• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 556 0

and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.’ Surely a Nairobi slum or a São Paolo favela is a worse place to be than a tranquil rural village? Not for the people who move there. Given the chance they eloquently express their preference for the relative freedom and opportunity of the city, however poor the living conditions. ‘I am better off in all facets of life compared to my peers left behind in the village,’ says Deroi Kwesi Andrew, a teacher earning $4 a day in Accra. Rural self-sufficiency is a romantic mirage. Urban opportunity is what people want. In 2008 for the first time more than half the people in the world lived in cities. That is not a bad thing. It is a measure of economic progress that more than half the population can leave subsistence and seek the possibilities of a life based on the collective brain instead. Two-thirds of economic growth happens in cities.

Not long ago, demographers expected new technology to hollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs. But no – even in weightless industries like finance people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other in glass towers to do their exchanging and specialising, and they are prepared to pay absurdly high rents to do so. By 2025, it looks as if there will be five billion people living in cities (and rural populations will actually be falling fast), and there will be eight cities with more than twenty million people each: Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, São Paolo, Mexico City, New York and Calcutta. As far as the planet is concerned, this is good news because city dwellers take up less space, use less energy and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers. The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area. ‘Urban sprawl’ may disgust some American environmentalists, but on a global scale, the very opposite is happening: as villages empty, people are living in denser and denser anthills. As Edward Glaeser put it, ‘Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.’

After a ‘stinking hot’ evening in a taxi in central Delhi in the 1960s, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich had an epiphany. ‘The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.’ It was then that Ehrlich, like so many Westerners with culture shock, decided that the world had (to quote his chapter title) ‘too many people’. However good life might get, perhaps in the end it is all in vain because of population growth. Was he right? It is time to understand old ‘Population Malthus’.

Chapter Six

Escaping Malthus’s trap: population after 1200

The great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement; or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery.

T. R. MALTHUS

Essay on Population

Since human beings are just another kind of animal, the story of population should be a simple one. Give us more food and we will have more babies until we reach the density at which starvation, predators and parasites crash the system. In some episodes of human history something like this has indeed happened. Yet often, after the crash, population density settles at a higher level than before. The subsistence level keeps on rising, erratically, but inexorably. In terms of power and relative wealth, modern Egypt may be a shadow of its pharaonic self, but it is much more heavily populated today than it was in Ramses II’s day.

There is another odd feature. On the way up the graph, abundant food encourages some people to specialise in something other than growing or catching food, while others