You Can’t Stop That Clock

Catching up on printed media all at once after a lag of several days—an almost electric shock accompanies the experience—made me think that we really do have far too many people in the world. The collective consequence of that is there in print. This got me wondering about the current population of the globe. I went to worldometers, one of the population clocks, and took a look.

I measured first how many people accrue to world population in a minute. The number was 144. That number is births net of deaths. In my statistical minute, I noted 249 births and 105 deaths, producing my net population growth. Now that translates to 8,640 net new people every hour, 207,360 every day, and 75.7 million every year. And that clock, when you watch it, is absolutely relentless.

worldometers labels itself “real time world statistics.” Concerning “statistics,” there are two views. One derives from their right use. When used with caution and handled carefully, as if they were dangerous explosives, we get a lens on the vast collective. The other view characterizes the abuse of statistics with a famous phrase: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Which of the two applies to worldometers? Well, censuses of population always appear at a lag of time and, because it takes several months to conduct any census, they’re not even accurate snapshots. But such population clocks more or less accurately reflect change that can be tracked, census to census. So here we’re dealing with a truth—indeed, watching that clock rushing madly along, a dangerous truth.

At the same time, lies and damned lies are there as well. I read today an article which suggests that as homeownership rises, so does joblessness. Some feeble-minded economists have collected data on both and—assuming an entirely untraceable cause and effect relationship—proclaim that homeownership may be a baddy.

In the time I put these words on the screen about 42,000 people have been added to the world’s population. Educating all of these new people is truly a growing burden. It does not surprise me that, as population increases, the average skill of economists is tumbling like the seeds are falling out there today—covering my driveway in a nice mixture of yellows and whites.

We're Oddly Privileged Observers

The chart I present today is a somewhat more rationalized version of data from the Bureau of the Census that I had already posted here a while back. It shows the best scholarly estimates available on the subject of human global population for the period 1 to 1950 A.D. What I have done is simply extrapolated data points to fill in the gaps in the estimates, thus enabling me to show population on a continuous scale at 50-year intervals for the current chronological era. The raw numbers are available here. To this I might add that the original tabulation also provides estimates from 10,000 B.C. down to 200 B.C. The estimates for the human population for the time—and it’s nothing more than a guess-and-a-golly—suggest that in that entire period the human headcount was always below 230,000 million. When I arrived in America—the 1950 census was still being processed then—our population here was just a hair under 151 million. If I’d charted the entire range of the scholarly guesstimates, it would show a straight line running just above zero for all recorded history—and a huge, unbelievable spike appearing the day before yesterday.

In this chart I’ve plotted, along with the lower and upper estimates of scholars, the running average of the low estimate (green bars) and, overlaying them for most of the temporal trip, the difference between that average and the actual low estimate. What this tells me is that the real divergence from the perennials of history had its beginning in or around 1700, thus before the Age of Oil actually began. The early rising of the curve no doubt owed a great deal to advancements in agriculture discovered and applied in medieval times as documented by Lynn White in his fascinating Medieval Technology and Social Change. Coal mining began in the late 1740s; the steam engine appeared in 1770. And it was “hold on to your seats” after that.

We’re oddly privileged observers. We’re also, if you think about it, challenged to make the most of this odd and wondrous opportunity. The Age of Oil has already begun its descent from Mount Petroleum, and in another wink or two of historical time, the found wealth—which we, in fact, did very little to obtain beyond extraction—will have been consumed. We have a tiny window of time in which, somehow, we must, if we can, learn something from all this—and make the kinds of arrangements whereby we save and protect the physical gains we have been able to realize—not least electric light and the vast deposits of knowledge leisure has made possible to study under lamps—and to apply that knowledge to social well being.

The oddity of all this is how little one person can actually do. Thus this subject, already once touched upon in this blog, deserves this repetition—in new words and with a chart that features a blue sky.

The American People

My title refers to the common phrase we hear, constantly, in political discourse. Now I will present a sample of two such people, American People, the only people seen walking on Kercheval Avenue in Grosse Pointe (it’s a sizeable boulevard), at precisely seven minutes to 5 p.m. today. One was myself, wearing jeans, a striped shirt, and a rugby cap (Detroit Rugby Football Club, Est. 1968), and carrying a white plastic CVS bag holding two medications, picked up on foot (about an hours' walk) to get exercise and (incidentally) to save a tiny bit of gasoline. Concerning me, you know a little something from reading this blog. The other representative of the American People was a gentleman of roughly my age. He wore a tan suit, a white shirt, and a dark bow tie. He walked from the shade of an elm into the sunshine, and that bow tie was like a coat-of-arms, you couldn’t miss it. He was carrying a slender folder. Judging by the place, the time, I guessed that he was a retired businessman or banker who still visits an office, a place of refuge, a place where the transition may be marked in dignity, most likely in the Punch & Judy Building, across from our Library—a building that specializes in offering just such suites, modest in size but nicely appointed, to serve such purposes. I went my way, he in his, and as I walked home I pondered the meaning of this picture—the limitless uniqueness of each and every person, not least the American People neither of these two old men could see—because they were driving up and down Kercheval, as usual, but the sunlight reflecting brightly from the windshield hid their faces from view.

The Hydrocarbon Lottery

The Census Bureau—that worthy supplier of great statistical instruments by means of which we see our world—provides (here) a tabulation of world population going some 12,000 years into the past. I’ve taken these data and graphed them in Excel, plotting the upper and the lower estimates the Census makes available.

The chart, shown below, is sloppy as such things go; the bottom axis, showing years, is unevenly spaced: on the left side intervals are thousands of years, in the center hundreds and then fifties, to the right tens. I present a more properly scaled picture of the same data (second chart), using intervals of 1,000 years. In that graph I’ve shown the 2000 world population as 6.071 billion for both the low and upper estimate.

Looking at these patterns, the first thing that stands out—by not standing out—is that the world’s population, going back thousands of years, barely changed. Our numbers never managed to exceed 500 million at any time until the year 1500, roughly the end of the Renaissance. The first great leap comes between 1700 and 1750—and after that population bursts upward like a geyser! The second chart, with its millennial scaling, shows the rise as an almost vertical ascent.



Wow!

Here is an analogy. Place a tiny bacterial population on a laboratory sheet of glass. Watch it shrink or slowly increase using some faint residual nutrients clinging to the glass, left there by invisible moisture adhering to your fingertips. Now place a tiny drop of sugary water on the surface of the glass and watch what happens. The bacterial population will explode.

The analogy is apt because the sugary water most easily identified as the likely cause of our surge in numbers is the harnessing of fossil fuels. If we plot U.S. energy consumption from 1850 to 2000, shown below courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a pattern very similar to our population curve. As shown here, coal production predates the harnessing of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power.

The first mining of coal on record in the United States dates to 1748. Modern use of petroleum began when extraction of kerosene from “rock oil” began in 1852, the fuel used initially for lighting. The steam engine, which stimulated coal mining to feed it, dates to the late eighteenth century (the 1770s). The first internal combustion engine, a clumsy affair that ran on hydrogen and oxygen, saw the light of day in 1806, produced by the Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz.

The philosophical implications? One can’t help but think, looking at skyward rising curves that, well, what goes up, must come down. Was it wisdom or luck that opened cornucopia for us—or was it Pandora’s box? In any case, plenty to ponder here—not least the falling curves of oil discovery projected into the future. Will population follow where once it led?