Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I’d say this has a fair sentiment. I’m a huge proponent of reproductive rights, meaning access to birth control and abortion. No matter what agenda you’re trying to push, though, one thing you should never do is use misleading statistics. All of the numbers in this post check out–they are accurate, but they aren’t stated in a way that puts them into perspective so that you can understand what they mean. The 80 million people per year figure is to most people, myself included, just a really big number.

If we take another step back and look at how that number has changed over time we’ll see that it was over 2% for most of the 1960-70s and has been on the decrease ever since. Saying a large figure like 80 million people per year triggers panic, not because that’s bad, but because it’s a really big number and we’re not sure how to handle that information. It sounds bad, right? So I think this is just a scare tactic to convince people we need to put the hand brake on global population growth by making careful, sane family planning the norm (something we should do, just not for this reason) because Earth’s population is screaming out of control… when it’s not.

To add  a little extra context to the picture, we can also look at population growth rates for individual countries and regions. What you’ll find is that developed countries have very low growth rates while developing countries have very high, sometimes up to 6%-9%. This is because most people in developed countries have already embraced the idea that they can have children only when they want to have children through the use of contraceptives. It may seem like this is a really fringe idea, especially here in the United States, but is rather normal if we believe the population growth figures.

The hotbeds of population growth are in developing countries where an increasing standard of medical care are extending life expectancy while the birth rate is remaining high. So if you want a specific scenario in which you can use population growth as an important hook for the value of the availability of contraceptives, those are the regions of the world you want to concentrate on. Otherwise, I think the Earth will continue to happily spin about its axis as we continue to see roughly 80 million new humans each year (whether or not that number increases or decreases depends on how fast the rate changes).

If you want to play around with numbers, check out this fun interactive graph from Google and, of course, my good old buddy, Wolfram Alpha.