Here's a question: are there more people alive than dead? Well, the population is certainly higher now than it's ever been, and it's increasing by the birth rate minus the death rate. The number of dead people is increasing by the death rate. So, if (birth - death) > (death) on average throughout all history then there are more living people than dead people. It seems unlikely that the birth rate has been, on average, twice the death rate, and the standard demographic transition model reflects that for most of history both the birth and death rates have been very high.
Only in the transition stages (2 and 3) is the birth rate much higher than the death rate, so in my estimation there are probably far more dead people than living people.# Stage 1, the situation that has characterized the world throughout most of history, is marked by high death and birth rates. Population levels fluctuate somewhat but there is no steady growth.
# In Stage 2, which began in the West around 1800, birth rates remain steady but mortality rates begin to decline because of improvements that reduce the toll of infectious diseases--the big killer in countries with high death rates. Population begins to grow.
# In Stage 3, a continuing decrease in death rates is accompanied by a decline in birth rates. Falling childhood mortality means that the number of births
needed to reach a desired family size drops. In response, fertility rates decline, but the population continues to grow because the number of births in a society is based not only on the number of children each woman bears but also on the number of women of childbearing age. With a disproportionate share of people in the childbearing years, population grows even after fertility rates decline.# In Stage 4, the situation in the developed world today, there is a rough parity between births and deaths. Correspondingly, the population grows very slowly--if at all. Once a Stage 4 equilibrium of low birth and death rates is reached, immigration becomes the driving force for additional population growth.
# In Stage 3... population grows even after fertility rates decline.
Should read "living population grows..."
Even though the living population is theoretically stable (according to your "Stage 1") the dead population continues to grow. Every one that has ever lived that is not now alive is, in fact, a member of the dead population. Your graph does not track the dead population.
# In Stage 4... immigration becomes the driving force for additional population growth.
Immigration? from where, Jupiter? are we talking global population throughout human history, or something confined to a certain nation for a specified period of time? And don't immigrants die as well?
The answer, me thinks, is more dead than alive.
A better demographic transition to evaluate would be the direction of the shift from one population to the other... Have more people gone from being alive to dead than from dead to living? I can think of many instances of the former, but only one of the latter (not counting Lazarus, his demographic state reverted to death.}
Is abortion factored into this? That's a few million right there.
gaw: I don't think RAND was much concerned with the population of the dead.
DD: No, abortion almost certainly isn't factored into the death rate or the birth rate. Still, it's a rather recent phenomenon, so I'm not sure how much effect it's had. I think all the factors taken together pretty conclusively suggest that the dead outnumber the living.
The National Library of Medicine (Pub Med) lists this abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7483750&dopt=Abstract
The abstract calculates ~100 Billion people have ever lived, thus far more dead than now alive....
Abortion may be recent, but death among babies would play a big factor in answering your title question of more living or dead. Infant mortality was quite high in ancient times. If you count every conception as a life, then we probably still have many more dead than living. You'll get fewer dead if you consider life to start at the first breath, and fewer still if you don't count them till their first birthday.
That would be an interesting though meaningless numbers game, but the RAND study is entirely different. I was disappointed to see so little analysis of beliefs and birth rates. It would be interesting to correlate birth rates with various demographic factors.
My hunch is that the religious procreate much faster than the secular, and rising prosperity correlates with secularity. Or perhaps the causation works backwards: Per-capita prosperity rises as birth rates decline by spreading the same income over fewer people.
BC: Thanks for the link, very interesting.
BB: I was mainly looking for data on the ratio between birth and death rates.
Looking at the rates is all fine and dandy - but you can't make claim that there are more people alive than dead. It's simply not logical.
Mayhaps more people are born in a given time-span than die in said time, but you need to clarify that you're talking about a certain period of time rather simply stating what you have...as this implies over the course of human history.
Your argument is a fallacy; it suffers from the fallacy of equivocation. You are correct in saying the average birth rate must exceed twice the average death rate. These rates are measured in births (deaths) per year. However the quoted declining birth (death) rates are measured in births (deaths) per year per person. In fact the birth (death) rate in births (deaths) per year have been rising exponentially. The recent enormous values of these rates do have the property that the birth rate exceeds twice the death rate. It is unclear whether the recent value are big enough to dominate in the calculation of the average.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/r6/39542.html
r6: Yeah, the problem is that I didn't make it clear that in my mind, when I wrote "on average throughout all history" I didn't really mean an average by time, but by population. For some reason when I wrote "all history" it seemed adequate in my mind for indicating that the average should be taken across population as a total, but in hindsight it's unclear.
hey hey hommmmmmmeboy! Just to tell you...this question made me think A LOT. just the other day...i was in the much loved family park 'Longleat' just checking out the giraffes when i found this handy 'Life-up-thing-for-a-fact'. At first i thought...THIS COULD BE A TRAP...but then i pondered furthermore...to discover the fact that 'There are more people alive, than dead'
LONGLEAT DOES NOT LIE.
FACT
kthx
xxx
Hey, umm, I don't know if you got your facts wrong but! .. Longleat Safari park is telling everyone that your wrong, and that there are more people alive.. THAN dead!
So I'd re-think if I were you.. becuase Longleat have Lions and Monkeys, and when you next take your car through there, they'll have the freakin' wingmirrors off I'm afraid.
Sorry to inform you of this but as I said, I don't want to be held responsible for anyones wingmirrors.
An interesting thought that I'd heard a couple of years ago. More people alive than dead. We'll never know. Until one day when our records show that it is true of modern day. It is an idea that shouldn't be discounted or thought about too much either. It's a pub fact at the end of the day; not much use in the real world. So, tell your friends about it and store it in the back of your mind and move on with life. You are a long time dead.
I don't beleive it, there has to be factors and stuff that you are missing, more people alive now than dead? people have been around for millions of years (if you have a religion that says else wise, don't argue with me please, it would just make me and many others angry) millions of years, right? well.. at least 100 people or something like that have died a year way back long ago, then many more up to now blah blah blah, no way there has been less than 6.5 billion human deaths, i bet there has been more than that in just the past 1000 years
I had a book years ago called 'would you believe it' one was 'the dead outnumber the living by 30 to 1'
In my opinion the dead out number the living easily. Lets concentrate on the AD time frame only 0001 AD to 2007 AD. Today’s earth population hmn 6.7 billion lets round it to 7 billion. Lets make 7 Billion the population @ 0001 AD and for the benefit of the doubt life expectancy @ 100 yrs (lol). Very important fact to remember is the living population has never exceeded 7 billion on the planet at any time in history. So the question right now is “Are there in excess of 7 billion dead people?” Lets calculate.
Lets throw a crazy number such as 500K people dying every 100 years since 0001 AD to 2007 AD = 100.3 Billion dead.
For there to be more living than dead then from 0001 AD to now the death rate would have to be 350K per year. Total madness. There are way more dead than living and at the end of time we all will be dead. Hey geniuses calculate earths population @ 7 Billion ALIVE in 1300 with every body living forever + 10 Million births each year (US avg is 4M per year)…in 2007 there would be the 7 billion people from 1300 (remember they live forever) plus the 7.07 billion that were born (2007-1300= 707x 10 M). So with nobody dying plus the births there would be 14.07 Billion people alive today in 2007.
There is less than 7 billion people alive on earth today and 99.9% of every body born before 1900 is now dead. Go figure, the dead outnumber us.