More Procrastination

Demographers (at the INED, in France) estimate that the world population of living humans reached six and a half billion December 19, 2005, give or take a couple of years. Fifty years ago, when we were only two point seven billion, they (demographers) predicted we would be 6.5 billion in 2005. Well done, humans! Rarely are long-range targets and plans achieved, and this, involving billions of people over a span of fifty years! We also managed to heat the planet to its highest temperatures known or estimable over the past 650,000 years. We are unstoppable, the sky is the limit! Or maybe not, but that is what we appear to assume, by and large.

In a recent article, Joel Cohen, of Columbia University and Rockfeller University, pointed out three or five remarkable demographic phenomena of our times (for those of us born before about 1960).

• doubling of world population during one's lifetime: no-one born before about 1930 witnessed doubling of the world population, whereas anyone over 45 today lived in a world of only three billion in 1960 and over twice that number today.
  
• fastest population growth ever: between 1965 and 1970, population grew at 2.1 per cent per year. Such a rate was never achieved prior to the XXth century, and has since dropped substantially.
  
• voluntary reduction of population growth, from the 2.1 % p.a. noted above to the current 1.1-1.2 %. This necessarily includes the "Family Planning" effect in China, which may have debatable "voluntariness", but also include a lot of developed, European countries where the reduction has been voluntary.
  
• More mature population: Globally, the number of persons aged 60 years or overis expected almost to triple, increasing from 672 million in 2005 to nearly 1.9 billion by 2050...In developed countries, 20 per cent of today’s population is aged 60 years or over, and by 2050 that proportion is projected to be 32 per cent. The elderly population in developed countries has already surpassed the number of children (persons aged 0-14), and by 2050 there will be 2 elderly persons for every child. [source U.N. poster]
  
• Malthus vindicated: in 1950, one third of the population was in "rich" countries, but from 2005 to 2050 95% of population growth will occur in "poor" countries, raising their populations to six times that of "rich" countries. Nine countries accounting for over half the expected growth are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia, China, and the U.S.A. (due to immigration).
  

To this we should add the point made by Richard Freeman, Director of Labor Studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Herbert Ascherman Professor in Economics at Harvard University:

In 1980, the global workforce consisted of workers in the advanced countries, parts of Africa and most of Latin America. Approximately 960 million persons worked in these economies.

Population growth — largely in poorer countries — increased the number employed in these economies to about 1.46 billion workers by 2000.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, workers from China, India and the former Soviet bloc entered the global labor pool. Of course, these workers had existed before then. The difference, though, was that their economies suddenly joined the global system of production and consumption.

In 2000, those countries contributed 1.47 billion workers to the global labor pool — effectively doubling the size of the world's now connected workforce. read more