The U.N. puts a lot of effort into projecting populations. Obviously, they should be taken with a grain of salt, but reading them is better than putting your fingers in your ears and chanting "I can't hear you!"
The Daily Mail reported in June:
Global population to soar to 11 billion by 2100 as African population quadruples
Projection is 800 million more than a previous UN forecast of 10.1 billion
Researchers had expected fertility in Africa to more fall quickly
By JILL REILLY
PUBLISHED: 10:29 EST, 13 June 2013
The world’s population will reach almost eleven billion by the end of the century because of soaring birth rates in Africa, according to new research.
... Researchers had expected fertility on the poorest continent where a woman will give birth to an average of 5.2 children in her lifetime, to fall more quickly than it has.
The current African population is about 1.1 billion and it is now expected to reach 4.2 billion, nearly a fourfold increase, by 2100.
Professor Adrian Raftery, of the University of Washington, said: 'The fertility decline in Africa has slowed down or stalled to a larger extent than we previously predicted, and as a result the African population will go up.'
The UN's tables make interesting reading.
For example, the population of Tanzania was 7.7 million in 1950, and it's now 49.3 million. The projection for 2025 (in 12 years) is 69.3 million, in 2050 (in 38 years) is 129.4 million, and in 2100 it's seven googol gazillion 275.6 million.
Nigeria, in contrast, isn't expected to grow as fast as Tanzania, in percentage terms:
1950: 37.9 million
2013: 173.6 million
2025: 239.9 million
2050: 440.4 million
2100: 913.8 million
I certainly don't take these UN projections as gospel, but you have to say they are interesting. I realize, however, that's not a universal opinion. Even though immigration is on the table in the House, few in American public life seem aware of these UN projections or their implications for immigration policy.
I would suspect, however, that the government of Israel pays closer attention to UN population forecasts than does the government of the United States. Perhaps rather than the government of Israel trying to hire failed American officials like Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke, the government of the United States should try to hire successful Israeli officials with strong track records of preventing illegal immigration?
r selection and Islam are converging in Africa (check the growth rates of Muslim vs. Christian African populations -- they show the trend, but as the article suggests are still way too conservative on the Muslim numbers). We are going to watch one "Christian" African country after another fall.
ReplyDeleteThis is going to be an extremely bloody century in the dark continent. It's inevitable. I think it will force a paradigm shift in Western values. I'm still surprised how little attention people pay to what's going on in that enormous continent.
Bill:
ReplyDelete"I think it will force a paradigm shift in Western values"
On the present course, by 2100 (more like 2060-80) there won't *be* any West, so there won't be any Western values to shift. The geographical West will bear less resemblance to the historical West than the Western Europe of AD 500 did to the Western Roman Empire of AD 300. Most of the West's population of AD 1950 will have been replaced by non-Westerners, and with the population gone the culture will go, too.
Absolutely astounding numbers. The world population didn't reach 900 Million until the 18th Century, and Nigeria is going to hit that in less than 90 years?
ReplyDeleteOf course, African population won't rise that much. Western food aid is feeding the continent right now, and as Simon in London pointed out, there isn't going to be a west in 70 years.
I doubt the Chinese will be quite so "generous" with the dark continent.
So what happened to the AIDS crisis that was going to decimate the population of Africa?
ReplyDeleteOn the present course, by 2100 (more like 2060-80) there won't *be* any West, so there won't be any Western values to shift.
ReplyDeleteThe West died in 313 AD.
Simon in London, I would take it further and say that the West is already dead, in 476 when the last Roman emperor was deposed the common view of many was that the Roman empire was still around and would last forever. In 476, the world did not immediately jump into the Dark age, the same applies now, there is was one single one sudden event that ended Western civilization it was a gradual process. One major indicator is the election of a non white as a "Western ruler", another is how the utter power of political correctness, and its jurisdiction over ALL societal morals, has replaced traditional institutes like the Church.
ReplyDeleteZimbabwe is a has-been, once known as the bread basket of Africa, it's not literally a basket case. South Africa is falling apart. The Caucasoid Arabs have North Africa and the Horn of Africa (in East Africa). The Chinese are also taking away resources from sub-Saharan Africa (West/Central/South Africa) and they have no "white guilt". The only "Christian" religion thriving in the dark black African continent is American style heretical charismatic Protestant type and that's about it.
ReplyDeleteSoon no more lion, elephant, cape buffalo, gorilla, etc. outside of zoos. Greater tragedies than the death of the West, which wants so much to extinguish itself.
ReplyDeletePathetic "Western" idiots call Golden Dawn "criminal."
Denial is not just a river in Egypt; Dysgenesis is not just a book in the Bible.
ReplyDeleteThe current African population is about 1.1 billion and it is now expected to reach 4.2 billion, nearly a fourfold increase, by 2100.
ReplyDeleteBlessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Our host said: I would suspect, however, that the government of Israel pays closer attention to UN population forecasts than does the government of the United States.
ReplyDeleteHunsdon said: I would suspect, however, that the government of Israel pays closer attention to most things than does the government of the United States.
Africa supporting a population of 4 billion is preposterous. That is about as much as Asia today, which has a far smarter population and a far larger landmass, a 500 year history of urbanized higher civilization, and far more resources.
ReplyDeleteWhere will the food, water, energy, and infrastructure needed for all these people come from? Africans cannot even maintain the colonial infrastructure we gave them without continued financial and technical assistance from outside.
What this really means is that either 2-3 billion will have moved elsewhere like a swarm of locusts, or mass death will be coming that will prevent those numbers from ever occurring, whether from war, disease, or starvation.
"I'm still surprised how little attention people pay to what's going on in that enormous continent."
ReplyDeleteMost modern Westerners have grown up with an instinctive fear of criticizing black people. Telling them their culture is rotten, saying that they drink too much, all is a big no no. Hell, in the UK it's practically a capital crime to give a dark-skinned person a dirty look after he beheads one of your soldiers in broad daylight. So you can imagine that they wouldn't say a peep about such lovely things as eating albinos, raping infants, and burying children alive.
Regardless, the West has done nothing since the end of the Cold War except empower jihadists in every single place where they intervened. The less the West does in Africa, the better off the Africans will be.
The problem with the outdecades projections showing continued rapid growth of black African populations is that it presumes that humanitarian aid slash international welfare from sap liberalservative do-gooder white people can continue indefinitely.
ReplyDeleteAn assumption I don't buy.
Remember the Live Aid concerts back in the mid 80s? All the usual types came out to help the starving Ethiopians. Pictures of pitiful stick figures were all over the place; they were all dying, the country was collapsing, they were going extinct, etc. Less than 30 years later, however, the population has more than doubled, going from approximately 45 million back then to 93 million today. Looks like they weren't going to die out after all.
ReplyDeleteAfricans have been cute pets for whites in search of a cause, sending them a steady stream of missionaries to push religion and literacy, doctors to provide health care, experts to help with agriculture and just about everything else. This has probably contributed to their population explosion. Now they're trying to flood into Europe. What'll happen when their populations double again in another 30 years? The pressure on the developed countries will probably become tremendous. How long can the civilized countries continue to act civilized in the face of threats to their existence? What happened to the African AIDS epidemic? I thought they were all supposed to be dead by now.
These projections are not believable.
ReplyDeleteThe population carrying capacity for any of these countries is so far below the levels they predict that the trends cannot continue. The idea that Nigeria would have nearly the same population as China in a much smaller landmass, half tropical swamp and half Sahel is absurd.
If African countries do manage to make some modest development, their fertility rates will drop.
You don't need to get anywhere near European levels of wealth to see falling fertility. Vietnam, Thailand, and Brazil all have below replacement fertility rates. Even urbanization without much wealth growth will slow fertility. South Africa's birth rate has fallen substantially since the end of Apartheid.
The geometric increase in Africa's population was made possible by trade and aid from outside. When Western societies collapse economically, they are no longer going to be able to provide this aid and Africa's population will have to shrink to a level that can be supported by the resources of that continent, or so it seems to me.
ReplyDeleteThe beginning of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is a description of the Malthusian Trap in pre-Industrial Revolution. This unpleasant state of affairs has been the norm of human history -- most places, most times.
ReplyDeleteTo the autistic demographers working for the UN and its contractors, it's as if those 440,400,000 Nigerians of the year 2050 aren't people at all. 4.404E8 is one point on a curve defined by an equation.
It gets more complicated if these projected Nigerians decide to do people-stuff like, for instance, eat. Even beans.
Van den Bergh and and Rietveld cite a prior study that sets the carrying capacity of the Earth at 1E9 billion people on the basis of dissipation of body heat. More than a billion billion of us, and the planet would melt.
No worries! Amnesty and Open Borders! Now!
Does anyone think these numbers will actually come to pass?
ReplyDeleteIn the stables out back, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddling up.
America had better pay attention to the UN projections. Where are all the excess Africans going to go? By the way our African population has also grown by quite a bit.It has roughly quadrupled since 1900.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure Malthus wouldn't want to be vindicated in the way this will end.
ReplyDeleteThe UN population projections, especially about Africa, are nonsense. A few years ago, e.g., the UN was wary of such projections because of the high rate of AIDS.
ReplyDeleteAfrican populations will reach a level (I'm not sure what) at which they will no longer be sustainable due to, well, Africans being Africans. If someone can point to Africa being able to feed, defend and control itself w/o external assistance, then these numbers might have some plausibility. As the West contracts, Africa's future will become even more bleak.
Don't worry, Captain Cowen will teach the Stratos-dwellers to give the Troglytes canned beans, to make the xenite mines more bearable.
ReplyDeleteThe Daily Mail article you linked to is the most frightening thing I have read in a long time. I have been worried for years that population growth in Africa just isn't going to stop, because the people of Africa are just different than people elsewhere. I think the odds are good that Africa will turn out to be the ruin of the world.
ReplyDelete"Perhaps rather than the government of Israel trying to hire failed American officials like Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke,........."
ReplyDeleteWho says they failed? That entirely depends on what it was they were actually hired to do and on who actually hired them.
Nigeria is only about 33% larger than Texas. Nearly one billion people in Nigeria alone? Wow.
ReplyDelete"Bill said...
ReplyDeleteI'm still surprised how little attention people pay to what's going on in that enormous continent."
Bono is paying attention. I'm sure he's got all the answers.
Steve Sailer writes, "the government of the United States should try to hire successful Israeli officials with strong track records of preventing illegal immigration?"
ReplyDeleteYou realize retired Israeli officials would be Jewish? A good fraction of your recent posts have been about how there are too many Jews working for the US govt.
Looks like that mess of freshly-ground-cumin-seasoned beans that Tyler Cowen's preparing, for all us white non-"star performers" to live on, will be shipping instead to Tanzania.
ReplyDeleteWell the west isn't going to step up to the plate and do what must be done in Africa. Maybe the Chinese with have the stones to do it. The UN numbers are apocalyptic. There is no way to feed those kind of numbers. It will be hell on earth.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the world carrying capacity for humans, given current technology?
ReplyDeleteThis is a serious question. I've seen estimates as low as 10 billion. World population according to the UN was supposed to level off at just above 9 billion, but I understand this estimate keeps getting revised.
World population is currently at 7 billion, double what it was when Nixon took office.
Population growth has leveled off just about everywhere except for Africa and the Middle East. All the growth in world population is being generated by these places. I have no idea what to make of this, except its a sign that these regions are outliers and probably won't achieve the (literally unbelievable) numbers being forecast.
Meanwhile, we're giving how much aid for the purpose of preventing AIDS deaths?
ReplyDeleteAt one time I had hoped that HIV would help keep the numbers down, but between evolution of the pathogen and Western alleviative medicines there are countries where practically every adult is HIV positive and living a long life.
We'll just have to hope that population concentration and habitat destruction leads to the development of a fairly lethal but highly contagious superbug.
Steve --
ReplyDeleteThis is not just an American problem. The Op-Ed page of today's FT has an editorial by Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medicin Sans Frontiers and a former Socialist human rights minister lambasting Europe for not taking in all of Africa and the ME and "allowing" several thousand illegals to drown off Lampedusa.
The dynamic is this. Rich, entitled, and moral preening guys like Kouchner, seek to endlessly display their moral superiority and thus gain social and political power, by displacing their fellow countrymen they despise with third world props.
That in the long run say twenty years, they and their families will be ethnically cleansed and THEY will be nothing more than refugees themselves is no matter. They don't believe it or don't care, because "they'll be dead" (I have heard this line many times by older moral status mongers) and "that will be your problem."
Fundamentally however it speaks to how much the West hates itself, or really how much half the West hates hates hates the compromises, male cooperation, wealth generation, safety, security, and "boring" middle class values that underpin the core of the West. Women hate the men it produces, "boring" beta male nice guys, gays hate the middle class predictability, the upper class hates the check on their decadence and debauchery, what little remains.
And this Western/White self-hatred has ALWAYS been there, right down to Julius Caesar slaughtering a million Gauls or the destruction of the Western Roman Empire by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, Visigoths, and Vandals.
There's a billion Africans and Kouchner wants them all in Europe, essentially. And because there is no check, no fear, no ability of the people or even will (since half the people share elites values) elites like Kouchner will get their way.
I've been skeptical for a while about population forecasts. Every few years (for the last 20) there's some article in the papers saying "Nothing to worry about, the demographic transition will kick in and round about 2050 world population will stabilize at 9/10/11 billion." The trouble is, every few years, the date moves further back, and the peak figure is higher. Although total fertility rates (TFR) are declining in many countries, they're still v. high in several well-known failed states.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be a popular meme that Malthus was wrong - esp. popular among free-market fundamentalists (The Economist, Robert Zubrin and so on). It seems to me that Malthus was actually right for most of human history - except for the period just after he published! In fact, Malthus was disproved by certain specific, one-off events - bad ones (The Black Death), and good ones (the Haber process and the Green Revolution). The question is, how many more rabbits are there to pull out of the bag?
I offer this for debate, I am no expert.
I don't think Israel needs to headhunt executives to tell them how to prevent illegal immigration.
ReplyDeletePerhaps America's Border Agency should hire some Israelis.
What do those numbers tell me? They tell me to invest heavily in Chinese and Russian arms manufacturers. We're in for a bloody future.
ReplyDeleteIf something can't go on forever, it won't. And Nigeria's population won't be hitting 900 million. How it manages not to hit 900 million should be a matter of great interest, but if past and present are any guide...
So what happened to the AIDS crisis that was going to decimate the population of Africa?
ReplyDeleteIt was a fraud, as people who pay attention knew all along.
ReplyDeletePopulation growth has leveled off just about everywhere except for Africa and the Middle East. All the growth in world population is being generated by these places. I have no idea what to make of this, except its a sign that these regions are outliers and probably won't achieve the (literally unbelievable) numbers being forecast.
The only form of aid should be birth control. No food. No arms. No medicines. Just birth control. They aren't so stupid that they can't figure it out.
Sounds harsh? Only short term. A billion starving is far far harsher.
"The problem with the outdecades projections showing continued rapid growth of black African populations is that it presumes that humanitarian aid slash international welfare from sap liberalservative do-gooder white people can continue indefinitely. An assumption I don't buy."
ReplyDeleteForeign aid would have to continue even as Western governments watch their budget deficits skyrocket, thanks to aging populations. Foreign aid would also have to increase to keep up with the growing populations. Need for aid is going to increase at a much faster rate than the population.
The US is already reeling from our ridiculous efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (combined population: 62 million). Americans are at the breaking point. We've come to understand that the world doesn't want our help, and that fixing broken countries requires more money and coercion than we're willing to use. Look at the response to Syria. The Syrian government gassed innocent civilians. The reaction of most Americans? 'What the hell you expect us to do about it?'
We're done with trying to fix the world. The end of foreign aid won't be too far behind.
Although total fertility rates (TFR) are declining in many countries, they're still v. high in several well-known failed states.
ReplyDeleteJust think about that statement.
How is it that a failed state has a rising population?
What happens when the elites change course?
Are the elites just waiting for Christianity to die out so they can turn in to Nazis 2.0? Cuz they don't actually love Muslims and Africans and have no real morality.
the people of Africa are just different than people elsewhere. I think the odds are good that Africa will turn out to be the ruin of the world.
ReplyDeleteOh, come on. The only way Africans could ruin the world is if the world lets them, or more accurately aids them in doing so. If the rest of the world ignored them for a decade, their numbers would shrink to what they were in 1950. We don't need them at all. They need us. People will wise up just as soon as they have to. They just don't have to right now.
The negative reaction here to the population predictions is an old economic fable.
ReplyDeleteAll that is required to make this possible is (1) advances in solar energy technology to create an abundant soylent green type food, (2) advances in national or regional security to allow and maintain absolute, unconditional dictatorships to manage living spaces (30 story apartment buildings with self-cleaning lobbies, elevators, and hallways) and water & heat technology, and (3) an utter disregard for liberty issues and for human life as a value, separate from the right to breed at will.
Not such a great life, but it could most certainly be done.
"Nearly one billion people in Nigeria alone? Wow.
ReplyDeleteThat would give them about 1 acre for each family of four. Not enough, even if they were German farmers on good arable land, which they aren't. So no, they won't be getting to 900M. No one else will be willing and able to subsidize that many, so starvation will set a limit long before that, or they'll spread across enough neighboring countries to give themselves enough room.
the page i look at whenever i want to give myself a good chill down my spine:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
if you think that is frightening, imagine having watched the numbers change over the last 13 years, as i have.
once you establish the general trajectory, and convert those raw, detached integers from an intellectual exercise into a more visceral feeling and emotion about where the earth is heading, you might get a bit shaken.
whatever your reaction though, you will definitely, definitely realize the time of the europeans is over, the peak of europe and the US has come and gone, and all those things and that time period will become only a chapter in a history book within just a few decades. in fact, in 50 years it will be hard for people to imagine that europeans once predominated the globe for centuries. that will seem so...unpossible. such a far, far away place and land.
Meanwhile back home, the continual SWPL nattering about birth control and population explosions and diminishing resources has persuaded their *own* kin to stop reproducing.
ReplyDeleteOops.
As the west becomes poorer, and less influential, there will be fewer poverty-reduction programs, fewer disaster-relief efforts, and less charity, overall, spent in Africa.
ReplyDeleteAnd that will curb African population growth.
You think China is going to do this? Or the Arabic nations? Fat chance. Bill (commenter #1) is right. Africa is going to have a bloody awful time during this century.
Remember the Live Aid concerts back in the mid 80s? All the usual types came out to help the starving Ethiopians
ReplyDeleteI am also old enough to remember what made the Ethiopians starve in the first place. Communism, imported as part of Russian imperialism //// do-gooder foreign aid.
Think of all the beans we can sell to Africa!!!!! Sincerely, Tyler Cowen.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, Captain Cowen will teach the Stratos-dwellers to give the Troglytes canned beans, to make the xenite mines more bearable.
ReplyDeleteBring in the Talented Mr. Ripley, master of the ritalin mines (oops, ryetalin), creator of the perfect android woman!
I know, wrong episode.
But I would really like to see on pop-sf a principled defense of elitism. Imagine tribbles, not as deceptively dangerous fuzzballs, but as some sort of sentient or sub-sentient slave creature. The natural human impulse would be to free such "downtrodden" creatures - but due to their fast breeding rate, hypnotic powers, immense physical strength, and hidden evil nature they become a huge menace once freed.
I mean "evil" as in naturally and incorrigibly destructive, not as seeking just revenge for past wrongs. I don't mean a noble warrior race that needs a little discipline, either. I mean revelling in rape, pillage, and mass murder for its own sake.
The crazy thing is that this problem could be solved almost overnight with some modest eugenics benefits to boot. Simply decide to stabilize the population of Africa and then pay people to be sterilized. I'll bet for 100 bucks per head, you'd have impoverished Africans lining up for miles to get a snip or a shot. The wealthier, educated types who actively plan their families would eschew the payments and probably be secretly glad to see their poor, violent cousins opt out of the reproduction game.
ReplyDeleteIt's a win all the way around, and all for the cost of a few billion dollars a year.
Does anyone think these numbers will actually come to pass?
ReplyDeleteIn the stables out back, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddling up.
This has been said before by someone else on iSteve: no, it won't happen, and the way it won't happen will be horrible.
I hate to even think what these African population projections mean for Africa's precious and irreplaceable wildlife. The loss of habitat alone will probably drive whole groups of species to extinction. So sad and cruel.
ReplyDeleteDont Depair, Insect flour will save the day.
ReplyDeleteFlour Made From Insects Will Feed Underfed Populations
Chew on this.
A team of MBA students were the recipients of the 2013 Hult Prize earlier this week, providing them with $1 million in seed money to produce an insect-based, protein-rich flour for feeding malnourished populations in other countries. The product is called Power Flour.
"It's a huge deal because we had a very ambitious but highly executable five-year plan in place," said team captain Mohammed Ashour, whose team hails from McGill University in Montreal. "So winning this prize is a great step in that direction."
Ashour, along with teammates Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott, will be immediately working with an advisory board to recruit farmers and workers in Mexico, where a population of roughly 4 million live in slum conditions with widespread malnutrition.
"We will be starting with grasshoppers," Ashour said.
He noted that the insect is already familiar to the local diet and currently sells at a premium because of a three-month harvesting season and because grasshoppers are typically hand-picked. But farmers have already expressed interest in raising grasshoppers on a mass level, according to Ashour.
While for Americans the idea of eating bugs remains mostly a novelty, in other areas of the world they are a common form of protein. The kinds of insects people consume from country to country varies, with the people of Ghana preferring palm weevils and in Botswana, caterpillars. The Power Flour product will vary ingredients according to those habits, adjusting production to the breeding cycles and nutritional profile of each culture.
In order to research their business plan, the members of the McGill Hult team have all consumed "kilos" of insects themselves, Ashour said.
"Shobhita was recently researching in Thailand and tried everything from worms to water beetles," he said.
Even Gabe Mott, who identifies as a vegetarian, has consumed his fair share of basil-flavored palm weevil.
"He's a vegetarian for ethical and ecological reasons, and when he looked at insects, for him it was really not an issue as far as being a source of protein that is ecologically balanced," said Ashour.
Pass the chapulines.
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/strange/article/329942/82/Flour-Made-From-Insects-Will-Feed-Underfed-Populations
1. One step to reduce sub-Saharan fertility would be for the First World (Europeans in particular) to make it absolutely clear that further migration from Africa will not be tolerated. This is the only way to ensure that the carrying capacities of poor countries will be the limiting factor for further population growth.
ReplyDeleteIn that vein, it's worth thinking about how many ethnic Mexicans there would be in the world if mass immigration to the US had been prohibited since 1965. Would the population of Mexico be tens of millions greater than it is now due to today's Mexican-Americans existing instead in this hypothetical no-emigration Mexico? I very much doubt it; Mexican fertility would have fallen farther and faster.
Another obvious move would be to make aid conditional upon dramatic reductions in fertility. I.e., the fewer people you make us support, the more generous our support will be.
2. This all raises the obvious moral question of why, exactly, First Worlders with one or two children ought to go out of their way to subsidize poor foreigners to out-breed and/or colonize their own First World descendents?
For poor foreigners with above-replacement fertility to ask for Western aid to sustain their surplus populations is a species of extortion. Third Worlders get the genetic, practical, and emotional benefits of big families, even as the costs of that population growth are externalized.
To put it in Rushtonian terms, you can't have the cake of r-selection and enjoy the delicious taste of K-level investment too.
It's amazing how many problems in the world are variations on the theme of privatized profits and socialized costs.
Although it is a huge continent, Africa shrinks a lot in terms of good and usable land. The Sahara desert for example is about as large as the whole of the USA. The Kalahari desert is about the size of Great Britain and France combined. Africa cannot even support its current population. Without outside aid it would face famine routinely and Africans cannot even maintain the infrastructure Europeans laid down in their countries from 50-150 years ago. These population projections are madness and suicidal. Africa would be better off in every possible way if it had HALF its current population. The last thing it needs is more people.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand these figures could be way off. Who can say what things will be like in 83 years? What European in 1900 could have imagined WW1 & 2, Hitler, Stalin, the iron curtain etc? There were famous population projection at that time for Russia. It was thought by 2000 it would have 800-850 million people. In Canada in the 30'3 and 40's, demographers made predictions that French-Canadians would be moving toward majority status by the end of the century. It was assumed at the time that immigration had come to an end and Francophones had very high birthrates then. In fact they are barely 21% of Canada's population now.
Africa will never reach these insane population levels. SOMETHING will happen to prevent it. It isn't going to be pretty.
ReplyDeleteCan Africa support 4 billion people? I don’t know. It won’t be Switzerland, but I’m not so sure that it can’t be done, especially given another century of technological progress. But even if they’re not literally starving, a lot of them are going to want to emigrate (see Mexico), and so Europe should start preparing for a way to prevent themselves from being the destination.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think Europe should start aggressively recruiting white immigrants from the new world right now. Meanwhile, having filled itself with white immigrants, it should support African immigration to the new world, and hope that any other excess Africans get absorbed into N. Africa.
I find some of these UN projections puzzling. Among the countries that they project will send the most immigrants over the next 40 years, they do not include any African countries. Between now and 2050, they predict that China will send (net) 300,000 immigrants to other countries each year. Do they even send that many now? Do they actually think the rate will go up? I count at most 150,000 annual Chinese immigrants to the New World. There really aren’t that many in Europe; where are all rest going?
And I’d love to know how they come up with these fertility projections. Isn’t it convenient that in every low-fertility country, they think fertility will go up, while in every high-fertility country, they think it will go down? I agree that this has been our experience, and that all else being equal, both assumption make sense, but all these countries are different, and I wonder how many variables they consider. I suspect they’re working under a pretty crude model.
"Although it is a huge continent, Africa shrinks a lot in terms of good and usable land. The Sahara desert for example is about as large as the whole of the USA. The Kalahari desert is about the size of Great Britain and France combined. Africa cannot even support its current population. "
ReplyDeleteI read once (can't remember where) that the nation of Angola could produce enough food to feed all of sub-Saharan Africa if modern (US and European style farming) methods were used.
Don't ask me how to hell to get from what they got now to there though....
"I hate to even think what these African population projections mean for Africa's precious and irreplaceable wildlife. The loss of habitat alone will probably drive whole groups of species to extinction. So sad and cruel."
ReplyDeleteWestern environmentalists are slowly making peace with the idea that Africa is a lost cause. When you think about it, it makes sense. Why should some African peasant care about what some white moralizing nerds tell him about his own homeland? He's got a big family to feed and doesn't want his land clogged with jungle flora and cheetahs and lions preying on his sheep. Plus, if he gets his hands on a rhino, he can sell the horn for enough to feed his family for a year!
It's like trying to hold back a tidal wave. Don't even bother trying.
That's the high variant. It suggests birth rates will increase.
ReplyDeleteThe low variant is more promising. I'd take that Daily Mail article with a lot of salt; they do the same about catastrophic man-made global warming. Scare stories sell money, remember.
"Think of all the beans we can sell to Africa!!!!! Sincerely, Tyler Cowen."
ReplyDeleteI think you mean:
Think of all the money we'll make on the commodities market buying beans from Latin America and selling them to whoever's feeding Africa! Sincerely, Tyler Cowen.
Clearly those of us in the West need to stop having babies now, to make room for all the Black and Muslim babies that are being born. We owe it to the environment and of course to relieve our white guilt. At the same time, we need to open up immigration to anyone and everyone, except Europeans of course. B.O.
ReplyDelete"If African countries do manage to make some modest development, their fertility rates will drop."
ReplyDeleteNo they won't. They're r-type. Out of Africa *required* a shift to k-type behavior. Civilization required an even bigger shift.
Things will get worse and insulated upper middle class people in the west wil bend over backwards to keep the looming disaster on track - which will include importing the problem to the west - and as the west crumbles it will be harder to keep Africa afloat until it reaches it's final tipping point and billions starve.
Oh, come on. The only way Africans could ruin the world is if the world lets them, or more accurately aids them in doing so. If the rest of the world ignored them for a decade, their numbers would shrink to what they were in 1950. We don't need them at all. They need us. People will wise up just as soon as they have to. They just don't have to right now.
ReplyDeleteHere's how it will work: Nothing changes in the West. Continuing low birthrates means a collapsing population, with a serious excess of old people who simply cannot be supported by the young. The pressure from do-gooders and rich bastards to allow mass immigration from the only source of young people -- starving Africa -- is irresistible. Blacks have already proven that they can be competent workers if well supervised, so the new normal, in every civilized country outside of Africa, is a large and growing population of black Africans supporting an aging and shrinking cohort of whites and Asians (the only exceptions being hopelessly backward places like Afghanistan). Eventually, once the population of the world is 80 or 90 percent black African, the managing non-African elite loses control, and everything goes permanently to bloody Hell.
No guarantee that this is what will actually happen, but if I had to bet, this honestly does strike me as the most likely scenario.
I have a rather crude excel demographic model. Crude as it is, I can model historical population and total fertility rates with it so, crude as it is, it can't be that bad. Based on my model, 4 billion sub-Saharans does not require any wild assumptions at all, sadly. Still, there are some things to be aware of.
ReplyDeleteSub-Sahara's total fertility has been diminishing at a rate of about 1.3% per annum over the last decade (which is a more rapid rate than it had been diminishing at previously, btw). If it can diminish at a rate of 2% per year from here on out it can hit replacement level around 2050. If it only diminishes at 1.5% it'll hit replacement around 2070.
When it comes to the population total that will be reached (and when) TFRs aren't the whole story. Much also depends on health care, and specifically infant mortality. Sub-Sahara's health care has unquestionably been improving and it will doubtless continue to improve. The question is the rate at which it will improve and the eventual level it will reach.
In a 'worst case' (wrt population) scenario, health care reaches a 'high western' level quickly (and continues to improve in lockstep with western developments). In the case that TFR diminishes at 1.5%, then this scenario would easily see Sub-Sahara reach (and exceed) 4 billion by century's end. Indeed, it could go sub-replacement TFR and linger there for fifty years (much as western countries have done) before its total population began to drop. (Fifty years of momentum!) It's rather unrealistic to expect sub-Sahara to reach 'high western' levels of healthcare though.
If it reaches 'low western' levels, and doesn't improve in lockstep with further western developments, and TFR reduces at 2% per year, then the population will grow to about 2.3 billion and begin to reduce before century's end (provided it goes sub-replacement).
The most 'optimistic' scenario (wrt to population) would be for TFR to diminish by 2.5% per year from here on out and health to fail to reach even low western levels. Then population would top out (and begin falling, pending going sub-replacement) before hitting two billion.
How likely is it that sub-sahara could reduce its TFR by the 2.5% per year of my 'optimistic' scenario?
ReplyDeleteWell, there have been some notable and probably unexpected results in the past that should give us some hope. Algeria went from 6.7 children in 1980 to 2.2 children in 2011. (It's hopeful because it was - and many would say still is - undeveloped, backwards and islamic.) That impressive average rate of reduction of some 3.6% per year was actually topped by, of all countries, Iran (land of the mad mullahs, supposedly), which went from 6.2 as late as 1985 to 1.8 in 2005 (and has stayed sub-replacement since). That's a rate of over 4% per year.
Looking specifically at black countries, all the small Caribbean islands (eg St Kitts, Barbados) that I could get data for have been sub-replacement for over a decade. Jamaica hasn't quite made it to sub-replacement yet (2.3) but is bound to get there. Closer to Africa, Cape Verde went from 6 in 1982 to 2.3 in 2011. Sao Tome has gone from 6 in 1984 to 3.5 in 2011. One might argue that these are islands and thus naturally more attuned to carrying capacity constraints so they are not a guide to anything. It's reasonable to think they'd be more aware of carrying capacity issues, but the point is once they became aware they changed their behavior accordingly. It's reasonable to think that the more sub-saharans become aware of carrying capacity (and life quality) issues they will adjust their behavior accordingly too. If they can't become as aware as they should be of their own accord, we should help them develop that awareness. (Listening, Oxfam, World Vision et al?)
Not everything is carrying capacity, though. In sub-Sahara itself, Botswana went from 6 in 1982 to 2.7 in 2011. In that time, per capita GDP grew, on average, over 3% per year. TFR reduced in lockstep with wealth. Amid all the doom and gloom of HBD it seems poorly understood that sub-Sahara has enjoyed by far its best economic decade these past ten years. True, they haven't done it all by themselves; foreign know-how and management has played no small part. But how they got there is beside the point. The point is they got there and they're continuing on that path. So this is more - not less, more - reason to expect them to get richer and their TFRs to drop more than otherwise were dropping.
Lastly, even a country that has not been growing, that has notoriously been retrograding, has managed some fairly spectacular TFR reductions. Zimbabwe (!) went from 7.1 in 1980 to 3.2 in 2011 - that's leagues better than most sub-saharans of that profile (size, population, development level). (Worryingly, this evidence raises the question of whether the best way to reduce sub-saharan TFRs might not be to destroy rather than develop the economy, but that goes against the grain of the thinking of all but perhaps the wackiest neo-nazis, so there's little point speculating.)
Were these population projections done by the same people who do the "climate change" computer modeling?
ReplyDeleteJust sayin'...
McGillicuddy, Meanwhile, having filled itself with white immigrants, it should support African immigration to the new world, and hope that any other excess Africans get absorbed into N. Africa.
ReplyDeleteYou're playing 'negrify thy neighbor.' I can understand your desire and your reasoning, but in the long-run this is a lose-lose demographic policy. There is no way in hell N. Africa is going to benefit from a mass influx of sub-saharans. If you attempt it, they can hit you right back, and since white resolve for now is weaker than n.african resolve they'll probably succeed. It's a better idea to make them aware of this - or perhaps, to get them to publicly admit they're aware - because that will win you a demographic ally, and create a platform on the basis of which bilateral demographic issues can be dealt with.
This is important because right now no people on earth is in as desperate need of popular recognition of a 'right to life' than whites. Establishing popular recognition and acceptance that whites have a right to live is half the battle. (Actually, it goes back even a step further: establishing that whites have an interest in living on. That's how far gone whites are: they require convincing they have an interest in living on rather than dying off.)
Now, if you're a delusion white "anti-racist" who has been trained (aka brainwashed) into thinking of blacks as "minorities," your head will explode at what I just said. Fortunately for me, I'm not interested in what white "anti-racists" think. Heeding their opinions on racial issues is akin to taking advice on mental healthcare from someone in a lunatic asylum.
Silver:
ReplyDelete(It's hopeful because it was - and many would say still is - undeveloped, backwards and islamic.)
Actually, Algeria is a relatively wealthy country by African standards with oil and mineral resources, fertile land along its northern mountains and a workforce capable of building cars to world export standards. The native Berber/Punic/Arab population is perfectly capable of producing both manufactured goods and intellectual goods, engaging in world trade (and piracy, like reformation-era Britain), and has a history of civilization dating back past St. Augustine, Cyprian, and Tertullian (three of the leading intellects of Christian Rome) to the time of the Phoenicians. You might recall Algeria (and Tunisia) formerly being called a world power known as "Carthage" that nearly took down Rome. As a cultivar, North Africa produced an ample food surplus for millenia. and Algeria (and Morrocco and Tunisia) also has the advantages inherent in the infrastructure developed by the Pieds-Noir.
There is simply no comparison with what the North African people are capable of if freed from the shackles of Islamic extremism, and the Bantus on the other side of the Sahara.
U think 1:47 PM is right that if we paid them we could persuade an awful lot of Africans to get the snip. More than $100 per but cheap in a world that took $50 bn for a false breast implants scare.
ReplyDeleteI also think that Africa could feed as many as Asia. It is half the size but half of Asia is Siberia that hardly counts & almost all of Africa is nearer the equator & thus warmer and sunnier than almost all of Asia. And yield per acre should keep rising as technology improves.
I am not worried about population growth overall and not much worried about differential growth between countries but differential growth within countries is going to cause new Kosovos across the wealthy part of the world (except Japan which doesn't allow net immigration).
Never seen so many dumb comments in one thread. Truly political incorrectness makes you all stupid here.
ReplyDeleteAfrica is doing fine right now and getting better, just about in every country despite current rapid population growth.
Take Zimbabwe. White landowners get their estates taken away. Land goes unused. Economy collapses. But then land is actually distributed to farmers. Machinery is distributed to the farmers. Now the main cash crop of the country tobacco is mostly restored, not far from where it was before the land seizures.
That whole bullcrap about white landowners being highly gifted farmers turned out to be conceited nonsense.
Africa will do fine with 4 times more people.
Population growth in Africa will fall, and dramatically at that. The hardest part is knowing when.
ReplyDeleteThat whole bullcrap about white landowners being highly gifted farmers turned out to be conceited nonsense.
ReplyDeleteAFAIC, "gifted" and "farmers" don't even belong in the same sentence.
"What is the world carrying capacity for humans, given current technology?" - with the hydrocarbon 10B is a good estimate. Without it, 2-2.5 Billion.
ReplyDeleteIf we put the people who manage Israel's immigration policy in charge of America's immigration policy, we would probably get a worse immigration policy than we have now.
ReplyDeleteRemember the case where an MP in Israel hatched a plan with a Jewish MP in Australia to have Australia take Israel's Africans?
Wonder what a best-fit logistic curve would look like for Africa. It's a simple model, but that can be an advantage when one might be tempted to have one's thumb on the scale with more complex models. What carrying capacity fall out?
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna copypasta Whiskey's entire comment, just in case it tries to run down the memory hole.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey said...
Steve --
This is not just an American problem. The Op-Ed page of today's FT has an editorial by Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medicin Sans Frontiers and a former Socialist human rights minister lambasting Europe for not taking in all of Africa and the ME and "allowing" several thousand illegals to drown off Lampedusa.
The dynamic is this. Rich, entitled, and moral preening guys like Kouchner, seek to endlessly display their moral superiority and thus gain social and political power, by displacing their fellow countrymen they despise with third world props.
That in the long run say twenty years, they and their families will be ethnically cleansed and THEY will be nothing more than refugees themselves is no matter. They don't believe it or don't care, because "they'll be dead" (I have heard this line many times by older moral status mongers) and "that will be your problem."
Fundamentally however it speaks to how much the West hates itself, or really how much half the West hates hates hates the compromises, male cooperation, wealth generation, safety, security, and "boring" middle class values that underpin the core of the West. Women hate the men it produces, "boring" beta male nice guys, gays hate the middle class predictability, the upper class hates the check on their decadence and debauchery, what little remains.
And this Western/White self-hatred has ALWAYS been there, right down to Julius Caesar slaughtering a million Gauls or the destruction of the Western Roman Empire by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, Visigoths, and Vandals.
There's a billion Africans and Kouchner wants them all in Europe, essentially. And because there is no check, no fear, no ability of the people or even will (since half the people share elites values) elites like Kouchner will get their way.
10/23/13, 9:54 AM
Whiskey, you do know Kouchner is not WASP-Puritan, right? You know he's the fourth most influential Jew in the world, according to the Jerusalem post, so says Le wiki.
He's not exactly trying to giving away his only homeland.
There is simply no comparison with what the North African people are capable of if freed from the shackles of Islamic extremism, and the Bantus on the other side of the Sahara.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't discussing the prospects of civilization blooming. I only cited Algeria as an example of a dramatic decrease in fertility. We know falls of that magnitude can happen, even among poor and very undeveloped peoples. I also cited examples of dramatic decreases (less than Algeria's, but even so) among sub-saharan peoples. There's every reason to think nightmare scenarios of four billion could be avoided.
The larger point was that we should be unconcerned about the prognostications of these "UN demographers." Who knows what their political motivations are? Perhaps they want four billion. Perhaps their statements are intended to prime audiences into accepting larger numbers of sub-saharan immigrants than they were otherwise prepared to accept. We can't know but we're well within our rights to speculate (the UN being what it is).
And this Western/White self-hatred has ALWAYS been there, right down to Julius Caesar slaughtering a million Gauls or the destruction of the Western Roman Empire by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, Visigoths, and Vandals.
ReplyDeleteThe strangest thing about Whiskey is that he doesn't seem the least bit embarrassed by these ridiculous anachronistic effusions. It probably says something about the contempt in which he holds his audience.
Basically, the impending African population catastrophe is a disater wholly wrought by white men - albeit with the best of intentions.
ReplyDeleteFor countless millenia it was tropical disease, principally malaria, which kept the number of sub-Saharan Africans down - in fact, until recently, Africa was vastly underpopulated for its size.
In 1879, the British army docytor, Ronald Ross discovered that malaria was transmitted by the mosquito. (As an aside, I wonder if left to their own devices Africans would ever had made that discovery, even though malaria has decimated them for millenia - would they had discovered this fact independently even in another millenium, if western science had never been devised?).
The big explosion in African population only really dates from around 1950 - exact the same time as effective control for tropical disease started.
In a most prescient comment, the great Australian scientist MacFarlane Burnet had this to say - in a book first published in 1951.
"If malaria is ever to be controlled, internationally, then in a very few years the racial, economic and political consequences will be truly appalling".
Of course this was in the days before PC, when a great scientist could make such a quote offhand, with no comeback and include the term 'racial' in it.
I'd love you to write more on this topic Steve. It is so important! Have you read Countdown by Alan Weisman?
ReplyDeleteIt's called Camp of the Saints.
ReplyDeleteRead it.
If we put the people who manage Israel's immigration policy in charge of America's immigration policy, we would probably get a worse immigration policy than we have now. Remember the case where an MP in Israel hatched a plan with a Jewish MP in Australia to have Australia take Israel's Africans?
ReplyDeleteEasy peasy - just tell him he's designing the immigration plan for his country, then pull the old switcheroo when he's finished.
“The crazy thing is that this problem could be solved almost overnight with some modest eugenics benefits to boot. Simply decide to stabilize the population of Africa and then pay people to be sterilized. I'll bet for 100 bucks per head, you'd have impoverished Africans lining up for miles to get a snip or a shot. The wealthier, educated types who actively plan their families would eschew the payments and probably be secretly glad to see their poor, violent cousins opt out of the reproduction game.”
ReplyDeleteSimply decide? With S word in it? Are U out of your mind? Just imagine how it would look in NYT op ed. Or Guardian´s… There´s no need for going that far. In population of 1 billion, there must be at least a million African males with IQ>120. Just pay them let´s say 20 bucks for a daily hand job, spend $100 per African woman for artificial insemination, don´t forget to throw in some hush money for her husband and in two generations U will see a tremendous drop in fertility rates. If a hundred is not enough, double it, triple it or simply pay whatever it takes. Such a noble cause would be even a great justification for defaulting on Chinese debt. And, who knows, they may even pitch in. If not, there are still Zuck, Bill, Bloom, the Omaha guy and Donald in search of a just cause. US taxpayers won´t even notice. It may even serve as an excuse for taxing gas. Actually, that could be a great post-presidency job for U know who. He could even volunteer with his own hand full. With Harvard IQ, there would be no qualification issue. And it is just off the top of my head, without bothering it with math. If U guys throw your brains behind it…