Defusing the population time bomb and the myth of gridlock
We have started an interesting discussion via Goodreads about the population timebomb and what this means for the future of mankind.
A bit of background on Philip Henley’s blog here …
The basic issue is this:
• For much of the history of mankind, the human population of Earth struggled to get much above 100,000 people.
• With the advent first of agriculture and then cities we started to grow in fits and starts. Improvements in agricultural technology meant that one man could feed hundreds instead just himself and his family. That meant that other people were freed up to specialise in non-farming activities, leading eventually to cities which rely on a large agricultural hinterland to supply themselves with food.
• We reached 1 billion people on this earth somewhere around 1804.
• It then took another 123 years to get to 2 billion in 1927.
• We hit 3 billion 33 years later in 1960, despite our best efforts to wipe out a large proportion of Europe in WW2.
• Roll on another 14 years and we hit 4 billion in 1974.
• Since then we have been adding another 1 billion population every 12-13 years.
• The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2100, the population of the world will be anywhere between 16 billion (high estimate) and 6 billion (low estimate).
Or, to put it another way, I am a few weekend beers away from my 50th birthday. Since I was born on 22 July 1964, the population of the world has more than doubled.
More statistics here:
The $64,000 question has to be: why is this happening, and more importantly what can or should we do about it? And when you think about it, that is a question that seems to be worth quite a bit more than £64,000. It may not be overly dramatic to say that the future of the human race could depend on how we deal with this.
We are in uncharted territory. Mankind has never had to deal with these levels of population before. We can’t look to other civilizations or past times to find a solution. We have never ever been in this situation before now.
How has this come about? There seem to be several factors – improving healthcare means that more children are surviving childbirth, better agriculture means that more people can be fed, better medicine means that we are living longer.
The net result is startling. In the early 20th century, the average world life expectancy was 31 years. It is now 67.2 years. The best place in the world to live is apparently Japan with an average life expectancy of 86 years. The worst place is Sierra Leone where the average is 47.5 years.
Let’s rewind the clock to 1911 – around 100 years ago. At that point, a man in the UK could expect to live for a shade under 50 years. The average is now around 79 years for men (and over 80 for women). By 2062, one estimate is that the average life expectancy in the UK would be 100 - except for Scotland (which may or may not be part of the UK). All those deep fried Mars bars and super-strength fighting lager, eh?
But what does it all mean?
The starting point for the UK at least is that we have a mounting public spending problem. When the average working man died in his fifties or sixties it did not cost the state much to pay his pension and for the National Health Service to look after him in his declining years. A high proportion of the population was in work paying for a relatively small number of elderly people. The welfare state was affordable.
But an increasingly elderly population needs to be looked after. If you retire at sixty and then live to be a hundred, you will draw pension for 40 years – possibly longer than you worked for. Healthcare also becomes much more expensive for the very old. One estimate is that it costs four times as much to care for a person in their 80s as a it does for a person in their 60s. Add to that the cost of care homes, and we can see that the state will have to pay an increasingly large public health bill.
This is one reason why the UK’s finances are currently in a poor state. We are borrowing more than £100 billion every year because we are not attracting enough income (in taxation) to pay for the cost of running the country. And the biggest costs by far are in social spend – education, healthcare and social services.
At this point, people tend to get distracted and say that the real problem is one or more of these:
• Europe
• MP’s pay and allowances, and similar scandals
• Fat cat salaries
• Inefficiencies in Government departments
• Spending on the armed forces
• Overseas aid
• Social security payments to the unemployed
• Social security payments to immigrants
In varying degrees, these all add to the cost of running the state. But the amounts involved are tiny compared to the social care budgets. These little issues make for good political footballs and newspaper scandals, but they are all small change in the grand scheme of things. That’s a subject for another time.
The only thing we need to know right now is that the big costs are all connected with looking after people. In 2013, the UK received £612 billion in taxes and spent £485 billion of this on social protection, health care and education.
If we continue on current trends, there will come a time when all of our spending is devoted to these areas of spend and nothing on anything else. That means no money for libraries, transport, environmental protection, police, defence, energy, building…
But then roll on the predictions a few years later and we will not have enough money in the state to look after our residents, even if we do nothing else.
The nightmare scenario looks something like this:
• We all live longer (hooray!)
• The state gets more and more bankrupt (boo!)
• Housing becomes more and more expensive because the elderly aren’t moving out of their homes to allow the next generation to move in.
• We all use more energy, depleting our stocks of fossil fuels more quickly.
• Meanwhile climate change leads to unpredictable weather patterns which leads to flooding, snow, tsunamis, earthquakes. We will struggle to deal with these because the state is bankrupt.
• War, pestilence, disease, the full end of the world apocalypse, but without the need for zombies. Or maybe we become the zombies?
Now you might think that the classic solution is to ask the elderly to pay for their own care. The problem with this is that up to now we have been telling these people that the state will look after them. Old folk will fiercely tell you that “I’ve paid my stamp”. It would take a very brave (aka foolish) politician to say otherwise.
I’ve got some good news (I think). The world is not about to end, although we are going to have to make some massive changes to the way that we live. And to understand that we next need to talk about road congestion - the subject that pays my mortgage until people buy my books in large enough quantities.
You see, there is a very similar worry about road congestion. It is what I like to call the gridlock myth. Politicians and economists will tell you that as we become more wealthy we buy more cars. We have more free time and more disposable wealth, so we use those cars more. Roads get busier until the point of congestion and ultimately gridlock. Nobody can move. We all find ourselves living in a non-stop traffic jam.
It’s a great theory. Many a politician has earned votes by tub thumping on this very theme. We must do something now otherwise we will have gridlock. And everybody nods sagely because avoiding gridlock sounds like a Very Good Thing.
Except that gridlock very rarely happens, and then only at certain times. Sure roads get busy, we all have awful journeys from time to time, but somehow it all keeps bumbling along. We never get to permanent gridlock, although we do certainly have it for some parts of some days.
I first noticed this when I was working with a team of traffic forecasting consultants. They carried out a computer forecast of the amount of traffic using one of the UK’s motorways. This forecast showed a nice linear growth in traffic. Each year the traffic levels grew as the population grew and people bought cars. Doh – well what else would you expect to happen?
But right at the end of the simulation the traffic model did something unexpected. Instead of the traffic continually growing it reached a point where it stopped increasing. It took several decades to reach that point, but eventually we arrived at a time when people were still buying more cars but they were not using them so much.
At first the traffic modellers couldn’t explain this. So I asked them to go back and investigate why the model was predicting this levelling off of traffic growth.
What they discovered was that the model was predicting people’s behaviour in extreme traffic conditions. When a road gets too busy, people stop using it.
That was more than 10 years ago. Since then I’ve found dozens of examples of the same thing. It seems that we never truly get to gridlock. As we get close to it the roads become borderline intolerable. At that point, people stop using them. They look for alternatives, which includes travelling at different times, car-sharing, using public transport and not making some journeys at all.
When our motorways are closed for repairs, you might think that the rest of the road network will grind to a halt. It doesn’t. People adjust. The 2012 Olympics didn’t cause traffic problems for London or the South East of England. People who didn’t want to watch the games stayed away.
The thing is that people are not wholly stupid. If a situation becomes intolerable they do something else. We are not frogs who can be boiled without realising it if the temperature is increased a little at a time. We are more sensible than that – although opinions vary on just how sensible we can be.
So what does the future hold for the earth given the trends towards hyper-population and climate change?
The answer, I think, is the same as for the gridlock myth. We will adjust our behaviours to suit the circumstances. The retirement age will increase so we all work longer. Health care will be rationed, which will incidentally slow down the increase in life expectancy. We will learn to adjust to lower levels of energy use. Extended families will come back together again and live under the same roof. That may be the only way that there will be someone to look after Granny, and also the only way that the young ‘uns can find somewhere to live. Granny exchanges board and lodging in her house in exchange for her children and grandchildren looking after her.
We will travel less, live in smaller homes, work and shop locally. This probably means a shift away from a society which produces goods and more towards a society which cares for its residents.
In short, the human race has been living well beyond our means for at least the last 100 years. Next comes not just a period of austerity, but an age of austerity. We will all need to learn how to live small, look after each other, use less fuel, build less, consume less, throw away less.
The 20th century may come to be seen as an age of excess – a jet age where we consumed resources and grew our population without heeding how much it costs. For the 21st century and beyond we will need to live within our resources.
It is time to switch off the jet engines and learn how to glide.
A bit of background on Philip Henley’s blog here …
The basic issue is this:
• For much of the history of mankind, the human population of Earth struggled to get much above 100,000 people.
• With the advent first of agriculture and then cities we started to grow in fits and starts. Improvements in agricultural technology meant that one man could feed hundreds instead just himself and his family. That meant that other people were freed up to specialise in non-farming activities, leading eventually to cities which rely on a large agricultural hinterland to supply themselves with food.
• We reached 1 billion people on this earth somewhere around 1804.
• It then took another 123 years to get to 2 billion in 1927.
• We hit 3 billion 33 years later in 1960, despite our best efforts to wipe out a large proportion of Europe in WW2.
• Roll on another 14 years and we hit 4 billion in 1974.
• Since then we have been adding another 1 billion population every 12-13 years.
• The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2100, the population of the world will be anywhere between 16 billion (high estimate) and 6 billion (low estimate).
Or, to put it another way, I am a few weekend beers away from my 50th birthday. Since I was born on 22 July 1964, the population of the world has more than doubled.
More statistics here:
The $64,000 question has to be: why is this happening, and more importantly what can or should we do about it? And when you think about it, that is a question that seems to be worth quite a bit more than £64,000. It may not be overly dramatic to say that the future of the human race could depend on how we deal with this.
We are in uncharted territory. Mankind has never had to deal with these levels of population before. We can’t look to other civilizations or past times to find a solution. We have never ever been in this situation before now.
How has this come about? There seem to be several factors – improving healthcare means that more children are surviving childbirth, better agriculture means that more people can be fed, better medicine means that we are living longer.
The net result is startling. In the early 20th century, the average world life expectancy was 31 years. It is now 67.2 years. The best place in the world to live is apparently Japan with an average life expectancy of 86 years. The worst place is Sierra Leone where the average is 47.5 years.
Let’s rewind the clock to 1911 – around 100 years ago. At that point, a man in the UK could expect to live for a shade under 50 years. The average is now around 79 years for men (and over 80 for women). By 2062, one estimate is that the average life expectancy in the UK would be 100 - except for Scotland (which may or may not be part of the UK). All those deep fried Mars bars and super-strength fighting lager, eh?
But what does it all mean?
The starting point for the UK at least is that we have a mounting public spending problem. When the average working man died in his fifties or sixties it did not cost the state much to pay his pension and for the National Health Service to look after him in his declining years. A high proportion of the population was in work paying for a relatively small number of elderly people. The welfare state was affordable.
But an increasingly elderly population needs to be looked after. If you retire at sixty and then live to be a hundred, you will draw pension for 40 years – possibly longer than you worked for. Healthcare also becomes much more expensive for the very old. One estimate is that it costs four times as much to care for a person in their 80s as a it does for a person in their 60s. Add to that the cost of care homes, and we can see that the state will have to pay an increasingly large public health bill.
This is one reason why the UK’s finances are currently in a poor state. We are borrowing more than £100 billion every year because we are not attracting enough income (in taxation) to pay for the cost of running the country. And the biggest costs by far are in social spend – education, healthcare and social services.
At this point, people tend to get distracted and say that the real problem is one or more of these:
• Europe
• MP’s pay and allowances, and similar scandals
• Fat cat salaries
• Inefficiencies in Government departments
• Spending on the armed forces
• Overseas aid
• Social security payments to the unemployed
• Social security payments to immigrants
In varying degrees, these all add to the cost of running the state. But the amounts involved are tiny compared to the social care budgets. These little issues make for good political footballs and newspaper scandals, but they are all small change in the grand scheme of things. That’s a subject for another time.
The only thing we need to know right now is that the big costs are all connected with looking after people. In 2013, the UK received £612 billion in taxes and spent £485 billion of this on social protection, health care and education.
If we continue on current trends, there will come a time when all of our spending is devoted to these areas of spend and nothing on anything else. That means no money for libraries, transport, environmental protection, police, defence, energy, building…
But then roll on the predictions a few years later and we will not have enough money in the state to look after our residents, even if we do nothing else.
The nightmare scenario looks something like this:
• We all live longer (hooray!)
• The state gets more and more bankrupt (boo!)
• Housing becomes more and more expensive because the elderly aren’t moving out of their homes to allow the next generation to move in.
• We all use more energy, depleting our stocks of fossil fuels more quickly.
• Meanwhile climate change leads to unpredictable weather patterns which leads to flooding, snow, tsunamis, earthquakes. We will struggle to deal with these because the state is bankrupt.
• War, pestilence, disease, the full end of the world apocalypse, but without the need for zombies. Or maybe we become the zombies?
Now you might think that the classic solution is to ask the elderly to pay for their own care. The problem with this is that up to now we have been telling these people that the state will look after them. Old folk will fiercely tell you that “I’ve paid my stamp”. It would take a very brave (aka foolish) politician to say otherwise.
I’ve got some good news (I think). The world is not about to end, although we are going to have to make some massive changes to the way that we live. And to understand that we next need to talk about road congestion - the subject that pays my mortgage until people buy my books in large enough quantities.
You see, there is a very similar worry about road congestion. It is what I like to call the gridlock myth. Politicians and economists will tell you that as we become more wealthy we buy more cars. We have more free time and more disposable wealth, so we use those cars more. Roads get busier until the point of congestion and ultimately gridlock. Nobody can move. We all find ourselves living in a non-stop traffic jam.
It’s a great theory. Many a politician has earned votes by tub thumping on this very theme. We must do something now otherwise we will have gridlock. And everybody nods sagely because avoiding gridlock sounds like a Very Good Thing.
Except that gridlock very rarely happens, and then only at certain times. Sure roads get busy, we all have awful journeys from time to time, but somehow it all keeps bumbling along. We never get to permanent gridlock, although we do certainly have it for some parts of some days.
I first noticed this when I was working with a team of traffic forecasting consultants. They carried out a computer forecast of the amount of traffic using one of the UK’s motorways. This forecast showed a nice linear growth in traffic. Each year the traffic levels grew as the population grew and people bought cars. Doh – well what else would you expect to happen?
But right at the end of the simulation the traffic model did something unexpected. Instead of the traffic continually growing it reached a point where it stopped increasing. It took several decades to reach that point, but eventually we arrived at a time when people were still buying more cars but they were not using them so much.
At first the traffic modellers couldn’t explain this. So I asked them to go back and investigate why the model was predicting this levelling off of traffic growth.
What they discovered was that the model was predicting people’s behaviour in extreme traffic conditions. When a road gets too busy, people stop using it.
That was more than 10 years ago. Since then I’ve found dozens of examples of the same thing. It seems that we never truly get to gridlock. As we get close to it the roads become borderline intolerable. At that point, people stop using them. They look for alternatives, which includes travelling at different times, car-sharing, using public transport and not making some journeys at all.
When our motorways are closed for repairs, you might think that the rest of the road network will grind to a halt. It doesn’t. People adjust. The 2012 Olympics didn’t cause traffic problems for London or the South East of England. People who didn’t want to watch the games stayed away.
The thing is that people are not wholly stupid. If a situation becomes intolerable they do something else. We are not frogs who can be boiled without realising it if the temperature is increased a little at a time. We are more sensible than that – although opinions vary on just how sensible we can be.
So what does the future hold for the earth given the trends towards hyper-population and climate change?
The answer, I think, is the same as for the gridlock myth. We will adjust our behaviours to suit the circumstances. The retirement age will increase so we all work longer. Health care will be rationed, which will incidentally slow down the increase in life expectancy. We will learn to adjust to lower levels of energy use. Extended families will come back together again and live under the same roof. That may be the only way that there will be someone to look after Granny, and also the only way that the young ‘uns can find somewhere to live. Granny exchanges board and lodging in her house in exchange for her children and grandchildren looking after her.
We will travel less, live in smaller homes, work and shop locally. This probably means a shift away from a society which produces goods and more towards a society which cares for its residents.
In short, the human race has been living well beyond our means for at least the last 100 years. Next comes not just a period of austerity, but an age of austerity. We will all need to learn how to live small, look after each other, use less fuel, build less, consume less, throw away less.
The 20th century may come to be seen as an age of excess – a jet age where we consumed resources and grew our population without heeding how much it costs. For the 21st century and beyond we will need to live within our resources.
It is time to switch off the jet engines and learn how to glide.
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Philip
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May 03, 2014 10:31AM
Thanks Will - enjoying the discourse. The Uk pressure is one thing my concern is the worldwide pressure especially for higher standards of living and the pressure that will put on resources which will inevitably lead to war. This might lead to some population decline but offset by baby booms after wars are over. This may not be European wars but look at Nigeria, Congo Republic, huge countries with conflict but growing populations who are demanding more. I may turn my attention onto the role of religion here. The role of educated women appears to reduce growth rates in terms of numbers of children and increase survival rates for those that are born. Another blog maybe which will upset many as any discussion of religion seems to do.
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There are several difficult strands to this one!There's an interesting debate going on about religion in the Angels and Demons discussion board - "would you rather live in a world without religion or a world without science." Some very strong views being expressed.
If we were simply managing the planet we would have no difficulty in promoting contraception and stopping the third world from achieving some of the advantages that the first world has enjoyed. But who would vote for a politician or religious leader who tried to say that?
I suppose that's the value of fiction. We can explore ideas which we could not easily say in a non-fiction context.
My next book is going to tackle this - on one level it's a James Bond spoof where the bad guy is the hero. On another level it poses the question "would it be so bad if a benign dictator ruled the world?"
Just bought your book "To the survivors" - very much my kind of topic.
Thanks Will have yours on to read - an ever expanding list. I have invested in pro-editing for that book so I am hoping there is a pay off.An in production sci-fi has a great famine in the distant past as a backdrop. Not sure when I will get it out, waiting on Beta readers then there will need to be editing.
