Where Do Eight Billion People Live?
SWP Report 2023 | United Nations Population Fund, unfpa.org)
In November 2022, the world population eclipsed 8 billion people. For many of us, it represents a milestone the human family should celebrate. A milestone of people living longer, healthier lives, and enjoying more rights and greater choices than ever before.
If you have not noticed India eclipsed China in population.
At the bottom of the chart, each area of Earth is color coded to identify continents, countries and their population.
In November 2022, the United Nations announced the human population had surpassed 8 billion people. Two thirds of the people are living in places where fertility rates had fallen below the so-called “replacement level” of 2.1 births per woman. These trends offer a nuanced look at demographic transition, the shift from higher to lower mortality and fertility as it unfolds in different countries and contexts.
The subtleties of this story were often lost. “Too many” people will overwhelm the planet, many pundits proclaimed. Coming even as others warned “too few” people would lead to civilizational collapse. Every population trend seems to invoke its own vision of catastrophe. Too many young people? Destabilizing. Too many old people? A burden. Too many migrants? A threat.
The information about is pulled from the Executive Summary.
According to population alarmists, our world is overrun and close to bursting at the seams. Politicians, media pundits and even some academics have asserted that global challenges like economic instability, climate change and resource wars can be pinned on overpopulation – on too much demand and not enough supply.
The alarmists paint a picture of out-of-control, unstoppable birth rates. Usually, they point a finger at poor and marginalized communities who have long been portrayed as reproducing recklessly and prolifically despite making the smallest contributions to issues such as environmental destruction.
This narrative oversimplifies. SWP Report 2023: The problem with ‘too many’ | United Nations Population Fund (unfpa.org)
In a YouGov survey of almost 8,000 people across eight countries (Brazil, Egypt, France, Hungary, India, Japan, Nigeria and the United States) the most commonly held view was that the current world population was too large.
Some interesting stats can be found at this United Nations report on population.
Also: Immigration, Population, Replacement, Politics and the Economy, Angry Bear, run75441
Taken from: Interesting stuff, The one-handed economist, David Zetland
Highest global average standard of living in all of history, highest global average food security in all of history, most measures of pollution and environmental quality better than fifty years ago — and we still have people who act like it’s possible to imagine that Paul Ehrlich had some idea what he was talking about.
I’m old enough to remember those ads decades ago asking for donations to help starving people in places like Ethiopia and Bangladesh, with pictures of stick-figure emaciated kids….. Notice you never see those any more? It’s because those places aren’t like that any more.
Most of the increase in world forest cover over the last few years has been due to reforestation programs in India and China — the two most populated countries are doing the most to restore the forests. The “overpopulation” nuts seem to think that humans (or at least humans in poorer countries) are some sort of locusts that mindlessly devour everything. It is a vile delusion.
The reason we are in as good shape as we are is because Ehrlich and others like him sounded an alarm 60 years ago. That led to international efforts to control population growth, improve children’s health, fight disease, deal with economic degradation, make agriculture more efficient and so on. The disasters that were predicted were prevented because their precursors were recognized and dealt with.
Just because the car stopped before hitting the brick wall doesn’t mean that alerting the driver who then slammed on the brakes was the wrong thing to do.
dobbs
i don’t know how many people can fit into a telephone booth, but don’t call it living.
infidel
if you get your information from Fox News you might believe this. if you think standard of living is measured in dollars or plastic toys you might believe this.
a tree farm is not a forest.
my sources tell me that subsistence farmers are happier than Americans who work for wages.[if the farmers are not being exploited by landlords]
Following up on Infidel the problem isn’t overpopulation, the problem is underutilization of the land. More accurately improper use of the limited amount of land available to use. What we need to do is stop building houses in cow pastures, as my son is this very moment doing in Minnesota, stop grazing cows and grow food. Not corn for ethanol to water down the gasoline, not sow beans for cellulose … food.
Build up in the cities, or better still, drill down, build underground …
https://english.news.cn/20221002/0515c7f55dc74e26a31f03c2a2c8e59b/c.html
October 2, 2022
Why is a quarter of world’s new forest area coming from China?
BEIJING — China ranks first globally in the area of planted forests and forest coverage growth, contributing a quarter of the world’s new forest area in the past decade.
The secret behind the rapid growth of China’s green landscape lies in its large-scale greening campaign, including conserving existing green ecosystems, adding new forests, grasslands, and wetlands, as well as fighting desertification.
According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, the accumulative afforestation area reached 960 million mu (64 million hectares) over the past 10 years, while 165 million mu of grassland was improved, and more than 12 million mu of wetlands were added or restored….
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202302/17/WS63eef463a31057c47ebaf662.html
February 17, 2023
Scientists develop drill-like seed carrier to promote afforestation *
HANGZHOU — Chinese scientists with their counterparts from the United States have designed a drill-like, self-burying carrier that can significantly increase the success rate of aerial seeding in afforestation….
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3
Infidel:
“Highest global average standard of living in all of history…”
Importantly, while China has been able to end severe poverty through the vast country, the United States has been trying to stop Chinese development and this has come to be generally taken for granted in US intellectual circles.
The US isn’t trying to stop Chinese development. If nothing else, it is trying to force China to develop its internal market rather than trying to dominate external markets.
“The US isn’t trying to stop Chinese development. If nothing else, it is trying to force China to develop its internal market rather than trying to dominate external markets.”
Offensive nonsense.
Of course the United States has been and is trying to stop Chinese development. Openly beginning in 2011, when the US sought to undermine the Chinese space program and began the pivot to Asia and continuing from there and becoming increasingly fierce.
Anne:
Who are you working for?
What Kalesberg is saying is true. Why is a small island off its cast so important to China? No one nation is attempting to stop China’s internal growth as long as it does not impede the rest of the world. Which in many cases there are underlying reasons why China is lending aid to Africa and Mexico for that matter.
“Comparing US and Chinese Foreign Aid in the Era of Rising Powers – https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03932729.2020.1855904
How noble of China, heh Anne?
I have flown into Beijing and traveled by van to the industrial city of Tianjin. Around the airport were planted acres of very recognizable Ginko trees. Why would they plant Ginkos? Maybe, its because of its resistance to pollutants, fungicides, insects (along with most insecticides), disease, bacteria, droughts, and smog. It resists pollution and because it goes through photosynthesis it can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Smart idea by China’s government. The Ginkgo is the Official National Tree of China.
I was in Shanghai on it’s worst air pollution day ever. The air stagnated. Tianjin air was similar. I was in Jinan traveling by car to a supplier. Our Chinese guide explained to us, the new rows of the same style apartment buildings would most likely never be occupied by the Chinese labor that built them. Why? Because they could not afford them.
While working for the Germans, I was sent to Shenzen I passed a shopping mall while on my way to their PCB factory. Row upon row of empty buildings for acres. I was told by my accompanying Chinese director, they would probably never be occupied. Much of what I talk about is about keeping Labor busy. The government was afraid they would riot.
2020: “China’s CO2 emissions are already more than double those of the United States (with GDP just 63% as large) and are currently growing by 4-5% per year.3 America’s cumulative and per capita emissions still exceed those of China. But after three decades of breakneck growth China is catching up fast. Its annual emissions now account for 30 percent of the global total against 15% for the US, 10% for the EU, and 7%for India, the next biggest emitters.”
Richard Smith – Real World Economics: Climate arsonist Xi Jinping: a carbon-neutral China with a 6% growth rate?
2015: The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he could not believe his eyes. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their factory compound without a word. In March 2008 Li and other farmers in Gaolong, a village in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, told a Washington Post reporter that workers from the nearby Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co. had been dumping this industrial waste in fields around their village every day for nine months. The liquid, silicon tetrachloride, was the byproduct of polysilicon production and it is a highly toxic substance. When exposed to humid air, silicone tetrachloride turns into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people dizzy and cause breathing difficulties.
Richard Smith – Real World Economics:China’s communist-capitalist ecological apocalypse
The US isn’t trying to stop Chinese development. If nothing else, it is trying to force China to develop its internal market rather than trying to dominate external markets.
[ “Develop your internal market, China, or else…”
The Chinese of course know better, and have been compensating internally and externally. ]
So, the alarmists were right, and we were right to pay attention to them. Food security was an important issue. Environmental degradation was a real problem. Agricultural productivity needed to improve. You can go down the list of scares and warnings, and it turns out they were largely valid, that there was a need to devote resources against them and that the outcome of that response has been largely positive. Some crazy lunatics deserve a pat on the back.
Kalesberg:
You are mostly right or I can’t find a point I would seriously disagree with today. What is being discovered is we do need more immigrants. As the country is not replacing itself at ~1.6 replacement rate via births.
It is what we consider being adequate. If we believe Dean Baker, there are enough components of economic activity to support the nations needs.
– Twenty twenty-one is the first year since 1937 the U.S. population grew by fewer than one million people. The lowest numeric growth since at least 1900 (Census Bureau began annual population estimates).
It is said that most, if not all of us could live in a single Texas-sized city.
all of us could easily fit in a Texas-sized city that is as dense as New York City.
well, put me on the list that thinks there are too many of this. i have believed this since long before it was fashionable. maybe the comparison of living in Chicago vs living in upper peninsula Michigan in 1950.
as far as i know the only reason we need more people is to make more money for the rich and to supply more troops for the army.
environmental degradation is a real thing, global warming or no. but global warming is real… a consequence of too many people burning too much fossil fuel.
typo watch
too many of us, not too many of this.
It would seem, as far as we are concerned, that more young people are needed to pay the retirement benefits of our old people.
Dobbs
you are just baiting me. i have said enough about “more young people…paying for the old” that even you should know it is a lie. or at least..a gross misunderstanding of how workers pay for themselves and can always pay for themselves.
in any case “the young” have always “paid” for the old…or at least “paid back the old for all the old did for them,” or paid in advance for their own retirement…by the common understandig of “paid for” that applies to any saving or investment plan.
i’ve read your comments long enough to know that you are not deliberately trying to deceive people, but your understanding of anything is severely compromised by your inability to consider more than one “fact” at a time leaving you nothing useful to say but make wise cracks while the guy who actually understands, say, how a car works, is fixing your car while you are wondering if it wouldn’t be cheaper to just pour mouse milk into the carburetor.
The continued existence of human kind seems to depend on continued growth. It seems that Thomas Malthus asserted long ago that this was not going to work out well for us. If that is the case, then someone has to figure out a better alternative.
Dobbs
on what basis do you believe that our existence depends on continued growth?
That may be a good question. Or not.
The continuance of society seems to require monetary inflation.
Inflation seems to stem from economic growth.
Perhaps you can see a way around this?
What is economic growth? And why is it so important?
The goods and services that we all need are not just there – they need to be produced – and growth means that their quality and quantity increases. …
utobbs
thanks for your answer. i don’t think you are right, but I don’t have any immediate answer that I would be sure of. As a place to start.. I think the Indians lived in the Americas for ten thousand years without anything we would call growth. I think the same is more or less true in the old world for the thirty thousand years between the appearance of Cro-Magnon and the invention of agriculture. I am not sure of either the “facts” or the reasoning from the facts to my belief, but maybe something to think about.
your assumptions are at least questionable:
“the goods …we all need…”: why do we “need” them?
does inflation stem from economic growth? [a bit of inflaition seems to encourage economic (money) growth, but that does not obviously lead to growth causes inflation. or that inflation is necessaryfor the continuance of society. can you reform these statements so they make at least a this-therefore-that argument with a little more in the “therefore.”
What is economic growth? And why is it so important?
The goods and services that we all need are not just there – they need to be produced – and growth means that their quality and quantity increases. …
“What is economic growth? & why so important?’
Thjat’s a link, which tries to answer the question. I don’t have one.
“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”
So argues Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, the new magnum opus from UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong. It’s a bold claim. Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; the “long twentieth century” represents 0.05 percent of that history.
But to DeLong, who beyond his academic work is known for his widely read blog on economics, something incredible happened in that sliver of time that eluded our species for the other 99.95 percent of our history. Whereas before 1870, technological progress proceeded slowly, if at all, after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. And especially for residents of rich countries, this technological progress brought a world of unprecedented plenty. …
Humanity was stagnant for millennia — then something big changed
Why the years from 1870 to 2010 were humanity’s most important.
The rapid explosion in technology of all kinds correlates with the rapid explosion of human population. The medical advances that began with basic sanitation and the simplest forms of avoiding germs along with the knowledge that vaccines could prevent disease meant that the population could grow, and children live to adulthood in increasing numbers. More humans, more human brains thinking about how to do things better. If only one in a thousand or million could be the innovative genius, there were more thousands and millions of candidates for the job. It is almost simple math.
typo baiting not bainting
Jane:
For all I know, we may be a tiny bit of bacteria in the blood stream of far larger being. Until we become a nuisance to the health of the being we exist util the appropriate medication is applied to erase our existence (old science fiction story on over – population).
and like all simple things mostly wrong.
here is a simple analogy or word picture: we don’t think of the wheel as stunning progress because we have always had wheels in our own lifetime.
actually, there are far better examples that wheels. but “technology” is not always “progress.” for one thing all the genius economists have utterly failed to make our lives any better.
Human population has always tended to expand exponentially over time.
Technology development ‘growth’ is marvelous & fortuitous but has little if anything to do with expanding population, rather it has to do with our inate intelligence & ability to communicate with one another & learn. While we re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Technology and the Triumph of Pessimism
NY Times – Paul Krugman – June 28, 2022
One of the best-selling novels of the 19th century was a work of what we’d now call speculative fiction: Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward: 2000-1887.” Bellamy was one of the first prominent figures to recognize that rapid technological progress had become an enduring feature of modern life — and he imagined that this progress would vastly improve human happiness. …
My reference to Edward Bellamy comes from a forthcoming book, “Slouching Towards Utopia,” by Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The book is a magisterial history of what DeLong calls the “long 20th century,” running from 1870 to 2010, an era that he says — surely correctly — was shaped overwhelmingly by the economic consequences of technological progress.
Why start in 1870? As DeLong points out, and many of us already knew, for the great bulk of human history — roughly 97 percent of the time that has elapsed since the first cities emerged in ancient Mesopotamia — Malthus was right: There were many technological innovations over the course of the millenniums, but the benefits of these innovations were always swallowed up by population growth, driving living standards for most people back down to the edge of subsistence.
There were occasional bouts of economic progress that temporarily outpaced what DeLong calls “Malthus’s devil” — indeed, modern scholarship suggests there was a significant rise in per-capita income during the early Roman Empire. But these episodes were always temporary. And as late as the 1860s, many smart observers believed the progress that had taken place under the Industrial Revolution would prove equally transitory.
Around 1870, however, the world entered an era of sustained rapid technological development that was unlike anything that had happened before; each successive generation found itself living in a new world, utterly transformed from the world into which its parents had been born.
As DeLong argues, there are two great puzzles about this transformation — puzzles that are highly relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves. …
The first is why this happened. DeLong argues that there were three great “meta-innovations” (my term, not his) — innovations that enabled innovation itself. These were the rise of large corporations, the invention of the industrial research lab and globalization. We could, I think, argue the details here. More important, however, is the suggestion — from DeLong and others — that the engines of rapid technological progress may be slowing down.
The second is why all this technological progress hasn’t made society better than it has. One thing I hadn’t fully realized until reading “Slouching Towards Utopia” is the extent to which progress hasn’t brought felicity. Over the 140 years DeLong surveys, there have been only two eras during which the Western world felt generally optimistic about the way things were going. (The rest of the world is a whole other story.)
The first such era was the 40 or so years leading up to 1914, when people began to realize just how much progress was being made and started to take it for granted. Unfortunately, that era of optimism died in fire, blood and tyranny, with technology enhancing rather than mitigating the horror (coincidentally, today is the 108th anniversary of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination).
The second era was the “30 glorious years,” the decades after World War II when social democracy — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed off by labor unions and a strong social safety net — seemed to be producing not Utopia, but the most decent societies humanity had ever known. But that era, too, came to an end, partly in the face of economic setbacks, but even more so in the face of ever more bitter politics, including the rise of right-wing extremism that is now putting democracy itself at risk.
It would be silly to say that the incredible progress of technology since 1870 has done nothing to improve things; in many ways the median American today has a far better life than the richest oligarchs of the Gilded Age. But the progress that brought us on-demand streaming music hasn’t made us satisfied or optimistic. DeLong offers some explanations for this disconnect, which I find interesting but not wholly persuasive. But his book definitely asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way. …
(The paperback version of DeLong’s book comes out in November.)