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from the On-a-Pale-Horse-vs-Being-a-Green-Mother dept.
The world population is growing because the birth rate exceeds the death rate, so to stabilize the world population either the birth rate needs to drop, or the death rate needs to increase. The most cited reference for population studies is the projections of future population (PDF) made by the Population Division of the United Nations. The UN report projects the world population to eventually stabilize as a result of countries settling in to a birth rate that falls around the replacement level.
A commentary by Stephen Warren in the open access journal Earth's Future takes the UN report to task for focusing on birth rate. He notes that all species generate offspring in numbers well above the replacement level of two, but you don't see historically the kind of population growth like you do with humans. He argues that despite all the negative feedback mechanisms on population (such as war and pestilence), it seems that Malthus (PDF) was correct that food supply is the driving factor, and wonders whether it is even possible to stabilize the world population until food production levels off.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:41PM
I'm gonna stick my neck out here, and claim that maybe, just maybe, that law was something to do with the drop in birthrate in China between 1960 and 2010.
I also notice in that video, when he explodes Ethiopia, the scatter pattern of each region seems to have a much flatter regression line than the historical 1960 world plot. Regression lines getting flatter over time is very interesting. What if that continues (should there be any reason for it not to?) The limitting case of regession lines getting flatter is a state we mathematicians call "uncorrelated" (no change in one variable would be expected to cause a change in the other variable). So his insistance that correlation actually is causation, and that nothing else can be causation, for this pair of variables even starts to look less supportable.
If he wants to really show the causal trend that he's claiming, he should be plotting infant mortality at time T with birth rate at time T+delta, for some delta, and show that that is better correlated than the non-lagged data. (It shows more clearly that one follows the other - compare the leaded petrol vs. crime 20 years later plots from freakanomics (one of their more reliable analyses, some are pretty poor).)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming there's no connection, in particular once an appropriate lag is found I'm pretty sure there'll be a clear correlation between movement on one axis and movement on the other, I'm merely a perturbed by his insistance that there's *only* one way of changing one of the variables.
Maybe he's trying to dumb things down for the masses so much that they've become wrong?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves