Ronald Lee - Overpopulation & Demographic Transition

Global population is 8 billion and it's straining the Earth's carrying capacity. Dr. Ronald Lee discusses the surprising solution to overpopulation and the social impact of demographic transition. Back in 1968, Stanford Professor Paul Erlich prefaced his non-fiction best-seller, The Population Bomb, by saying, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” Erlich's Malthusian catastrophe never happened: and if demographers are correct, it never will. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5 — where Europe is today — then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. Today we explore why - and what it means. Dr. Ronald Lee is a Professor of the Graduate School in Demography and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He has an MA in Demography from Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, and is the founding Director of the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at Berkeley. Throughout his career, he has taught economic demography, and has earned numerous honors and awards for his contributions to this field of study. His current research focuses on the macroeconomic consequences of changing population age distributions and on intergenerational transfers and population aging. He joins us today to discuss the topics of overpopulation and demographic transition. For 18 years he co-directed with Andrew Mason the National Transfer Accounts project, which includes collaborating research teams in more than 60 countries, and estimates intergenerational flows of resources through the public and private sectors (NTAccounts.org). He continues to work on modeling and forecasting demographic variables including mortality and on evolutionary biodemography, in particular the role of intergenerational transfers in life history theory. From 2010-2015 he co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Long-run Macroeconomic Effects of the Aging U.S. Population. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; he is a former President of the Population Association of America and a Laureate of the international population association, the IUSSP. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Lund and Montreal." Links & Resources: The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533003772034943 Dr. Ronald Lee - UC Berkeley Demography https://www.site.demog.berkeley.edu/ron-lee The Surprising Solution To Overpopulation https://medium.com/swlh/the-surprising-solution-to-overpopulation-ee12704f9edc