Dear Cecil,
Can you find a statisticianal genius who could get the information and numbers
required to extrapolate what would be the world population IF:
There had been no man-made murder in the 20th century. God forbid starting
earlier, i.e. The Crusades for example.
The Holocaust, WWII, The Atom Bomb, and any major organised genocide.
I have no clue as to how to start, but you may know a slew of mathematic genii
who would like to take a stab at it. I think we should draw the line at diseases
because I blame the planet for trying to preserve itself with natural disasters
such as earthquakes and tsunami, etc.
Do you answer these things ? or must I try to find it in the huge list ?
The only way we’re going to have a century with no fatal acts of violence between humans is if there are no humans around. Therefore, the world population would be zero.
The problem would be factoring out ‘baby boom’ issues as we saw after WW2 and the like, ie the assumption in the question is that fertility is automatically decreased by violence which may not be actually true.
So its theoretically possible that the population would be smaller.
Otara
There were other large numbers of people killed. It wasn’t just WWII. There was also WWI.
If you count artificial famine caused by general leftyism, then the famines in Asia at the start of the century count.
Actually, forget the baby boom. Economically, the world has been seriously damaged by war (in the long run, war is necessarily destructive –it damages the factors of production and uses their remainder in nonproductive ways.) Presuming that the rate of destruction of wealth proportionately outstripped the death tolls – a reasonable assumption, matching human experience – then the war is less wealthy. Observing that birth rates are at present inversely proportional to wealth, we are left to conclude that birth rates would be significantly decreased by a lack of war, so peace would decrease world population.
Obviously, this effect may or may not outstrip the effects of immediate population depletion through war. But it’s worth considering nonetheless.
Actually more people died in the 1918/9 influenza outbreak than were killed in WWI.
While Clochemerle is fictitious, the opening page of the book is quite interesting.
The jist is that an outburst of medieval plague reduced the population to a level where everyone was fairly affluent - and the inhabitants deliberately kept it that way.
Wealthier and more ‘certain’ populations tend to breed less, so a society without the risk of war, insurrection, famine, plague etc could well be one that has very little growth.
To: Straight Man, FRDE, and Bootis. Welcome aboard, you ARE Thinking People!
I am editing the word “blame” to read “accept” as in what-goes-around-comes- around. Little test #1
All living beings require oxygen. Oxygen is created by plants.
Plantlife needs a healthy growing medium. Man is systematically destroying and
polluting the earth.
Back in college, Dr. Hillis Kaiser’s class, we studied “Logic”. If you make a
syllogism of the above, and it is a valid syllogism, you must distribute the middle
term. In the above group of statements, all of which are true, find the middle term and draw a conclusion.
PS. I failed Logic. Didn’t know WHAT WAS the “Middle Term”.
