Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
The number of great powers increases by 1 every time there's been enough cumulative economic growth, and is reduced by 3/8 every year that war deaths exceed 0.5% of global population. For the first part I just add up annual growth until it reaches 100. Barnes uses "25 years of fast growth", but he doesn't specify how fast, and this wouldn't work with constantly slowing growth, anyway.
The actual great powers are trickier, as we've been discussing. I start with USA, Russia, China, UK, France, India. Nigeria is the next most populous in the latest 2050 projections, so that's the first new power. I randomly selected USA, Russia, and France to be eliminated as great powers in WWIII. It's simplest to assume they were allied, and lost the war. Now they no longer qualify as great powers, and can only regain that status via population rank. So Russia and France are out for good. But the USA is big enough to climb back up to great power status in 2073. Bear in mind that the country names are just proxies for geography, "USA" means the big power in North America, however different it is from the USA that entered the war.
In 2098 I switch over to the 2100 projections, and add Congo. The distinction between Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville doesn't matter this far out. Pakistan and Indonesia are next, still from the 2100 projections. WWIV busts everyone down to secondary power status. The next new power rises in 2251, which is beyond the scope of the 2100 projections. The 2300 projections say India is the most populous country, but that's based on obsolete data. With the new African growth figures it might be Nigeria. I'll go with India for now.
So in 2300 India is the sole, uncontested superpower of the world and has been for 50 years. The world's been at peace, more-or-less, for 70 years. That's the same period that separates us from WWII, except that advanced medicine means the equivalent of both "fugitive Nazis" and "Holocaust survivors" are much healthier. Slow economic growth means that a rival great power to India will take a while to emerge.
Interesting. Yeah, I'd completely missed the revision in projections. That changes a great deal.
I notice, when looking back to your GWP growth chart, you mention 2036 as "a golden era of progress." I notice this is pretty close to the time that Nigeria reaches great power status. So I wonder if this might mean we're looking at some great economic flourishing around West Africa, or perhaps even Subsaharan Africa in general. An impetus for this might include (or require!) a cure for AIDS. For Nigeria to make a sudden rise like that might connection with Salmoneus's mention of Ecowas. Maybe in response to turmoil and insurgency and whatever sort of fallout ends up happening related to Boko Haram and the like, Ecowas ends up more closely knit, and latches on to medical advances and builds up its economy.
I wouldn't discount the possibility that the joint fall of the US, France and Russia could've been for reasons other than a joint alliance. Something could've happened like to Russia in WWI where a country pulled out of a war despite having been on the side that would ultimately prevail. As another possibility, those countries could simply have been victims of some level of WMD use. Or perhaps targeted biowarfare or something.
I suppose the change in UN population projections would change the graph of GWP growth a little, though?
I also wonder if, once the GWP plateau is reached, that would lead people to turn to economic expansion off-Earth in a more significant way. That might look more like tourism and research, though with Africa's population skyrocketing so much, some African countries (particularly the powerful Nigeria and Congo) could end up leaders in terms of setting up actual bases. Could see India going that way too.
As far as not having ridiculously high death tolls, I wonder if this might involve more technological countermeasures against WMDs? Or maybe even that tons more people die, but some sort of uploading technology is in place so that they end up having backups, in a sense? You could go a few directions with this, I think.
TSSL wrote: So I wonder if this might mean we're looking at some great economic flourishing around West Africa, or perhaps even Subsaharan Africa in general. An impetus for this might include (or require!) a cure for AIDS.
I believe that if Subsaharan Africa could afford the current Western treatments for AIDS, it would be much less of a problem for them. In Western countries AIDS is now a serious chronic disease, but not a death sentence. So they don't actually need a cure, just to be rich enough to afford the current treatments. Or for equivalent treatments to get much cheaper.
TSSL wrote:
I wouldn't discount the possibility that the joint fall of the US, France and Russia could've been for reasons other than a joint alliance. Something could've happened like to Russia in WWI where a country pulled out of a war despite having been on the side that would ultimately prevail. As another possibility, those countries could simply have been victims of some level of WMD use. Or perhaps targeted biowarfare or something.
Yeah, there are all kinds of possibilities there. Another possibility is that the US has a civil war, which prompts Russia to grab back territory that's no longer under US protection. Everyone else turns on Russia and defeats it, but the civil war knocks the US out as a great power and France just gets hammered in the war.
TSSL wrote:
I suppose the change in UN population projections would change the graph of GWP growth a little, though?
Right, the current GWP growth assumes a constant population of 9 billion, from the old figures. The new figures give 11 billion by 2100, and a plateau somewhere above that. I'll run the calculations to check exactly where.
TSSL wrote:I also wonder if, once the GWP plateau is reached, that would lead people to turn to economic expansion off-Earth in a more significant way. That might look more like tourism and research, though with Africa's population skyrocketing so much, some African countries (particularly the powerful Nigeria and Congo) could end up leaders in terms of setting up actual bases. Could see India going that way too.
To get more growth under this model, you need either more population or more productivity. I'm not sure that space guarantees either. Some of the stranger ways to get more productivity could be the basis of the revolution that kicks off WWIV. I'm thinking of a suggestion I saw that the entire human population should be moved to a big city in a mild climate - think of the networking, and the savings on air conditioning!
TSSL wrote:
As far as not having ridiculously high death tolls, I wonder if this might involve more technological countermeasures against WMDs? Or maybe even that tons more people die, but some sort of uploading technology is in place so that they end up having backups, in a sense? You could go a few directions with this, I think.
The "Star Wars" system was insanely ambitious for the 1980s, but it gets more and more plausible as we go further into the future. Isaac Asimov was once interviewed live by satellite about this. There were all sorts of problems with the satellite link, and he used this as an argument against Star Wars. Of course, now satellite interviews are routine... We could handle the computer side of it now, the armoured nuclear-powered X-ray laser satellites not so much, but eventually it'll all be plausible. Which suggests another reason to go into space.
The problem with WMD countermeasures is that if you get them first, you have a strong incentive to nuke everyone before they get countermeasures too. This might be what happens in WWIV. Although by 2230 it'll probably be on the cellular or molecular level rather than shooting down missiles.
So! What I decided to do was take 25 interesting countries, calculate their average gdppc growth rate over the last 15 (actually 14) years, and then apply a formula to have these revert to an expected low-growth level (less than 1%) over time (with a little thing built in to make growth overshoot or undershoot that 'target', creating cycles, rather than just sticking onto the target and staying there).
What I found was.... that this doesn't work.
Basically, there are two scenarios this gives you:
a) if you assume that growth reverts rapidly to a low level, then you have to conclude that poorer countries will never be able to catch up to richer ones, or even come anywhere close
b) if you let growth revert moe slowly, then you have to conclude that poorer countries will be on a different planet in the near future - that American and Brits will have similar GDP per capita to today, while the Chinese will all be multimillionaires.
[of with a reversion speed in the middle, you have both problems. The Indonesians in these numbers I'm looking at are stuck at $27k, Americans have risen very slightly to $60k, and Chinese are up at $500k]
The problem is, Chinese growth (and to a lesser extent a few other countries) is so much higher that thanks to exponential growth, unless you can really yank down the underlying growth rate really quickly, they quickly shoot way past everybody else. But other countries, even those with impressive (but sane) growth rates, like Indonesia, are so far behind that unless you let the underlying growth rate stay high, they'll never be able to catch up, even if the first world remains stagnant.
The reason for this, is that that this model doesn't take into account long-term history. China's growth will stall more dramatically than Indonesia's, because China has been transforming its economy, and when it finishes that transformation it will run out of room and stop; Indonesia has not yet reached that level of its transformation, so its growth rate is lower but will last longer (and may even boom in future).
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
Interesting. I suppose it's down to the detail of the model. The huge Chinese growth is generally considered to come from peasants becoming factory workers, and there are obvious limits to that, and opportunities for poorer countries. You try to use a model that takes that into account, or choose the lazy option like I do. I'm assuming quite rapid global convergence in productivity, so that all that matters is population. A hundred million Nigerians are equivalent to a hundred million Americans. The problem is that the population projections don't make this assumption, and actually assume persistent African poverty driving increased African population.
There was a comment on the Marginal Revolution blog that if we do get global convergence, it'll be the densest places that are the richest. Network effects again, and the size of local markets. Bangladesh and Java might just be full of small, poor farms now, but under convergence that's where all the customers will be. I haven't taken this into account in my model, but it's something to think about.
There would be a kind of justice in the sole global superpower in 2300 being an African nation. Most Sci-fi I've seen seems to assume that the great powers that build humanity's bright future in space will be the same as the ones existing now. Heck, the Star Trek universe explicitly includes a couple of catastrophic global wars in the relatively near future, as well as a massive economic collapse in the United States, but that doesn't do anything to stop Starfleet HQ from being in San Francisco. It would be nice to see a future where people who are presently among the poorest and most marginalized citizens of the world have become the foremost architects of fantastic new societies.
That said, I feel like this kind of modeling fails to take into account a lot of big questions that make the future very difficult to imagine (at least for me). For instance, to what extent will nation-states even be relevant entities 300 years from now? How will increasing automation and the concurrently shrinking job market affect population growth and demographics? What are the long-term consequences of a graying population? How will climate change and the decline of fossil fuels affect the pace and distribution of economic growth?
It's possible that the answers to these questions won't be particularly word-shattering, and that future developments will indeed resemble what we'd expect if we extrapolate past trends, but I wouldn't necessarily count on that.
Star Trek has a unified Earth government, doesn't it? And one of the senior officers is Kenyan. Those big questions are valid, but I'm glossing over them here, assuming that extrapolation from the past is valid. The one that gives me pause is climate change. We won't run out of fossil fuels, since the US alone has enough coal for centuries. It's what the fossil fuel does to us. The only prediction I'll make is that no country will reduce its standard of living to deal with climate change. We'll either discover some relatively painless solution, or drown.
That's right. He has a series of sequels to those too. The books themselves are set centuries after the history he extrapolates to 2300, so it's only mentioned in passing. It's interesting to see where he's changed things from his original simulation. In the article, he has the tension between Japan and the "Southern Hemisphere League" lead to a global peace movement. But in the books, it wasn't just tension. I've already mentioned how birds still don't migrate to Japan...
If you were wondering, I'm still working on this. I'm just stuck on population. At the moment the world population in 2300 is somewhere between 569 billion and zero.
Gareth3 wrote:If you were wondering, I'm still working on this. I'm just stuck on population. At the moment the world population in 2300 is somewhere between 569 billion and zero.
Heh, well, I suppose it surely will be somewhere between those two.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.
World population is meant to come to a level point only a few billion north of here.
To get more than that, you're going to need growth. To get a lot more than that, you're going to need a lot of growth.
Growth comes from the death rate being lower than the birth rate. Historically, this was because medicines improved the death rate, before the birth rate lowered.
Why did the birth rate fall? Because children became too expensive.The fundamental value of children is a function of the relative productivity of capital and labour. Broadly, in a society where the best way to make a profit is to own land, or a bank, or a factory, or a computer, people will not want many children: the cost of children will be higher than their economic productivity. This is the case in general in the West today: if you have a child, it will, over your life span, cost you money, because the chance of owning capital (company shares, watch collection, larger house, or the social capital of promotion, or the human capital of a university degree, etc) that you forfeit to fund your child is not repaid by your child's gratitude later in life. If, on the other hand, capital returns less profit, and what matters is hard solid labour, then it makes sense to have lots of children. Your investment is relatively cheap, and the profitability of each child is high.
So how do you get growth? Several ways.
1. Lower the death rate.
a) lower the rate of accidental death and suicide. Will have little impact and hard to do;
b) lower the rate of premature death by disease. Will have some impact and is conceivable. However, because most deaths by disease still happen after that generation has had children, this won't have a huge impact;
c) increase life expectancy. This could have an order-of-magnitude impact: if this generation becomes immortal, but birth rate remains the same, your population doubles every generation. But two problems. First, is that possible? A smaller increase in life expectancy would lead to population growth, but only slowly. And second, would a longer life span really not change birth rates?
2. Raise the birth rate.
a) make the fundamental economic utility of children higher. That means making labour more valuable and capital less valuable. That seems unlikely: the continual trend of modernity has been to make capital more and more valuable, and labour less and less valuable. [Labour prices have gone up, but only because they're primarily judged against raw materials (eg it's more expensive to carve gargoyles on our buildings now and cheaper to cover them in plate glass) not against the opportunity cost of capital)];
b) artificially make children cheaper for individuals by shifting the burden - eg have the government pay for all childcare costs; that requires giving the government some big motivation to want a boom in children
c) make the non-economic value of children higher. People like children; but different people value them differently. In general, societies that have a lot of social isolation, lots of movement of individuals over their lives so they don't build ties with their neighbours, no extended families, no religion, no trade unions, and lots of solitary work - basically, societies where everyone feels alone and depressed - don't like children. In contrast, societies where everyone stays in the neighbourhood where they were born, everyone goes to church together, everyone goes to big communal dinners together, everyone goes to work in big heavily-unionised workspaces, everyone comes home and listens to their grandparents telling stories around the fire, and everybody is happy - they like kids. But will they like kids enough to make a population boom?
d) make people richer. that way, kids still cost money, but because you're richer you don't mind as much. A less obvious way of doing this is increasing life span - time is money, and if you live longer then you are more willing to spend time raising kids (and your long-lived parents can help out with your kids, lowering the cost in time to you). It helps though if you can increase the age of fertility as well. At an extreme, you might be able to have people having two generations of kids each, rather than one.
At the moment, 2c) and 2d) seem to be combining to slightly increase birth rates in some western countries again (perhaps with a little help from 2b)), though not to anything like historical levels. In general, these things to me look like viable ways to keep the world growing at a steady rate, with a birthrate higher than modern europe but way below africa. To have really big booms, though, you need something pretty drastic.
Personally, I think we'll only see population booms again if technology (fusion power, or maybe developing cheap asteroid mining) makes us all much, much richer. Because our own resources are limited and I don't have faith in "efficiency" and "value added" and "service" being able to infinitely increase wealth on their own.
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
The simplest solution is to just start with the old prediction of population levelling off at 9 billion, nudge it upwards to allow for the faster African growth that's been recently discovered, and just plot a curve that levels out at say, 12 billion. But that feels like cheating. Anything more 'realistic' seems to either crash or explode after a century or so. The one thing I gather from reading articles is that there is a tendency to return to replacement fertility even if you've dipped below it. I think this is related to your 2c.
Gareth3 wrote:Anything more 'realistic' seems to either crash or explode after a century or so. The one thing I gather from reading articles is that there is a tendency to return to replacement fertility even if you've dipped below it. I think this is related to your 2c.
I'm not sure how reliable that kind of prediction could be, since the conditions that have lead to the decline of birth rates in developed countries are fairly unique in the history of the world. I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect the population to begin declining at some point in the future. One would expect a decline in population to subsequently lead to an increase in the value of labor based on simple supply and demand. As Salmoneus pointed out, this would tend to increase the value of children, which might eventually lead to fertility returning to the replacement rate.
However, it seems likely, given current trends, that the demand for labor (particularly unskilled labor) will continue to decline well into the future, which will tend to keep the economic value of children low even if the global population were to drop below its current level. Furthermore, it seems likely that the devaluing of labor and increasing use and sophistication of automation will ultimately lead to increasing unemployment across the board. Unless we see some truly massive social changes in the relatively near future, this will likely contribute to a general atmosphere of unhappiness that will further discourage people from having children.
These factors could contribute to a population "crash" at some point in the future, with potentially catastrophic short-term effects related to an aging population and acute shortage of skilled workers to replace employees who have become too old to world productively. I suspect that this sort of thing would eventually lead to social changes that would ultimately contribute to the population stabilizing once again.
Of course, it's always possible that some kind of environmental or economic catastrophe will spiral out of control and do enough lasting damage to the industrial infrastructure of the world that the value of labor will unexpectedly shoot up. After the ensuing Mathusian die-off, the remaining population may find having children a much more attractive prospect.
