Have we underestimated the total number of people on Earth?
newscientist.com42 points by wahern 2 months ago
42 points by wahern 2 months ago
I doubt the population counts are that underestimated in countries where there's a state authority handing out birth certificates and ID cards.
Now how does China do it? I don't know.
India's Aadhaar has reasonable coverage as well. I'm sure neither this nor China's counts are perfect, but there's no way they're off by 53%.
If you want wildly unreliable data, Africa is the place to go. The Democratic Republic of the Congo hasn't had a census since 1984, when the population was 31 million, while current estimates are in the ballpark of 100 million.
I think it's generally considered that China is (charitably) "wrong" by OVERESTIMATING its population.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+population+numbers+wrong&t=n...
oh the old belief in the infallibility of bureacracy.
in reality it's simple: stuff gets so much byzantine that any numbers coming out of it are just hallucinations.
Not in jurisdictions where you can't do shit without the state issued ID card...
All over the place there are folks living without official documentation. Mostly recent immigrants, but also elderly folks who were distrustful of government when the ID cards were introduced, nomadic peoples like the Romani who may have reason to fear government interference, and so on... Maybe not enough to invalidate the official census numbers, but certainly enough to make them inaccurate
Given a certain place, somewhere in rural China or Congo or wherever, how sure are we it is the case that you can't do anything without the state ID? I for one have no clue. Maybe the reality on the ground is quite different than the theory.
And even if it is true. Even here in lets-say-civilised Romania, there's possibly a reasonable number of people who have emigrated but are still on the books. Because it takes effort to remove yourself, and little gain, so people don't do it. And the bureaucracy certainly does not do it by itself. They don't care in the slightest.
There are a lot of possibilities. A lot. The world isn't that simple.
We just did a census in Romania :)
And we have too much bureaucracy. This article is more about countries where they aren’t all covered by a bureaucrat. I doubt that’s China.
You mean can't do shit without a card that looks sufficiently indistinguishable from a state issued ID card.
Disclaimer: I'm from Poland, not relocated, but conscious.
"We live in times where there’s always data to back up any conclusion—you just have to pick the right ones."
Every relocated person got money for the relocation. Even if there were not a lot of people living in the areas - families gathered together to fake the count and get a lot more money. Sad, but true.
Maybe this is statistically irrelevant, but seeing Poland and dams listed - I had to write this.
If people here point out that predicted overpopulation catastrophes have not occurred, they still can occur in the future. We just haven't reached the tipping point yet.
It is obvious that the earth is unlivable if there were 1 human per square meter. So where is the tipping point?
Additionally, quality of life goes down in terms of lack of solitude, increased competition for jobs especially among academics, increased rents etc.
The world seems to be moving straight towards the opposite problem (not enough young people) before it would ever hit "overpopulation catastrophe".
It's both at the same time,
Here's Nigeria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria
that population growth, combined with somewhat sudden climate change and droughts and famines, and ensuing armed conflicts, does look like a possible upcoming catastrophe, I'd say
While in China, Korea etc yes it's the opposite
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Why don't we just start a self-count, one by one. I'll start. One.
Reminds me of https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger :
> After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order.
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Remember when Hillary went on a rant about how the total population of Earth shouldn't exceed 500,000,000?
No I don't.
Because she never said anything even close to something like that: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/feb/26/viral-imag...
That's no 'rant'. Just a commandment of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones for healthy and ecologic sustainability.
AUDI, VIDE, TACE
What is it about an educated woman who doesn’t want to take anyone’s BS that scares you so much you’d repeat made up nonsense?
In closed systems, e.g. bacteria in an agar medium petri dish, the classic population size goes through exponential growth, steady state, and finally the death phase as the medium is depleted and waste products accumulate.
If we map humanity on to a similar system with the earth as the closed system there are some high level similarities that would suggest a similar end result. Exactly where we are on that curve is something that we will only be able to determine with hindsight.
What's different with humanity is that we have opportunities and the ability to re-engineer the system. Opportunities that bacteria don't have, so they die.
What we lack is desire for a long term steady state. Maybe we'll need to mutate into something else to get there.
The earth is not a closed system. We get 175 quadrillion watts of energy from the sun.
We also radiate a lot of energy back into space
We're working on fixing that part though.
That's a misconception. Earth is still pretty much in an equilibrium and emits as much as it gets from the sun. Global warming is due to the heat staying a bit longer in the system, not due to emitting less.
If the world is warming up it is not in equilibrium, or an I missing something?
If I have a tap flowing into a bucket, then once the bucket is full the amount of water flowing over the top will exactly equal the amount of water flowing in from the tap.
If I increase the size of the bucket, the the amount of water flowing over the top will also exactly equal the amount flowing from the tap.
There's also scale to consider: global warming is more like if my bucket was very soft, and I've stretched the plastic a little bit to give it slightly more volume (the analogy breaks down beyond this point).
This idea is extremely old, but also has a very bad record of being wrong for hundreds of years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...
It’s worth knowing if you’re proposing an idea that’s been continuously proposed, and has been continuously proven wrong by time and history, that you might want to consider if there are other drivers that continually oppose your thesis. I think technology is sufficiently powerful we’ll be able to power our needs for another hundred years at a minimum if we try.
The wiki article you link cites some "critics" but I don’t see proofs. How would you "prove" the future of humanity anyway? Moreover that idea has taken different forms between time and individual formulating it, we can’t reject all of them because some includes fallacies.
> Despite use of the term "Malthusian catastrophe" by detractors such as economist Julian Simon (1932–1998), Malthus himself did not write that mankind faced an inevitable future catastrophe. Rather, he offered an evolutionary social theory […]
1. subsistence severely limits population-level
2. when the means of subsistence increases, population increases
3. population-pressures stimulate increases in productivity
4. increases in productivity stimulate further population-growth
5. because productivity increases cannot maintain the potential rate of population growth, population requires strong checks to keep parity with the carrying-capacity
6. individual cost/benefit decisions regarding sex, work, and children determine the expansion or contraction of population and production
7. checks will come into operation as population exceeds subsistence-level
8. the nature of these checks will have significant effect on the larger sociocultural system—Malthus points specifically to misery, vice, and poverty
I didn't know before reading the Wikipedia article you linked that Malthus's essay led directly to the creation of the UK census. Which is one of the mechanisms by which we cope with population growth!
Perhaps both things can be truth - the criticism is right with no intervention, AND the interventions it hopefully causes make everything alright.
History is also littered with people confidently stating that since something has not happened it therefore can never happen. Often immediately before the thing then happens.
Why would history bother to record the people who claimed an event could never happen and were right?
I mean humanity is a little bit more complex than bacteria growth, for example because humans can to some degree influence if, when and how many kids they are getting.
But the logistic growth function is used to model populations in animals as well. So the question is what is your counteragrument?
1. reality is more complex than the logistic function, but ultimately in fact we would reach some sort of saturation effect, e.g. by humanity moderating the birth rates.
2. reality is more complex, but infinite growth in an finite habitat is somehow possible (note, that infinity is a huge number)
If it is the latter I'd be very curious to see your mathematical model and your reasoning behind it.
On the topic of model complexity: the logistic growth function is a simplification and in reality one would have to incorporate at all kind of resources (and their geographical locations, renewing rates, etc) in a complex mega model. But I do not see how any model could sustain infinite humans. And if it can't it means there is saturation and that means the logistic growth function is a good mental approximation for populations.
Also see: https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...
Or we just didn't estimate the maximum population correctly, or managed to keep pushing it up for a century with improved agricultural technology.
It's hubris to suppose humans are immune to natural laws that seem to apply to everything else.
We know that poverty, high mortality, lack of education and lower social and legal status for women are factors contributing to net population growth. We also claim to be interested in fixing these problems globally - even the most zealous defenders of capitalism are quick to cite statistics intended to demonstrate a decline in global poverty.
On the other hand we have people panicking about population decline because 1) our economy (including many pension systems) is built on the obviously unsustainable paradigm of infinite growth and 2) some people have very unhealthy feelings about the relative proportions of arbitrary demographic groups because of race essentialist bunk-science that is still being regurgitated by people who benefit from sowing division along those lines to distract from themselves.
Lol what? Since when is asserting "finite resources will eventually be unable to sustain exponential growth" disproven by observing that "Yeah, well, they haven't yet"?
100 years is virtually no time at all, I'm having a hard time believing you're not making a joke with your optimism being that you think we have at least that long.
For roughly the same reason that "if I keep driving in a straight line, I'll crash into the tree at the end of my street" is disproven by the many years it hasn't yet...because it turns out the car has a steering wheel and I can turn when I reach the corner.
The steering wheel in the case of overpopulation being a general reduction of living standards in the best case and widespread genocide and refugee crisises in the worst case.
The steering wheel in the case of overpopulation is gentrification. Turns out folks with all their basic needs met have way fewer children than folks who are barely scraping out an existence.
Enjoy reading about irrigation, greenhouses, mechanised farming, crop rotation, artificial fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide, the Haber-Bosch process, artificial selection, genetic engineering, futures contracts, state subsidies, refrigeration, salting, pickling, freeze-drying, vacuum sealing, National cheese reserves, food banks, and more!
No, not true. Many societies in the world have voluntarily reduced reproduction to the point where population growth would be zero, except for improvements in longevity.
These changes largely pre-date small recent drops in living standards, having taken place at the end of unprecedented runs of improvements in health and quality of life.
And how will you deal with the societies whose populations are booming in poverty and whom will desire to share your living standards? All the excess population from latin america, south east asia and africa will soon be displaced north by climate change
Zoomers call it "copium". Believing whatever has to be believed for peace of mind, even though it's logically not true.
There is no exponential growth though, most people don't have 4+ kids. Everything indicates that World population should stabilize this century and then slowly decline, through demographic transition [1]. No resource pressure here.
The Earth regenerates food with input of solar energy, unlike a petri dish, so that model doesn't apply at all. Animals still exist, after-all. We may reach steady state like they did, or oscillate perhaps.
We’ll oscillate likely, not perhaps. The whole-world has shown no ability to solve critical issues without “oscillations”, yet, not unlike animals.
We have the exactly opposite problem. We can produce so much that there are no markets to consume it all. There is an excess and we get assaulted by ads to consume some of it. Shortages are almost absent.
Arguably, the real problem with humanity's resource use today is not consumerism - not overconsumption - but overproduction. We produce vast amounts of food only to let it go to waste. We produce vast amounts of consumer goods only to shred the unsold (or returned) surplus to maintain their price points. It's cheaper to destroy what we overproduce than to discount it or decrease production output. From an economic point of view it becomes a problem of optimizing the waste disposal costs, not the resource use (especially not resources that can be externalized) - turning food waste into animal feed or biofuels, which in turn incentivizes overproduction when those uses become too profitable.
The entrepreneurial spirit is a perfect example for this. We can talk about disruption all we want as if it means making the world better but ultimately we're looking at existing systems and seemingly saturated markets and asking "how can we add to this in a way that makes us money?". We are explicitly opposed to notions of zero-sum markets but the only way to have a non-zero sum is to add more to it and that extra something has to come from somewhere, even if it's an externality to the balance sheets. For the past century marketing has been defined by creating needs rather than addressing existing ones, selling more rather than just providing another option.
This fuels the economy but it's a horrible waste if you look at it from a detached impersonal global resource use perspective. Even trying to go against this system has been productized and can be bought as a subscription model at this point. We've unlearned any other way to do things because everything has been recuperated by the system we've built. It is indeed easier for most people nowadays to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current system and it being replaced by something better, fairer or more resource-friendly.
You could easily spend far more trying to distribute overproduced items to someone who needs them, or trying to match supply too precisely too production and the consequences of that are not symmetric either.
For example, we can survive an oversupply of food just fine. We absolutely cannot survive an undersupply of food: if you have a population needing a certain number of calories and you don't have it, then in about 3 weeks you no longer have a problem because they've died.
The excess isn't a problem on its own, but it prevents people from making money.
You get stuck with people who have money, who have everything they want, and people who don't have money who can't make any, becauae there is already a huge excess of anything that people who do have money would want.
Capitalism has no solution to this problem.
The solution is pretty simple, tax the rich and give it to the poor. Hard to put into practice due to the power dynamics involved, but let's not pretend it's this great mystery with no possible solution.
The rich are not your problem. It's the guy who can't work any cheaper because he has to keep paying his mortgage who causes this deadlock.
but the guy can work cheaper if he has more money, no? If the rich, through a series of steps including taxes and a debt relief program, pays that guy's mortgage, he can work cheaper, breaking the deadlock, no? Or am I misunderstanding the problem you're stating?
> we map humanity on to a similar system with the earth as the closed system
That's why bad analogies are bad.