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.