My mind has been blown and I blame Sarah Hoyt! First some background. Strap in because I’m going to talk science and history. Sarah may not have phrased it that way but I’m seeing that I fell prey to the Gell-Man Amnesia effect.
Gell-Man Amnesia effect:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
–Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
That’s for other people. I’m a clever dude. I pay attention to my sources of information. I wouldn’t fall prey to stupid shit like that. Right? Right!?!
The Standard Narrative of Population Explosion:
Mind you, I’m painting with a broad brush here. Even so, my bullet points are about what anyone would tell you is roughly “the truth” about human population growth:
- Human population grew incrementally about from when we were cavemen through to about 10,000 years ago. The advent of agriculture led to the pleasant effect of more humans surviving despite the accompanying curse of cities and bureaucracy. Populations slowly grew.
- From the advent of agriculture through ancient Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages things slowly inched along and populations grew slow and steady. There were ups and downs, as one would expect, but at best it was incremental growth or an occasional die off. Occasionally there would be a big die off from something ugly like the Black Death (1347) or Genghis Kahn (1200s). In due time humans recovered from these upsets. Occasionally there would be a boost in population due improvements in farming technology such as the heavy plow (9th century medieval Europe) or good luck such as the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250). Often this paved the way for resource competition or depletion that knocked things back in future decades. (Note that a period of unusually warm weather was good for humans! Warm = good, cold = bad. I’m just sayin’.)
- Beginning around the Industrial Revolution, the global human population went apeshit. It began to grow exponentially. This was due to mechanized agriculture (more food) and then later due to the advent of decent medicine (less infant mortality).
- In the 1960s, everyone read The Population Bomb took a bong hit and went full retard. Paul R. Ehrlich predicted massive death through starvation. The cause would be overpopulation. Everyone bought it hook line and sinker. They had a group hug, invented earth day, and started bitching at everyone about recycling beer cans. This continues to this day. Meanwhile human starvation went into decline. There was less starvation than ever before in human history. This continues to this day. By now (2022), mass starvation has been virtually eliminated. This is the first time in human existence it has been so! Starvation is now limited to self-inflicted situations; usually socialist paradises (Venezuela, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China) or similar totalitarian hellscapes (North Korea). (Note that Ehrlich was literally the most wrong a human being could possibly get. He was wrong about the direction, timing, and amount of human death through starvation. It is literally impossible to be more wrong on that subject that Ehrlich.)
- About the same time, Normal Borlaug, a biologist & scientist, was going full bad ass and just rocking the world on rice and grain yields. He ushered in the “green revolution” which vastly increased crop yields. Borlaug probably saved more lives that any other human in history. (As an aside, the Nobel prize used to mean something and now it doesn’t. In 1970, Borlaug got a Nobel prize for saving an estimated one billion human lives. In 2007, Al Gore got a Nobel prize for a PowerPoint presentation. In 2009, Barak Obama got a Nobel prize for breathing.)
- It is clear that mass starvation was narrowly averted due to higher crop yields but people have never stopped freaking out about population growth. Hippies, in particular, have never seen a fully stocked grocery store with cheap food without protesting it. Here’s a hint, if a hippie wants to meddle with the food supply, punch them in the head before you wind up starving. (Ask yourself which is more dangerous to your wellbeing: GMOs in your box of cheap plentifully available cornflakes or the Potato Famine of 1847? Hint, even if cornflakes suck, they haven’t killed about a million Irish people.)
- Because nothing succeeds in academia like being incredibly wrong in a loud and flamboyant way; Professor Ehrlich enjoyed a long and distinguished career. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at Stanford University. I assume he’s the inspiration for Paul Krugman, who also is never right about anything.
The standard narrative produces charts like this:
If you back off a bit on the hysterics and fiddle with the axes you’ll get charts that aren’t so scary. They tend to have a peak and gradual decline from the peak. This one is about 10 years old from Britannia. (They exist, who knew?) It shows the same basic thing as the earlier chart but on different scales.
It never occurred to me to doubt any of this. Clearly the population had grown. I’ve personally seen crops from 1970 and 2022 and the difference is absolutely amazing. Borlaug really did pull our ass out of a bad situation (with help of human ingenuity and possibly capitalism).
I’m forever frustrated by hippies who’ve latched on to death by overpopulation. They flog that shit like a Catholic priest bitching about eternal damnation due to original sin.
But it never occurred to me to doubt the actual measure of global population growth in the last century. Say, 1950 through last Monday. I just sorta’ went with it.
Sara Hoyt asked the question that surprised me in it’s obviousness. She posted EVERY GENERATION A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM MARCH 9, 2020 and now I’m thinking too much!
“The other thing they have believed with credulous certainty is that the population figures from the UN are accurate, instead of being — at BEST — guesstimations, and
accuratelyat worsta steaming pile of bull of excretacompletely imaginary.”
Dammit!
“I’m not a hundred percent sure wh[y] people in other countries, like, say, Portugal, think that the population “count” makes any sense. No, I’m serious. I don’t get it. Unless it is a rock bottom assumption that EVERYONE must be more organized then them. (Bizarrely it doesn’t even begin to be true.) I know that they tend to believe our federal government has machine-like control over every aspect of civic and cultural life in the US (no. I’m okay. Really, I’m okay. Let me have some water so I can stop laughing and type again.)
Only this illusion allows people to believe that — what is it now? 8 billion? Yeah. It’s about as accurate as climate modeling into the far future. Computers and GIGO rule! — population count the UN puts out.”
T-rex on a pogo stick! Why have I never considered this?!?
Furthermore, I live in America. As far as I can tell, my observations fit her theories.
I’ve seen plenty of places with booming population but none where the boom is from birth. It’s is always a boom in population that arrived from somewhere else. If it wasn’t immigration (usually, but not always illegal) it was Californians (often fleeing their State with the inadvertent likelihood of replicating the same failed politics in their new home).
I’ve never personally witnessed a place in America growing in population due to Americans cranking out offspring. Sad but true. One exception: It seems like the Amish have grown a lot in Pennsylvania and Ohio and that’s probably not because of lots of Millennials chucking their cell phone to join the community. So maybe they’re the exception and more power to ’em. Even so, they’re rounding errors compared to Chicago or Miami.
Sara doesn’t give up. She has an answer to the immigration angle too. She twists the knife in my preconceived notions (Note: I added the emphasis.):
“Now, why did the west open their doors?
My guess is because our leaders have some inkling of how bad things are in terms of how many people are in the upcoming generations. My guess is that they are becoming scared, because — get this — nonexistent people cannot have children.
As much as most people like to pretend I’m crazy when I say I think our world population is already falling (why this would be any more crazy than the UN’s baseless assertion that we’re drowning in babies, I don’t know) that’s what the actions of the government of EVERY developed country are doing.
They are in a desperate fight for resources: the biggest resource of all: PEOPLE.
The west is willing to take welfare cases and illiterate peasants, in the hopes — I would guess — that their children will be productive citizens.”
Holy shitsnacks! Forgetting the wisdom of unlimited illegal immigration, the amount and direction and trends I’ve seen in the several states I’ve lived don’t disagree with Sarah’s theories.
Don’t you just hate it when you had a notion and then realize there’s another completely reasonable theory that explains behavior just as well? I just believed the UN? Why the heck was I doing that?
I had to ask myself. Are the UN / Global population numbers for real? What do I think of my source:
- “How often has the UN been right about anything?”
- “How often are governments correct with statistics like this?”
- “If there was an error in population statistics, would the bias be to overestimate or underestimate? Which one brings more prestige, power, electoral votes, NGO funds?”
To which I answer:
- Almost never.
- Almost never.
- Always overestimate!
She’s got a point. After a lifetime of seeing government statistics and UN statistics and witnessing that they’re incredibly unreliable… just exactly why the hell would I think they’re correct this time and for this particular subject?
I’m pissed off that I hadn’t thought of this before!
I’m not the only one that thinks Sarah is onto something. Dio’s Workshop had a similar reaction to mine.
“What if, and I have no way to verify, no one does, but logic and historical precedents tell me its highly likely, that UN figures are complete bunk and Sarah’s estimate of Less than Half stated figures of world population are correct, then literally every talking point on Gorbalworming/Peak Oil/GreenEnergy will save the planet/we need to reduce the population (why if its already half of what they claim?) etc etc etc,,, Every! Single! Point! they try to use to keep things in line is bullshit if just that number is off by half.”
Indeed.
I haven’t enough personal experience to form global opinions based exclusively on my own experience but I have traveled extensively in the USA. I know for damn sure our growth is mostly imported and not breeding. I also have been hammered relentlessly to report as much as possible to every census and head counter in creation. I live in a sparse poor farming community and at every census they’re flipping over rocks to find every last person. They sure as hell don’t check to make sure you’re telling the truth. I could claim I’ve got sixty people living in my chicken coop and they’d love it!
They’ve got a clear motivation. They want poor, they want many, they want minorities. They count every molecule that hints at it. If they find Bigfoot’s tracks they’ll count him as an underrepresented minority of large footed hominids in need of funding and next year there will be a project based on Bigfoot outreach.
Also I have a homestead and you’d be amazed how much shit the Dept. of Agriculture generates to try and fluff up farm numbers. (I’m just one guy… super small time. I’m a friggin’ rounding error. Ignoring me would make sense. Yet they’re always poking and prodding to count acres and such. (It feels like this: “Could you conceivably claim to have 100 head of cattle?” “Are you shitting me? I can barely keep up with a flock of chickens and a handful of pigs. I haven’t got time for fucking cows.” “OK, I’ll check the box for ‘under 100’, do you also have less than 100 zebras?” Get the fuck off my land.”)
I haven’t verified the same thing overseas. Maybe I’d think differently if I’d spent some time in Africa… or maybe not. (I did spend some time in Portugal; which is Sarah’s home. I thought Portugal was growing fast fast fast not unlike an American suburb. But I didn’t see lots of children and large families. I have no idea what the immigration of the time was or where the need to build fast food joints and malls was coming from. I’ll defer to Sarah about her home country.)
Here’s the deal. Sarah’s theories, that we’re already past a peak in population and sliding down the backside, wouldn’t differ from my personal observations. It’s also my experience that the UN has been wrong about anything it says since Woodrow Wilson created the damn idea. The US government data is about as reliable as you’d expect. (Does anyone buy US government estimates of inflation anymore?) Nor does the US have a great track record of intellectual competency. Did they predict the collapse of USSR? Did they manage the budget without massive debts? Heck, how often does the presidential election appear squeaky clean?
So, I’ve had a simple basic illusion shattered today. I’m pondering how weird that makes me compared to everyone else who still buys standard narrative and how dumb that made me in the past. How’s your day going.
Okay, Portugal: when I was a kid, the population for the stack a prol apartments and the expanding suburbs came from the country. The rural areas of Portugal are now largely deserted. (Partly through modernization of agriculture/less hands on the work.)
Nowadays? EASTERN European. I swear half the young are either second generation Eastern European or one of their parents is.
BTW, there is now credible evidence that the rest of the Americas is emptying out of young people, largely due to our open borders. They don’t have THAT many to begin with, apparently. I’d need to track down the blogs, but I’ve seen them in recent time.
That’s interesting, are all the young people winding up in Texas or what?
All too many of them are winding up dead on the trail, and that’s based on what we’re finding. The real numbers are undoubtedly higher.
Don’t know about that too much. The demographic of Latin America has a huge skew towards the young end. Young girls having multiple kids with the macho/protector “de turno”.
I dunno: I’ve lived too many desperately overcrowded places to really dismiss the idea of overpopulation. How miserable it is depends a lot on infrastructure, and whether or not people are forced to concentrate in megacities by economic manipulation and the inability to own the land. America was special for a lot of its history, because people actually owned the land and homes they lived on/in. Anymore that’s rare.
So a few weeks back I mentioned maybe having something to brag about – it took me a few weeks longer than I anticipated to finish, and will take two more weeks before they’ll let me sell it, but I wrote an interesting computer simulation that might be interesting enough to sell:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1976310/Riemanns_Lens/
(Actually, it wasn’t even that (different hobby project), but the idea for the project attacked, and I had to see if I could make it work.)
A Riemann Lens? Holy crap that’s cool! I was proud of myself for starting a campfire by banging rocks around, but now I feel like a complete moron.
I dunno. My graphics card is only 100 watts, which doesnt make THAT much of a space heater. Youre probably warmer than me. :-p
I enjoy your camping articles, and the outdoor adventures. Will have to get back to my more physical hobbies now that this is done.
Ha ha ha, I never thought of it like that but high computational loads are the only heat source less efficient than flint on steel. 🙂 I’m looking forward to more camping as the weather clears; some of which will make stories for my blog. It seems like winter / spring is just not letting up and I’ll be looking at snow forever but I complain about that every year. I’m behind schedule though. I still haven’t thawed out my shop enough to service my off road toys or paint my boat.
I suppose it’s possible that population numbers are much less than reported. If so that’s not a bad thing, and it’ll still be a while before we have to worry about anything like mankind dying out. The entire world was invented, built out, and explored in the 18th,19th, early 20th centuries, with anywhere between 1/10 to 1/5 of (assuming it’s in the ballpark) current population.
As to our rulers, they don’t have a lack of people to accomplish things with, they have a lack of people who are desperate and will do it for next to no pay. They’re working on both ends of that problem. And we don’t have a lack of warm bodies, we have a lack of free people who live self-sufficient lives and are free to build and experiment. The Wright Bros could not have invented the airplane if they worked in someone else’s bicycle shop, much less commute into San Francisco to fill out timecards and TPS reports, before commuting back to a shoebox apartment.
I think the concern would be the welfare state. Older people are less productive and if there are more older than younger people the politicians might have to shift from promising everyone the moon to realistic downsizing of government, welfare, and infrastructure. The state constantly growing like the blob is bad enough. But against the backdrop of a shrinking population? That could be disastrous.
On the pre-industrial farm, kids were cheap labor AND retirement account AND life insurance policy. They would take care of you when you were old or sick (not that you ever entirely stopped working, but they at least took over the really physical tasks for you), or your spouse if you passed away. With industrialization and the mass migration to urban living, children became (as Peter Zeihan puts it), “expensive, noisy furniture”. Add in social programs and retirement plans, and you no longer needed children of your own in order to keep you alive and fed when you got too old to work all day. It took a generation or three for the ancient desire to have a large family so that some of them would survive and become successful to fade away, but it did. Add in the Pill, and suddenly children are not just no longer a necessity, they’re now a completely optional luxury (made even worse when society tells you that you have to put them all through college!). Add in the overpopulation “crisis”, and society began actively shaming people for having large families, right at the point where families had already begun to shrink to critically-low sizes.
So, while the would-be socialists/neo-feudalists (I consider them as such, because they always expect to end up in the de-facto “noble class” that is “more equal than others”) have committed terrible acts against society, it’s more that they deprived us of our last chance to turn the trend around than that they caused it in the first place.
“The Wright Bros could not have invented the airplane if they worked in someone else’s bicycle shop,…”
This.
Something the Left fails to understand (what they fail to understand is a very long list, but this one is near the top) is the economic and social value of personal independence.
It’s been pointed out too many times to count, but nearly all the Great Steps Forward have been made by some guy or gal looking at something and deciding he or she could do better, or at least seeing something differently from everyone who looked at it before (I will concede that occasionally “government funding” provided some degree of assistance – I’m thinking stuff like the P-51 Mustang – but Fleming and Salk didn’t work for the Federal Bureau of Medicinal Improvements, and Musk didn’t build Space X from CALDOT and NHTSA retirees.
‘Tain’t “Californians” fleeing the state.
It’s peoples’ toothless banjo-playing kinfolk from the Other Forty-Seven, having sucked what they can from the Golden State, now either returning home, or latching onto a new locale to befoul and despoil until they move on, plague locust-like, to their next victim.
You could look it up.
They weren’t Californians when they arrived here, and they weren’t Californians when they left either. Try checking Social Security numbers instead of license plates. (See if you can guess how we know 98% of the “homeless” flopped all over California aren’t Californians either. They were shipped here from everywhere else.)
Look up where Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer are from, and get back to me.
Multiply that by 20M, and you’ve cracked the case.
I think of two points here. First, wealthier countries produce fewer offspring, at least in part because there’s enough other things to do. When making babies is free, and you can’t really find any other entertainment, you go with what you got. Second, the US has been paying unwed mothers to produce more children since the 1960’s. Not enough to raise them, but funny enough, many don’t make it to adulthood, anyway.
How do you KNOW that wealthier countries produce fewer offspring? To return to the theme of this post, maybe they only appear to because they have fewer incentives to fudge the numbers.
Indeed… as far as I can tell we don’t have much to go on.
However, at least in America there is massive huge almost unstoppable drive to come up with as many poor people as possible to justify a thundering herd of social programs. Also every congressional district is based on population.
Elon Musk agrees.
“It’s completely the opposite,” Musk said, urging people to look at the data. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
When asked if this is why he has so many children, the father of six said he’s trying to set a good example, adding that he has to practice what he preaches.
“There are not enough people,” Musk told a Wall Street Journal event Monday. “I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people,” he said.
cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-civilization-will-crumble-if-we-dont-have-more-children.html
I had no idea Musk had mentioned what I’m now calling “the Hoyt conundrum”.
it’ll still be a while before we have to worry about anything like mankind dying out
True enough, but consider how pension funds work (government run or not). They are, to one degree or another, Ponzi schemes that require an influx of money to support current expenditures. As the demographic pyramid inverts (more old, fewer young), the number of people influxing versus the number of people exfluxing requires more money per capita.
In the US, Gen X is screwed during its peak earning years (which are about to occur). In terms of potential cash-flow, they’ll do fine in retirement because Gen Y is bigger. The question then becomes: Will Gen Y be willing to pay the ruinous tax rates that Gen X paid? Being a larger cohort, if they say “no”, tax rates will be lowered and Gen X gets screwed again in retirement.
Outside the US, there is no Gen Y generation “bulge”. The list of countries that are doomed is YUGE! – even with the UN numbers. If those numbers are significantly off on the high side (which is not unreasonable), then things are about to get very interesting.
Japan makes a great example because they’re ahead of most countries on this demographic path of doom. It’s never (in human lifetime/practical terms) going to get better. Life in Japan is now as good as its ever going to be. Russia is just a bit behind Japan, and much poorer. They didn’t choose the 2020s to invade Ukraine “just because”; by the mid 2030s, they won’t have an army; by the mid 2050s, they won’t have an economy. China is right behind Russia, and even poorer. And that’s by official counts.
Yeah…shit…OF COURSE the stats are cooked, they’re ALWAYS cooked. Like you, I bought the bogus numbers too. Frankfort Institute, brain washing, I mean advertising, actually works. William Casey, CIA: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.”
Only Whites fave been hammered with the “you must go extinct to sustainably save Mother Gaia from being murdered by OVER POPULATION!”
Population of China is estimated to be cut in half by 2050. Cause is an aging population and a lack of babies
Ziehan kind of has the population bomb bit nailed. See damn near any of his videos on YouTube. Heck, grab yesterday’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bww_LNrJYHs
Dude was a lot more negative on China than I am. So weird when I’m the optimistic one.
Astrophysics / cosmology is another place where the received wisdom doesn’t add up; they have been trying to prop up the standard model for more than 80 years with “dark matter” and “dark energy” because the model can’t account for, among quite a few other things, galactic rotation. The further out from the center, the more that part of the galaxy rotates faster than the model predicts. “Dark matter” was proposed as the cause, but it has not once been found in over 80 years of trying.
A competing model recognizes that the observed universe is 99% plasma (a mix of charged and neutral particles) and that the known behaviors of plasma, controlled by the well understood laws of electromagnetism and confirmed in over 100 years of plasma laboratory experiments, account for the phenomena observed in the cosmos without relying on exotic physics or untestable hypotheses (which is all black holes, neutron stars, etc. are despite their treatment in the popular press). But you will look far and wide before you find any mention of electricity in mainline astrophysics papers. Magnetism yes, electricity no, even though they are both aspects of electromagnetism.
Plasma Cosmology and the related Electric Universe model are solid as far as I can tell, and I have been studying and trying unsuccessfully to falsify them for years. Gareth Samuel’s “See the Pattern” videos on YouTube, along with those of Dr. Donald Scott, are a good introduction. Why does the “Big Bang” crowd avoid electricity like a vampire avoids holy water? I dunno. It’s almost as if some space alien HOA, afraid we boisterous humans will screw up the neighborhood, grab graduating astrophysicists and tell them to keep their traps shut about e*********y or they’ll be locked in a room and forced to listen to 100 hours of Barry Manilow.
Whenever I hear about “dark matter”, I think of phlogiston. The definition of dark matter seems to be “our models don’t work without it so the stuff we can’t detect and have no other inkling it exists must definitely be there and it’s called dark matter”. Phlogiston probably made sense at the time but it went out the window as soon as everyone figured out what oxygen was and the alternate explanation no longer needed to postulate a mystery element solution.
I just love google maps for this. Go to San Antonio, layer view, wander around for a bit, then center it with the sale at the bottom right showing 5 miles. Look at the roads, rails, and other transport in and out. Look at the traffic on those roads, carrying food, fuel, etc. Published population 1.6 million or do.
Now go to Africa. Kinshasa, Congo. Do the same thing. Population 17 million. 10 times San Antonio’s number. As soon as you leave Kinshasa the roads are dirt. Where’s the infrastructure to support that many, even in poverty? Rail lines, roads, and farms? Even trucks?
Published population numbers over most of the world is a joke.
My understanding was that population figures were growing not from increased childbirth but from extended lifespans. If you increase lifespans from 40 years to 80 years, and nothing else changes, you double the number of people, but you don’t double the number of productive people, you vastly increase the number of dependent people. You don’t double the number of childbearing people either. And if the childbearing people have fewer children (which is happening nearly everywhere) Population goes into decline once max. lifespan has been achieved if not before.
That is the situation now in China, Japan and Russia especially. Indeed I have heard credible doubts expressed as to whether China’s population is as large as they say, and whether it in fact peaked a few years ago. Nobody trusts Chinese numbers, they are in general propaganda.
You’re not the only one that feels like you’ve been scammed. I’ve personally experienced the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect when reading about programming languages I know a great deal about. A few paragraphs in you realize the author(s) may have a clue but have no understanding of context. Then, just like your quote highlights, you read about a topic you have little expertise with and assume the writers are not misleading you. The “misleadia” as some cynics have tagged the press is on target. It’s wise to assume corruption, either intentional or accidental, and practice relentless verification. If you, and I mean just you, cannot check an assertion you must treat it as conjecture at best and propaganda at worst. You’re either a hard ass skeptic or a credulous buffoon. Choose one!
You’re not the only one that feels like you’ve been scammed. I have personally experienced the Gell-Man Amnesia effect, and I constantly remind myself to practice relentless verification. but I still find myself giving credence to sources that have time and time again demonstrated they are not reliable. It’s unfortunate because global population growth, or decline, is an important topic. You would think strenuous, and fully disclosed efforts, would be made to discern reality of the situation. I can only infer that we love our bullshit on planet moron.
Could this population decrease be the Great Filter that makes the sky not have 350 radio signals?
I doubt that “normal” population growth rates after the “baby boom” is the Great Filter that solves the Fermi Paradox. But if it is, we’re deeply in the covfefe.
Your example of a plea to check media reports against your personal experiences goes against my personal experiences watching Orthodox Jewish communities.
Population building through natural means in that community?
I have a long samizdata post on how the same thing played out late in the Roman empire: https://www.samizdata.net/2020/02/echoes-of-distant-rhymes/
Well, I spent years shipping and delivering humanitarian aid to the Africa. When we started, it was because of a famine, which turns out to be normal there. Between my first and most recent trip there, the only thing that changed is that the population doubled. They still don’t have meaningful agriculture, industry, or any sort of stability. That population rise is very visible and alarming. Beyond that, they will absolutely slide into starvation if we slow down our mountains of direct food aid.
Why this matters to us, besides basic humanitarian concern, is that we could easily see a few hundred million angry and illiterate “refugees” show up in Europe, or eventually the USA. That would not substantially change the conditions in Africa, but it would bury us.
So that’s an actual observation that matches un stats!
A few thoughts:
If the 8B number is roughly correct, everyone could fit into the state of Texas with a population density of NYC. So whatever.
How is the 8B number correct if the 20th century saw so much war and casualties, again probably an unknown number, with many “historians” considering 100-200million deaths possible. Even just considering the US involvement with WW2, VietNam and Korea, which took hundreds of thousands of men out of the gene pool, it seems odd that our population grew so much afterward. Of course you could argue that most men in general do not reproduce, while most women do.
The “space” example above regarding dark matter is apropos too.
Certainly a known unknown, this is a fascinating subject for conjecture. Thanks!
That is interesting. Well, the first question that comes to mind is: has anyone done a check with know, available data?
By that I mean, the 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and (now) 1950 census records are available for free. Has anyone done any actual count and compared it to the official numbers? OCRing the set and analyzing the data is not that overly complicated. Those comparisons would give you an idea of how much overestimation is done.