Happy Halloween # 7 Billion

Somewhere in the world--perhaps India, as the Associated Press suggests--a baby was born today that was designated by the United Nations Population Fund as the person that pushed us over the 7 billion mark in terms of humans alive at the same time. Keep in mind, of course, that population growth at the global level is the balance of births and deaths, so the only reason that this birth mattered was because someone else on the globe didn't die. Indeed, the only reason we have reached 7 billion is because we have brought the death rate under control, so we really should be celebrating survival, not so much the birth of a child per se.


And, remember that according to the US Census Bureau's world population clock, we won't reach 7 billion until next March, so we will have plenty of time to continue thinking about how many of us there are. Actually, we will have the rest of our lives to figure that out...

Final Push to the Seventh Billion Person

Halloween is the day that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has designated to be the day we turn the population clock over to 7 billion. This is somewhat arbitrary, to be sure, but it makes good press even if, as one of my students noted, it's a little ghoulish (pun intended) to have this "celebration" the day before the famous Mexican "Day of the Dead" holiday. 


Last week UNFPA released its "State of World Population 2011" and that has stimulated a round of commentary about world population in the New York Times.


Without question, though, the best of the last-minute responses to 7 billion is the free (for a limited time) iPad app just released by the National Geographic Society. You should have this...[although it's only for the iPad, not the iPhone].

A More Personal Take on Achieving Seven Billion

Chris Arsenault of Aljazeera has published an online article about population growth that features quotes by several demographers, including me. One of the concerns I raise is that we genuinely do not know how we are going to feed our growing population. Already nearly a billion among us are hungry and yet we expect to add another 2-3 billion by the middle of this century. 


I was alerted to the fact that the article had been published by the receipt of an email suggesting to me that the answer was so obvious--a vegan diet (not only no meat, but no animal products such as milk or eggs). Now, in truth, I don't disagree with that idea. My wife and I transitioned to a vegetarian diet twenty years ago--although more for animal rights reasons than as an example of how to save the planet. Yet there is no doubt that one of the huge problems we face today is the enormous amount of agricultural output that could feed people directly, but rather winds up feeding non-human animals for slaughter or other purposes. Is it possible to even think about a vegan world? Twenty years ago I would have said no, but in the past twenty years being vegetarian has become commonplace, and being vegan is essentially where being vegetarian was two decades ago--people are likely to look at you as though you are nuts. 


If you live anywhere in the New York City area and want to experience what a vegan lunch or dinner (or brunch on the weekends) is all about, go to our favorite restaurant--Candle79 at 79th and Lexington. You may help save the planet.

The 7 Billion Hype Continues

As we approach 7 billion (or did we pass it? Or is it not until next year? Nobody knows for sure), people continue to jump on the bandwagon with stories. Anthropologist Barbara King notes on NPR that one of the more wild of these attempts--the idea that we should all be heading back to the "typical" hunter-gatherer diet:

In a few days, the world's population will reach 7 billion. Only a tiny fraction of this number still makes a living by hunting and gathering, the way all our ancestors did before about 12,000 years ago.
According to a set of claims relentlessly pushed in some books and blogs, as many modern humans as possible should adopt a hunter-gatherer diet. That is, we should eat lean meat and vegetables because our Paleolithic hunting-and-gathering ancestors did. At the same time, we should refuse dairy, grains and sugars because our hunting-and-gathering ancestors didn't eat these items.

But, of course, there is no scientific evidence of such a "typical" diet and, in all events, do we want to go back to the life expectancy of 20 years that these people experienced? I don't think so.

Economic Recession Equals Migration Recession

In bad economic times people tend to go somewhere else, if they think that things are better in that somewhere else. If there isn't anyplace better, as seems to be true over the past few years, then people quite rationally just stay put. This latter trend is the hot-off-the-press conclusion from analyses of the just-released 2008-2010 American Community Survey survey data, as reported in today's New York Times.

The institute’s study [the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire] compared three years’ worth of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which was released early Thursday and covered 2008-10, with the data from 2005-7. Since the survey’s findings are released in three-year increments, this was the first time that researchers had a set of data that included only years since the financial collapse began, allowing them to make a direct comparison to a similar period before the collapse.
Using this and other data from the I.R.S. that many researchers consider even more comprehensive, they found that migration into formerly booming states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada began to slow as soon as the recession hit and continued to shrink even into 2010, when many demographers expected it to level off. At the same time, Massachusetts, New York and California, which had been hemorrhaging people for years, and continued to do so in the three years before the financial collapse, suddenly saw the domestic migration loss shrink by as much as 90 percent.
“When times get really hard it gets really hard for people to up and move,” said Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute, who conducted the analysis. “People who might have left New York for North Carolina are staying put. But that is a very recent change, so that places that had been growing rapidly suddenly aren’t, and the outflow has really slowed down.”
Mr. Johnson said that the same phenomenon could be seen within states, as the growth began to slow in once rapidly growing suburbs, and shrinking cities like Los Angeles and Chicago began to stabilize.

In an analysis of the American Community Survey data made public on Thursday, William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, found that large metropolitan areas with once-flourishing economies, like Atlanta, Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., are no longer magnets for Americans ages 25 to 34.Mr. Frey said that, in many ways, young people were staying in the more established cities with a kind of wait-and-see approach to the economy. He said he expected the relocation rates to pick up as soon as there were new housing and job opportunities for young adults.
“They are trying to bide their time in a hip place they know,” he said. “But there is going to be a pent-up demand for migration, because right now people are just putting their lives on hold.”

With any luck, we won't have an economic recovery based on a new unsustainable housing bubble, but when the economy does bounce back (and it will), we will know it by watching the moving vans roll down the street.