
The Population Bomb? - yugoja
http://www.retroreport.org/video/the-population-bomb/
======
clumsysmurf
One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors.
When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without
access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed.

Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such
crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal.

I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected
from nature, they forget or never understood how much they depend on it - not
just from nutrition & ecological services standpoint, but psychologically and
spiritually as well.

~~~
tgflynn
I think I agree with you. The world seems overcrowded to me. I've never been
much of an out of doors person but sometimes I'd just like to get away from it
all. That seems difficult these days. Anywhere you go in the US it seems like
the land is either privately owned or government owned with tons of
regulations that nobody really wants to deal with. Those regulations are
probably at least somewhat needed because without them the sheer number of
people visiting government lands would probably do great damage. Anything
above about 1 billion people on this planet seems probably suboptimal to me.

~~~
dagw
Not overcrowded, just spread out too thin. The reason the US looks like it
looks is that everybody wants an acre of land around their house, so they chop
down forests and build suburbs instead. If people gave up on that notion and
where willing to live in cities then there would be an abundance of unspoiled
nature.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Every place is pretty much owned in America. Land is valuable. And there is
admittedly little or no unspoiled land left.

But don't blame houses. People in America still live on a tiny fraction of the
land. Its all about farming and grazing and mining.

~~~
mplscoder
The Feds own most of the land.

See chart "Federal Land as a Percentage of Total State Land Area"

[http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-
facts-...](http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-of-
federal-government.html)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sure, and they rent it out for grazing, mining. Still nothing like
'unspoiled'.

~~~
tgflynn
Personally I don't necessarily care much about "unspoiled". I just wish there
was a place I could legally go without paying tribute to the world machine and
be free from outside interference with my mere existence.

EDIT: In fact living in a world where such a simple act is not possible isn't
a bad definition of hell in my opinion.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Well, there's all that federal land, right?

Personally I just walk out my door - I have 80 acres of rolling hills, trees,
occasional waterways, deer, pheasant and miscellaneous critters. Bought by
selling my quarter-acre in San Jose and relocating.

------
eleitl
The whole essence of overshoot and die-off is due to running into limits in a
finite world.

Any sophisms detracting from that basic facts are criminally insane, or just
criminal.

------
mangeletti
Is this article meant to be sarcastic? The world population has quite
literally doubled since 1968 when there were 3.5B people worldwide. Yes, the
population has doubled since most of your parents were born.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Which implies an interesting statistic: the majority of people who ever lived,
are still alive.

~~~
dagw
Doesn't work like that:
[http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's interesting. An optimistic guesstimate assuming uniform growth from
50KBC. But humans have been boom and bust since then, with things like ice
ages putting a monkey wrench in the works. I'm thinking it could have busted
to 10M repeatedly through history.

------
transfire
Idiotic article. It ignores the real decremental effects of overpopulation
that are taking place presently. Moreover, 50 years is not that long. Consider
how things will look in another 200 at any appreciable positive growth rate.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk)

------
noselasd
There's a nicely illustrative video by Hans Rosling here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg)
on the population growth.

~~~
userulluipeste
There are a lot of unproven assumptions there, such as that the education is a
decreasing factor of population growth. That is only a correlation. I don't
claim to know _exactly_ how things are revolving in this matter, but as an
educated guess I can say that, outside the necessary physical conditions (like
enough nourishment and such), the culture of family is the most influential
here. The education and the opportunities it opened for a better life just
happened to be seductive enough to attract the individuals out of that family
culture, but I wouldn't take this effect for granted.

~~~
noselasd
You can look at the the other videos of Hans Rosling which might answer that.
Whether it's a correlation and not a cause might still be up for debate, but
the observation of that effect have been observed in virtually all places
around the world.

------
wmil
India seems like a very poor example.

Instead look at Chad. It's had exponential population growth for decades
without slowing. It's mostly young people. It's already flooding Italy with
refugees.

I'm not convinced that "The Population Bomb" was wrong.

------
graeham
Forecasting is a art - I think the Population Bomb (and other predictions made
~ that era - Hubbard Peak Oil? Ozone holes? Space Travel? Robots?) are subject
to the initial conditions of the prediction.

Why were mothers in India having so many children compared to to those in
Europe and North America? The model assumed static conditions that would
continue the trend. Economics (cost of raising children, no need for extra
farm help) and social factors (women's education and access to birth control)
changed trends.

Population growth does continue to be a problem and concern for the future -
both from over-use of resources and pollution of the environment.

But I think this does show an important point of not putting too much
weighting into future predictions. The process of planning is very important,
but the plans themselves are useless.

People worry about running out of oil. While not an excuse to be wasteful, I
think its likely we will move to alternative energies before supply becomes
overly constrained. Mega-batteries (reported today in Japan and proposed by
Tesla) could be a key to make other energies feasible, and would not have been
predicted even a few years ago. The future is exciting times!

------
sohkamyung
For more statistics and a historical look at world population growth
(including references), see the "World Population Growth" charts at
OurWorldInData [ [http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-
stati...](http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-
statistics/world-population-growth/) ]

------
facepalm
Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium.

If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation?
When we produce lots of young people now, and those become old, we need even
more young people, and so on? So population growth is the only way forward?

Not even mentioning that today fewer people are needed to take care of other
people than in former times. For example one farmer can produce food for many,
many more people than one hundred years ago.

It's obvious that population can not grow indefinitely. Just think of the
surface of the earth. There is a limited number of square meters. Eventually
you would have so many people that there would be one person per square meter.

Maybe we could even live like that. We could live in skyscrapers, or even in
little boxes Matrix style and spend our days in spacious virtual reality.

But the question is: do we want to live like that? We have to also think how
we want to live, and how that can be made possible.

In the same vein, I guess the world obviously can not be overpopulated. If if
were overpopulated, people would start dying until it would not be
overpopulated anymore. That's presumably what is already happening in some
regions of the world anyway, and has always happened. In "Collapse" Jared
Diamonds describes a tribe living on a small isolated island. When they get
overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to
die on the sea alone. It's not a new problem.

But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people
be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first
place.

~~~
shoo
re: the anecdote that was shared from Diamond's "Collapse"

> When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and
> paddle away, to die on the sea alone.

This was an example of a society which had developed bottom-up knowledge and
management of population levels. As well as cases of "virtual suicide", as
described, there were also traditions dictating which siblings were allowed to
have children, and which were not. From memory, they also developed
appropriate agricultural practices to not damage their limited available
productive land.

In my opinion, this society developed a successful reaction to the limits of
their environment, although some aspects of it might seem very confronting or
perhaps even unethical to us in other societies.

On a personal note, in a strange way I found it was peaceful to read
"Collapse", to learn that there have been many civilisations that have
collapsed in the past -- civilisations that were in some sense more successful
(by lasting for a longer period) than the civilisation I am part of.

Similarly there is a sense of peace in learning more about the non-human parts
of natural history. It's not all about us.

------
Shivetya
The population bomb went the same way as every other doom and gloom scenario -
no where, people just ignored it till the zealots finally shut up.

too many people? too little food? do people even realize how much land in this
world isn't being used for people or food? most issues with food and
population are caused by politics and usually bad politics. population numbers
didn't cause the issues, greedy and power hungry people who went unchecked do.

~~~
pjc50
Reposting comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205)
because it's still relevant:

This is a bit like saying that the people causing panic over Y2K were
unwarranted because everyone checked their systems and sorted it out in
advance. If nobody had panicked about it, then nothing would have been done.

There has been a major, coordinated effort to give women family planning
information and technology worldwide, along with economic and social change.
Efforts against overpopulation have been a common theme of development
planning.

------
shoo
I think it is unhelpful to look at something like population in isolation from
other deeply related issues, such as affluence, pollution per affluence,
technology, unsustainable consumption of resources / production of pollution,
changes in efficiency. For example, one simple way of modelling things is the
`I=PAT` equation (see also the critique under "Reception") [0].

I'll quote from VHEMT [1]:

    
    
      > For example, in terms of energy consumption,
      > when a North American couple stops at two it’s
      > about the same as an average East Indian couple
      > stopping at 30, or a Bangaledesh couple stopping
      > at 97.
    

Maybe energy consumption is a bit abstract - it is not immediately obvious
what, if anything, is wrong with that. Instead we could consider per-capita
CO2 pollution, taking the 2005 statistics from Wikipedia [2]:

    
    
      United States: 19.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year)
      Bangladesh: 0.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year)
    

From these numbers, a 1 additional US person has the same immediate short-term
impact in terms of CO2 pollution as about 64 additional Bangladeshi people
[2].

CO2 pollution produced by humans is primarily the cause of recent global
warming. If the current trend in greenhouse gas pollution continues to track
the high end of (conservative) IPCC baseline models [3] then it will not be
surprising if we end up with a world that is +3.5C -- +4C -- or more higher
than baseline, by the year 2100 (from memory, we're already at about +0.6C
this year). It really doesn't look like we will limit the temperate increase
to the "agreed 'safe'" +2C in the real world, outside of modelling
scenarios[4].

It doesn't appear that the world has experienced a temperature of +4C for
quite a long time (either hundreds of thousands or millions of years,
depending on which graphs you look at)[5][6]. The last time it was that warm
certainly pre-dates human agriculture (~12000 years ago) [7], and perhaps the
human species (100s of thousands of years ago)[8]. I.e., we are rapidly
pushing the climate toward a state where humans and human civilisation have
never previously existed. The result will likely be unpleasant, in the sense
that many people will suffer and die, due to heat stress, natural disasters,
reduced crop yields, disease, and conflict caused by displaced people /
resource shortages [9][10].

I have focused here on climate change in isolation, but that is just the first
hurdle. Other serious concerns are human impacts upon biodiversity and the
nitrogen cycle - and those are just the impacts that we're able to measure
[11]. There's reasonable evidence that the world is currently experiencing a
period of mass extinction [12].

So -- bringing it back to population. From the perspective of everyone else
alive right now, assuming they are well informed and rational, should they
think it is a good idea for me to have a child, particularly if I live in an
affluent, polluting society[13]? I doubt it very much.

Of course, it isn't all grim. There is still time for us all to get better at
being altruistic, thinking clearly, predicting the future, cooperating,
changing our minds about what might be important, and modifying our
environment (for better or worse). But, at best, it is obviously a race
between positive and negative trends. There is not much time left. But, from
historical evidence, so far the metrics of biodiversity and CO2 pollution are
very much going in an undesirable direction, with no sign yet of change.

edit: I'll finish by quoting David MacKay out of context. He is talking about
the UK's sustainable energy debate [14]:

    
    
      > We need to choose a plan that adds up. It is possible
      > to make a plan that adds up, but it’s not going to be
      > easy.
      >
      > We need to stop saying no and start saying yes. We need
      > to stop the Punch and Judy show and get building.
    

I pretty much agree with this sentiment in the realm of sustainable energy,
and I'd also agree with the sentiment if it were extended much more broadly,
beyond MacKay's intended context, to questions of population, affluence,
equality, poverty, intergenerational fairness, and how economies should be
run.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception)
[1] [http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm](http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm)
[2] we're glossing over the fact that some of these additional people might
choose to have children, or that annual per-capita CO2 pollution could change.
[3] For 2014 data, see figure 3 (a) of
[https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outl...](https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outlines/2014-15/GEOG4411/Friedlingstein%20et%20al.pdf)
[4] [http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-
warm...](http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-warming-
possible/) [5]
[http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page...](http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php)
[6]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg)
[7]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture)
[8]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human)
[9]
[http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-...](http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-
change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century) [10]
[http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/](http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/) [11]
See figure 6 of:
[http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...](http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=iss_pub&sei-
redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com.au%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Decosystem%2Bsafe%2Bboundaries%26btnG%3D%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%252C5#search=%22ecosystem%20safe%20boundaries%22)
[12]
[http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publicatio...](http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publication/50267709_Has_the_Earth%27s_sixth_mass_extinction_already_arrived/links/00b7d5183edf5b6c76000000.pdf)
[13] assuming they don't have some kind of interest in driving down the cost
of labour in the short term, to reduce the labour cost of producing this
season's model of useless widget. [14]
[http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml](http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml)

~~~
im3w1l

      > For example, in terms of energy consumption,
      > when a North American couple stops at two it’s
      > about the same as an average East Indian couple
      > stopping at 30, or a Bangaledesh couple stopping
      > at 97.
    

The Americans in this example behave like O(1) and the Bangladeshi as
O(48.5^n). No matter the constants the Bangladeshis' resource consumption will
eventually outstrip the Americans'.

~~~
shoo
I can see what you are saying, but I think we can both agree that the literal
interpretation of families with 97 children isn't particularly realistic.

A similar objection goes for asymptotic time horizons: we don't have infinite
time to work with, this is reality, we have a handful of critical decades.
Climate models are typically run to year 2100, where of course the world
hasn't ended, but it's probably a +3.5C ... +4C ... scenario, so options are
dramatically restricted, and continuing to diminish, for the surviving people.

Another way to think about the population would be to simply consider how we
might expect the US and Bangladesh populations to change over a reasonable
time horizon, to figure out how many person-years of consumption (and
pollution) we get for each individual and half of their descendants.

Here are some parameters and assumptions for a rather simple model:

    
    
      Parameters:
                            Bangladesh      United States
      ----------------------------------------------------------------
      Fertility rate, births per woman    2.2 (y2013)     1.9 (y2013)
      life expectancy at birth, female    71 (y2013)      81 (y2013)
      life expectancy at birth, male      70 (y2013)      77 (y2013)
      life expectancy mf geom average     70.5            79
      average age of first child birth    18 (y2011)      25.4 (y2010)
    
    

This data in itself is pretty interesting! The fertility rate for both
countries is similar (although on different sides of the 2.0 fence), but the
"average age of first child birth" is very different!

    
    
      Simplifying assumptions:
    
        assume everyone in each country behaves the same:
    
        everyone lives until their birth life expectancy
        everyone has same number of kids
        uniform life expectancy
        divide birth rate by 0.5, everyone gives birth
        everyone has children at the same age
    
        all these parameters are stationary wrt time
    
    

These are pretty severe assumptions, obviously, but let's see where they take
us.

Using these parameters, over a time horizon of 100 years, starting with a
0-year old US person, and a 0-year old Bangladeshi person, we obtain [0]:

    
    
      Bangladesh: 343.8 person-years of consumption
      United States: 214.7 person-years of consumption
    

If we multiply this by the country specific per-capita per-year rates of CO2
pollution, we get

    
    
      Bangladesh: 343.8 * 0.3 = 103.14 tons of CO2 pollution
      United States: 214.7 * 19.3 = 4143.7 tons of CO2 pollution
    

The US person (and their descendants), have contributed ~40x the CO2 pollution
as the Bangladeshi person (and their descendants) over this time horizon!

We can compare this to a US person who has no children over the same time
horizon:

    
    
      United States, no children: 79 * 19.3 = 1524 tons of CO2 pollution
    
    

If we extend the time horizon to look at a ridiculous 900 year period, then we
get the following:

    
    
      Bangladesh: 71650.5 * 0.3 = 21495.2 tons of CO2 pollution
      United States: 1308.8 * 19.3 = 25259.84 tons of CO2 pollution
    

The single United States person (and their finite number of descendants) have
still produced more CO2 pollution than the single Bangladeshi person (and
their large and growing number of descendants)!

### What, if anything, can we conclude?

Over a time horizon of 100 years, a cartoon typical US person (and their
descendants) will be responsible for about 40x the CO2 emissions as a cartoon
typical Bangladeshi person (and their descendants).

A cartoon typical US person can reduce the CO2 emissions they are responsible
for by around 60% if they make a decision to have no children, over a 100
years time horizon.

Over a 900 year time horizon, ridiculously assuming parameters to not vary
over time, a cartoon typical US person will still be responsible for more CO2
emissions than a cartoon typical Bangladeshi person.

[0] via a hastily written python script:
[https://gist.github.com/fcostin/2225b2a51ad8859b5d1b](https://gist.github.com/fcostin/2225b2a51ad8859b5d1b)

------
dang
Url changed from [http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-
defused](http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused), which points to
this. HN prefers original sources.

