ARTICLE: Demography, growth and the environment: Falling fertility, The Economist, Oct 29th 2009
Worth watching.
If you remember my demographics stuff in both PNM and BFA, this all tracks nicely: poverty causes babies, not the other way around, meaning rising incomes control birth quite nicely in those instances when the state isn't up to the task (and thank God both India and China were, because, in combination, they change world history).
Bottom line: the world adds about 2.5-3.0B to our 6.5B (today) over the next four decades, yielding us a topped-out global population (and historic tipping point) at roughly 9-9.5B--just in time for the life-lengthening revolution to start kicking in big-time, along with global warming (see my recent WPR column on the "great waves of change").
I really like these videographics from The Economist: very informative and easy to absorb.
(Thanks: Steve Fleming)
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Comments (1)
Tom, I e-mailed you an interesting alternative perspective from Albert A. Bartlett, Colgate '44, who acknowledges these world wide trends but still warns that population growth is still the "elephant in the room". I too found these commmuications from The Economist
"very informative and easy to absorb"; but so did I find Bartlett's essay on the same subject but which has a different conclusion.
Posted by Elmer Humes | November 13, 2009 9:13 AM