Demographic Trends
Demography is the study of the numerical values of the size and composition of populations, increases and decreases in their size, and the possible rules that govern the changes. There are a few comments that have to be made before analyzing the demographic data:
Demography is not an exact science. We have only vague ideas about the controlling factors that might be correct or not. Past experience proved that it is next to impossible to influence demographic trends from outside.It has also been proven that one cannot really predict demographic trends. Common wisdom (as expressed by the Rev. Thomas Malthus at the time when the European demographic explosion took off) claimed that demography is controlled by the availability of food supply. It means that when food supplies are rising, together with the standard of living, people would have more children. Malthus even created a law, claiming that demographic increase will always be faster than the increase of the available food supply. That law is neither correct nor scientific. It might be correct in very extreme circumstances. If there will be no more food to eat then people will starve to death and population will drop. But even in this way it might not be applicable. In the last decade of the 20th century TV news showed hungry and starving people, a typical extreme case of the Malthusian theory, but even then there were no signs that the birth rate has dropped.
After Malthus, they found that food is not a unique factor, living space is another important element. That was the time when they made the famous experiment with a kind of fish, the guppies, and found that despite an abundance of food in the fish tank, the guppies have always adjusted their number to the size of the tank. This theory too has worked wonderfully for guppies, but human behavioral was not so easy.
Indeed, when one looks at empirical data then one finds that they confuse theoretical analyses. The 2nd century AD was a comparatively prosperous and peaceful era. It certainly was not overcrowded, except perhaps in the warrens of the big towns. Edward Gibbon crowned that century as the best one to be alive in. However, when one looks at the demographic data of that period then the trend that later brought to the depopulation of the Empire has already started then.
Even more confusing is the behavior in the Modern Age. A demographic explosion has started in Europe in the 18th century. It was not a really prosperous century; it was full with famines, starvation, bread riots and breakdown of food supply. It could not have been otherwise. The stream from the villages to the cities has already started, so people were far from the supply. No state apparatus of that time had the knowledge, the money or even the conception for a long-range policy of supply, storage and distribution. There were no tools to build such a machine. Still, things did improve and the demographic explosion of the western world continued until the second half of the 20th century.
Then comes the new millennium, and the west has an unprecedented prosperity, with a prognosis that the prosperity will continue. Nonetheless, the prediction is that in Europe, the heartland of the West, there will a net population loss, to be offset by increase in North America and Oceania.The figures for Europe show that between 1900 and 1950 there was a net growth of 34 %, about the same growth in the following fifty years and a predicted net loss of 15 % for the period between 2000 and 2050. It is certainly a clear contradiction of the Malthusian theory; a population loss in the most advanced area of the world at the time of the most prosperous and secure period of its existence. It is the memory of the 2nd century AD that is coming back to haunt.
Even more curious is the behavior of the rest of the world. The period between 1950 and 2000 saw the decolonization process, with disorder, starvation, plagues and even genocide. Still, the population has increased by an astounding 179 %.
In whatever way we look at the figures, it is obvious that the Malthusian theory has failed, together with the second theory, based upon that experiment with the guppies. If not the food supply and not the available spaces are controlling factors, then what are the controlling factors?
There is one possible cause for the demographic increase of Europe in the 18th century and in the rest of the world a century later. It is very possible that the answer is in the improvement of public health. In the 18th century, public health became an issue and it was improved. It started even earlier. The first inoculation of children against smallpox was done in the year 1700. It was done in a primitive way by inserting a piece of skin from an infected person under the skin of a child, but it worked and the mortality from that disease had dropped.. Additional experiments reduced the mortality of children in the West even more.
The advantages of western public health and the inoculation of children reached the non-western world only with the colonization and with intensified contacts in general. The colonial powers felt themselves responsible for the well-being of their wards and made efforts to improve conditions in the colonies. I know that this statement is against the politically correct view that colonialism only brought evils to the colonies, but it happens to be true, despite it being politically incorrect. As the colonization started only in the 19th. century, the demographic increase of the non-western world started later than that of the western world. Hence the lag in the peaks on Chart 3.
Rate of birth in general is a constant that seems to be controlled by environmental and economic factors. In places of low rate of children mortality the rate of birth was lower than in places of high mortality. The tropics are the home of many tropical diseases, hence the high rate of mortality for children that meant also a higher rate of birth. The temperate areas of the world are usually healthier places, hence the lower rate of mortality and the lower rate of birth. This hypothesis explains the lag in the peaks, and the different rates of the two parts of the world.
It is a plausible hypothesis and probably it is the correct answer. However, knowing the truth cannot alter the present. The demographic explosion is advancing like a runaway train. The fact that we know what caused the train to start will not explain us how to operate the controls to stop it, or whether there are any controls at all?
 |
The population figures quoted in this chapter are estimates, and not exact figures. In most parts of the world, there are no reliable census figures even today, and it certainly was not different in earlier times. Since the figures that appear in this chapter and in the charts, which accompany it, are the basic materials of this chapter, and of the whole study, the sources from where they were borrowed are listed below..
Years Source.
0 – 1500 AD J. D. Durand: Historical Estimates of World
Population:
An Evaluation (Univ. of Pennsylvania,
Population Studies Center, Philadelphia,
1974)
1750 – 1900 AD United Nations, The Determinants and
Consequences of Population Trends,1973
1910 – 1940 AD United Nations, World Population Prospects. As
Assessed in 1963, 1966
1950 – 2050 AD United Nations, World Population Prospects, The
1998 Revision, 1998
|
|
For the years before 1 AD there are no estimates. However, there is an estimate of the size of humanity at the time of the end of the last Ice Age, which is the date of the Neolithic Revolution. That estimate, which is 6 million human beings on the earth, serves this study as a starting point.
|
* * *
It is estimated by archaeologists that the count of humans at the end of the last Ice Age, which was at about 9000 BC, or 11000 years BP (before the present) was in the neighborhood of 6 millions. This number of humans made a comfortable living as a scavenger of nature. Although they had natural enemies, the big predators, it seems that they had the mental ability to cope with them. Mainly, they had distance weapons, spears and arrows, and they had fire, which was an unbeatable weapon. They were scavengers not in a sense that they poached kills of other animals, but in a sense that they hunted animals and collected fruits, nuts and grains, growing in the wild. They haven't contributed anything to the food chain, except their own body, if they were unlucky enough to be caught by one of the predators. In this respect, they did not differ from the other animals.
The changeover to agriculture and husbandry that presumably started after the end of the Ice Age, was the result of the climatic change, which compelled humans to start producing food, instead of collecting it. It is, at least, the viewpoint of most of the scholars, although there are dissenting opinions who think that agriculture and husbandry had a much earlier origin. I tend to agree with these scholars. It is difficult to accept that early humans who were hunters and gatherers, and judging from the size of their brain, had mental capabilities not less than their descendants would not make a few simple observation.
They collected grains from large patches of wild grasses. It is difficult to assume that they haven't noticed the connection between the amount of rain and the yield, or between the fact that large herds of animals grazed on the field and fertilized it and the connection between the yield of that land and other land without natural fertilization. It would also be difficult to accept that after hunt of ruminants, they did not collect the calves for future meat supply, which could have been a start for a domesticated herd.
However, whenever agriculture and husbandry started, it was a long period before the results were seen in demography. Indeed, judging from the evidence of archaeological remains, the early period of the Neolithic Revolution, which could have been thousands of years long, must have been a difficult and tiring period. There are clear signs of undernourishment on the skeletons. No reliable estimate exists from this period, but one can make an educated guess, based upon the establishment of urban civilizations.
The year 3500 BC is assumed to have been the year when the first urban civilization was established in Sumer, followed by other centers of civilization in Egypt and in the valley of the Indus. They were not the first towns; there were others before them. Jericho was at least 2000 years older than the earliest urban civilization, but Jericho was not a town in the sense of urban civilization. It was a collection of huts and houses, surrounded by a protective wall, as a defense against marauding enemies. When we talk about urban civilization, we do not mean only a defensive enclosure, but also an administrative, religious and defensive center, which surveyed a territory under its rule. The existence of an urban civilization assumes the existence of a ruling class, administrators, priests, soldiers and craftsmen. In short, a whole range of occupations that had a common denominator. None of them had to grow or hunt their food; it was given to them.
In this sense, the existence of urban civilization first in Mesopotamia, and later in the valleys of the Nile and the Indus, meant that at least in those places there was a surplus of food, beyond the needs of the growers, and there were people who consumed that surplus. Whether that surplus was collected as a
voluntary religious tithe or was taken by coercion, is immaterial here. We cannot know the absolute figures but they could not have been very large.The sizes of the oldest cities are not very large; there could not have been large populations there. According to the Bible, at the time of Abraham there was a raid of 4 Mesopotamian kings in the valley of the lower Jordan. They came probably to collect taxes but were not averse of collecting booty as well. They collected tribute and took prisoners, and turned back home.
Abraham's nephew, Lot, was among the prisoners. Abraham collected his retainers, 318 in number, and some allies, and followed them. He attacked the kings near Damascus, recovered the booty and released the prisoners.
According the Bible, he had a small army, probably less than a thousand men, so the enemy could not have been much stronger. That was at the end of the 3rd millennium Bc, about 1500 years after the establishment of the first urban civilization. The mass armies were still in the future, probably not earlier than the middle of the second millennium BC.
The first date for which there is an agreed population estimate is the year 1 AD. It is an estimate that is based, at least partially, upon a Roman census. The year 1 AD, the beginning of the Christian calendar, was the period when Augustus ruled in Rome. In Rome they took a census practically every decade since very old times. When Augustus settled the political questions of the Roman empire, he organized an empire-wide census. It found that the population of the Empire counted some 60 million people. The world's population of the same time is estimated at about 300 millions. It is based upon the Roman census, as well as estimates for Iran, India and China.
If that census is accepted then since then beginning of the Neolithic Revolution to the year 1 AD, some 9000 years, the population of the earth has grown from 6 millions to 300 millions. It is an infinitesimal small yearly increase. It is possible that most of the increase was in the comparatively settled period of the Pax Romana. In Italy itself, we know that the city of Rome has grown from a small trading post on the Tiber to a huge city of over a million people. The city of Rome was surely an exception, but its example is sufficient to support the assumption that the increase between 9000 BC and 1 AD was not a linear increase but an exponential curve, similar to Chart 1, on a lesser scale of course.
After year 1 AD there are two important way stations. One of the stations is the year 1000 Ad and the second is the curve of the Growth of Population, which is attached as Chart No.1.
It is estimated that the world's population in the year 1000 AD was 310 million people, If the previous estimate is accepted, that in the year 1 AD the population of the world was 300 million people, then during the millennium the population has grown by 10 million people only. The first millennium AD was a cruel and unsettled period but it certainly was not much worse than any other millennium since the Neolithic Revolution. It is true that the first part of the millennium saw the depopulation of the Roman Empire because of causes, which are still hidden from us. It was also the period of the onslaught of barbaric peoples on the empire, but then each previous millennium had its invasions, wars and massacres. It is possible that the growth of the population before the year 1 AD was caused by the Pax Romana and by the comparative peace and safety of the Roman Empire. The first millennium AD has stopped that growth and the population remained unchanged.
The second way station is the chart which shows the size of population in units of 50 years, starting from the year 1750 to the estimate of the year 2050 AD. This chart is exceptional and there is nothing in earlier history that can match it. It shows 791 millions in the year 1750 and 8909 millions 300 years later. It is an extraordinary period, as far as demography is concerned, both for the rate of increase and for the absolute numbers. Starting from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution to the year 1000 AD, the world population has increased from 6 to 310 millions. The rate of increase in the last 300 years, between 1750 AD and 2050 AD, is 1100 percent, meaning that the population in 1750 has increased 11 times to result in the estimate of 2050 AD. If this ratio would apply to the 10000 years, between 9000 BC and 1000 AD, then the original population should have been increased by about 330 times and the number of people in the year 1000 AD should have reached 2 billion people and not 310 millions.
It is an extraordinary period so far as absolute numbers are concerned. In the first 10000 years, the number of people who were living at the time of the count has increased by 304 millions, from 6 to 310 millions, while in the 300 years, the number of people has increased by 7118 million people, from 791 millions in 1750 to 8909 millions in 2050 AD.
According to the estimates of the United Nations, from whose publications the relevant figures were extracted, after 2050 the population increase will slow down. Of course, the publications assume normal circumstance, rate of birth by women in childbearing age, rates of death, etc. It does not take into account possible violent upheavals, wars, natural catastrophes, plagues, etc.
This study is in the opinion that judging by the experience when the world counts only 6060 million people, the world's population will not reach 8909 million by the year 2050 AD, and if yes, it will not be a world we know, or would like to live in.
The aim of this chapter is to present the demographic trends since the Neolithic revolution until our own days, in such a manner that the chapters which deal with the events of the last few hundred years, the so-called Modern Age, can point to and show the correlation between the events and the demographic trend.
In order to provide the necessary data, three charts were prepared. The first chart, named Growth of Population (Chart 1) shows the curve of the population growth between the years 1750 and 2050, in intervals of fifty years; seven stations altogether. The stations before 1750 are not shown but there is no need. If you sit by your table and the printout of the chart is before you, then imagine that the paper is extended to the left to the wall of the room, or even to the far wall of the room next to it, and there is a near straight line on it, representing the increase from 6 to 791 millions. After 1750 the line rises until it reaches 8909 millions in 2050. One does not have to be an expert in history or in demography to understand that there is some process here without a precedent in history, or even a similar example to it, It is a frightening curve.
It does not seem to be a curve representing a simple count of people, but a representation of a tidal wave, a tsunami, that seem to engulf the whole world. The meaning of the curve is not far from the impression. When the single curve is separated into two, one for the Western World and one for the rest of the world, it becomes even more frightening.
Charts No.2 and 3 analyze the figures of Chart No.1, by separating the figures into two parts. The first part contains the demographic values and the rates of change of the Poor World and the second part the same data for the Rich World. Rich World means here that part, which is actively, participates in the Global Economy. The Poor World is that part that at best can supply cheap labor and raw materials, and at worst is excluded from all participation altogether.
To be excluded does not mean that someone has decided that such and such a country is not part of the New World Order. To be excluded means that a country has nothing to offer to the rich world, neither cheap labor, nor raw materials, or even market for finished goods. There are many countries today in that category. Wages might be low in Sierra Leone, Liberia or in Somalia, still no one would risk building a factory there. So, those countries are slipping out of history, and their number is growing. Small-scale deals in smuggled diamonds do not mean participation in the Global Economy. It might interest numbered-accounts in Swiss banks more than it does the people of Sierra Leone or Liberia.
Chart No. 2 also shows the relation between the populations of the Rich and the Poor Worlds. There are extreme variations in the ratio which can be seen in the numbers, but is has an even extreme picture in the absolute figures, not shown on the chart. As an example to that extreme one example suffice. In 1900 the population of Europe was three times of the population of Africa. In the year 2050 AD the ratio will be reversed and the population of Africa will be more than three times of that of Europe. In the year 1750, the population of the Rich World was 21 % of the population of the Poor World. It increased to 30 % in the years 1900 – 1950, and drops to 12 % in the year of 2050.
The rates of change of both the poor and the rich world are plotted on a graph, presented as Chart No.3. They are the same figures as on Chart No.2, still the graphic presentation emphasizes the values and shows their real meanings. One can have a look at the graph and at one glance can see that between the years 1800 and 1900 the demographic increase in the developed world was much greater than in the undeveloped world. After 1950, that trend has reversed. There are very clear meaning is that graph and they are used to explain many of the events of that period. It indeed tells a unique story in the history of mankind. It is possible that there were similar trends in the past, but they are highly unlikely. If they would have existed then some trace would remain, and there are no signs of such a trace.
The chart shows two demographic bulges, one of the western world and the second for the rest of the world. There is a shift of about a 100 years between the peaks on the chart. The year 1900 is the peak for the western civilization and the year 2000 is the peak for the rest of the world. It should be explained
again that the chart does not represent absolute figure but rate of increase. There can be only one explanation for that chart.
It is obvious that the bulges cannot be the results of conscious decisions, neither of some central power, nor of the people themselves. The sorry outcome of central power attempting to influence patterns of families was more than amply demonstrated by the Chinese experience of limiting the number of children in families. Similarly, no individual decision could have influenced the figures on the chart. No western family decided to have more children because there was an Industrial Revolution and the additional offspring could find jobs in the new factories.
It seems that rate of birth is a constant, which is controlled by biological factors and economic constraints. The expression 'replacement value' is a modern expression, meaning that a family unit should have at least 2.1 children in order to replace the parents, allowing also for barrenness. That law of demography, which was formulated only in modern times, caused families in societies with a high rate of date of mortality of children before reproductive age to have a high rate of birth to allow for the loss. The type of family occupation influenced economic constraints. In areas of high-intensity agriculture, there was a premium on the number of children, because they could help the family from an early age. High number of children was also a type of social security in ages without such insurance, meaning every period in history, except the very present in a limited part of the world.
If we accept that the chart presents an objective picture of the biological and economic constraints in both parts of the world, in the part of the Western Civilization and parts outside of it, then it seems that the rate of increase was less in the west to begin with. The peak of the rate of the demographic increase in the west was 63 %, while in the rest of the world it reached 179 %,
So, if the pattern of bringing offspring to this world is a constant that was developed in thousands of years or even more, what then was the change which brought on the explosion? First in the territory of the western civilization and later in the rest of the world. The only factor in the demographic equation that has changed was the public health, meaning that the mortality of children was reduced, first in the west and later in the rest of the world. That meant that the rate of birth remained constant and the mortality rate has decreased. The result was a demographic explosion, starting in the west in the 18th century, reaching its peak in 1900 AD, and followed by the rest of the world, where the public health has improved because the colonial administration has imported Western practices, medicine, inoculations and special treatment of children, etc.
A book of history is not supposed to be a sermon on ethics. This book attempts to stick to that rule. However, when one examines the charts of demography, one cannot refrain from having thoughts about countless doctors, chemists and scientists in general, who made every effort to help humanity, to provide a better health and reduce mortality of children. What they did was controlled by a biological imperative, not much different from that imperative that controls the number of children in a family. No doubt, they felt extreme satisfaction when they saw that their effort succeeded and the curve of mortality turned downward. They deserved it. Still, one wonders, what would have happened if they had seen the outcome of that curve in a couple of centuries beyond their age? We shall never have an answer to that question, and maybe it is better that way?
The charts are added as separate units and not parts of this chapter. The reason is that the main body of the book refers to them many times, so it is advised to keep them independently.
|
|
|
