The So-Called Increasing Population Problem Is Decreasing

China's relaxation of their one child policy - basically a relaxation driven by the need for more workers to narrow the worker/pensioner ratio - has led to some commentators waxing lyrical about overpopulation in general. Hans Rosling's popular BBC2 lectures have gone some way to dispel the overpopulation myth, and I wrote a big article on the subject a few years ago (see this Blog post Why The World Is Not Overpopulated) - but alas, deep concerns about overpopulation linger.

The article I wrote covers (to my satisfaction) the reasons why the overpopulation arguments are fraught, and often just plain wrong, but another thing you might like to consider is that, lack of contraception aside, human history has built its ideas of childhood on how having children benefits the parents. For example, in many cultures (old agrarian, but also many modern developing cultures) having children is based a lot on spawning workers who will look after parents in their older age. Equally, even in the UK most couples who plan to have children have them for the benefits they will bring to their lives (the fact that a new life is created with its own unique life is a great and special factor too).

The fact that the world continues to become more developed and prosperous, coupled with the fact that more and more people are living in big cities, means that many of the factors that make overpopulated areas ill-equipped to deal with it are becoming less and less of a problem. The more it's the case that parents choose to have children on the basis of a rational cost-benefit analysis, instead of needing children to help survive old age or women not having proper control over their reproductive cycle, the sooner population numbers will begin to more closely resemble science's law of parsimony.

Contracting Birth Rates Mean The Gradual Fading Out Of The State

Numerous people in history have uttered the maxim that the measure of a civilised society is how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. The elderly are perhaps the best case in point, because children with all their life ahead of them are seen to have plenty of future value, whereas a society that maltreats elderly people may do so on the basis that they have little perceived societal worth.

We used to treat the elderly in ways that would make your blood boil. When we were in hunter-gatherer groups the elderly soon became a burden on the party, taking up resources, slowing them down, and being unable to contribute much by way of hunting or gathering. Consequently, it wasn't uncommon for older folk in the tribe to be starved to death, killed with a sharp or heavy object, left behind to die, or even eaten by some of the tribes with cannibalistic proclivities.

Nowadays we're doing better - we have a social services system that ensures there is adequate treatment for the elderly, and in places like Spain and Italy you'll often find the elderly living with the rest of the family, being cared for until they die. One day we might even allow people the dignity of assisted suicide - a present solecism for which future generations will surely look upon us with horror.

Yet in spite of best intentions, and all the progress we make ethically, there is still something that will cause us big problems in the future, and is starting to already. The problem in question is a financial discontinuity between the tax that can be gathered and the money needed to be gathered to sustain State-funded institutions like the NHS and pensions. When state pensions were first introduced there was an 8 to 1 worker to pensioner ratio. Currently there is a 3 to 1 ratio, but at some point that will be reduced, perhaps even to the point where there is just 1 worker for every pensioner. For this reason alone the NHS is only going to survive if it is fully privatised, which it pretty much will be in a few decades.

But the problem deepens because most developed countries have systems of welfare that depend on a growing population to sustain their workforce. Apparently, though, we're told that after a steady growth since 2001, the past three years have seen birth rates fall quite sharply (that's not to say this trend will continue). If birth rates continue to fall and life expectation continues to rise (both of which seem quite likely) then there will be relatively fewer workers paying taxes towards the NHS and pensions.

Because of this, taxes have been way too high, which negatively affects total revenue from earnings. Also the tax threshold for low earners is far too low, which means people in the lowest quintile are often not keeping enough of their wages, and some finding it is not worth their while being in work at all. There is no question about it: things cannot go on as they are - the State is going to have gradually unload its most costly institutions - institutions that were once affordable, but due to a very different ratio of workers to pensioners, no longer is.

The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth

It is ridiculous to claim that the UK is overcrowded, as many people are eager to claim in this current political climate. Crowded cities are popular because people like to live in them.  They like crowds because crowds have more people, and more people bring greater benefits to society.

Consider it from the perspective of what your being born brings to the world by way of benefits to others. Apart from all the obvious benefits you bring to your closest family, consider all the other good things you bring to the people in your city; you contribute skills, you work and earn money, you are a friend to many, a caring neighbour, a parent, a lover, you think up new ideas, you bring a unique perspective based on a unique experience of the world, you bring help and support in people's tough situations, and conversation, and with that comes anecdotes, wisdom, retrospective prudence, humour, and many more things. The reason why your existence is a blessing to others in your city is the same reason why increased population has made the world more prosperous; you have brought much more into the world than you have drained from it*.  

Regarding overcrowdedness, the upshot is, rural areas are quieter because fewer people like to live in them - and house prices are very expensive in Central London and Manhattan because more people want to live there.  Its simple logic - the reason London has 8.6 million people and rural towns have only a few thousand is because more people prefer to live in London than they do rural towns. The reason being, not only is there is a greater abundance of the aforementioned benefits in more populous areas, there are also better career prospects, higher salaries, better nightlife, greater choices of restaurants, a richer choice of entertainment, more tourist attractions, better public transport, greater diversity of people – the list goes on. 

So what I wonder is this: of all its citizens, who is statistically more likely to complain that the UK is over-crowded – people in crowded places or people in non-crowded places having a perception that other busier places are overcrowded? If it’s the former then they would do well to read this Blog post because it should show them that they don’t know how good they have it. If it’s the latter then I don’t get their complaint because life is not overcrowded for them in their rural provenances.

In terms of probability, the highest number of complainers will most likely come from a highly populated area, which probably explains why to them the UK feels overcrowded. Most people who pontificate on overcrowding are likely to be pontificating from a vantage point of high population density. The people with the highest probability of feeling an intense population density are those who live in the densely populated areas. For example, if city x has 7 million people and a village y has 1000 people, and only x and y exist, there is only a 1 in 7000 probability that you don't live in city x.

Let's get one thing straight, though - the UK is not overcrowded. The mistake people are making is that they are trying to average population density of people instead of averaging over square miles. You can't get a proper picture of the UK's people to area ratio by counting how densely populated a populated area is - the only way is to assess how densely populated the average square mile would be when considering each square mile as a weighted average of total population and total area. A tube station in the rush hour can be overcrowded; so can a concert venue without proper door control - but take a trip around the UK by plane and look down, and for the most part you won't see crowds of people, you'll see fields and woodlands.

The rate of urban areas in relation to square miles is vanishingly small - there is potential for literally millions more people living in the UK. Of course, just like all sensible immigration policies, a nation must ensure it has the schools, hospitals, roads, etc to support more people, but given the myriad qualities and benefits one distils from living in places like London, that ought to be something that's greatly encouraged.

It certainly is the case that in some areas of the UK the infrastructure hasn't quite kept up with population demand, but once you accept the general maxim that more people means more cultural and social benefits, it's easy to see that inadequate facilities does not mean the nation is overcrowded, it simply means that the UK infrastructure has not progressed conterminously to facilitate the social and cultural benefits that come with an increased diversity of people.

* For a much more comprehensive analysis of this, see my blog post Why The World Is Not Overpopulated. 

Yay For Big Cities!



Not exactly big hitters here, but a couple of amusing things caught my eye today - both to do with Green politics. Firstly, this social commentator in Australia causing a stir with his above placard.

This fellow makes no sense in his provocative placard-graph. If the distance from the black line to the red line is supposed to represent tax revenue (the vertical line segment that descends from B), and the longer vertical line segment extending to the red line is supposed to represent financial restitution paid by the government - then all the placard is conveying is that if you pay x in carbon taxes and return x + y from the government you'll be better off.

Well, no kidding Sherlock - this guy's a genius at stating the obvious. What he doesn't state - the thing which actually is supposed to be an argument for higher carbon taxes - is why that makes increased carbon taxes a good thing.  Swap 'carbon taxes' with anything - food, alcohol, cigarettes, petrol, cosmetics - and the same still applies - if you pay x in food, alcohol, cigarettes, petrol or cosmetics taxes and return x + y from the government then that tax is deemed to be good for the consumer.

 

This fails to account for the fact that what's good for the consumer has to be offset by a cost to the provider - but we'll overlook that. The real trouble is, as anyone who has even a basic understanding of GCSE maths can tell you, such a working system requires us to suspend the laws of arithmetic in order to make it fly, because the government cannot create wealth, it can only transfer resources from one place to another.

The other vital thing he overlooks is that carbon is, quite obviously, a source of many benefits (they're called 'positive externalities'). All grounds for sensible taxation are based on negative externalities (which are vastly overstated - as I explain here in this Blog), but since neither positive nor negative externalities appear on his placard, and not the hint of a net cost-benefit analysis, the best I can say about it is that it makes no coherent arguments for increased carbon taxation.

 

It's the kind of graph that would only be a good case for increased carbon taxes if it replaced reality with fantasy and had completely different information mapped onto it. Which is like saying that if you interpret 'Natalie Bennett' to mean 'Clint Eastwood' and 'Russian ballet dancer' to mean 'Hollywood actor' then Natalie Bennett is a Russian ballet dancer.

The other issue today that I've seen is one raised by a couple of MEPs bemoaning big cities, and how they are the main causes of over-pollution. Their focal point is along the lines of "per square mile big cities are the most environmentally damaging areas in the world". That's true, but to use that as a criticism of cities is about as ill-conceived as criticising big hospitals over smaller ones because they have more ill people in them. It is pointless trying to measure environmental efficiency on a square mile bases - it has to be measured on a 'per person' basis.

When this is done you'll find that on a 'per person' basis, big cities are, in fact, much more environmentally efficient than rural areas. Cities like New York, London, Tokyo, and so on are more densely populated; they have more people walking or cycling; more people living closer to work, the shops, and restaurants; more people using public transport, a more environmentally friendly infrastructure, and more compact accommodation (which means on average they own fewer items).

A simple thought experiment will prove the point; count the exact population of London and find the equivalent number of people in rural areas, and see if you can fit all the rural people's property, land and possessions into an area as small as the area in London that houses its inhabitants (you won't be able to). And while you're onto it, compare the average weekly petrol, gas, coal and wood consumption of a family in rural Suffolk with a family who live in Westminster or Manhattan (you know which one will be highest on average).

Far from being the environmentally damaging leviathans that is too often claimed, cities are the most environmentally efficient habitats on earth. And that's to say nothing of the other numerous benefits to cities - benefits that make millions of people want to live in them, and benefits that make the price of property in them skyrocket.

The 'Save The Planet' Paradox



I care about the planet, but I care about people more.  Let me put it this way - if the choice was: preserve the Yorkshire moors and kill 1 million British people, or build factories on the moors and the 1 million people get to live, I'd choose the latter, and I'm pretty sure just about everyone else would too.  When people say we need to 'Save the planet' I think they usually mean we need to 'save people'.  I say this because everyone knows that the planet has been surviving long before we came along, and it would survive perfectly well if we all died out.  Some will argue that by 'save the planet' people mean preserve its beauty, lower our emissions and reduce our carbon footprint - but as my Yorkshire moors example shows, people don't generally value these things over the preservation of human life - so saving the planet (by which it is meant ‘the globe’) must always be a secondary aim behind saving the planet (by which it is meant ‘life on the planet’). 

Therefore, if preserving life is the primary goal, then part of that goal (the most urgent goal in my view) is to bring an end to global poverty and help the neediest people out of their plight of impoverishment.  This leaves the 'save the planet' folk with a problem, because the only way to bring an end to global poverty and help the neediest people out of their plight is to help those people attain economic freedom, and the ability to trade, be self-sufficient, and productive in the broader market economy.  The only realistic way to achieve this is to generate the kind of industry and globalised expansion of the market that will increase our emissions and our carbon footprint, which comes at the cost of not preserving the natural world as well as we’d like. 

The upshot is, in the short-term future, to end global poverty we're going to have to increase our environmental damage, not reduce it.  Of course, as third world countries increase their infrastructure and market potential, they are largely going to be using the most ecologically efficient technology, so there is every reason to continue to develop and pioneer more environmentally efficient methods of industry.  But realistically, the things that are the biggest ingredients in achieving this - free trade, healthy imports/exports, high employment, sensible and equitable Government spending, a good legal system, cultural plurality, immigration, global travel, welfare systems, human rights, property rights, family rights, and freer citizens – are going to have an environmental cost that is more than compensated for by the good it will do for the neediest people in the world.

So instead of just asking “How can we best reduce our carbon footprint?”, I think people should be asking a more urgent question; “How can we best cope with the fact that our increased technology and a wider market economy has environmental costs as well as all the benefits it confers?”  That’s a much better question.  Stirring up people to become too obsessed with reducing emissions often causes them to be less mindful of coping with the costs of our increased technology and a wider market economy, which then has the concomitant danger of causing them to be less mindful of the immeasurably more good that increased technology and a wider market economy does for the world’s neediest.

* Picture courtesy of https://www.gov.uk/government/news/we-can-end-global-poverty-by-2030-united-nations-report

Why The World Is Not Overpopulated

In the backwaters of Blogosphere there is nothing worse than speaking the obvious.  The flip side of that coin is that there is nothing better than taking a viewpoint that the majority of people believe to be right and showing it to be wrong.  This is what I’m going to do with the 'overpopulation' myth. The reason that the overpopulation scaremongering seems to be back in vogue is because of the continual literature on climate change, and also because recently the world population exceeded 7 billion (people love a good round number as a catalyst for such pronouncements), which must mean the world is overpopulated and that we are consuming far too many resources. Also Professor Stephen Emmott of Oxford University has been pulling in the crowds with his Ten Billion lecture, which is a proclamation of doom and gloom for the 21st century.

Professor Stephen Emmott is preaching to the choir, because if you ask people whether they think the world is overpopulated, most will tell you they feel sure it is.  There are two reasons for this (well three actually, but I’ll come to the third in a while).  The first reason is that ideas are like memes – they are passed on in the form of cultural viruses (just like the biological analogue).  ‘The world is overpopulated’ is one of those memes – it has been heard so often that people just accept it must be true.  The second reason is a development of the first reason; it is because people start with the natural assumption of overpopulation that they find it very easy to observe evidence to support their view.  Whether it be a huge metropolitan city ring road full of traffic at a stand still, or a London tube station in rush hour, or a crowded African region struggling for food and water, or a diminished animal community on the verge of extinction, it’s easy to assume the world has too many people*.

People are wrong about the over-crowdedness issue in a similar way to how they are wrong about the over-pollution issue – in both cases they have their reasoning backwards.  To see why, we first need to see why it is a good thing that you and I were born – and to do this we must go back to 1798.  The bad idea that “the earth is overpopulated” was started most prominently by Thomas Malthus in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argues that the population increases geometrically but food supplies only increase arithmetically, which means an eventual and inevitable case of worldwide famine and disease.  I’ll explain what that means in a moment, and why Malthus was wrong.

Now there is no denying that in some parts of the world increased population, poor resources and lack of birth control is a problem.  But that doesn’t mean that the world is overpopulated - it means that the population of people that are alive are not doing as well as they could in aiding those that need more help than they are getting.  It is true that humans do damage to the environment and to other animals, but a countersceptic could point out that animals have been doing harm to other animals for millions of years before humans came about - and also that environmental events have ‘damaged’ parts of the planet for even longer.  If you take the entire history of life that has ever lived on this planet, over 99% of that life lived and became extinct before humans came about – so it seems absurd to suggest that humans being alive is a unique and unprecedented cost to the animal kingdom. 

Here’s what the sceptics fail to realise.  Yes, we certainly can do more to be mindful of other animals, but the fact that there are parts of nature that are worse off because of humans is not an argument that says there are too many humans, it is an argument that humans need to be more mindful of the effects they have on nature, and seek better ways to improve the status quo.  Similarly, the fact that there are so many divorces is not an argument against marriage, it is an argument that humans need to be more mindful in selecting the right partner, and work at being better husbands and wives.  I’m going to show why the solution to the ‘natural’ problems that overpopulation proponents describe is not fewer people, it is more people – which is why I say the world is under populated, not overpopulated.  To see why, let’s look at how Malthus got his reasoning wrong.  Malthus’s distinction between Arithmetical ratios and Geometrical ratios is as follows:

Arithmetical ratios (technology growth) are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 etc

Geometrical ratios (population growth) are: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 etc

What he’s saying is that as the population grows and grows with increased rapidity, the food supply grows at a much slower rate, leaving us eventually over-populated and out of resources.  That’s what the ratios mean.  Malthus was right about these ratios up to the time of writing his essay – but what he didn’t predict was how the world was about to change, most notably with the Industrial Revolution** and later contraception.  The reason Malthus got it wrong was that he didn’t work out that progress in technology is proportional to the number of people alive in the world, which means that technological growth will eventually grow geometrically along with the population.  In simple terms, with more people alive there are more innovative ideas being produced at a greater rate.  Before the world’s big population boom in the past two centuries, technological progress was so slow that Arithmetical ratios and Geometrical ratios were all but indistinguishable, because population increase and technological innovation were slowly and steadily moving along the same coterminous lines in history.  Geometrical ratios become more noticeable when you have a large foundation to facilitate the exponential increase, and that happened after the industrial revolution, and will continue to happen henceforward at an even greater rate.

This is the key distinction between qualitative changing and quantitative changing – the former gives us the real breakthroughs in economic and technological change, the latter only gives us more of the same.  Here’s an example.  It was once forecasted that economic progress in Manhattan was coming to a close because the island had nearly reached its capacity regarding the horses it could contain.  If you’re only focusing on quantitative change your narrow vision only has you looking to see where you can fit more horses; whereas if you’re focusing on qualitative change you look to advance beyond horses to industrial machinery, and eventually from industrial machinery to computers.  Another example, the Great Irish Famine wasn’t just due to unfortunate infestations in potatoes – it was over-reliance on one single crop that severely added to the plight.  Whether it is potatoes for food or horses for transportation, it is important to diversify, because diversity leads to increased qualitative change.  That's another reason why you can be sure that our technology will continue to progress - we diversify our skills and our imagination by not having an over-reliance on too narrow a range.

Consider this in terms of an analogy in which we are recording planetary temperature. Planet A increases its global temperature of 100 degrees at a rate of 1 degree per year (arithmetical), whereas Planet B increases its global temperature of 100 degrees by 1% per year (geometrical).  In one thousand years Planet B, which is increasing geometrically, would be 2000 times hotter than Planet A, and growing 2000 times faster too.  If you looked at the temperature differential in the first few years the difference between the two planets would be minimal – whereas after a couple of thousand years it would be immense.  That’s what is happening with our technological progression – it is getting hotter and hotter because technological progression is increasing like the heat on planet B, not Planet A as Malthus thought.  Our probability of running out of any resources has always been superseded by our ability to advance the sufficient technology or innovation to wean ourselves off the dependency of those resources.  It is the geometrical ratios of both population growth and technological progression that make this exponential progression more or less inevitable. 

If you want some kind of qualification for that, it’s easily done.  I’ll give you some empirical indication based on how the world has gone for the past 200,000 years.  For the past 199,800 years we’ve had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality.  Until recently in our 200,000 year history we have lived in pretty poor circumstances, just above the subsistence level.  Then a couple of hundred years ago something changed.  People started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it’s still going on).  This progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb – people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems - and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.  The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper. 

It’s no coincidence that each half century has been progressively better than the last, and that the most recent times have been the most globally prosperous than any time in history.  That’s largely because we have 7 billion people on the planet – more ideas, more innovation, better technology, improved economic freedom, peak human liberation, and more global communication and potential to help the neediest***.  When the world has 8 billion people it will be even more prosperous; when it has 9 billion, yet even more prosperity.  It’s no coincidence – the recent burst in population in the past 200 years has been the primary cause of our burst in prosperity (200 years is only 0.1% of 200,000 years).  That we have a maximal population and progression dialect in 0.1% of the entire human history suggests that the answer to our worries about the world is that we haven’t had enough children in the past 200 years, not that we’ve had too many. 

It is easy to look at some of the worst places in the world, like Africa****, and say that many of the countries there have too many people in relation to the available resources, and this is true.  But those countries do not amount to an argument that supports the overpopulation proponents – they show that there are places in the world in which the economic conditions are unable to take advantage of the benefits of having a large pool of potential innovators, and fruitful trade potential.  This is usually because the countries in question are run by dictators or oppressive political groups that keep the masses starved of food and knowledge.  They are being denied the very thing my argument says will enrich them – the ability to contribute to their nation, and to the wider world.  If simply having a densely populated nation was inimical to success then Japan and Hong Kong would be as bad as much of Africa. 

It’s good that you were born

Now that’s cleared up, let’s consider the costs and benefits of an individual being born.  First off, you probably know all the facts about the incredibly tiny probability of the unique 'you' being born - 1 in the millions of sperm that made it...same for your ancestors…etc etc - so the upshot is you're very fortunate to be alive to experience a life on this planet. I'm glad you were born, and I don't think you'd wish you weren't here to experience life on this incredible planet.  If you'd never been born, your family would have ever so slightly more resources consumed, due to your not being born to consume them – but your family probably are the ones most glad you were born. 

Notice I said “your family would have ever so slightly more resources” not “the rest of the world would have ever so slightly more resources.  Let’s consider the resources humans consume.  It is thought by many that if you weren’t born the rest of the world would gain from what you don’t consume.  That’s not true.  When you were born you cost the world very little; the only people who would have felt a cost would be the people whose resources (time, energy, economic) you took up – and that would only really apply to your immediate family.  And as I said, your immediate family are the ones who have gotten most pleasure out of you – your parents spent a lot of time, energy and money on your upbringing, but you (and any siblings you have) are probably their greatest joy in life.  If you hadn’t have been born your family would have more resources, and the rest of the world would have the same as before.

It is clear that life has a multitude of net benefits that have no attached costs, as well as costs that do have concomitant attached benefits, and also some net costs too.  I said the main costs you bring are to your family – the reason being is that your external spillover costs mostly have benefits for others, and most people’s net costs that confer no benefits are comparably tiny.  Over-population theorists tend to only see the costs and miss the benefits.  The car in front of you in the morning rush hour is imposing a cost because the driver is delaying your journey slightly.  But he is probably going to his place of work in which the benefits he brings to the company, and to society, far outweigh the costs of delaying your journey by a minuscule amount.  Your partaking in the auction on Sunday helped bid the price up, which was a loss to the eventual buyer.  But the buyer’s loss is simultaneously the seller’s gain.  If you are successful in a job interview the other candidate sees you as a cost to his aspirations, but you succeeded because the interviewers saw that you could bring more to the company than the other candidate.  His loss is yours and the company’s gain.  The upshot is; it is easy to focus on the costs and omit the benefits.

Now then, seeing as though the costs are minimal, let’s look at the benefits to your being born.  Apart from all the obvious benefits you bring to your closest family, look what else you bring to the world; you contribute skills, you earn money, you work, you are a friend to many, a caring neighbour, a parent, a lover, you think up new ideas, you bring a unique perspective based on a unique experience of the world, you bring support, and conversation, and with that comes anecdotes, wisdom, retrospective prudence, humour, and many more things.  The reason why your existence is a blessing to the world is the same reason why increased population has made the world more prosperous; you have brought much more into the world than you have drained from it. 

Now let’s consider the cost-benefit analysis from the point of view of the people who chose to bring you into this world – your parents.  When your parents decided to have you, they knew that you would be a drain on their resources – both their financial resources, and their time and energy.  But I’ll bet having you was one of the best days of their life – and I’ll bet they haven’t regretted it since.  In other words, they focused on all those costs, weighed them up with the benefit of having you, and thought you were worth having, even though they must have overestimated the costs and underestimated the benefits.  I say “underestimated the benefits” because to begin with most parents think of a having a child only in terms of that effect on the family life – they are not taking into account all those benefits I mentioned above, because they are spillover benefits that come later, not direct benefits to your parents.  Hence, they overestimated the costs and underestimated the benefits, and still thought you were worth having – and that single case can be applied to the parents of just about all children.

The ‘overcrowded’ myth

I’d guess by now you’ve now got ahead of me and realised how fallacious the over-crowded argument is.  Crowded cities are popular because people like to live in crowded cities.  They like crowds because crowds have more people, and more people means more of the benefits I mentioned above.  Rural areas are quieter because fewer people like to live in them, and house prices are very expensive in Central London and Manhattan because more people want to live there.  Its simple logic - the reason London has 8.6 million people and rural towns have only a few thousand is because more people prefer to live in London than they do rural towns. The reason being, not only is there is a greater abundance of the aforementioned benefits in more populous areas, there is also better career prospects, higher salaries, better nightlife, greater choices of restaurants, a richer choice of entertainment, more tourist attractions, better public transport, greater diversity of people – the list goes on. 

On the pollution argument, well, my 0.1% observation is a bit like the reverse of pollution.  The benefits of pollution (profits from owning a factory, pleasure from driving a Subaru, etc) are outweighed by the costs of pollution to others, which means polluters pollute too much.  Parents and prospective parents vastly underestimate the benefits that children bring to the prosperity of the world, so they end up having too few children.  Progression and increased population is an inevitable concomitance because each generation reaps the benefits of the inventiveness of its ancestors.  Not only that, but population growth drives technological and industrial innovation, which drives economic growth.  The ‘overpopulation’ proponents have got their reasoning backwards; our improved technological abilities and economic prosperity have both engendered significant population growth as well.  Economic prosperity has continued to increase for the past two thousand years, with every century more prosperous than the last, and this is because there are more people on earth to contribute to the strategic and technological advancements. 

So not only is overpopulation a clear myth – the reverse is true - if you want to help solve the problems of the world like damage to the environment, bad living conditions for the neediest, and the diminishing populations of endangered animal species, you’ve got more chance if you have six kids than if you have none – because one of them just might be the one who puts a better solution in place.

 

 

 

* Not too long ago the entire world’s population could be housed quite comfortably in the State of Texas.

** It may actually be true that things like the industrial revolution had to wait until humans had the capacity to support large-scale innovation.

*** One point of note, despite increases in population it's not the masses that drives us forward, it is the top 1-2% of every generation as a rule. Were it not for the top 1-2%, humanity probably would have remained in the middle ages.  The reason why the model I gave you works is that with each increase in population the 1-2% of innovators increases numerically too.  When there were only 300,000 people in the world the top slice 2% innovators were only 6000 per generation.  In a population of 7 billion the top slice 2% innovators can be as many as 140 million.  That's a lot of people with a lot of ideas - so despite a justified pessimism regarding the overall abilities of most humans, such pessimism doesn't impinge on my model of progression. Once an idea is conceived it can be shared by millions. Once cat's eyes are invented, the whole world benefits. Once a computer chip is prototyped by the first innovator, the whole world reaps the rewards, and so on. 

**** You may also like to note that the countries with the largest populations - China, Brazil, Russia, India (and several African nations) – are actually showing the world’s fastest economic growth rates. 

Happy New Year - You Are Lucky To Be Here!

Happy New Year to you all!  If you are reading this at the beginning of 2013, then you are one of 7 billion people that is astronomically lucky to be alive today.  It is quite common for biologists and religious people to make calculations of the odds of your being born, but it is a largely faulty endeavour because such models only ever focus on a few of the variables, and they fail to take into consideration that many of the contingent facts are post hoc and not amenable to straightforward probability calculations (the picture at the bottom of the page gives exhibition to the same flawed model). So, in trying to tell us the incredibly small chance of any individual being born, they choose a method that underestimates the real chances by a factor much larger than the figures they give us.  That's like a multi-billionaire trying to show off his wealth by emptying the moneybox next to his bedside table.

But that said, it is at least true that despite the flaws in the oft-presented probability models, you had an alarmingly fortuitous journey in being born.  Even if we calculate solely on the direct male line with the figure of your one lucky sperm with the unique set of DNA that makes up your father’s genes you inherited amongst 250 million sperm per intercourse, then going back a mere 40,000 generations you only had a 1 in 1.8 x 10⁴⁰³¹⁶⁷* chance of making it here. 

Now that you have made it here to 2013 after 40,000 generations of 1 x 250 million chances of being the lucky sperm, consider something else – the reality you create by being human is an astoundingly brilliant illusion that requires a human mind to experience it.  Here’s why;

The following things can be said to exist: table, moon, freedom of choice, chair, love, jealousy, the play Hamlet, a dream about the play Hamlet, the sun, gravity, atoms, fear, admiration, generosity, and a hurricane.

If asked to put them into two distinct groups, most would do the following:

Group 1: table, moon, chair, the play Hamlet, the sun, gravity, atoms, a hurricane.

Group 2: freedom of choice, love, jealousy, a dream about the play Hamlet, fear, admiration and generosity.

The demarcation is usually centred around separating things that exist conceptually or as products of mental cognita (group 2) from things that exist in physical form in the external reality out there (group 1) – not dissimilar to how Kant separated noumena and phenomena. 

But I think this is a hugely (and implicitly human) limited view of reality, naturally resulting from our evolution of very limited parts through natural selection.  Natural selection built us to survive and understand a world of hunting and gathering – we are not well equipped to understand the full depths and complexities of reality. 

To understand reality more proficiently is to understand the following. Both of the above groups represent not too dissimilar objects in that the whole of reality with which humans interface is, in fact, a brilliant illusion constructed by the human mind.  That reality is different for every other kind of animal, and maybe without minds to perceive external reality, mother nature would be nothing more than mathematics (or thoughts in the mind of God, as per Berkeley’s Idealism, if your beliefs lean that way).

Either way, the existence of, say, table, moon and chair in the form perceived by humans is no more or less real than the existence of freedom of choice, love and jealousy – in that both sets of objects of study are as they are because of how the human mind interfaces with reality.  It’s a secret not many people know – but outside of human perceptions, the world doesn’t really have atoms, motion, heat, colour, water, rocks, dust and things of that kind.  Yes of course these things existed before humans (and other living things) came along, but they did not, and do not, exist as you know them, outside or apart from how you know them – they exist only in non-reified mathematical form, and they are probably existent in the reality of some kind of mathematical patterning that is able to bring to bear the physical substrate you and I know as the material world. 

As you begin 2013, have a little smile as you consider that at the beginning of the universe there was a vanishingly small chance of your ever being here – and also that having made it here, the whole of reality with which you interface is a brilliant illusion constructed by virtue of the fact that that is how humans perceive reality and make conceptions within it.  If that’s not a reason to marvel at being alive, I don’t know what is. 

* That’s 403,167 zeros