So Why Is Manhattan Much Richer than Malawi?

Don Boudreaux.

Reporting on Nigeria’s growing population, Elisabeth Rosenthal uncritically advances the popular narrative that large populations hamper economic development (“Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population,” April 15).  She supports her point with demographer Peter Ogunjuyigbe’s declaration that “If you don’t take care of population, schools can’t cope, hospitals can’t cope, there’s not enough housing – there’s nothing you can do to have economic development.”

Not so.

Fifty countries today have population densities higher than that of Nigeria.*  Forty-two (or 84 percent) of these have per-capita incomes higher than that of Nigeria – and in many cases multiple times higher.  South Korea, for example, has three times as many people per square mile as does Nigeria, yet South Korea’s per-capita income is more than ten times higher than Nigeria’s.**

Nor does rapid growth of population necessarily prevent rapid growth of the economy.  Over the past 150 years, California has had an average annual population growth rate of about 3.1 percent.  (In some periods it’s been much higher, such as in the 1920s when California’s population grew at an average annual rate of 5.2 percent.)***  Only in the past 40 years has California’s annual population growth rate fallen below Nigeria’s current annual population growth rate of about 2.27 percent.****  Yet, obviously, this hefty population growth can hardly be said to have been a drag on California’s economy.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030

* Figures gotten here.  (I count Taiwan as a sovereign nation.)

** Calculated from the CIA World Factbook

*** All calculated, solving for r, using the formula PopX = PopY (1 + r) “to the”n  — where “r” is the annual rate of population growth; “PopX” is population in the latter year; “PopY” is population in the earlier year; and “n” is number of years.

I got figures on California’s population here.

**** I use the U.N. figure for the years 2005-2010 (found in the left-hand column).

Temperatura, energía, población mundial y alarmismo. Antón Uriarte

Leo en el Guardian esta relamida frase : "Nos enfrentamos a desafíos de épicas proporciones: calentamiento global, cortes de energía, crecimiento de poblaciones"

Desde hace unos doce o trece años la temperatura media global no sube. La revolución del shale gas y el shale oil aumenta espectacularmente el suministro mundial de energía fósil, la población mundial frena su crecimiento y en muchas zonas, por ejemplo en Rusia – el país más extenso del planeta– es el decrecimiento de la población el problema.

Pero en los medios de comunicación suenan todavía estos timbres de alarma de vez en cuando. A destiempo y sin razón. Por inercia.

ref.

Design and invention can power us out of recession | James Dyson | The Guardian

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Population Decline in Russia

Mapa Lingüístico de la Península en Tiempo Real. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Cosas interesantes que veo (de verdad que sin ningún tipo de comentario editorial, es lo que me llama la atención):

1) La gran concentración metropolitana de Madrid.
2) Como se pueden seguir las carreteras radiales sin ningún problema.
3) La población, en las costas. Aragón y Castilla, mucho más vacias.
4) En Cataluña, el área de Barcelona está muy mezclada, fuera el catalán predomina mucho más.
5) En la Comunidad Valenciana predomina el castellano, excepto en el norte de Castellón.
6) Poco peso del gallego (aunque con el esquema de colores y sin los datos exactos es difícil de precisar).
7) El este de Portugal está vacío.


Leer entrada completa en Nada es Gratis.


Más en Big Thing.

How poverty has tracked global population. Felix Salmon

The world officially hit 7 billion people today, and so to celebrate I decided to take a look at what’s happened to poverty in the world as its population has increased — many, many thanks to Nick Rizzo and to Laurence Chandy and Homi Kharas at Brookings, two Englishmen who provided him with unpublished data and were extremely generous with their time.

The big picture can be seen in the chart at left: the number of poor people hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as the number of people. And indeed over the past 24 years, as the world’s population increased by 40% from 5 billion to 7 billion, the total number of people living in poverty has actually gone down. (One small note I should make about these charts: the dollar-a-day figures from 1987 onwards actually measure the population living on less than $1.25 a day, so a jump in the absolute-poverty numbers between 1974 and 1987 is partially a function of the fact that we’re raising the bar from $1 to $1.25.)

In fact, there’s pretty much the same number of people living in absolute poverty today — about 890 million, or 12.7% of the global population — as there were all the way back in 1804, when the world’s population hit 1 billion and 84% of them were living in absolute poverty.

Indeed, back in 1804, only 5% of the world was living on more than $2 a day. (All these numbers, of course, are real, and adjusted for purchasing power.) Today, that number is 4.7 billion, or 67% of the world’s population. The number of people in the world living out of poverty has been growing faster than the world’s population as a whole for pretty much all of recorded history.

And the “global middle” — people living on somewhere between $10 and $100 per day — is growing particularly fast. It was 1.14 billion in 1987; it’s 1.96 billion today. That’s an increase of 72%, even as the population of the world as a whole has gone up by just 40%.

Read full in Reuters.

El error Malthus. Jorge Alcalde

En primer lugar, hay que advertir que, a pesar del ruido causado por la ciudadana 7.000 millones, el ritmo de crecimiento poblacional está descendiendo. Mientras se tardó 14 años (1960-74) en crecer un tercio (de los 3.000 a los 4.000 millones), han hecho falta 21 (1990-2011) para el siguiente cambio de tercio: de los 5.000 a los 7.000 millones. De hecho, los expertos consideran que nos acercamos al escenario de menor fertilidad de la historia y que, una vez alcanzados los 8.000 millones de habitantes, la población se estabilizará o llegará incluso a declinar.

En segundo lugar, es evidente que ni Malthus ni sus seguidores tuvieron la menor confianza en el ingenio humano. Al contrario de lo que pensaban, la mejora de las tecnologías, el avance de las ciencias, la evolución de nuevas labores agrícolas, el aumento del uso de fertilizantes y plaguicidas y la adaptación/globalización de las costumbres alimenticias ha premitido que el stock de alimentos no haya dejado de crecer en paralelo al aumento de los seres humanos alimentados.

Los datos hablan por sí solos. En los últimos 21 años, mientras la población creció un 40 por 100, el porcentaje de individuos que viven en la pobreza extrema no ha hecho más que descender. De hecho, hoy hay prácticamente el mismo número de seres humanos bajo ese umbral (es decir, que viven con menos de 1,25 dólares al día) que el que había en 1804: 890 millones de ciudadanos sobreviven en esas dramáticas condiciones. La cifra, que no deja de ser espeluznante, es idéntica a la de principios del siglo XIX, pero entonces la población humana era apenas superior a los 1.000 millones.

Es decir, en 200 años, el porcentaje de población sumamente pobre ha pasado del 80 al 12,7 por 100.

Evidentemente, los datos no son para alegrarse. Todavía hay demasiados seres humanos padeciendo la escasez más absoluta de recursos básicos. Pero nadie podrá negar que –si un titular debe extraerse de la incontestable realidad estadística– el mundo es hoy mejor que hace un siglo, y que, en contra de las previsiones agoreras, el aumento de la población no ha traído más pobreza, hambre y enfermedad, sino todo lo contrario.

A algunos esto les parece una amenaza y prefieren pensar que el avance de los países más pobres del planeta es insostenible. Creen que debe limitarse su crecimiento para proteger el medioambiente, el clima, los recursos. Vuelven a pensar, como Malthus, que aquellos que osan crecer, que aquellos que aspiran a ser tan ricos como la vieja Europa, tendrán tarde o temprano su castigo.

Los que creemos en el ingenio humano y en el poder regulador de la ciencia y la tecnología sabemos que también ellos se equivocarán. 

Leer completo en Libertad Digital.

Coping with only six billion. Matt Ridley

The peak is in sight. Even as the population passes seven billion, the growth rate of the world population has halved since the 1960s. The United Nations Population Division issues high, medium and low forecasts. Inevitably the high one (fifteen billion people by 2100) gets more attention than the low one (six billion and falling). But given that the forecasts have generally proved too high for the past few decades, let us imagine for a moment what might happen if that proves true again.

Africa is currently the continent with the highest birth rates, but it also has the fastest economic growth. The past decade has seen Asian-tiger-style growth all across Africa. HIV is in retreat, malaria in decline. When child mortality fell and economic growth boomed like this in Europe, Latin America and Asia, the result was a rapid fall in the birth rate. For fertility to fall, contraception provides the means, but economic growth and public health provide the motive. So the current slow decline in Africa’s birth rate may turn into a plummet.

If that happens, the low UN estimate could prove more accurate with the world population peaking a little above eight billion and falling to a billion less than today by the end of the century.

Imagine too that agricultural productivity continues to rise. Abundant gas drives down fertiliser prices. Demand from China ensures that new varieties of seeds, better storage and cheap fertiliser reach more African farmers. Perhaps even EU tariff barriers against African produce are lifted and America’s crazy policy of diverting food into motor fuel is reversed.


Read full in The Rational Optimist blog.

Reactionary, nostalgic pessimists. Matt Ridley

There's a fine article at Spiked by Tim Black exposing what Robert* Malthus actually said. Malthus was a reactionary nostalgic pessimist who was not just wrong about population growth outstripping food supply. He was also wrong in his cynicism about helping the poor lest they breed more.

His subject was not so much the principle of population growth – this Malthus was happy to take for granted, hence the scant attention he actually paid to justifying it. Rather, his real purpose was the extent to which a supposed law of population would confound those writers like Godwin and Condorcet who advocated social transformation. The theory, the so-called science, was always subservient to Malthus’s main objective of justifying the social order as it is. As Malthus himself wrote: ‘The principal argument of this Essay only goes to prove the necessity of a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers.’ Malthus was not pessimistic about the chances of improving society because of his theory of population – that is the wrong way round. His wilful social pessimism, where misery was the lot of the majority, inspired his theory of population.

...The Essay is at the very least a striking attempt to smother society as it then was in amber, to fix it permanently in time. The forces that would revolutionise society, from the burgeoning industrial bourgeoisie to the incipient class consciousness of the proletariat, threaten Malthus’s world on either side. He wants to hold these social forces back, to paint them as tending against the natural order of things. This was what was always animating the essay, not some scholarly concern with population growth and agricultural productivity: a desire to render society, in all its vice and misery, as the product of the laws of nature. The Essay was a stunning work of reaction, a desperate rear-guard move from a man who, at some level, knew the tide of history was rushing against him. For there is nothing more desperate than blaming hunger and want on the excessive breeding of the ‘race of labourers’.

Read full in The Rational Optimist blog.

¿Motivo de alarma? La población mundial crece un 130% en sólo 50 años. Ángel Martín

La población mundial continúa creciendo, aunque cada vez a menor ritmo. Surgen las voces de alarma contra la supuesta sobrepoblación y falta de recursos del planeta. Estas advertencias, sin embargo, han fallado estrepitosamente en el pasado. ¿Acertarán ahora?

Este lunes, 31 de octubre de 2011, la población mundial alcanzará los 7.000 millones de personas. Así lo estiman las mediciones del departamento dedicado a estudiar la población de la ONU. En tan sólo 12 años el número de habitantes del planeta ha crecido en 1.000 millones, desde los 6.000. La mitad de esa cifra -3.000 millones- se alcanzó el 22 de abril de 1961, según una aplicación interactiva deThe Guardian.

Desde mitad de siglo XX hasta la actualidad, la población del globo se ha multiplicado por casi tres veces. La década de mayor crecimiento poblacional fue la de los 70 -con una tasa de más del 20%-, muy seguida de cerca por los años 60. Pero desde entonces el crecimiento ha sido cada vez menor y en la década del 2000 la tasa fue de aproximadamente el 13,3%. Así, se observa cómo las tasas de crecimiento se van desacelerando de forma notable.

Continuar leyendo en Libertad Digital.

From quantity to quality. Matt Ridley

This "demographic transition" to lower birth rates began in Western Europe in the 19th century and later spread to North America, then Latin America, Asia and now Africa. In 1955, the birth rates per woman in Yemen, Iran, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil and China were, respectively, 8.3, 7.0, 6.8, 6.5, 6.1 and 5.6. Today they are 5.1, 1.7, 2.7, 5.2, 1.8 and 1.7. Notice: The poorer a country has remained, the slower the fall.

Birth rates have gone down because of prosperity, not poverty. Everywhere it has occurred, it has followed a fall in child mortality and famine and an increase in income and education. The wider availability of contraception has been necessary, even vital, for this shift, but it has not been sufficient.

Read full in The Rational Optimist blog.

Bottom up beats top down at seven billion. Matt Ridley

Your population cover story makes a good case that public-sector experts effectively turned their backs on the issue following the intervention of an unusual mixture of conservatives and feminists at the Cairo conference in 1994. Was this silence entirely a bad thing? Do not underestimate the harm done by the coercion recommended in the 1970s by western intellectuals -- and implemented. Egged on by Western governments and pressure groups, coerced sterilisation became a pattern all across Asia in the 1970s. Chinese women were forcibly taken from their homes to be sterilised. Cheered on by Robert McNamara’s World Bank, Sanjay Gandhi ran a vast campaign of rewards and coercion to force 8 million poor Indians to accept vasectomies. Yet we now know that bottom-up forces, chiefly public health improvements and economic growth, generally reduce birth rates even faster than top-down coercion (which bodes well for Africa with its recent rapid economic growth). The availability of contraception is necessary but not sufficient. Maybe the inattention of the international quangocracy is not always a bad thing.

Read full in The Rational Optimist blog.

The genetics of bigger chickens. Matt Ridley

Of all the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in the world, the most abundant species is probably the chicken. At any one time, approximately 20 billion cocks and hens are alive on the planet (though never for long).

Chickens owe this abundance, of course, to their place on our table. About 90 million tons of chicken meat are consumed every year, plus 67 million tons of eggs, compared with 110 million tons of pork and 67 million tons of beef. Between 1970 and 2005, world production of poultry meat more than quadrupled.

The red jungle fowl was domesticated around 4,000 years ago in India, where it still calls cock-a-doodle-doo in tiger-infested forests. But the triumph of the chicken is relatively recent. Until a couple of decades ago, beef and pork outweighed poultry in the average American diet. Fifty years ago, chicken was a scarce delicacy in many European countries.

What accounts for the rise of cheap chicken? First, motorized transport led to the growth of the intensive broiler industry, in which food is brought to the birds rather than vice versa. Second, selective breeding led to birds that were more efficient at converting grain into meat. Remarkably, this genetic improvement even now shows no sign of tailing off.

Read full post in The Rational Optimist blog.

The World is UNDERpopulated

Vía Cafe Hayek.

While many myths compete with “the-world-is-over-populated-with-humans” myth for the honor of being the myth with least empirical and theoretical support, no myth surpasses the over-population myth in groundlessness and, really, absurdity pregnant with totalitarian impulses.  I like the take of the Boston Globe‘s Jeff Jacoby:

For more than 200 years the population alarmists have been predicting the worst, and for more than 200 years their predictions have failed to come true. As the number of men, women, and children in the world has skyrocketed - from fewer than 1 billion when Malthus lived to nearly 7 billion today - so has the average standard of living. Poverty, disease, and hunger have not been eradicated, of course, and there are many people in dire need of help. But on the whole human beings are living longer, healthier, cleaner, richer, better-educated, more productive, and more comfortable lives than ever before.

When human beings proliferate, the result isn’t less of everything to go around. The planetdoesn’ t run out of food and fuel, minerals, and metals. On the contrary, most resources have grown cheaper and more abundant over the past couple centuries - in tandem with rising population.The explanation is no mystery. Yes, more babies mean more mouths and therefore more consumption. But more babies also mean more minds and arms and spines - and therefore more new ideas, more effort, more creativity, more initiative, more enterprise. “Human beings do not just consume, they also produce,’’ writes George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan. “The world economy is not like a party where everyone splits a birthday cake; it is more like a potluck where everyone brings a dish.’’

And see here just how out of touch with reality is the myth of over-population.  (HT Chris Meisenzahl).