Saturday, February 06, 2016

"How the world went from 170 million people to 7.3 billion, in one map"


This video, publicized by Vox, does a nice job illustrating the general contours of world population growth in the past two millennia. I might find some issues with the video--population growth in the pre-Columbian Americas may be substantially underestimated--but the broad outline is correct


2 comments:

RT said...

Shame about the fact it is married to a Malthusian narrative. Unchecked population growth is bad, but population growth is slowing around the world, and the consumption of rich populations has vastly more impact on the environment than that of a much larger number of poorer people. Population growth is an issue for the long term - for fixing the priorities here and now, focus on consumption first

Randy McDonald said...

Agreed. As I noted, it also seems to vastly underestimate the pre-Columbian population of the Americas.