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Long-Term Global Population Trends
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Global Population Growth
In this course, Professor Ian Goldin (University of Oxford) considers the causes, consequences and future of global population growth, centring on a single key question – is the planet full? In the first lecture, we explore global population growth throughout history and whether this will continue into the future, arguing that declining fertility rates suggest not. In the second lecture, we look at this decline, its global nature, its causes and its consequences for future demographic patterns. Next, we think about two issues associated with demographic change – consumption and its environmental impacts, and population ageing. In the fourth and final lecture, we consider the future of population growth in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and conclude by addressing the question of whether the planet is full.
Long-Term Global Population Trends
In this lecture, we think about some key long-term trends in global demography, focusing in particular on: (i) population growth, especially the rapid increase in the world’s population since the late-nineteenth century, and its causes in terms of the decrease in infant mortality and lengthening of life expectancy; (ii) the reasons for these changes, such as expansion of public healthcare and improvements in medical technologies; (iii) whether this growth will continue, with particular reference to the decline in recent decades of the fertility rate to below replacement level – the number of children per adult woman needed to keep the population at its current size.
I'm Ian Golden,
00:00:06the professor of globalisation and development at the University of Oxford.
00:00:07And I'm also the director of three research programmes in Oxford.
00:00:11The Oxford Martin Programme on the future of work,
00:00:15Future of development
00:00:18and technological and Economic change
00:00:20have written many books on a wide range of topics.
00:00:23The most recent rescued from global crisis to a better world
00:00:26thinks about how the pandemic has changed things.
00:00:29And my book, which is most directly focused on fertility,
00:00:32is the planet full.
00:00:37And that's the question
00:00:39I'm going to be dealing with today. Is the planet full?
00:00:40How do we think about the world's population,
00:00:44demography
00:00:47and the changes
00:00:49and has the pandemic brought new changes in this area?
00:00:50Many people feel that the planet is full, but when they say that
00:00:55they mean full of other people,
00:00:59they don't mean full of
00:01:01their Children
00:01:03or others closely related to them.
00:01:05And so there tends to be
00:01:08in many people, some bias that somehow more of people like themselves a good thing.
00:01:10More of other people,
00:01:15not so much.
00:01:17And yet when you look at the numbers, we see that everywhere around the world,
00:01:18there's been extraordinary change.
00:01:24For thousands of years, the world's population was very low and stable,
00:01:28and then improvements in nutrition through the agricultural revolution,
00:01:33improvements in life expectancy
00:01:37as water became cleaner
00:01:40led to a growing population.
00:01:42We, as we mastered our environment more,
00:01:46I've been able to build homes that kept us warm,
00:01:49where clothes have kept us warm,
00:01:52cooked, began to cook food
00:01:55and develop more efficient means
00:01:57of ensuring
00:02:00that we survived for longer
00:02:01and as battles and clashes between groups took a lower toll,
00:02:04the population group. It really wasn't until
00:02:09much more recently in world history
00:02:12that we've seen this rapid population rise.
00:02:15And over the last century
00:02:18there's been a particularly rapid rise,
00:02:20and that's led to ideas like the population bomb
00:02:23was the name of a book population explosion
00:02:28and ideas that somehow this is out of control.
00:02:32And indeed, there has been a doubling
00:02:35of the speed
00:02:38in which the world's population has doubled
00:02:39over
00:02:42the last century because what we saw was this rapid decline
00:02:43in mortality, particularly infant mortality,
00:02:49young Children dying often in childbirth or before the age of one
00:02:52from diseases
00:02:58and an increase in life expectancy.
00:03:00And that's really because of progress that's been associated with income growth.
00:03:03People have more money, Uh, and therefore able to buy better food, have care.
00:03:07Societies are able to provide care, nursing hospitals and so forth,
00:03:14and also because of improvements in knowledge.
00:03:19Simple things
00:03:23like smoking kills you.
00:03:25Wearing a safety belt prolongs your life.
00:03:27Wearing a condom prevents
00:03:30the transmission of HIV AIDS and other venereal diseases,
00:03:32and the increases in life expectancy have been to changes in public health,
00:03:37like smoking, like pollution
00:03:43and others.
00:03:46And also, of course, due to extraordinary new technologies.
00:03:47Vaccines have been absolutely critical in this vaccines against polio, measles,
00:03:51smallpox
00:03:56against tuberculosis
00:03:58and the ability to control
00:04:01increasingly malaria and other diseases has led
00:04:03to a rapid improvement
00:04:07in life expectancies. And it's Bigmat, which is
00:04:09explained,
00:04:13together with rising income, improving nutrition,
00:04:14the rise
00:04:18in the world's population
00:04:19from
00:04:212,000,000,004 billion
00:04:22than to six and now approaching eight billion people in the world.
00:04:26But where is this going to go?
00:04:33Are we going to continue to see a doubling an
00:04:34increase and the evidence points very firmly against this?
00:04:38What we're seeing
00:04:43is around the world a rapid decline
00:04:45in population growth. What we're seeing around the world is
00:04:48fertility. That's the number of Children. On average, woman
00:04:53have
00:04:58declining below replacement level over the period 1950 to 2050.
00:04:59That means less
00:05:06then what was necessary over the medium term
00:05:09to keep populations at their current size.
00:05:12Replacement level tends to be about an average 2.1
00:05:15Children.
00:05:20Uh huh,
00:05:22uh, Mother
00:05:24women of adult age. Because what?
00:05:26We saw the ideas of the right to choose that women have the right
00:05:28over their own bodies
00:05:32to choose how many Children they will have
00:05:34these ideas spreading around the world
00:05:36and that the church, increasingly stepping back,
00:05:39still has places to do this
00:05:43from ideas
00:05:45that women shouldn't be able to do that not allowing contraception, for example.
00:05:46So this spread of contraceptive methods the spread of knowledge,
00:05:50the spread of rights
00:05:53has been quite fundamental in needing to this decline in the number of babies born,
00:05:55and the reason it's not just to, you know, you have two Children,
00:06:02and then you have
00:06:05in the next generation another two, and you keep the population
00:06:07stable
00:06:11and some studies it's much more than two that you need 2.12 point 22.3 on average.
00:06:12The reason it's higher is because not all Children
00:06:19are girls, so half of girls and actually, increasingly, in many societies,
00:06:24there's a skew nissen the population towards boys, so many more boys
00:06:30growing up than girls and some countries like China. This is rather dramatic.
00:06:36You have provinces in China where there's 1.2 boys, on average for every girl.
00:06:41In other words, 12 boys for every 10 girls.
00:06:47And that means that there are much less potential mothers, uh, in that environment.
00:06:51And that's because these gender biases are because of gender discrimination,
00:06:59largely
00:07:05that men in many societies have higher status, higher income than girls.
00:07:06And so when people are only having one child
00:07:13and they have the technologies to choose,
00:07:16they have means to through scans and other means
00:07:18to identify the the gender of their future child.
00:07:22They are choosing not to have girls often in favour of boys.
00:07:25So one reason why, for replacement you need over two Children.
00:07:30Uh huh,
00:07:36Child wearing mother
00:07:37is because
00:07:38not
00:07:39everyone is gonna
00:07:41be a girl, and actually they're much less girls in many societies now than boys.
00:07:42The second reason is that even if there are half the number of population is women,
00:07:48many women are not choosing to have Children.
00:07:55
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Goldin, I. (2021, December 10). Global Population Growth - Long-Term Global Population Trends [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/global-population-growth/long-term-global-population-trends
MLA style
Goldin, I. "Global Population Growth – Long-Term Global Population Trends." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 10 Dec 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/global-population-growth/long-term-global-population-trends