There is nothing beyond death. Birth is very difficult. During the 200,000 years of human history, an estimated 109 billion people died, compared to the 8 billion living today. Thus, about 7% of the people who have ever lived are now alive. But they will also die: I live here.
The chart below suggests that the population was stable until about 2000 BCE. From 2000 BCE, the population increased slowly until around the 17th century, there were some disasters like the Black Death of the 14th century, which probably killed one third of the European population. Then, suddenly, the population exploded from the 18th and 19th centuries onwards (you can play with the graph on the Our World in Data website). In 1820, life expectancy at birth was 36 years in Western Europe and Japan; its average was only 24 worldwide, the same level that existed everywhere on Earth around the year 1000. In the United Kingdom, it was 40 years in 1820, and has grown to 77 in 1999.
The Industrial Revolution, which greatly increased income (GDP per capita), played a role in supporting and fueling population growth. As Angus Madison noted, “there has been significant convergence over time and between regions, in patterns of development in per capita income and life expectancy. [expectancy].” (See Angus Maddison, The World EconomyOrganization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2003, 2006.)
We’ve met Angus Maddison before when we looked at his estimates of GDP per capita from year 1 and its dramatic upward trend during the Industrial Revolution. Increasing GDP per capita requires that gross domestic product (GDP) increase more than the population. This growth trend, which was unprecedented in the Netherlands and the UK, requires institutions that do not stifle free markets and entrepreneurship. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, the constant fear of starvation for the common people was eliminated in countries that had embraced the idea of the Industrial Revolution. Many countries that had a slow industrial revolution were able to partially benefit from each other through trade.
Note that the Industrial Revolution was not just about industry, even if the production of common goods for common people, such as clothing and everyday items and tools, was an important step and a great achievement. But it was preceded and accompanied by the financial, not to mention commercial, reforms of previous centuries (even if they were often blocked by political rulers). Without this institutional background, widespread technological progress is impossible. The whole industrial civilization was born and led to great development in agriculture and intangible services as well. Today, in America, two-thirds of consumer spending goes to services—such as education, health, housing, home delivery, and the like—instead of food and hard goods. Consumers are now looking for services mainly because food and manufactured gadgets are less expensive.
As my post “The Importance of Industrial Revolution” also showed, some industrial revolutions started but failed, and some countries never came close. For us in the West (and a few Asian countries), the future depends on our ability to strengthen the institutions that allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen. Ortega y Gasset warned us that civilization—industrial civilization—is not guaranteed against political stupidity.
Another study relates to the environmental scare of the 1960s and 1970s in the form of the “human bomb,” the subject of a book by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Environmentalists are advocating a big government dirigisme to control the population and save humanity. In 1965, the The New Republic declared that “the world’s population has outgrown the supply of food,” that “famine has begun,” and that global hunger would be “the single most important reality of the last third of the 20th century.” In fact, the last third of the 20th century brought about a historic decline in world poverty. “Freedom to breed is untenable,” ecologist and microbiologist Garrett Hardin said. Economist Julian Simon argued with Ehrlich that man was “the main source,” the title of his 1981 book: too many people in our world are not the problem but, on the contrary, they bring more participants to the solution of humanity’s problems—besides the individual. a life worth living. Simon made and won a famous bet with Ehrlich about resource exhaustion. The story is told by Paul Sabin The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (2013); if you don’t have time to read the whole book, you might like my short review on Law and Freedom.
We may reframe this problem in terms of what is called “management ability.” National Geographic explains that
the type of population in a particular area. The size of a species is limited by environmental factors such as adequate food, habitat, water, and mates. If these needs are not met, the population will decline until the resource returns.
Applied to Homo Sapiens, this Malthusian rhetoric ignores the important fact that humans want more than “enough food, shelter, water, and mates,” and are indeed capable, with the right institutions, of getting more. I Encyclopedia Britannica adds “public needs” to capacity-carrying cases, although the word “needs” seems to limit the scope of voluntary public cooperation:
carrying capacitythe average population density or population size of a species at which its numbers tend to increase and further its numbers tend to decrease due to resource scarcity. Carrying capacity is different for each species in an area due to the food, habitat, and social needs of that species.
Economics helps us understand how people living now will comprise 7 percent of all living in 200,000 years. It also enables us to take a close look at the fears of environmentalists and other social issues.
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