Seven Billion and Counting
Posted on December 6th, 2011 by Stephen Hardy | 4 Comments | Print | RSSA month ago we hit an important milestone as a species. It wasn’t some startling new discovery, a medical breakthrough or the completion of a massive engineering project. It was a quiet milestone receiving barely a mention on the evening news. Nevertheless, it was highly significant. With very little fanfare, the world’s human population reached seven billion.
No one knows exactly who the seventh billion person to be born was or where or when they were born. So to mark the event, the United Nations chose October 31 as the date and identified babies in various countries around the globe to act as symbolic heralds for the milestone.
How did we get to this milestone? It’s an important question with a very interesting answer.
It took all of human history to reach 1 billion people in 1800.
It was another 127 years before we reached 2 billion in 1927.
It took 33 more years to reach 3 billion in 1960.
Another 14 years to reach 4 billion in 1974.
Only 13 years to reach 5 billion in 1987.
12 years to reach 6 billion in 1999.
And in 2011 – another 12 years later – we passed 7 billion.
Figures courtesy of the United Nations Population Fund (1).
Look at how fast the population is growing. While it took two human lifetimes to go from 1 to 2 billion, it now takes little more than a decade for the population to increase by the same number. In my lifetime, the world’s human population has increased by over 4 billion.
But growth is a good thing, isn’t it? Shareholders want their stocks, investments and superannuation to go up; we want our houses to increase in value; business owners want greater productivity; employees want more take-home pay and economists and politicians constantly tell us we must have a growing economy to guarantee our future prosperity. So an increasing population must also be good? More people to do the work; more people to buy the goods we make and more people to pay taxes and contribute to the economy. So the faster we grow the better off we are, right? While it sounds great on paper, does it really work that way?
