The Global Population

The Global Population

Population growth is not something that gets nearly the face time in the media as it should. There are certain countries on this planet that are growing faster than there is land to put them. Anyone who studied the world population growth over the past two centuries is very aware of the severity of the situation. The global population reached one billion in 1804. 123 years later in 1927, it passed two billion. Sixty years later, in 1987, the world population was five billion, and 12 years later, it went well past 6 billion. Small wonder that many are concerned about what this bodes for our future. Due to the momentum represented by steeply pyramidal age distributions, population growth surely will continue for one to several generations. http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html

The global population growth rate has declined significantly from its 1970s number. Current estimates anticipate a continued decline to about 0.5 percent in 2050. This means a doubling time of 140 years, a rate that has raised concern about how the world will cope with 18 billion people in 2190. It is in the less developed countries that the continued growth in population will occur in the twenty-first century. Even though mortality is much higher in less developed countries (e.g., life expectancy at birth in 2000 was 75 years in the more developed countries and 62 to 64 years in the less developed countries), fertility somehow remains even higher, thus accounting for relatively high growth in the third world. However, projections are not guarantees. http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Population-Growth.html

Population may grow more slowly if, optimistically, fertility declines more quickly than experts expect (e.g., between just 1965 and 1987 the average number of children born to Thai women dropped from 6.3 to 2.2) or, pessimistically, if mortality increases, especially in light of the persistence of HIV/AIDS pandemic and other communicable diseases. http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Population-Growth.html

Population growth theory has been around for ages, first appearing in ancient Greece. The Englishman Thomas Malthus is thought to be the pioneering theorist of the modern age. Malthus formulated a "principle of population" that held that unchecked population grows more quickly than the means of subsistence (food and resources) to sustain it. Population will be controlled either by preventive checks (lowering the number of births, particularly by postponement of marriage age) or by positive checks (increasing deaths as a result of famines, plagues, natural disasters, war). Given a morally based preference for preventive checks, later followers of Malthus (neo-Malthusians) have supported family planning and contraception even though Malthus himself felt that contraception was not an acceptable answer. Other theorists have focused on the effects of rapid population growth: war, violence, and environmental degradation. http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Population-Growth.html

Karl Marx's had a different view. Marx disagreed with the idea of a universal principle of population that applied to all societies. Marx thought population growth depended upon the economic base of society, not basis of its means. There for a capitalist society is characterized by its own population principle, which Marx called the "law of relative population surplus." Marx argued that capitalism creates overpopulation (i.e., a surplus of people relative to jobs), leading to increased unemployment, cheap labor, and poverty. Capitalism also requires unemployment in order to ensure a docile, low-paid class of laborers. Marx believed that overpopulation would not occur in post capitalist, communist society.

http://www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Population-Growth.html

Somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, demographic transition theory became the dominant theory of population growth. Based on trends in Western European societies, it argues that populations go through three stages in their transition to a modern pattern. The first stage is "pre transition" and is characterized by low or no growth, and high fertility is counterbalanced by high mortality. The second stage is "transition", in which mortality rates slowly begin to decline, and the population grows at a rapid pace. Near the end of this stage, fertility has begun to decline as well. However, because the mortality decline had a head start, the death rate remains lower than the birth rate, and the population continues to experience a high rate of growth. The final stage is "post transition", where the decline of fertility and mortality rates is complete, producing once again a no-growth situation. The theory of demographic transition explains the three stages in terms of economic development, namely industrialization and urbanization.

The twentieth century witnessed rapid urbanization of the world's population. The global urban population increased from a mere 13 per cent in 1900 to 29 per cent in 1950 and, according to the 2005 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, reached 49 per cent in 2005. Since the world is projected to continue to urbanize, 60 per cent of the global population is expected to live in cities by 2030. The rising numbers of urban dwellers give the best indication of the scale of these unprecedented trends: the urban population increased from 220 million in 1900 to 732 million in 1950, and is estimated to have reached 3.2 billion in 2005, thus more than quadrupling since 1950. According