2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
The basics of overall population growth - which will drive these changes - are well recognised, and feared, by most politicians and media commentators. Just over half our groups, for instance, saw overpopulation as an issue for the future as well as for the present. The evidence is there for all to see. On the other hand, a similar number of groups warned about declining populations in the future - albeit usually in the context of decimation by diseases such as AIDS. In terms of future projections, according to Debora Mackenzie in the New Scientist, the world's population (starting at nearly six billion in the mid 1990s) will reach between 8 and 12 billion (most probably 10 billion) by 2025.
The unspoken corollary, which has been around for some 200 years since Thomas Malthus published his essay - 'Essay on the Principle of Population', is that starvation will soon sweep the world. The debate was rekindled, more recently, by the Club of Rome's 1972 report; 'The Limits to Growth'. The counter-argument is, of course, that it simply hasn't happened - even after two centuries; and the fact is that even Malthus recanted in the second edition of his work, though this is less often reported!
The latest projections, however, can look alarming; and the fastest growth is occurring in the Third World - with dramatic impacts where it can be least sustained. On the other hand, such population growth, when it occurs in industrializing nations (which is already happening to many of even the poorest nations) can be a significant stimulus to economic growth; and, as such, can both counter the impoverishing effect of more mouths to feed and positively enrich the nation.
In the longer term, the impact of migration - now into space - may become important; yet another reason for governments to pursue this latest frontier. Paul Kennedy made the significant point that one, neglected, reason Malthus was wrong was that literally millions of the poor and starving migrated to the new world (hence the famous inscription on the Statue of Liberty), at the same time greatly enriching the US itself.
As Geoffrey Lean - highlighting the problems, from the former viewpoint, in an article called 'Too Small a World' - reports "It took the whole of human history until the 19th century for the world population to reach a single billion. The second billion was clocked up at the end of the 1920s. The third arrived in 1960, the fourth in 1987." According to Debora Mackenzie in the New Scientist, the world's population (starting at nearly six billion in the mid 1990s) will reach between 8 and 12 billion (most probably 10 billion) by 2025. In fact - again according to Geoffrey Lean - the world-wide rate of population increase has in fact been falling since the early Seventies, from more than 2 per cent annually to about 1.5 per cent. This is in part due to contraception, where he reports "More than half of Third World women of childbearing age now use it, up from a fifth in 1960" - a little known success story which surprises most westerners when they learn of it. But he continues, to make the important point "...contraception only comes into its own when parents cease to want big families. In poor societies there are good reasons for lots of children. They are economic assets, doing useful work for the family from the age of six or seven...They provide security in old age [something many westerners might now envy!]." Geoffrey Lean highlights the problem with an anecdote "...when early campaigners in India put up posters contrasting a happy family with two children with a miserable one with six, they found that people came flocking to them to discover how to become like the larger family."
19 April 2003
Other pages you might like to consider are:
5121 MALTHUSIAN PESSIMISM, 5178 LONGEVITY, 5119 MIGRATION, 5200 RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION, 5141 RESOURCE GROWTH, 5020 POPULATION CONTROL
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