Why Overpopulation Fears Are Irrational

0:01 right now there are more than 8 billion people living on planet Earth billions is this a problem do we already have too many people according to a recent un report on the state of global population the most commonly held view across eight countries was yes global population is too high it's too damn High the question I have is too high compared to to what and why top among

0:33 people's concerns and maybe your own as well were economic and environmental impacts simply put people are worried that we won't have enough food and other resources to provide a good life for every person on this planet and even if we can we'll burn up the planet trying to do so it's no wonder then that a separate equally massive 10 Nation study found that half of 16 to 25y olds believe that humanity is doomed I'm here because I don't have a future

1:02 to show the impact that the climate change is having on our kids we're taking away their future how dare you with nearly 40% saying that this fear has made them reluctant to have kids themselves the best thing I can do for the environment is not to have any children they will not have children or have any more children because of climate change is Humanity headed towards Extinction is time really running out are we at the Tipping Point

1:29 for civilization a we seem to be hurtling off a cliff edge of climate Devastation as it turns out none of these worries are remotely new in fact the nickname we've given these sorts of concerns malthusian dates back over 220 years W in 1798 English cleric and Scholar Thomas mathus wrote the now famous and Infamous book an essay on the principle of population mathus predicted that population growth in England if it continued its rapid descent could not be

2:01 sustained because the ability to produce food and supplies would not keep up famine disease and War would surely follow to better understand where mathus was coming from let's jump in a data time machine and zoom back to England of the 16 and 1700s the country's population had doubled from around 4 million people in 1600 to over 8 million in 1798 and most of that growth had happened in the last 50 years mathus was

2:31 living through a population explosion so how did Mr mathus do did his hypothesis survive the test of time well this one is easy folks because no not by a long shot the population of England has increased Eightfold from around 8 million to over 67 million since Mathes made his prediction and so has the population of Earth itself from 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today

3:05 we can forgive Thomas mathus for failing to predict the enormous technological Transformations that made this population boom possible from Machinery to Modern fertilizers we've radically increased how much food we can produce On Any Given acre of land and we have ways of transporting it around the globe that were utterly inconceivable in 1800 science is never settled and especially so-called social science but this malthusian myth is as close to an open

3:35 and shut case as we've ever had open and shut case Johnson what's much harder to understand is how any modern malthusianism survives the empirical facts today how do people like Paul Erick author of the population bomb in 1968 or Dennis Meadows co-author of the limits to growth in 1972 stand by their failed itions with a straight face sometime in the next 15 years the end will come by the end I

4:05 mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support Humanity why did ERI become a fixture of late night TV for decades you have to get the death rate and birth rate imbalance and there's only two ways to do it one is to bring the birth rate down the other is to push the death rate up that over population remains a popular fear today is first a failure of our culture to reflect real ity and of

4:30 our education systems to teach us the truth you can't handle the truth the fear of Doom is rooted deeply in our human nature the inescapable fact that each and every one of us must confront our own mortality famed psychologist Sigman Freud called this pensent for death and self-destruction Thanatos after the Greek mythological personification of death and yes the Avengers do have Freud to thank for inspiring their best cinematic villain

5:01 this universe is finite its resource is finite if life is left unchecked life will cease to exist speaking of the movies disaster director Roland Emerich has $4 billion in box office receipts as proof of this Freudian fear and I count myself among the movie goers that loves a great disaster flick but maybe we shouldn't be making our life decisions based on the plot of moonfall the Moon falling onto Earth so let's dig into the facts so we can

5:32 defeat this fear together first of course the population of Earth has exploded in the past 200 years from under 1 billion to over 8 billion incredible but how are these 8 billion people living you might wonder are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer nope not at all the fact is as our population has exploded so has just about every everyone's material well-being all of human history up until

6:03 the time of Thomas mathus and the enlightenment powered miracle that followed was marked by horrible infant mortality estimates put the average at 49% across all of pre-industrial society then boom boom boom our Science and Tech powerered population boom also led to the absolute collapse of child mortality which accelerates the boom itself boom boom boom boom we're done but this change is even more recent than you

6:33 might think did you know that one in four children born on Earth in 1950 didn't see their 15th birthday one in four today that number is less than 5 in 100 your chances of seeing adulthood today are in almost A+ grade of 96% uh what's the old 96 Earth how did that happen again because Maus was wrong wrong again people aren't net consumers we're

7:05 creators we're innovators we use our big brains to constantly invent new ways of doing more with less check out the big brain on bread Economist Julian Simon blew up the population bomb way back in 1981 noting that human Ingenuity is the ultimate resource and the reason why as his original cover noted natural resources and energy are getting less scarce pollution has been decreasing the

7:36 world's food supply improving population growth it turns out has long-term benefits when people are creators we're producing more food on less land with fewer people farming than ever before literally half of humanity farmed in Math's time less than 2% of Earth does today and they feed all of us so thank you Farmers we need each of you now more than

8:08 ever famines especially due to weather and natural causes which have plagued all of human history are all but extinct today the famines that have occurred in the past 50 years such as in maest China and communist North Korea are entirely the product of topdown totalitarian policy failures they are acts of terrible men not God or Mother Nature why is everyone so stupid why aren't more people intelligent right me

8:39 obviously people not dying is a major reason for explosive population growth but how well are we living well consider this what today is called a middle class life would be experienced as the life of kings and queens in malus's time no scratch that today's middle class lifestyle would be the Envy of kings and queens from 200 years ago and roughly half of planet Earth's population today lives a middle class life half 4 billion

9:12 people live in homes with food clean water Plumbing electricity Heating and Cooling washing machines TVs mobile phones internet access automobiles etc etc think about that today we have four times as many people as Earth's entire population in 1800 living a life wildly better than Thomas Maus could have ever possibly imagined over three billion of them are active Facebook users three

9:45 billion look life on Earth isn't perfect and far too many people still go without and too many people spend too much time on social media but it's telling that among the biggest problems impacting many people today and they are very real are the products of our plenty like diabetes digital media overdosing and the like smack them smack them meanwhile people living in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day has fallen

10:16 to less than 9% of the global population and continues to fall that's down from over 35% in 1990 we are on a path to erasing absolute poverty from the face of the Earth by hunter gatherer standards one could say we already have all of this data is public and easily available with simple web searches or you can take a look at early pictures of say New York and compare them to pictures of Bombay

10:46 India the latter makes the former look like a backwards hellscape almost everything we have and take for granite today looks like magic to people not that long ago we live in in an amazing amazing world and it's wasted on the on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots even our serly confused and too often corrupt Global Elite can't help but recognize that the malthusians are wrong in that un report showing that

11:17 people around the world are worried that the population is too high the authors wisely note there is ample evidence from history that the fears stirred by this false narrative lead to Horrors and inhumanity what else is lost with the ringing alarm of too many the real and Powerful story of progress and the lessons of that progress we start to see human survival as a problem rather than an achievement and we Retreat to ancient divisions US versus them instead of

11:49 seeking common ground and solutions through solidarity and Innovation for the common good finding a un report to be insightful and even inspiring ing is shall we say a pleasant and unexpected surprise say what but there you have it our world is filled with wonders when you recognize that our creativity is the ultimate resource it changes the way you think about having kids and the kind of contribution that really is maybe your

12:19 son or daughter will discover the cure for cancer yes we create lots of trash but we're also able to turn yesterday's trash into tomorrow's treasure consider that in 1859 Edwin Drake dug the first crude oil well in Pennsylvania to distill the oil for carine lamps he and others who followed him including John D rockefeller's Standard Oil dumped the remaining byproducts of that distilling process out as trash into the rivers including a then useless liquid called gasoline 30

12:51 years later with the invention of the automobile that River polluting trash suddenly turned into a treasure that powers our modern world and our rivers are cleaner as a result human beings are as Julian Simon said the ultimate resource because of our incredible creativity it's how we've transformed a wild inhospitable world into one where billions of people flourish in even the harshest conditions we've built everything from medieval cities thriving 20 ft below sea level to water park

13:23 vacation spots in the blistering desert if you've got a problem humans can solve it the hook why my DJ this is who and what we are not the cringe but creators we are creators we aren't Gods but we are built in the image of one so embrace your nature as a creative being by creating more of us have kids get married and have kids continue your family and

13:53 Humanity's incredible implausibly triumphant story that is the message I have for you and anyone else who will listen a New Horizon is Dawning and our greatest challenge is no longer Lie from without but from [Music] within