Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

World Population Growth

ourworldindata.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 113 posts

Re: World Population Growth

#81

Post by hx87 »

AlaskaCasey wrote: post #57
qwrusz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, these are good examples. It's amazing how long some of these corrupt governments have stayed in power. Will be interesting to see what happens if/when there's a change in governance.

It's easy to stay in power when you have complete control over the news and propaganda machines. Using Venezuela as an example, the country is one of the richest in the world in natural resources, but 1% of the population controls 99% of the wealth.

And in most cases, communism just changes who the 1% are and leaves the distribution unchanged.

Re: World Population Growth

#82

Post by hx87 »

erispoe wrote: post #80
Zigurd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan appears to contradict this. There might be a debt default, but that will mostly be contained within Japan.

Because Japanese debt is owned by Japanese households, yes. But if it decreases their standard of living, it's not a contradiction, it supports the point. They will pay the price of refusing immigration.

Japan's problems are more due to refusing to risk short-term social disharmony in exchange for long term socioeconomic benefits.

Re: World Population Growth

#83

Post by b_emery »

WildUtah wrote: post #34
Symmetry wrote: post #14

If there are heritable traits that lead to people having more kids in a developed world environment then at some point evolution will take over and we'll start to see exponential growth again.

Yes. The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population with mandatory birth limits or unlimited expansion of land area to extraterrestrial territory. Otherwise evolution will always exceed its limits and produce a crash. Malthus explained it all mathematically 200 years ago, even before Darwin documented the mechanisms.

> The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population with mandatory birth limits

This is demonstrably not true. Look at Japan and western Europe: declining population. Its a function of economic situation (no need for more than 1-3 children) and female reproductive choice. If we give that to the world, the population problem goes away. The mathematics of population dynamics work for animals, roughly, but the assumptions don't hold for humans because of the changes in behavior.

Re: World Population Growth

#84

Post by WildUtah »

b_emery wrote: post #83
WildUtah wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population with mandatory birth limits or unlimited expansion of land area to extraterrestrial territory. Otherwise evolution will always exceed its limits and produce a crash. Malthus explained it all mathematically 200 years ago, even before Darwin documented the mechanisms.

> The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population with mandatory birth limits This is demonstrably not true. Look at Japan and western Europe: declining population. Its a function of economic situation (no need for more than 1-3 children) and female reproductive choice. If we give that to the world, the population problem goes away. The mathematics of population dynamics work for animals, rou…

There are people, even in Japan, that want a whole mess of children. That preference is heritable. Each generation has more of these people because they're the ones that reproduce.

Eventually those fertile and natal enthusiasts will dominate the population and exponential growth resumes. The current situation is a temporary response to an external shock, specifically to reliable contraception. But Malthusian conditions will return; Darwinism requires it.

Re: World Population Growth

#85

Post by WildUtah »

erispoe wrote: post #78
WildUtah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're well on our way to 15+ billion without pause on the current UN projections, so hang on for a scary ride.

Imagine what 15 billion brains can do.

The number of clever high-IQ people and engineers will continue falling. It's only the nations and cultures that don't value learning and invention that are expanding.

Re: World Population Growth

#86

Post by erispoe »

WildUtah wrote: post #85
erispoe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine what 15 billion brains can do.

The number of clever high-IQ people and engineers will continue falling. It's only the nations and cultures that don't value learning and invention that are expanding.

Care to elaborate on that?

Re: World Population Growth

#87

Post by crpatino »

hx87 wrote: post #72
crpatino wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a "modest increase" if we had spare carrying capacity. Instead, what we have now is a situation that is going from bad to worse, but since the crisis is unfolding in slow motion, most people do not recognize it as such; after all, most people alive today have either never seen what a good situation looks like, or where too young to grasp the meaning of the changes they observed back then. The (human) carr…

A couple of questions about your numbers: > was estimated to be around 2 billion By whom? A source would be nice, which is why I generally refrain from using passive tense when stating facts. > Also given that population growth was not arrested back in the 1970's, but only slowed down, the carrying capacity has not improved at all How exactly does population growth affect carrying capacity? If I have a car with 7 sea…

Ok, this are complex questions... but I will try to address them as best as I can.

1. The guy who first came with the 2 Billion figure in the 1920s was the scientist Raymond Pearl, though the copncept of 'carrying capacity' as we understand it today did not exist. Pearl's work was for the most part statistic/economic; It was Eugine Odum who later picked up that earlier work in the 1950s and applied it to the ecology concept of 'carrying capacity' which was independently developed by the observation of animals in natural environments. You can check the standard form in Odum's textbook "Fundamentals of Ecology".

The problem with the original formulation for Carrying Capacity is that it is assumed to be fixed, because animal behavior is governed mostly by insticts. Humans, even if ultimately subject to the Laws of Nature, can show much wider variations in behavior due to culture, availability of technology and many other factors. According to the wikipedia page, UN has several estimations of current carrying capacity, and they vary widely (From 4 to 11B) depending on each researcher biases and methodology.

I personally assume that the results in the higher end of the spectrum come from cornucopians that fail to take into account the economic and political presures that get in the way of implementing the (theoretically) optimal solutions, and therefore assume that actual carrying capacity is closer to the 4-5B range... but then, it's my own bias speaking there.

2. Other concept you can take from Odum is that long term carrying capacity can be eroded by organisims that happen to find a short term way to reproduce beyond the current carrying capacity of the ecosystem they belong to. This is what I was talking about in my previous msg, though I admit it sounds a bit convoluted and ranty in retrospective.

If you have a 7 seat car and you usually drive around with 10 or more people on it, (or with merely 5 fraternity bros that usually behave like baboons on meth) someone is eventually going to break one of the seats - probably the copilot one, which happens to be the least robust one. Then, you end up with a 6 seat car, at least for the lenght of the time that it takes you to fix it. And if you do not fix the seat but keep driving around with the same people on board, you are going to break another seat, and another.

Re: World Population Growth

#88

Post by lloyd-christmas »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #26
sumedh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are expected to live 40.1 years as a citizen of India Well that is depressing.

Not really. You're expected to die in childhood. Survive that, you'll likely live about as long as anybody anywhere else.

A glance at the methodology shows that they account for that.

https://github.com/worldpopulation/population.io-api/tree/ma...

Re: World Population Growth

#89

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

erispoe wrote: post #75
weatherlight wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think earth is going to be able to support 9 billion people without some sort of dramatic paradigm shift in the way, as a species, we consume things

Medieval economy relied heavily on wood consumption, in a very unsustainable way. Forests were cut down way faster than they could renew and, if no technological change happened, they would have hit a wall pretty violently. But they didn't. Instead, people and societies adapted. The lesson of that is that you cannot extrapolate our current technology and the resources we consume in the future and assume that everythi…

>The lesson of that is that you cannot extrapolate our current technology and the resources we consume in the future and assume that everything will stay the same.

I am reminded of an old joke:

"A man jumped from the 10th story and is falling to the ground. A woman at the 4th floor sees him from her window and asks, 'Hey, how's it going?'. The man replies 'So far, so good.'"

Yes, technology has saved us in the past. Given that new discoveries are increasingly harder and more expensive to achieve, will technology continue to do so in the future...?

Re: World Population Growth

#90

Post by kbutler »

WildUtah wrote: post #34
Symmetry wrote: post #14

If there are heritable traits that lead to people having more kids in a developed world environment then at some point evolution will take over and we'll start to see exponential growth again.

Yes. The only way to long run sustainability is central control of population with mandatory birth limits or unlimited expansion of land area to extraterrestrial territory. Otherwise evolution will always exceed its limits and produce a crash. Malthus explained it all mathematically 200 years ago, even before Darwin documented the mechanisms.

Did you forget the /s tag?

It's pretty well understood that population growth curves are logistical, rather than exponential (e.g., https://www.britannica.com/science/population-growth/images-...)

The appearance of exponential growth is always temporary.

As the population increases, negative feedbacks reduce the population growth rate. Examples of these feedbacks include cost to raise children, reduced dependence on large family for security in old age, etc.

Estimates of the "replacement fertility rate" are about 2.1 per woman in a developed society (higher in less-developed societies). Many first world countries are already below this rate, and without immigration, will have declining populations as their native populations age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

Malthus and his disciples have been wrong for 200 years.

Paul Ehrlich in particular, because he used to like giving short-term dates for his predictions, so we could watch them slide by. Then he decided time was different to him than to an "average person".

“How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach a conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?” -- Steward Brand, former disciple of Ehrlich

Post reply on HN