There is nothing more mundane than dying. Being born is even more difficult. In the 200,000-year history of humankind, Estimation 109 billion people have died, while only 8 billion people are alive today, meaning that about 7% of the people who have ever lived are alive today. But they will all eventually die. That’s life.
The graph below shows that human population was stable until about 2000 BC. From 2000 BC to about the 17th century, population slowly increased, but along the way, there were catastrophes such as the Black Death in the 14th century, which is said to have killed a third of the European population. Then, unexpectedly, there was a population explosion from the 18th and 19th centuries (graph below). Our World in Data websiteIn 1820, life expectancy in Western Europe and Japan was 36 years, while in other parts of the world it was only 24 years, the same level as everywhere else on Earth around the year 1000. In Britain, life expectancy rose from 40 years in 1820 to 77 years by 1999.
of Industrial RevolutionThis policy, which greatly increased incomes (GDP per capita), served to support and promote the population explosion. As Angus Maddison has noted, “the patterns of improvement in income per capita and life expectancy (life expectancy) have been remarkably consistent over time and across regions.” (Angus Maddison, Global EconomyOrganisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2003, 2006.
When I met Angus Maddison, GDP per capita from the first year and the astonishing upward trend during the industrial revolutionIncreasing GDP per capita requires that total product (GDP) outpace population growth. This growth, which never happened until the Netherlands and Britain, requires institutions that do not stifle free markets and entrepreneurship. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the average person The constant threat of hunger This system was abandoned in countries that rode the industrial revolution. Many countries that were weaker industrialists were able to benefit partially from the industrial revolutions of other countries through trade.
Keep in mind that the Industrial Revolution was not just about factories, even though the mass production of consumer goods for ordinary people, such as clothes, household items, and tools, was an important step and a major achievement. But before that, and in parallel with it, Financial RevolutionAs mentioned above Centuries of commerce (Even if it is often suppressed by political rulers). Without this institutional background, widespread technological progress could not have occurred. An entire industrial civilization was born, bringing with it major advances in agriculture and intangible services. Today in the United States, two-thirds of consumer spending is spent on services such as education, health, housing, and home delivery, rather than on food or hard items. Consumers now primarily want services because the cost of food and industrial goods is so low.
My post “The Significance of a Failed Industrial RevolutionAs the book points out, industrial revolutions began but failed, and in some countries nothing even remotely similar to an industrial revolution ever happened. For us in the West (and some in Asia), our future depends on our ability to strengthen the institutions that made the industrial revolution possible. Ortega y Gasset Civilization, he warned, namely industrial civilization, was no guarantee of immunity from political folly.
Another lesson relates to the environmental crises of the 1960s and 1970s. “The Population Bomb” was the title of a book by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Environmentalists advocated massive statism to control population and save humanity. In 1965, New Republic Erlich declared that “world population has outpaced food supply,” “famine has begun,” and that “the most important fact of the last third of the 20th century is world hunger.” In fact, the last third of the 20th century brought about a historic decline in world poverty. “Reproductive freedom is unacceptable,” declared ecologist and microbiologist Garrett Hardin. Economist Julian Simon countered Erlich by saying that humans are the “ultimate resource,” the title of his 1981 book. There is nothing wrong with having more people on earth, but rather more people contributing to solving the human problem. Other than that each individual is worth living. Simon made a famous bet with Erlich about resource depletion and won. The story is told in Paul Sabin’s The Evolution of Man. The Gamble: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Bet on the Future of the Planet (2013); if you don’t have time to read the whole book, My Short Review of Law and Liberty.
This issue may be restated in terms of what is called “carrying capacity.” National Geographic Define it as
The average number of individuals of a species in a particular habitat. A species’ population is limited by environmental factors such as enough food, shelter, water, and mates. If these needs are not met, the population will decline until resources can recover.
Applying this Malthusian approach to Homo sapiens ignores the important fact that humans want more than “enough food, shelter, water, and mates” and that, with the right institutions, they can obtain much more. Encyclopedia Britannica It adds “social requirements” to the carrying capacity condition, but the term “requirements” seems to limit the scope of voluntary social cooperation.
Capacitythe average population density or population size of a species, below which the population tends to increase and above which the population tends to decrease due to lack of resources. Carrying capacity varies for different species within a habitat depending on the specific food, shelter, and social requirements of that species.
Economics helps us understand how humans living today came to represent 7% of all humans alive in the last 200,000 years, and it also puts the fears of environmentalists and other social problems in perspective.
