
The Real Population Problem (2013) - nkurz
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/
======
whiteboarder
If one believes in a Malthusian apocalypse then one must explain why THIS time
things are different.

People have been talking about a supposed Population Bomb for literally
hundreds of years. And each time, they have been wrong.

Obviously, there exists some theoretical carrying capacity maximum on planet
Earth, but perhaps that maximum is closer to 1 trillion people than 7 billion.
That would be plenty of time for humans to figure that space travel thing out.
Especially since it is predicted that pop size will peak within the next 40
years.

~~~
merpnderp
If all the world population lived in a area as densely populated as Tokyo,
they could all live inside Texas.

And given we have great fission engineering, improving solar and wind power
generation, and most of the world could easily improve land productivity, we
aren't even close to a population cap.

~~~
petra
If we're taking into account growing food using bio-industry in
bioreactors,etc - we might even be able to do so at 10x-100x larger densities.

~~~
nosuchthing
Speaking purely utilitarian that may be true.

In practice though it's not that easy. Good luck convincing people on how
wasteful and pollutant beef production is, or solving the issue of affordable
housing for the masses near city centers.

I'd be interested in seeing a city-state attempt to design a modern planned-
city architecture incorporating local food production. Maybe even something
akin to Paolo Soleri's 'Archology' ;
[https://www.google.com/search?q=paolo+soleri&biw=1303&bih=78...](https://www.google.com/search?q=paolo+soleri&biw=1303&bih=785&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&#tbs=ic:gray&tbm=isch&q=paolo+soleri+arcology)

~~~
petra
>> Good luck convincing people

In a world with a real pressing population problem, coupled with good
alternatives(meatless meat that's good as the real thing, healthier ,cheaper,
marketed well) it seems doable.

>> local food production.

In the grand scale of things, i'm not sure that's a huge problem. food miles
are just 10% of food emissions, and we have some other ways to get rid of
that(clean transport, greenhouses spread around cities) that seem more
practical.

But if you're interested, there's some interesting research on large-scale
vertical agriculture[pdf]:

[http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/down...](http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/download/4526/3952)

But to build it would be expensive - 200 million euro, and as far as i can
remember , it wasn't price competitive.

------
biomcgary
The paper has a strong anti-immigration implication for the US, if you think
energy use is inherently dangerous (since it historically correlates with CO2
production). According to the paper, the US has the largest energy consumption
per unit of population growth. Thus, to save the world, we must limit US
population increases more than increases in other countries. US government
policy to reduce population growth can target reproduction and/or immigration.
Of the two, which do you think will have more support in the current climate
(pun intended)?

Personally, I think making energy less environmentally costly is a better
route than worrying about population size.

~~~
WildUtah
All US population groups other than post-1965 immigrants have below
replacement fertility. If you really care about energy use, stopping mass
immigration is the only choice -- reducing population growth among core
Americans is moot.

And the East Asian and European immigration could continue -- those national
origin immigrants assimilate to American birthrates or lower immediately. It's
the Central Americans, Caribbeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans that are
driving all long term population growth.

And now I see why the opening paragraphs warn about political incorrectness.
Comment readers, please just ignore that aspect.

~~~
kbutler
> All US population groups other than post-1965 immigrants have below
> replacement fertility.

U.S. Mormons have greater-than-replacement fertility rates, making Utah top
the nation's fertility rates. (Posting as WildUtah, you should know this!)

~~~
WildUtah
I wasn't thinking of religious groups, but yes. The Mos (and the Amish) are
keeping it up.

------
carapace
We convert fuel into people. As the author states, "It’s so blindingly obvious
that I am embarrassed to have belabored the point as long as I have."

To slow population growth anyway educate young women and provide them seed
capital.

A new person in the U.S. uses far more resources than a new person born in
China or India, so the U.S. population growth has a far greater effect than
they do despite their greater growth rate. (A good reason not to have children
if you live in the U.S., as the author has chosen not to do.)

In the final section titled "Oil-Clouded Crystal Ball" the author ignores
fusion. The word "fusion" appears nowhere in the article.

\-------

EDIT:

What's with the fusion hate y'all?

First: Dr. Bussard on fusion: $200M and done:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8)

And THE SUN: A fusion reactor that will burn out your eyes from 150 Giga-
meters away.

We're going to have plenty of ergs for the foreseeable future. Heat pollution
will be an issue before the deuterium runs out.

I don't like to be vulgar in public but hating on fusion power is just stupid.

~~~
AngrySkillzz
> the author ignores fusion

As he should. Fusion is still at least twenty years away, the same as it has
been for decades. We need to work on solving these problems now and not depend
on the possibility of magical future technology to clean up our messes for us.

------
Moshe_Silnorin
I think population control is worth discussing, but I do not see its
implementation as ever being very feasible. I also don't think the demographic
transition will last long. People are as affected by selection effects as any
other animal. Those who choose not to have children will be out-breed by those
with a more deliberate need for children. To the extent that this deliberate
desire is heritable, (either genetically or mimetically or both) it will
eventually reach fixation. As a side note, the way modern people riducle
Malthus (both libertarian and liberals alike) is very arrogant. Of course
there are temporary boons, even very large ones. His point was gains will
eventually be eaten. In the absence of outside intervention by an agent with
more power than any individual, there are very general reasons to believe he
will be correct in the long run.

However, I'm one of those nutters who thinks a technological singularity is
reasonably plausible. So I think an AI speciation event (a sort of Cambrian
explosion of non-biological intelligent agents, a key point here is selection
operates just as much on non-biological agents and much faster) is more
concerning than a population bomb.

~~~
brlewis
I used to subscribe to the same theory, that having lots of children would
breed itself into the dominant behavior. But that theory has not borne out in
many developed countries. You actually need incentives to get educated people
to have more children; it's a lot of work. If the theory were correct, this
wouldn't be a thing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-
replacement_fertility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-
replacement_fertility)

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
I agree that the demographic transition has occurred; I do not think it will
last.

~~~
brlewis
What mechanism do you think will cause it not to last? Why would the same
mechanism allow it to occur in the first place? The U.S. had a lot of large
families generations ago. This behavior not been generally inherited. What
makes you think the future will be different from what we've observed so far?

~~~
WildUtah
We had two massively destructive events that devastated the human population
in the twentieth century.

The first was the development of reliable birth control and the second was
widespread learning about fertility cycles. For the first time, people could
be in control of their fertility without celibacy. Our genes programmed us to
be mostly unable to be celibate but the allowed us to continue wishing that we
could have fewer children so that we could care for them better and not see so
many of them crowded in misery and starving. Once reliably vulcanized and
molded rubber was practical around 1910, our wish for fewer children could be
realized and evolution is slowly breeding out the desire to have a reasonable
number of children and stop. The pill and rhythm just intensified the effect.

You mostly see evolution in the form of population replacement. Educated and
modern Iranians and Egyptians, along with other Middle East and Sahel
populations filled up cities and created an Islamic rebirth of learned
culture, education, and prosperity in the early and mid 1900s. The people who
stayed behind in rural areas continued having eight babies each while the
urbanites averaged one. It's amazing to see the photos of free educated modern
young men and especially women on the streets of Cairo or Teheran in the
1950s. Those people planned to educate the next generation into modernity but
the next generation weren't their children; they were the children of the
villages they left behind. Now we have a fertile and intensely fundamentalist,
rural, and violent predominant culture in those nations and the renascence
exists only in exile populations in the West.

European descended populations that plan ahead to have fewer babies are being
replaced by more fertile populations from elsewhere across Europe and by
native populations in Latin America. Within the USA, you can watch Mormons and
fertile evangelicals expand their share of the white population every
generation.

The demographic transition is a temporary thing. Evolution absolutely demands
it. Creationism or Lamarckism is not going to just start being true because it
would be convenient to our demographic comfort.

~~~
astazangasta
This demographic picture of the wild rural savages out breeding the cultured
urbanites is one possible explanation of why we have fundamentalism now, but I
don't find this very compelling. Secular Arabs and Persians were not outbred,
they were deposed and shot. The same kids who a generation ago would have been
good Marxist PLO members are screaming "Takbir!" and wearing Hamas armbands. I
watched this happen in the US around 2003. Culture moves much faster than
selection.

~~~
WildUtah
"Marxist PLO members are screaming "Takbir!" and wearing Hamas armbands. I
watched this happen in the US around 2003."

You watched US PLO Marxists join Hamas in 2003?

~~~
astazangasta
I used to hang around with lots of Palestinians at various demos. Around that
time (leading up to when Hamas was elected) it became more common to see kids
with Hamas armbands, to have kids do Takbir call-and-response, have guys show
up with prayer mats. It was a very sudden transition and the reason is
obvious: there was a shift in who represented a credible opposition/resistance
to American hegemony. Prior to that it was the PLO, still riding the wave of
their Soviet-era influence. Now the radicals who were winning victories were
Islamists.

This is probably all as boring as just being about who has money (Communists
then, conservative Saudis now), and thus, ultimately about oil. But I don't
think it has much to do with population-level selection.

------
Qwertious
We already know what we need to do to curb population growth, it's just
counterintuitive - [http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-
growth...](http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/) .
Essentially, people have lots of kids because they're expecting one or two to
die. If you reduce child mortality, then they can stick with one or two kids
without significant risk of ending up childless.

And then in developed countries, we just need to massively improve energy
efficiency. Like, instead of leaving all the lights on all night in offices
"for security reasons", we put some disincentives on it and get people to put
the extra money from the energy bill into some goddamn insurance.

------
Falkon1313
Immigration doesn't change the population, it just shuffles it around. The
only ways to increase it are to increase births or decrease deaths. The
article isn't convincing that the U-shaped graphs are predominantly from
increased birth rates.

What is usually described is the pattern is birth rates decline as life
expectancy rises, but the lifespan itself hasn't changed. Because so much of
the life expectancy increase has occurred within the last couple of lifespans,
and it hasn't globally reached the lifespan limit, we haven't seen population
level off yet.

But even when we do extend the lifespan, there will still be a death rate. And
if the trend continues, the longer it gets the fewer births there will be. As
we approach practical immortality, the dangers of catastrophes will be
greater. That's the long-term population problem - when we only have one birth
per year, and some disaster wipes out a million people.

------
reasonattlm
People are just willfully blind when it comes to population.

Thus you can have all this number crunching alongside a complete failure to
talk about the role of medicine, the role of technological progress as a
whole. This is a blindness to the essential nature of our time, which is
rampant, accelerating progress towards the generation of more resources as
they are needed.

You can't just throw up a thesis that population scales by energy (since, hey,
population growth has a much better correlation with medicine and computing
power and bandwidth) and then put a question mark on the chart of what happens
after oil. We have perfectly good substitutes for oil now, and they are being
made ever cheaper and more effective by vast numbers of people in response to
past years of high oil prices. Which are on the way out for now because other
groups of people have been uncovering vast new exploitable reserves of oil,
and much cheaper and better ways to extract it and use it.

Meanwhile other people are working on getting to orbit, so as to provide
infinite room, and really anyone who argues that somehow we're going to
somehow run out of either energy or space any time soon just isn't thinking
clearly about how the world really works.

People respond to future expectations of price. Nothing is static. The world
will be upheaved and changed by as many people as it takes to replace a high
price resource with a low price one. That will keep on happening and
Malthusians of the death cult environmentalist variety like the author of this
piece (let's kill some people, who goes first) will keep on looking confused
as they try to explain their contrary viewpoint while ignoring the reality of
what is going on day by day around them.

These people are evergreen of course. Here's an interesting reference from a
time when there were on a couple hundred million people in the world:

[http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723](http://www.spiked-
online.com/newsite/article/7723)

"In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the
planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian
argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate
for us… already nature does not sustain us.’"

And what has changed between then and now, and what will change between today
and tomorrow? Think on that.

~~~
LangdonAlder
Great response. Panic over overpopulation is a tired canard that has become
particularly dangerous in recent years as declining rich-world birth rates
wreak havoc on societies that lack young workers to support aging populations.
Japan's thirty year economic stagnation should serve as a warning to any
society that seeks to actively discourage fertility.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Re: Japan - Economist Dean Baker makes the case that Japan's population
decline is not all bad:

"The decline in population is in fact a benefit in many respects for Japan. It
is a very crowded island with expensive land prices. A falling population will
reduce the pressure on land making housing more affordable. It will also
reduce congestion in cities. In addition, the decline in population will make
it easier for Japan to meet commitments for reducing greenhouse gas
emissions..."

[http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/contrary-to-the-
nyt...](http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/contrary-to-the-nyts-
assertion-japan-does-not-qface-a-looming-demographic-squeezeq)

~~~
kazinator
> _It is a very crowded island with expensive land prices._

But that is only a popular image of Japan. Areas clustered close to the
central districts of large cities _are_ crowded with expensive land prices.
But even in the suburban outskirts of the Tokyo metropolitan area (pop. 37
million), there is plenty of space. Farm land, forests, empty tracts of land,
golf courses, ... you name it. Most residential dwellings are fully detached
single family homes.

We have Google Street View; anyone can check this easily.

E.g. Noda City, area close to the Edo river, not far from Umesato train
station:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@35.9133252,139.8796061,3a,75y,2...](https://www.google.com/maps/@35.9133252,139.8796061,3a,75y,26.22h,77.56t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sfbg-4wn5bFksUqzMlaRdeQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Dfbg-4wn5bFksUqzMlaRdeQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D296.9118%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

~~~
WildUtah
Japan does very well in managing the land it has. The country is especially
good at medium density urban development (about 150 per hectare).

But the quality of life and access to wild land, open space, wilderness,
forest, woodlands, park space, farm land, ski slopes, bike trails, and beaches
will improve with less population. The pressured fish stocks will be able to
recover and free range beef won't be so expensive. Living space will be much
cheaper and wages will be higher.

Maximizing population is not the goal of a community. Offering the best chance
at a good life is. And as long as we are rational animals and not economic
production robots, that is dependent on more land available per person.

Japan will be much better off in 2100 with 60-80 MM people than it is today
with 127MM in the same land area. Here's hoping that the mass immigrationists
don't get a chance to ruin it.

------
acqq
In short, the points:

> who’s population growth is having the largest effect on global energy
> demand?—it’s the U.S.

> On the long view, the fossil fuel age is a blip, with a down side mirroring
> the (more fun) up side.

------
griffinkelly
This really brings up the question of the ultimate carrying capacity of the
world. Anytime you see graphs that hockeystick they eventually plateau and
stagnation is usually caused by mass famine, disease, or other catastrophic
circumstance; potentially war in the case of human beings. We haven't reached
that point in any countries yet, and when the US/Europe throws away half of
harvested food at the point of sale, I think its probably not something to
worry about in the immediate. However, particularly with China just removing
their 1 child per family policy, it looks like we may reach one of these
issues sooner than later, probably not in our lifetimes, but I don't think too
far off.

~~~
valarauca1
Human still hasn't fully modernized/mechanized farming on the India Subcontent
or Africa.

Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.

~~~
merpnderp
The Japanese get the most production per hectare of land. The rest of the
industrialized world isn't even close.

Humanity has a lot of ground to cover before we starve.

~~~
mc32
Do you have a source for that, my impression was that many of those family
farms were rather small and inefficient, but I could be wrong.

~~~
merpnderp
Looks like my data is outdated and the US has caught up.

Here's what it looked like the last time I was interested in this material:
[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&or...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?page=3&order=wbapi_data_value_2013%20wbapi_data_value%20wbapi_data_value-
last&sort=desc)

------
agentultra
The discussion at the end regarding the moral and ethical implications of
having kids is interesting. I struggled with this on an intuitive level having
not run the numbers myself. However some friends also pointed out that maybe
the world doesn't need _fewer_ people but more smart ones.

I think the choice to not have children is perfectly legitimate. There is
plenty of social pressure to procreate if you're involved in a committed
Heterosexual relationship.

But it's a difficult problem to pose ethically. If I were the author I would
have left that out. There be dragons in the ethics department.

------
memracom
The USA is overreaching and the further it overreaches, the greater the risk
of various parts of the socio-economic system breaking. The more things break,
and the more serious the problems, the faster the USA will collapse.

This is the real future of the USA if it is not able to curb and even to
reverse its per capita energy consumption.

When any system grows beyond its capacity to manage itself, then that system
tends to collapse. We see this most clearly in economic bubbles, but the same
mechanisms are at work in foreign policy, in NATO, in the EU, in China, and so
on.

There will never be a simple way to understand the problems of growth and
overreach so this means that countries which have greater capacity for self
reflection and thinking through the consequences of their actions, are the
ones most likely to dominate and to thrive in the long term.

Right now it looks like the USA will be a historical oddity by the year 2500
if not sooner

------
paulsutter
The authors data leads me to entirely the opposite conclusion. His data
perfectly support the point that we need massive new sources of clean energy
(for example, nuclear or even solar which is on an incredible downward cost
trend), to support growth.

Anyone who has spent time on planes knows that the world is mostly empty. I
recently flew from Seoul to Moscow and there was nothing but forest in
between. The first visible roads were on the descent to Moscow.

If you assume that innovation is impossible, then sure, I can see how he
conflates future energy use with CO2. But it's a failing of the piece that he
never explicitly states that assumption.

~~~
abalashov
Perhaps, but to be fair, there are fairly specific geophysical criteria for
plopping down a nontrivial human settlement, mainly relating to the water
table and agriculture. Inland, arid tundra, for example, isn't good place to
found a town, and neither is any place where you can neither grow local food
nor deliver it easily from other places. The more anthrocentric aspects, like
proximity to transportation networks and economic activity, also play a huge
role. All in all, it's not reasonable to suggest that much of the empty space
seen from a plane can be filled out with people equally well.

Indeed, a disproportionate share of energy use goes toward supporting life in
places nature did not will to be particularly habitable. Very expensive
contrivances--none altogether successful, and whose sustainability is in doubt
--exist to create water and indoor cooling in places like Las Vegas, for
example, and to pump water out of New Orleans or parts of the Netherlands.
Technology is impressive and can compensate, but neither cheaply nor without
all kinds of negative externalities.

~~~
paulsutter
Hmm, to solve those problems, would it help to have massive supplies of clean
energy?

------
sunstone
One of the problem with this analysis is that it uses population growth as a
proxy for fertility rate. Another is that it assumes that future energy will
come from the same sources as they currently rather than increasingly from
solar and wind.

------
jhallenworld
"We were full of hope and optimism, and believed we could do anything. That’s
good baby-making weather, folks."

I've seen this effect at multiple startup companies. If the company has
success, the babies start to come.

------
andrewprock
Most of the comments here are addressed in excruciating detail in other posts
on this blog. Suffice it to say, Dr. Murphy has done his homework.

------
temo4ka
The title implies that there is the other, “unreal” problem. What is it?

------
andyl
Starts as a scientific exploration on the relationship between population and
energy. Ends as self-loathing.

------
johansch
Bullshit. The real population bomb is a certain religion called islam.

------
debacle
There's little value in discussing energy and carbon footprint per person when
you're looking at the next 50 to 100 years.

Are the Africans noble savages who are so in tune with the land that they have
a smaller ecological impact? No, they desperately want better health care,
clean water, and more modern amenities. They want a bigger footprint, and we
shouldn't begrudge them that. In 100 years, it's very likely that the impact
of a US citizen will be very close to that of an African.

There is no dichotomy between population reduction and impact reduction - most
advocate both as unsustainable. This is poorly masked white guilt.

~~~
carapace
There is a distinction we can make between the standard of living and the
means that are employed to achieve it.

One example: building a modern communication grid is much less expensive today
than it was when e.g. America first built out telegraphs and then telephones
etc. Much less copper, etc.

