Joel Cohen: An Introduction to Demography (Malthus Miffed: Are People the Problem?) | Big Think

Joel Cohen: An Introduction to Demography (Malthus Miffed: Are People the Problem?)
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Professor Joel Cohen first asks and answers the question, "How did humans grow from small populations on the African savannah to almost seven billion people?" After holding steady for thousands of years, the world population exploded after 1800, more than tripling in 200 years. And while the rate of population growth is slowing down, Cohen shows how high birth rates in poor countries are turning societies on their head and leading to explosive problems in the future. Can we prevent an outcome where rich western countries are in permanent population decline while cities in Africa, South America, and Asia swell into massively overcrowded slums with no access to education, healthcare, or hope? Cohen applies demography to this pressing question with fascinating results.
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JOEL COHEN:

Joel E. Cohen is a mathematical biologist and Professor of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities. His research deals with the demography, ecology, epidemiology and social organization of human and non-human populations and with mathematical concepts useful in these fields. The author of 14 books, he has been honored with numerous awards, including the Sheps Award from the Population Association of America, the Distinguished Statistical Ecologist Award, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1999 and the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology from the Mayor of the City of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg in 2002. Professor Cohen has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in New York.
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TRANSCRIPT:

My name is Joel Cohen

I’m Professor of Populations at the Rockefeller University and at Columbia University in New York City.

My background is partially in public health and partially in applied mathematics.

Why should you consider taking a course in demography in college?

You will be growing up in the generation where the baby boomers are going into retirement and dying. You will face problems in the aging of the population that have never been faced before.

You will hear more and more about migration into the United States and in some cases, out, into Europe and out between rural areas and cities.

You need to understand as a citizen and as a tax payer and as a voter what’s really behind the arguments.

INTRODUCTION TO PROBLEMS IN DEMOGRAPHY

I want to tell you about the past, present and future of the human population. So let’s start with a few problems. Right now, a billion people are chronically hungry. That means they wake up hungry, they’re hungry all day and they go to sleep hungry. A billion people are living in slums, not the same billion people, but there is some overlap. Living in slums means they don’t have tenure in their homes, they don’t have infrastructure to take the garbage away, they don’t have secure water supplies to drink.

Nearly a billion people are illiterate. Try to imagine your life being illiterate. You can’t read the labels on the bottles in the supermarket, if you can get to a supermarket. Two-thirds of those people who are illiterate are women and about 200 to 215 million women don’t have access to the contraceptives they want so that they can control their own fertility.

This is not only a problem in developing countries; about half of all pregnancies are unintended. So those are examples of population problems.

DEMOGRAPHY AS A TOOL FOR SOLUTIONS

Demography gives you the tools to address and to understand these problems. It’s the study of populations of humans and non-human species that includes viruses like influenza, the bacteria in your gut, plants that you eat, animals that you enjoy or that provide your domestic animals. And it includes non-living objects like light bulbs, and taxi cabs and buildings because these are also populations. And it includes the study of these populations in the past, present and future using quantitative data and mathematical models as tools of analysis.

I see demography as a central subject related to economics, to human wellbeing as in material terms; related to the environment, to the wellbeing of the other species with which we share the planet; and the wellbeing and culture which affects our values and how we interact with one another.
WORLD POPULATION: THE PAST...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/global-population-boom-are-people-the-problem-the-solution-or-both

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