Is Overpopulation Still a Problem?

there's too many men too many people making too many problems that's how Genesis put it Elon Musk on the other hand thinks there are too few people on the planet I think a lot of people think that there's too many people on the planet but I think there's in fact too few and that the the possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the uh rapidly diminishing growth rate okay so who's right to many people or too few that's what we'll talk about today Scruff shows the increase of world population in the past 12 000 years leaving aside this dip in the 14th century when the plague wiped out big parts of the population in Europe and Asia it looks pretty much like exponential growth if we extrapolate this curve then in a thousand years there'll be a few trillions of us but this isn't how population growth works sooner or later all species run into resource limits of some kind so when will we hit ours when it comes to the question how close humans are to reaching this planet's resource limits the two extremes are doomsters and bloomsters yes doomsters and boomsters sound like rival gangs from a rock Musical that are about to break out and so on but reality is a bit less dire we'll look at what both sides have to say and then we look at what science says the doomsters have a long tradition going back at least to Thomas Malthus in the 18th century Martha said in a nutshell the population is growing faster than food production and it'll become increasingly more difficult to feed everyone if that ever does happen it would be a huge bummer because I don't know about you guys but I'd really like to keep eating food especially cheese I'd really like to keep eating cheese Martha's problem was popularized in a 1968 book by Paul Elish called the population bomb titled Alice predicted that by the 1980s famines would be commonplace and Global death rates would rise as you may have noticed this didn't happen in reality death rates have dropped continue to drop and on the average calorie consumption has globally increased still Elish claims that he was in principle right it'll just take somewhat longer than he anticipated indeed the club of Rome report of 1972 predicted that we would reach the limits to growth in the mid 21st century and population would steeply decrease after that basically because we weren't careful enough in handling the limited resources we have several analyzes in the early 21st century found that so far the business as usual predictions from the club of Rome aren't far off reality the Earth overshoot Day is an intuitive way to quantify just how bad we are at using our resources the idea was put forward by Andrew Sims from the University of Sussex and it's to calculate by which date in each calendar year we've used up the resources that Earth regenerates in that year if that date is before the end of the year this means that each year we shrink the remaining resources which ultimately isn't sustainable in this figure you see the Earth overshoot days since 1970 as you can see in the past 10 years or so we used up all renewable resources in early August in 2020 the covet pandemic pushed that day temporarily backed by a couple of days but now we're back on track to reach overshoot day sooner and sooner it's like Grant dog day meets Honey I Shrunk the resources clearly not something anyone wants so the doomsters fears aren't entirely unjustified we've arguably not been dealing with our resources responsibly overpopulation isn't pretty and it's very real already in some places for example the population density in Los Angeles is about 3 000 people per square kilometer but that of Manila and the Philippines is more than 10 times higher a stunning 43 000 people per square kilometer there's so little space some families have settled in the cemetery as a general rule and I hope you'll all agree I think people shouldn't have to sleep near dead bodies when possible such extreme overpopulation benefits the spread of diseases and makes it very difficult to enforce laws meant to keep the environment clean which is a health risk you may argue the actual problem here isn't overpopulation but poverty but really it's neither in isolation it's the relation between them the number of people grows fast faster than the resources they'd need to keep the living standard at least stable on the global level the doomsters argue the root problem of climate change and the loss of biodiversity that accompanies it is that there's too many people on the planet you may have seen the headlines some years ago want to fight climate change have fewer children scientists say having fewer kids is our best bet to reduce climate change science proves kids are bad for us these headlines summarize the 2017 article that appeared in the magazine Environmental Research letters its authors had looked at 39 peer-reviewed papers and government reports they wanted to find out what lifestyle choices have the biggest impact on our personal share of emissions turns out that recycling doesn't make much of a difference neither makes changing your car or avoiding transatlantic flight which is unfortunate for those of you who are scared of flying as not flying to protect the environment is no longer a good excuse the one saying that really made a difference was not having children indeed it was 25 times more important than the next one which was live car free the key reason they arrived at this conclusion is that they assumed you inherit half of the carbon emissions of your children and then a quarter of your grandchildren etc etc fast forward to the headlines of 2022 and we read that men are getting vasectomies so they don't have to feel guilty if they keep driving a car Elon Musk has meanwhile fathered eight children though maybe by the time I finish this sentence he has a few more so let's then look at the other side of the argument the boomsters the boomsters fire is fueled by just how wrong both methus and Earth were they were both wrong because they dramatically underestimated how much technological progress would improve agricultural yield and how that in return would improve health and education and lead to more technological progress boomsters extrapolate this past success and argue that human Ingenuity will always save the day to illustrate this point the economist Julian Simon has developed What's called the Simon abundance index you may think it tells you if there is an abundance of Simons but no it tells you instead the abundance of 50 basic Commodities and their relation to population growth his list of basic Commodities contains everyday needs such as uranium platinum and tobacco but doesn't contain cheese seems that Mr Simons and I don't quite have the same idea of basic Commodities the index is calculated as the ratio of the price of the commodity and the average hourly wage so basically it's a measure of how much of the stuff you'd be able to buy the index is normalized to 1980 which marks 100 percent in 2020 the index reached 708.4 percent and hey the curve goes mostly up so certainly that's a good thing boomsters like to quote this index to prove something now this seems a little overly simplistic and you may wonder what the amount of tobacco you can buy with your earnings has to do with natural resources indeed if you look for this index in the scientific literature you won't find it it isn't generally accepted as a good measure of resource abundance what it captures is the tendency of technology to increase efficiency which leads to dropping prices so long as resources are available it tells you nothing about how long the resources will last however the boomsters do have a point in that pessimistic predictions from the past it didn't come true and that underpopulation is also a problem indeed countries like Canada Norway and Sweden have an underpopulation problem in their Northern Territories it's just hard to keep up living standards if there aren't enough people to maintain them that's true for infrastructure but also education and Health Services a civilization as complex as the one we currently have would be impossible to maintain with merely some million people there just not be enough of us to learn and carry out all the necessary tasks like making YouTube videos another problem is the age distribution for most of History it had a pyramid shape with more young people than old ones this example shows the population pyramid for Japan for 1920. when people have fewer children this changes to an inverted pyramid with more old people than Young this makes it difficult to take proper care of the elderly here you see the population pyramid for Japan as it is right now the transition is already happening in countries such as Japan and South Korea and will soon help in most of the developed world but the inverted pyramid comes from a decrease in population not from underpopulation so it's a temporary problem that should resolve once a population stabilizes Okay so we've seen what the doomsters and boomsters say now let's look at what science says a useful term to talk about overpopulation is the carrying capacity of an ecosystem that is the maximum population of a given organism that an ecosystem can sustain indefinitely so what we want to know is the carrying capacity of Earth for humans scientists disagree about the best and most accurate way of determining that number and estimates vary dramatically most estimates lie in the range between 4 and 16 billion people but some pessimists say the carrying capacity is more like 2 billion so we've long exceeded it and some optimists think we can squeeze more than 100 billion people on the planet these estimates vary so much because they depend on factors that are extremely hard to predict for example how many people we can feed depends on what the typical diet is Earth can sustain more vegans than it can sustain Jordan Peterson's who eat nothing but meat though some of you may think even one Jordan Peterson is too much and of course the estimates depend on how quickly you think technology improves together with population increase which is basically guesswork the bottom line is that the conservative estimate for the carrying capacity of Earth is roughly the current population but if we're very optimistic we might make it to 100 billion another thing we can do is try to infer Trends from population data the graph I showed you in the beginning may look like an exponential increase but this isn't quite right if you look at the past 50 years in more detail you can see that the rate of growth has been steady at about 1 billion people every 12 years that's not exponential what's going on becomes clearer if we look at the fertility rate in different regions of the planet the fertility rate is what demographers call the average number of children a woman gives birth to if the number Falls below approximately 2.1 then the size of the population starts to fall the 2.1 is called replacement level fertility it's worth mentioning that the 2.1 is the replacement fertility in developed countries with a low child motility rate if tried mortality is high the replacement fertility level is higher current fertility rates differ widely between different nations in the richest Nations fertility rates have long dropped below the replacement level for example the current fertility rate in the USA is 1.8 and in Japan 1.3 but then the developing World fertility rates are still high for example in Afghanistan 6 Indonesia 7 house this situation going to develop we don't know of course but we can extrapolate the chance in October 2020 the Lancer published the results of a massive study in which they did just that a team of researchers from the University of Washington made forecasts for population Trends in 185 countries from the present to the year 2100. they used several models to forecast the evolution of migration educational attainment use of contraceptives and so on and calculated the effects on life expectancy and birth rate according to their forecast global population will peak in the year 2064 at 9.7 billion and gradually declined to 8.8 billion by 2100. by then the fertility rate will have dropped to only 1.66 globally this is remarkably consistent with the club of Rome report from 1972. they also looked at individual countries for example by 2100 China is forecasted to decrease its population by 48 percent to the small measly number of 732 million people no wonder Chi chingping is asking Chinese people to have more babies both the US and the UK are expected to keep roughly the same population thanks mostly to immigration Japan is expected to stay at its current low fertility rate and consequently its population will decrease from the current 128 million to only 60 million just a few weeks ago musk commented on this claiming that Japan could cease to exist well we've seen that Japan will indeed likely have its population by the end of the century and if you extrapolate this trend indefinitely then yeah it'll cease to exist but let's put the numbers into context this figure shows the evolution of the Japanese population from 1900 to the present it peaked around 10 years ago at about 130 million if that doesn't sound like much keep in mind that Japan is only about half the size of Texas this means its population density is currently about 10 times higher than that of the United States the Lancet paper forecasts that Japan will remain the world's fourth largest economy even after halving its population and no one expects the population to continue shrinking forever so the future looks nice for Japanese people regardless of what musk thinks what's with Europe the population of Germany is expected to go from currently 83 to 66 million people in 2100 Spain and Portugal will see their population cut by more than half but this isn't the case in all European countries especially those up North can expect moderate increases Norway for example is projected to go from currently 5.5 to about 7 million and Sweden from currently 10 to 13 million but the biggest population increase will happen in currently underdeveloped areas thanks to both high fertility rates and further improvements in living conditions for example according to the Lancet estimates Nigeria will increase from currently 206 million to a staggering 791 million that's right by 2100 there will be more Nigerians than Chinese Niger will explode from 21 to 185 million overall the largest increase will be in sub-Saharan Africa which will go from currently 1 billion to 3 billion but even there the fertility rate is projected to decrease below the replacement rate by the end of the century if you want to check the fertility forecast for your country just check out the paper and find out if it's sunny or cloudy those extrapolations assume business as usual but the same paper also considers an alternative scenario in which the United Nations sustainable development goals for education and contraceptive views are met in that case the population would start decreasing much sooner peak in 2046 at 8.5 billion and by the year 2100 the world population would be between 6.3 and 6.9 billion what do we learn from this according to the conservative estimates for the carrying capacity of the world and extrapolations for population Trends it looks like the global population is going to Peak relatively soon below carrying capacity population decrease is going to lead to huge changes in power structures both nationally and internationally that'll cause a lot of political tension and economic stress and this doesn't even include the risk of killing off a billion people or so with pandemics Wars or a major economic crisis induced by climate change so both the doomsters and the boosters are wrong the doomsters are wrong to think that overpopulation is the problem but right in thinking that we have a problem the boom stars are right in thinking that the world can host many more people but wrong in thinking that we're going to pull it off and I'm afraid musk is right if we'd play our cards more wisely we could almost certainly squeeze some more people on this planet and seeing that the most relevant ingredient to progress is human brains if progress is what you care about then we're not on the best possible track yes there are a lot of people in the world and some of them would really really like to know your credit card information if you'd like to share it in the comments please go ahead if you worry about that kind of thing check out our sponsor not VPN not VPN is an app that you install on your phone or laptop you use it to create a safe connection to one of their more than 5 000 servers all over the world then you browse the web from there this keeps your data safe even on a public wireless not VPN has the added benefit that it allows you to access websites in other countries through the nordvpn 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Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 411,015

Keywords: Overpopulation, underpopulation, is overpopulation a problem, is the world underpopulated, doomster, boomster, Elon Musk, world population, Club of Rome, Limits to Growth, Limits of Growth, Club of Rome 1972, fertility rate, fertility rate decline, population trends, overpopulation or underpopulation, Thomas Malthus, hossenfelder, science without the gobledygook, overpopulation problems, population, earth overshoot day 2022, overshoot day, earth overshoot day, overshoot day 2022

Id: VI1AaZ9OkH8

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022