{"id":11832,"date":"2011-10-29T10:57:23","date_gmt":"2011-10-29T14:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11832"},"modified":"2011-10-29T10:57:23","modified_gmt":"2011-10-29T14:57:23","slug":"more-on-malthus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/10\/29\/more-on-malthus\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Malthus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/timharford.com\/2011\/10\/malthuss-ghost-and-baby-number-7bn\/?utm_source=dlvr.it&#038;utm_medium=twitter\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Harford<\/a> poses and answers some common questions about the much-talked-about 7-billionth birth:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>There will be 7bn of us come Halloween? You\u2019re kidding.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Someone at the UNPFA has a sense of humour, it seems. This is a terrifying prospect to some and cheery for others, while most of us find it irrelevant. Halloween seems appropriate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This is a statistical projection, and statistical projections don\u2019t have a sense of humour.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>But they do have margins of error. The UNPFA doesn\u2019t even know whether the seven billionth person will be born in 2011. Even the UK is currently relying on 10-year old census data. There are places in the world where the data are decades old and we\u2019re just guessing at the population. Still, such celebrations &mdash; if they are celebrations &mdash; do pass the time.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p><strong>So Malthus was wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Even Robert Malthus realised that there was such a thing as birth control. His more excitable successors, such as Paul Ehrlich, author in 1968 of <em>The Population Bomb<\/em>, have been fairly thoroughly rebutted by subsequent events. Dan Gardner, author of the fascinating <em>Future Babble<\/em>, summarises Ehrlich\u2019s three scenarios for the 1980s as \u201ceverybody dies\u201d (starvation-triggered nuclear war), \u201cevery third human dies\u201d (starvation-triggered virus) and in the optimistic scenario \u201ca billion people still die of starvation\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Harford poses and answers some common questions about the much-talked-about 7-billionth birth: There will be 7bn of us come Halloween? You\u2019re kidding. Someone at the UNPFA has a sense of humour, it seems. This is a terrifying prospect to some and cheery for others, while most of us find it irrelevant. Halloween seems appropriate. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,7,28],"tags":[308,213,290,691],"class_list":["post-11832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-economics","category-history","category-media","tag-malthusianism","tag-newspapers","tag-statistics","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-34Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11833,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11832\/revisions\/11833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}