With access to energy we can easily turn air into nitrogenous fertilizer, and do a host of other equally amazing things. Overall, I’m optimistic. I don’t see anything that the world will run short of that can’t be replaced or manufactured. Even water. Water, of course, is another “shortage” that is simply a question of energy. We have plenty of water, except it’s salt water … but of course, turning salt into fresh just requires energy. This is typical of many “shortages” in the world today. They are not actually shortage of the raw material. They are shortages of some combination of energy, techniques, scientific understanding, practical procedures, and most of all imagination.
I wouldn’t be so quick to say that. Much of the U.S. now scrambles to get enough water; we as individuals don’t see it but our local utilities have to go further and to more trouble to provide it to us. Water tables are being drawn down and the only end in sight is when we reach the point of rolling weekly dry-outs, when the water would be cut off to consumers for one or two days a week. I don’t think I’m being alarmist over the long term. The population of this country is expected to reach about 438 million by mid-century; this is not from some harebrained, xenophobic anti-immigrationist group, but from the United States Census Bureau itself (see Table 1). One hundred-thirty-eight million more Americans? If interruption of the water supply is the worst thing that happens, we’ll be fortunate.
To the question of political correctness, I think for about fifteen minutes back in '68 or so, it was OK to talk about advocating family planning in the developing world–before such approaches were condemned as arrogant and racist. China’s coercive one-child-per-couple policy didn’t improve the image of the population control movement, either. Mainstream conservatives and progressives generally began to oppose the promotion of smaller family size, each for their own reasons; by the strange calculus of political correctness, the only ones to whom we can advocate the choice of having fewer children without fear of offense are the ones who have already made that choice. By default, it’s much more acceptable to point to the large carbon footprint of the prosperous countries, particularly the United States, but we cannot conserve our way out of this problem. If we reduce our per-capita consumption of water by 46% over the next 41 years, then the aggregrate national consumption will remain right where it is today, if the projection by the Census Bureau is accurate.
With regard to the OP, yes, it is already happening only one doesn’t hear much about it. About forty years ago an article in Scientific American* bemoaned the fact that a third of the world’s people, then about a billion, were living on less than a dollar a day. Today roughly 2.7B of the world’s people live on two dollars a day or less, and 2008 dollars are worth but a fraction of 1968 dollars. Lost in the glow of the city lights and nightlife of Shanghai and unheard over the bustle India’s tech boom is a degree and extent of poverty difficult to fathom. Per a recent L.A. Times front page story**, half the children in the country aged zero to five years don’t get enough food to eat. Probably half the world doesn’t have access to toilets or a dependable power supply. The situation in Mexico has been improving, but the drug violence is becoming so all pervasive that the future is anybody’s guess now.
*David Simpson, “The Dimensions of World Poverty”. Scientific American v212 n5 November 1968
** I honestly tried to find this article but couldn’t. It was on the front page of a Sunday edition, about mid 2008 IIRC.
Spectre, thank you for a thoughtful and informative post.
Well, I guess there are some advantages to gray hair. In my lifetime, the US population more than doubled. Since I was born, the population of the US has increased by more 161 million souls. So I’ll see your feared 138 million increase and raise you 23 million more …
Is the US more crowded? Sure. Remember, I’ve watched it happen. It is.
By world standards is it crowded? It is to laugh.
Will the next increase be more noticeable than the 161 million? I doubt it. In the earlier increase, the population more than doubled. That was noticeable. The upcoming 138 million doesn’t even increase the current population by 50%. Proportionally the change is much smaller.
Will there be water wars and water shortages, particularly in the American Southwest? There have been both shortages and wars over water for as long as human have inhabited the area.
The good news in the water world is that the majority of fresh water used by humans goes to crops, and much of that is wasted to evaporation, percolation, and runoff. More efficient farming techniques (e.g. downward facing sprinklers, drip irrigation, mulch) can free up huge amounts of water.
The next good news in the water world can be seen by going out to the mouth of any river or creek. See all that fresh water turning into salt water? …
In addition, the US is wildly profligate with its water. From car washes to golf courses to hosing off the driveway instead of sweeping, there’s literally millions and millions of gallons wasted every day.
As water has grown more scarce, it has grown more expensive, and people have become more conservative with its use.
There’s already restrictions. Los Angeles is a prime example. During drought times, the City cracks down, sometimes you can only water your lawn one day a week, sometimes no washing your car. People grumble, but I don’t foresee serious trouble when this becomes more widespread. Eventually, farmers and consumers alike will be asked to pay more for their water. Then people won’t hose off their driveway as much.
All true, and there’s a bit more to it than that.
The single factor that seems most correlated with population growth rates is the empowerment of women. When women have a say in the matter, when they get a vote in the deal, when they are educated and have status in the society, birth rates go down. Makes sense … they’re the ones bearing the pain and taking the risk and doing the work. Never saw a guy die from childbirth.
When women have no say, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking condoms or whatever, you’re not going to make much progress. Husband says no, that’s the end. If she dies, he’ll get another wife to bear him many sons …
So one reason you don’t hear a lot about population issues is that much of the effort being put into it is happening in a different context, that of women’s education and position in society. The work goes on there quietly, not because it’s politically correct, but because the women don’t want their husbands to get upset.
Once you get past that and the demand for contraception rises, then you have to deal with social issues. One result of the AIDS epidemic is that it’s now OK to publicly advocate condoms for disease control … so some of the population issue is being dealt with in that context as well.
Another big challenge is the cost of condoms. As a new and very poor father once commented, “I guess you can only re-use them so many times …”. So even though there’s huge flocks of condoms released into the wild by various development groups every year (often under the rubric of fighting AIDS), it’s not enough.
So work on the issue is still going on everywhere … it’s just nobody’s shouting too much about it. I think part of that has to do with the steadily declining population growth rate since the 1970s, and part of it has to do with lessons learned about how to actually effect the desired change.
First, bad math.
Total country water use (T) = Individual water use (I1) times Population (P1), or
T= I1 * P1
Supposing that the population increases to P2, and individual use decreases to I2, and we want to keep the total the same. We get
T= I1 * P1 = I2 * P2
Solving for I2 / I1 (change in consumption), we get
I2 / I1 = P1 / P2
P1 is the current population, 300 million. P2 is the 2050 estimated population of 438 million. 300 / 438 = .69, or a 31% reduction in per capita use.
Second, as I note above, there are heaps of opportunities for the US to conserve that much water, in industry, in farming, and in our private lives. I’ve talked to the women who live around the Kaolack salt flats in Senegal, women who all get up at 4 AM every day to walk for hours to fill up two jugs of water to last for the day. I know wasted water when I see it, and there is an immense amount of it in the US.
Third, we have forty years to do it. That means all we have to do is cut per capita use by a percent per year. Over that time, we’ll all slowly learn to use less water.
Kaolack salt flats, in the Sahel region of the Senegal? They have a water problem. The US? Not so much …
Again the familiar refrain, the apocalypse is upon us, repent before the end of days!
For about twenty years of my adult life I have lived and worked in developing countries around the world. I worked and traveled extensively as a consultant in village level development for the Peace Corps and USAID, among others. I have worked above and below the Sahara, in the deep countrysides of Morocco and the high desert mountains of Lesotho, in the jungles of Liberia, along the river Gambia, and in the inner cities of Lagos and Dakar and Lome. In addition to Africa, I have worked in Asia, Central America, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and South America. I still live in the third world. A quarter of the people I walked past in town today are too poor to own flip-flops, my own personal poverty gauge. I have seen enough grinding, bonecrushing poverty, rural poverty and urban poverty and just plain poverty in my life, to know all its evil ways. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life doing constructive things about this very issue all around the world.
In looking at things like poverty, it is crucial to distinguish between where a population is, and which way it is going. I haven’t found WB figures going back to 1968 on this issue but here’s the World Bank in 2005 on the changes in the previous quarter century (emphasis mine) …
Now for me, perhaps because I have worked in the field, I see that as an amazing success. As you point out, poverty was and assuredly still is a huge problem. But over a quarter of a century, we have gone from half the developing world living in poverty to only? a quarter living in poverty. That is a staggering accomplishment. And remember, this has happened during a time of rapidly rising population.
So yes, there’s plenty more to do, a quarter of the developing world to assist and support and encourage. However, I object most strongly to the idea that things are worse now than a quarter or a half century ago. By virtually every relevant measure (e.g calories per day, protein per day, per capita food production, $1 per day numbers) by and large the people of the world are better fed and better educated and have more money than at any time in history, rich and poor both.
The problem with the doomsday scenarios from my perspective is that they prevent us from seeing what has worked and what hasn’t, they kee us from learning from our mistakes. If you say “population is already driving the poor to hell in a handbasket and it’s getting worse every day”, you are not looking at the real world. Even the population growth rate has steadily declined since the 1970’s, leading the world bodies to revise their 2050 population estimates downwards time and again. Another advantage of gray hair … I’ve watched the estimates drop …
In fact, the poor are coming back from hell in a wheelbarrow, with lots of folks pushing, and it’s getting better every day. Yes, it is a horrible world, I’ve seen things no sane man should ever have to witness. But we are getting there, things are improving. We’re getting a better handle on how to spread the benefits of our knowledge, we’re learning what’s effective and what’s wasted effort.
And we’ve managed an amazing feat in the process. In 1980, half the developing world was below the World Bank poverty line. Now, a quarter of the developing world is below that exact same poverty line, measured in the exact same way. I call that a huge win, and I congratulate everyone on the planet for that. We’ve created a world where over the last half century we have steadily made things better for the poorest people in the world. Well done all. No one can sit on their laurels, still lots more to do, always many miles to go … but we’re doing better than ever, and moving ahead with no apocalypse in sight.
My best to all.
PS - when I was a little kid, we had almost no money. I wore boots from the town dump and my bigger brother’s old clothes, and for years everyone around seemed to have more money than we did.
One day I finally asked my poor harried mother (single mom, four kids), the question that had been bothering me for weeks.
“Mom, are we poor?”
“No,” she said firmly, and looked me in the eye, “absolutely not, we’re not poor. Poor is a state of mind.”
She took a deep breath, and looked up at the sky, and said,
“We’re broke at the moment, I’ll say that, but we’re not poor.”
Thank you intention for your thoughtful response. Your mother must have been a terrific parent. I’ve undergone some reverses of my own recently, and I try to look at life in just the same way that she did (or does).
