Dr Doom: UT Prof speaks of overpopulated Earth

I've mentioned on other threads that author, Phillip Wylie, wrote that population density ought to be 50 square miles per family. He might have settled for forty or even thirty; I don't know.

Sounds like my kind of guy.

He may be wrong, he may be right. But I'm not sure what he's saying that should piss people off. We don't expect other species to be able to continually increase in numbers without disastrous consequences -- why should humans be any different?

When i was born (1950), the population of the earth was reasonably estimated to have been less than two billion. When i was still just a lad, and the population had reached two billion, we were told that by 2050, the population of the earth would have reached five billion, and the consequence would be mass starvation, social collapse and global warfare. We now have over six billion people, and we're only slightly more than half way through that century from 1950 to 2050. I continue to be rather more optimistic than pessimistic about the fate of the human race.

The Population Bomb
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The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion". The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation.

The book is primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument, that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. It assumes that the population is going to raise exponentially, on the other hand the resources, in particular food, are already at their limits.

Unlike Malthus, Ehrlich predicted that not only the overpopulation will hit in some indefinite future, but it is certain to lead to a massive disaster in the next few years. Also unlike Malthus, Ehrlich didn't see any means of avoiding the catastrophe, and the solutions for limiting its scope he proposed were much more radical, including starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."
The book deals not only with food shortage, but also with other kinds of crises caused by rapid population growth, expressing the possibility of disaster in broader terms. A "population bomb", as defined in the book, requires only three things:

A rapid rate of change
A limit of some sort
Delays in perceiving the limit
Also worth noting is Ehrlich's introduction of the Impact formula:

I = PAT (where I=Impact, PAT = Population x Affluence x Technology)

Hence, Ehrlich argues, affluent technological nations have a greater per capita impact than poorer nations.

The predictions not only did not come true, the world developed in a direction completely opposite to the one predicted by Ehrlich, without implementing any of his proposed measures. The world food production grows exponentially at a rate much higher than the population growth, in both developed and developing countries, partially due to the efforts of Norman Borlaug's "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, and the food per capita level is the highest in the history. On the other hand population growth rates significantly slowed down, especially in the developed world [1]. The famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause is political instability, not global food shortage [2]. On the other hand, in the 1980s and 1990s in a number of countries (first of all in Tropical Africa) population growth rates still exceeded the economic growth ones, and on quite a few occasions political instability was caused just by food shortages (see, for example, Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends in Africa by Andrey Korotayev and Daria Khaltourina).

Although Ehrlich's theory influenced 1960's and 1970's public policy, a post-analysis by Keith Greiner (1994) observed that Ehrlich's projections could not possibly have held the scrutiny of time because Ehrlich applied the financial compound interest formula to population growth. Using two sets of assumptions based on the Ehrlich theory, it was shown that the theorized growth in population and subsequent scarcity of resources could not have occurred on Ehrlich's time schedule. The historical US population growth was more linear than exponential. Nevertheless The Population Bomb sold many copies and raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues. Early 21st century analyses of the age distribution of the US population show that growth in population declined after "the pill" was approved for widespread use (though the population continues to grow at a rate of 0.91% per annum [3]). That approval was likely influenced by Ehrlich's work. (Reference: Greiner, K. (1994, Winter). The baby boom generation and How they Grew, Chance: A Magazine of the American Statistical Association.)

There has been much criticism of the book from demographers today (chiefly Phillip Longman in his 2004 The Empty Cradle) who argue that the "baby boom" of the 1950s was an aberration unlikely to be repeated and that population decline in an urbanized society is by nature hard to prevent because of the economic liability children become. Paleoconservatives have been especially critical of the ideas of the book: The Population Bomb made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century in 2003 and was #11 ("honorable" mention) in Human Events' Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

For years, environmentalists and social activists have been handing out dire warnings about a looming "overpopulation crisis". They famously warned that we would run out of copper by 1980 and start running out of oil by 2000, but that it wouldn't matter because we would all be dead by 1985, having inevitably run out of food and water due to overpopulation. One environmentalist predicted that India would starve, the United States would have food riots in the 1980s, and that America's population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999 because of our use of pesticides. Our population is now approaching 300 million. Instead of starving, India is now an exporter of food.
Now Phillip Longman and others are warning about the opposite problem: depopulation. Global fertility rates are half of what they were in 1972. Fertility rates are not only decreasing in Europe and Japan, where fertility rates are far below replacement levels, but also in regions where overpopulation has been a threat, including Africa, China, the Middle East and Mexico. As their population ages, more and more of each nation's resources will have to be devoted to social services, health care, and pensions, while the income tax base of productive taxpayers continually decreases. Longman argues that this will cause widespread poverty. The competition between "guns and canes" will also cause military weakness, which could lead to political instability and war. Is this a real danger or more doom-mongering?

http://brneurosci.org/reviews/emptycradle.html

I agree, nothing here should piss people off. I remember when I first heard all the outcry about what he was saying, what really got them worked up was that he said that we need a huge decrease in population, like fifty percent or something.

So people twisted that into him saying he wanted to kill fifty percent of the world's population-- people were acting like if you gave him weapons and half a chance, he'd personally kill your family.

I mean, the way I interpret what he's saying is not that he wishes half the people he meets would die, but that he's simply saying ideally there would be half the # of people there are now. To me, those are two different things.

I think he seems like a neat guy, I'd like to meet him.

I hope 'Dr Doom' is making some sort of an impact, but humans are stubborn and selfish when it comes to the changes required to ease our collective footprint.

Ecological apocalysts like Eric "Dr. Doom" Pianka have a long and dismal record of mispredictions. According to Adam Smith, they already had a century-old record of failure in 1776, when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations". Because predictions of doom tend to captivate audiences, I'm sure Mr. Pianka won't be the last of his kind. Indeed, let me offer my own prediction for the next 50 years: We won't see a collapse of our population, but there will always be an abundance of esteemed ecologists who predict such a collapse for Real Soon Now (TM).