The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [137]
10 To name just two examples, economic growth models seldom consider political changes to immigration policy; climate model projections depend strongly on their assumptions about cloud physics.
11 “The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.” This phenomenon has been statistically studied by Philip Tetlock at UC Berkeley, who discovered predictions made by economic and political pundits often fare little better than flipping a coin. But by casting a wide net for subject matter, the probability that an important factor will be missed is reduced. P. E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 352 pp.
12 The following global population estimates are taken from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base (updated June 18, 2008), http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.html (accessed September 26, 2008).
13 We will return to Thomas Malthus and his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population in Chapter 3.
14 Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).
15 The term death rate usually refers to the crude death rate, measured as the number of deaths per thousand people in a population. There are different measures of population fertility; this book uses the total fertility rate (TFR), which is the average number of children for a woman within that population. Because it is a statistical average, it is possible to have noninteger values of TFR, for example 1.7 children per woman, a real-world impossibility. I also use the term birth rate to refer to TFR, not to be confused with crude birth rate, the raw number of births per thousand people. For a good introduction to population demography, including its definitions, the demographic balancing equation, and data collection issues, see J. A. McFalls Jr., “Population: A Lively Introduction,” 5th ed., Population Bulletin 62, no. 1 (March 2007).
16 W. Thompson, “Population,” American Journal of Sociology 34 (1929): 959-975. See also M. L. Bacci, A Concise History of World population, 4th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell), 296 pp.
17 For a good discussion of how the Demographic Transition unfolded differently in developing countries than it did in Europe and North America, see the unparalleled book by J. E. Cohen, How Many People Can the World Support? (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995), 532 pp.
18 The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of thirty developed and emerging-market countries with high global integration. Throughout this book I use OECD or developed to refer to this cohort rather than the term first-world. Today’s OECD originated in the post-World War II Marshall Plan as the Organization of European Economic Cooperation, which later expanded to include non-European countries. OECD members as of April 2010 were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
19 83%, computed from Human Influence Index (HII) grids, NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/wildareas/ (accessed October 8, 2008).
20 The following historical data on U.S. energy consumption taken from Appendix F, EIA (Energy Information Administration) Annual Energy Review 2001, U.S Department of Energy, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/multifuel/038401.pdf (accessed October 9, 2008).
21 The following numbers are calculated from British thermal unit (Btu) data. One Btu is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. One barrel of crude oil = 5,800,000 Btu, one short ton of coal = 20,754,000 Btu, one cubic foot of natural gas = 1,031