Exponential Human Population Growth.
Will the demographic trasition seen in the Western countries become the norm through out the world?
Demographics is the study of human populations.
Demographics is of value for a variety of reasons including...
  • required by governments to forecast trends to predict needs for food, public works, transit, education, medicine, pensions, strains on the environment etc.
  • military needs to keep track of national populations to predict military strength of self and other countries
  • population pyramids are  a useful demographic tool for examining human populations in terms of age cohort
  • corporations use demographics to determine insurance rates and product marketing ventures

 

Note the wide base. What does it mean?

What has generated the "pig in the boa" anomaly in Canada's pop. pyramid?
Presently the world human population has a doubling rate of 43 years with most of the population increases happening in the under developed world.

Demographic transition models suggest that as human standard of living improves and women's rights are ensured the overall population growth rate generally decreases.
The demographic transition model predicts that human population growth rates will decline over time in developed countries as the death rate and the birth rate decline for various reason.

Prior to the advent of technological inputs that improve health and education, populations fluctuated with the cycles of nature that included famine, warfare, climate change  and disease.

As cultures adopt technology education and women's rights populations tend to rise towards carrying capacity and then level out.

Perhaps carrying capacity needs to be redefined. It may be the cumulative stressors of technological culture that is limiting increased population growth rates.
Countries with low living standards, (including poor education), where birth control is not fully understood or available and  children are a source of social support for elderly parents tend to have high population growth rates especially when access to food is present.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa the spectre of population explosion has been exacerbated by the AIDS pandemic.

Europe took several centuries to go through the demographic transition.

The "Asian Tigers" have gone through the same process in a matter of decades!!

Perhaps humans may be able to escape the grim vision portrayed by Malthus in 1798.

Recent advances in technology especially high tech have helped overcome limits to growth in a variety of ways for example the ability to detect hidden sources of minerals and new ways to extend the productivity of agriculture.

What will happen to human populations however if humans discover and apply life extension technologies.

  Reverend T. Malthus

"How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ships hold and covered with a little earth."

-Giovanni Boccaccio   from the Decameron written during the plague