Global Population Trends
Speakers: Dr. Joel Cohen (click here for biography)
Soap Summit 2

Transcript of Proceedings
September 7, 1996

SONNY FOX: Earlier today, at lunch you heard an extraordinary speech by an extraordinary man, Tim Wirth, part of which was about population. We're going to revisit that subject in another way now. The gentleman you're going to listen to is Joel Cohen. Joel is Professor of Population at Rockefeller University. He's a man who has two PHDs, one in Math and one in population studies. He's just written a book called How Many People Can the Earth Support? I don't necessarily recommend it as great stuff for your shows. Mr. Cohen has never met a mathematical equation he didn't like and they're all in here. But it is an extraordinarily important book. It has been so reviewed and the word "brilliant" is what's normally appended after the name Joel Cohen when you use his name in places that are knowledgeable about these issues. Joel is also into poetry and into music. Today, I want him to talk a little bit about some of his thoughts on some of the issues that are raised in this book. This is Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University, Joel.

JOEL COHEN: Demography is the only subject that can make sex boring. And a Demographer is someone with a flair for numbers who doesn't have the personality to be a bookkeeper. For some people, a number is just what the name describes. It's something that you numb people's minds with. In fact, numbers can be quite funny. What's the difference between a flat tire and three hundred and sixty five condoms? A flat tire is a Goodyear. Three hundred and sixty five condoms, that's a great year.

I'd like to ask you to take a look in the folders that you were given by PCI when you registered, and fish out a page which I didn't ask to be put there but was put there providentially. It's a white page like this and it says, resident population projections of the United States, Middle, Low and High series. It's more numbers than you ever want to see in a single day but I'm going to just focus on a very small part of this. The first line says 1996, the U.S. today has about 265 million people, okay? And there are three columns of numbers headed Middle, Low and High series. These are projections that the U.S. census bureau has made about the future under some different assumptions about how many children we choose to have and how many immigrants we choose to admit to this country. So lets flip to the back page now and skip to the bottom line. In the bottom line there are four numbers. The first one says 2050.

This is 1996. That's 54 years from now. So, it's not very long into the future. If somebody had a child today, that child would be just two years older than I am today in that year. Okay, I'm 52 so 54 is not that long away into the future. And the third number over is under the Low column. It says 282,524 million. Well, that's 282 million, 283 million. You got that? That's low. And the other one says 518,903 thousand. That's 519 million. Got that? That's High. We choose in our actions today and over the coming years, between an America with 280 million people and an America with half a billion people. 519 million. And, the reason I say what you're doing is important is that the system operates like this.

This is a mixing bowl and this is a tennis ball. You put the tennis ball on top of the mixing bowl. Within a certain range, it more or less stays at the same height. It goes practically nowhere. If you give it a nudge in one direction it will fall off to the left. It's unstable in that direction. If you give it a nudge in the other direction, it goes off that way. It goes completely out of control. It's unstable in that direction, okay? We are here and you are the nudge. You are influencing our attitudes for having children without wanting them or without planning for them or without being able to anticipate their arrival. If we go one way we can end up with a population somewhat similar to what we have now. If we go the other way, we have half a billion people. So, I just wanted to impress upon you the average number of children per woman in the United States now is 2.0. A tiny fraction. That's the number required for a steady population. Why are we adding three million people a year? The Secretary correctly said we have increase of births over deaths, two million and immigration of one million. These are all choices that we have to make. The reason that we have an increase in births over deaths is women are only having an average of two. So, so you a very young age structure and that's a consequence of the baby boom. So, you are crucial in which direction we turn.

In the last few minutes I want to address the question of the complexities. David Poindexter introduced the session last evening. Most of you were there and you may have heard him refer to children begging with infants in Bombay, identifying this as a population problem. I would like to say to you is that it's partly a population problem no doubt. It's also a problem of poverty. If they weren't poor we wouldn't be worried about it so much. And it's also a problem of economics. Those people have no prospect or means of getting income. And it's partly political power. They're powerless so they can't get their hooks on whatever goods there are out there. And, it's partly the question of population. I walked home last night after the session. I was approached three times by beggars on 6th Avenue and asked for money. Why do we rail that poverty but not a population problem?

We have problems right here in the country. Yesterday morning I was in Tucson, Arizona which is increasing by about 30 thousand people a year, who are living on a water table that's going down three to four feet per year. It started just under the surface and we've not pumped down to 200 feet below ground level. That's fossil water that was left there 10 thousand years ago by the melting glaciers and is not going to be replaced in the near future. So, there we have a population problem but it has significant environmental components, namely, where are we going to get our water from it we want to live? And, a couple of months ago, I was in the town of Mattfield Green, Kansas. Mattfield Green is a town of population 50, about the number of people in this room. It used to have two or three hundred people. It's in the county with the most unplowed, native prairie in the United States. Their problem is depopulation. All the kids are going to the city 'cause there are no opportunities. So, all the skills that the people have there for making a living in a prairie grass community, are being lost. It's a cultural loss that's going on there.

So, my larger message is that population cannot be viewed in isolation but includes and interacts with economics, environment and culture. And that's really my core message. It's the core message of our, my book and our future depends not only on natural constraints but on our human choices. Several of the earlier speakers have emphasized choices and that's what I want to emphasize too. And, you are helping to shape our choices. I have no specific suggestions for you concerning the text of your plays. You don't need them from me. You are experts in complexity. You create complexity. You interpret it. You understand it. What I'm trying to do is give some broader global pictures that you can, in your creative way, interpret and use as you think best. So, let's have some slides. We're going to talk about the global situation.

Well, this is Bejing, this is Dacca. Right now we have 5.7, not 5.6 billion, as the Secretary said. We're growing at about 1.6 percent a year. 90 million increase, not a hundred. It is without precedent. The population at the present growth rate, is doubling in about 43 years.

At the time of Christ there were about a quarter billion people, roughly the population of the U.S. today, in the world. It took 16 hundred and fifty years to double, to half a billion and then things really began to heat up as the old and new worlds exchanged their food. So, by the next two centuries, by 1830, we already had the first billion people on the planet. So, it took 200 years to double here. 16 centuries here. The next doubling took place in one century and, right there is where Sonny Fox was born. That's the second billion. That little dot right there, that blip is Sonny Fox, okay. So, it took only one century to double to two billion. The next doubling took 44 years from two billion to four billion and, as the Secretary said, if you look back, we're growing at about a billion in ten years, ten to 12 years. Now, that is unprecedented. It took from the beginning of time to 1830 to put the first billion people on the Earth. It took 12 years to put the most recent billion people on the Earth. And, in the United States in particular, 1990 census was 248 million.

It's presently 265 million. We increased by 17 or 18 million. That's the population of the State of New York. So, in the last six years we've added another New York. Never before the second half of the 20th century had any human being lived through a doubling of human population. Yet now, anybody who's 40 years old or older has lived through a doubling. Those who have lived since 1920, which is far older than Sonny, have lived through a tripling. So, this is unprecedented. And, it says up there behind this thing, Two Worlds. To talk about one world is completely mistaken. There's a rich world and a poor world.

The rich world is getting an annual income per person of about 17 thousand dollars. The poor world is getting an annual income of one thousand dollars per year. This includes the middle class and the really poor. The middle class of about two and a half billion people, are getting about sixteen hundred dollars a year income and the bottom two billion, two billion people, are living on incomes of about four hundred dollars a year, roughly a dollar a day. Think how far that would go.

The rich world is doubling in about four centuries. It takes four centuries to double. The poor world is doubling in 36 years. Got that? In four centuries, if you're doubling in 36 years, you can double ten times or more. Ten doubling is a thousandfold increase. So, while the rich world grows quickly, the poor world grows rapidly. Now, a lot of people see your soaps. In the rich world, about one percent of children die before they reach the age one. Seven times as much in the rich world, in the poor, in the rich world, the average woman is having less than the number required to replace herself. In the poor world, twice as many. And, one out of three people in the poor world is a child less than 15.

The other important thing, three quarters of the people in the rich world live in rich cities. One out of three in poor world. That means two out of three are still rural peasants. And this is what life is like for a lot of people. This is a typical street scene in Bombay. Women and children sleeping on the ground. In 1990, one and a half billion people had no health services. Roughly one out of three people on the whole planet are infected with tuberculosis. In Africa every other person you see is carrying tuberculosis bacillus. Half the world's population has no toilets. No place to go. When you've gotta go, you just go wherever you are. That carries certain hazards for water and food.

A billion people are going hungry every night and a billion adults can't read and write. Two thirds, 60 percent of those are women. Worldwide, women get about half the higher education of men. Women are a majority of the world's farmers. And, in the last 30 years, there has been, 25, 30 years, there has been a revolution world-wide in women's roles. In 1970, for every hundred men who were working in paying jobs, there were 37 women working in paying jobs or looking for work. 20 years later, for every hundred men in paying jobs, there were 62. Practically a double. And it is during this period that, for the first time in history, the global population birth rate began to drop. It dropped from its peak of 2.1 percent per year in 1965 to its present rate of about 1.6 or 1.5 percent. There's a connection. When people have alternatives to spending their lives bearing children, they frequently choose those alternatives. If you can't see here, these are three women in Bangladesh. They're rock crushers. Look at their faces. That one looks to me like she's about 15 or 16. And women around the world are carrying the dual roles of reproduction and production. These women have the unenviable job of making big rocks into little rocks. They are human rock crushers. Part of our problem is that the goods don't go around evenly. Take all the people in the world and rank them by income within their countries from high to low. If you go down the top of the list until you get 20 percent of the world's people, in 1960, the richest 20 percent earned 70 percent of the world's income and the poorest 20 percent earned 2.3 percent. So, the ratio of income per person between rich and poor in 1960 was 30 to one. Is that clear what that means? 30 times as much income per person in the rich as in the poorest fifth. In 1970 it was 32 to one. In 1980 it was 45 to one. In 1991 it was 60 to one and it's continued, according to The New York Times recently, it was 90 to one in a recent study. The same thing is happening in the United States. The poor, everywhere in the world are getting a falling fraction of the pie. This is a good news, bad news slide.

The number of people who are chronically undernourished in developing regions has fallen worldwide from nearly a billion to about three quarters of a billion. But, in Africa, the number has risen by two thirds. Constant, at about one third of the entire population. One out of three people in Africa are hungry all the time. So, I've talked about population. I've talked about economics. I want to just mention in passing, the environment, we're most of the way there. This is British Columbia. This is a clear cut of an old growth forest. Look at the slope. One the soil washes away, it's not going to come back for tens of millennia. So we get the immediate profit from those woods, we can sell them but our children will pay a price in empty hillsides. If you make a plot of population density versus fraction of the land covered by forests in 60 tropical countries in 1980, as the number of people per square kilometer goes up, the fraction left with forest land goes down. So, I've talked about population, the economy, the environment and it doesn't make sense to talk about these without also mentioning culture and that has to do with what people want from life. This picture appeared in The New York Times in 1993. This is a girl, this is a vulture. Now what's going on here? Some people say this shows that Africa has too many people. It's beyond it's biological caring capacity. That is excessively simple and you should not swallow that line. What actually went on was that there was a period of dryness. That is an act over which people do not have an influence at this point. Then there was a crop failure. Why were they growing crops that depend on reliable rain when they could predict that there would be crop failures? They did not have markets in place that would permit people to buy food from other regions. There's enough food around in that part of Africa. They did not have dams and irrigation canals to supply water so it was a lack of economic infrastructure. In addition, the government was declaring war against these people. There was a civil war going on. And decided to use starvation as a means of, as a weapon to kill them. So, to talk about just too many people misses the fact that there was a cultural conflict here. And the rapid population growth in numbers is accompanied by exceptional increases in the contacts of cultures and the tensions that go with that all around the world. Another aspect of culture which affects our ability to support people well is shown in this slide. You cannot see it. It's a boy and a girl are both carrying rocks and, if you look carefully, the boy has his shoes on and the girl is barefoot. They're walking on the same rocks. Now that is a decision not to invest in the girl but to invest in the boy. And that is, it's inequitable, it's unjust but it's economically inefficient as well because if you invest resources, whether shoes or education, in people on the basis of gender, what sex they happen to be, it's a very poor predictor of their capacity to perform. It's not a good predictor and, therefore, you get less yield from your investment and, if you looked at the actual performance you want. Maybe this girl is just as good at carrying rocks as the boys.

So, to talk about the Earth as a pyramid with population, economics, environment, culture in one uniform whole is too simple, 'cause there are many different cultures with different values and they influence each other through trade, through exchange of ideas, through soap operas. What you can't see here, is a man and his boy, on a Pacific Atoll and there they're watching, I think it says As the World Turns or something, one of the soaps. Your influence is really world-wide. Thanks very much.