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Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead
Ciara Curtin, Scientific American
Booming population growth among the living, according to one rumor, outpaces the dead
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The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.
…To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.-his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. “[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people,” says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
(1 March 2007)
The Motherhood Experiment
Sharon Lerner, The New York Times
To the dismay of pundits and politicians alike, women in industrialized countries and elsewhere have been bearing fewer and fewer children. More than 90 states have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, and the trend, which began in the early 1960s, is already leading to fewer workers, graying populations and dire predictions about vanishing peoples.
While scholars blame several phenomena, including greater access to birth control, later marriage and a drop in what one researcher calls “hopefulness about the future,” many researchers agree that at least part of the problem is due to the particular burdens women face in the work force.
If becoming a mother requires a woman to take a huge financial and professional hit, the thinking goes, she will be far less likely do it.
(4 Mar 2007)
DL comments: “Far too many countries think the “population crisis” is the upcoming reduction in the number of citizens. A drop in “hopefulness about the future” is cited as one cause. What do those mothers know that all those smart population experts don’t?”
Medical, social problems cause of high death rate – Putin
RIA Novosti
Russia’s high death rate is a social problem, the country’s president said Wednesday.
Addressing a meeting of the council overseeing priority national projects and demographic policy, Vladimir Putin said: “This country loses over 700,000 people annually. Losing people of working age – men account for 80% of these – remains a tough problem,” he said.
Although cardiovascular diseases and such “unnatural factors” as drug and alcohol abuse are major causes, life safety problems also persist, the Russian leader said.
In his annual address to the nation in May, President Vladimir Putin pledged financial incentives to women with larger families. As a result, Russia’s parliament passed a maternity incentive bill in December 2006 to provide payouts to women who give birth to more than one child.
Russia is suffering a severe demographic crisis. Its population has been in steady decline, with the United Nations predicting that it may fall by a further one-third from today’s 142 million by the middle of the century.
According to official statistics, there are currently more than 364,000 people in Russia, including over 2,290 children, registered with HIV. The Russian government increased spending on HIV control measures 20-fold last year.
(7 March 2007)
Douglas Low of ODAC comments:
Most environmentalists / sustainability advocates see population falling/stabilising not so much as a good thing but essential. Population is falling throughout Europe, and Russia, but most politicians and especially economists see it as bad.
