Hans Rosling on Population Growth

I. Peak Population

Whenever you get a chance to watch a speech by Hans Rosling, take it. Last month he posted a video discussing the peak of population growth, and it's very interesting.

Rosling has spent most of his life working on health and development issues, currently he is closely involved with a project to help individuals around the world access and manipulate demographic data, at Gapminder.org. The site has some interesting ways of building graphs that allow you to see a large number of variables at play at once while still understanding what's going on. I like to imagine this makes Rosling the digital age's William Playfair (you know, the Scot who invented the line graph, the bar chart and the pie chart).

Much of Rosling's work (as a doctor, statistician, and public speaker) emphasizes ways to save children in the poorer regions of the world. Similar work caused Paul Ehrlich to raise a moral dilemma several decades ago in "The Population Bomb":

Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies - often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.

In other words, if a high human population damages the environment, and leads to greater poverty, then isn't it misguided and dangerous for Hans Rosling to focus on decreasing child mortality in the developing world?

Rosling provides a response in last month's video which cuts right to the data. He provides interesting trivia and projections along the way.

Many who worry about overpopulation, including Ehrlich, rely on a Malthusian picture of population trends. Unchecked, they believe, birth rates will be high, and populations will grow until famine, plague or some mass extinction event pushes it back. The prevailing respect for Malthus is odd, because when Malthus applied his theory, he predicted that population growth would outstrip food supply in the mid-19th century. (It did not.) Neo-malthusians like Paul Ehrlich subsequently predicted mass famines in the 1970s. So why are Malthusians so often wrong? For starters, birth rates are not consistently high. Factors like increasing GDP and female literacy (among others) tend to push down population growth by lowering family size, even while longevity increases.

II. Sustainable Population

In the video, Rosling discusses where we can expect population to level off. Will that level of population be sustainable?

In evolutionary theory, "adaptive radiation" is used to describe how a species can aggressively fill out a new niche (in that case, through greater diversification). Even in the biological world, nature abhors a vacuum, a given species will quickly expand to find new boundaries. Over the course of history, mankind has faced some huge population explosions, despite no radical adaptive radiation, nor significant gains in territory. Such explosions might be worrisome at first. But if you look back through history, these population spurts often followed agricultural revolutions. It's not that we became more aggressive in breeding, but that we became more efficient at using the limited resources of this planet to sustain more people.

Of course global population will be sustainable once it levels out, because living well under sustainable levels is one factor which drives population growth, and also because the singularity is nigh.

This hits on a concept that I learned from the classic Sim City 2000: Sustainability is determined not by nature, but by technology. Or, the plough was just the first iteration of the arcology.

III. Further Consideration

* Emily Oster discusses how longevity can interact with other systemic social problems, like AIDS and development.

* Birth rates and longevity can be folded into median age, which may be a useful demographic indicator. The US has a median age around 36 years, while almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa has a median age between 14 and 20. We cannot expect Africa to follow a "build infrastructure, then profit!" path to development like the US or Western Europe. Most of the population in Africa is either too young to help build any infrastructure, or cannot expect to enjoy it very long. Increasing health outcomes is an accessible, meaningful, and perhaps obvious first step.

* You can make your own GapMinder graphs through Google Spreadsheets.

Steven Levitt on the Urban Healthcare Initiative

When Freakonomics author Steve Levitt, whose career is made on finding the flaws in various institutions, supports a program, you know it is doing interesting new work for the benefit of all.

He blogs this week on the Urban Healthcare Initiative, a plan to radically reform Emergency Care in Chicago, doubtless an area that could use some work.

Kosmix and Bobby Jindal

Kosmix is a new search engine attempting to penetrate the "deep web."

For a good starting place, check out their page on Bobby Jindal, my fav for the McCain VP, my fav for the Republican Party challenger in 2012, and to deliver the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union on Tuesday.

I'm not well equipped to measure their deepweb capabilities, but I notice two things right off:
1) Novel searches take a few seconds to process.
2) The page layout incorporates modern search engine usability ideas, like putting photos in one place, news articles in another, and wikipedia results and regular search results somewhere else. Deepweb is exciting, but usability seems like the next place search can gain the most ground the most quickly to me.

Erroll Tyler and Economic Liberty

Randy Barnett discusses the 14th Amendment a bit at the end, the same Randy Barnett who took California's Medical Marijuana case to the Supreme Court. Barnett is really good at crafting arguments that force the Supreme Court to either abandon a series of precedents or engage in radical social change. (They can be expected to squirm a bit, then opt for the former.)

I suspect Errol Tyler's claim that the 14th Amendment protects his right to earn an honest living will fail. If it succeeds, we may need to drastically overhaul commonplace regulations and laws across the country regarding licensure and access to professional organizations. Now, any overhaul that liberalized and harmonized professional licensure requirements throughout the Union would be for the good of all Americans, as I've whined about before, but I doubt such a change would come from the bench. I seriously doubt such a sound economic policy change would ever be realized in this country.

UPDATE: As much as I like to imagine him constantly harrying SCotUS with their inconsistencies, Mr. Barnett corrects that his activity in Raich should not be confused with a habit. He posts on this issue here.

Oscar Highs & Lows

Highs:
- Sean Penn's "You commie homo-loving suns of guns! I did not expect this, and I want it to be very clear I know how hard I make it to appreciate me often." A good line against the moral majority. He then undercut that delicious bit of subversion by explicitly chastising those that voted for Proposition 8. Ladies and gentlemen... Sean Penn!

- Ben Stiller's Joaquin Phoenix impersonation. Natalie Portman killed with the "You look like you work at a Hasidic meth lab" line.

Lows:
- The fake kisses from the actresses nominated for 'Best Actress'. It would have been bearable if the women presenting weren't butchering the kudos delivered. The whole time the actresses nominated were tearing up and mouthing 'I adore you'. These actresses all truly deserved the Oscar.

- "The musical is back!" No, Hugh... it's not. No matter how hard you want to believe. Hugh Jackman's second musical number was fine when he and Beyonce weren't singing on top of each other...on purpose.

Push:
- The five person presentation for the major awards. I liked the concept and presentation, but most of the people presenting had zero charm, zero believability in the what they were saying, and on occasion a complete inability to deliver basic lines of gratitude.

1999 in Film

Kottke provides an appreciation of Eyes Wide Shut, a film I'm still not convinced was really transcendent. But at the end of the post, he includes a list of why 1999 may have been the greatest year in film in a long time.

It's hard to argue with Run, Lola, Run!, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix and Princess Mononoke.

The Ideal Ranking System

I consider Tyler Cowen a fairly brilliant guy, and he's influenced a lot of how I think about various issues. He's an economist, a gamer, and an academic, so he has a hell of a start endearing himself to me.

Because I hold Mr. Cowen in such high esteem, I was surprised to read his post today, which criticized Spin's move from a 5 point ranking system to a 10 point scale.

I almost exclusively read film reviews through the filter of Metacritic, which converts all the written reviews to a 100 point scale. I find the small scales typical of newspapers uninformative. There are a lot of 4/5 star films, or albums, or restaurants. That represents a huge range of quality, and I often want more information about items in that range.

A commenter suggests that these expanded scales are only good some of the time,

More granularity is useless if you are making no comparisons and just making a pure recommendation: Go see Coraline. Read The Hobbit. Don't read The Stand. Etc.

- Bob Montgomery

At first blush, that seems plausible. If a friend of mine asks me "Should I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?", and I reply, "87!" then I can see where that would be confusing.

If I replied, "I'd peg the chance you like it at 87%," I can see that as being a weird, resulting from questionable methodology, perhaps, but not less helpful than "Yes." Certainly not useless, as the commenter suggests.

I began with a commenter, because I worry that Mr. Cowen's thoughts here are... less developed.

"But say they give a new release eight, nine, or who knows maybe eight and a half stars? What exactly are they trying to say?"

This means that the album in question is better than a 7 star album, but worse than a 10 star album. I'm not sure where the difficulty lies in understanding such a system. Numbers mean what they always mean. This is not Crazy 8s.

I think that Cowen is trying to suggest that the main function of any rating scale is for the magazine to "put it's name on the line" with it's maximal review. A five-star scale then lets the magazine really go out on a limb for a lot of albums, where a ten-star scale lets a magazine softball some truly great works at a 9, reserving 10s for "safe bets".

This is not my intuition of how reviewing systems work. Probably due my experience with video game ratings. The video game magazine industry, for a long period of time, rated almost all videogames in the 7-9 range. This ruined their credibility for me and others. The fact these were basically trade magazines that shilled for the mainstream wasn't somehow disguised by the 10 point scale.

I now see reviewers as putting their name on the line with everything they write, and I'm no longer interested in giving them opportunities to hide their opinions in broad, imprecise scales.