Good afternoon, welcome to the Oxford Martin School. My name's Charles, go free.
I'm the director. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to another in our series of talks on the evolving economic thought,
and I'll speak this evening is Danny Dorling, Professor Danny Dorling,
who is a Harvard McIndoe Professor of geography at the School of Geography here.
And Danny has been in Oxford since 2013.
Grew up in Oxford. And before that was at Sheffield for 10 years.
And then he works on a huge number of different things.
But issues around social inequality, housing, health, employment, education, poverty and many other things.
He also co-founded the internet based World Map, a project that is talking this afternoon on as a human species slowing that day coming of CO2.
Well, thank you for coming. It's a very elegant title.
You're not going to get the answer the next 40 minutes,
but the least I can promise you it won't be longer than 40 minutes because I'm interested in what you've got to say.
It's a book I've been working on on and off for six years. This is not quite finished.
I'm four weeks away from the end of it, so you can absolutely wreck my next four weeks if you point out the fundamental problem.
And I'm going to talk to you a lot about demography because this is where I will show and I'm far from the first person to point this out.
And Will Baker and John Ibbetson have done very well in the book, which has been published Nameless Languages Around the world.
January February this year and titled Empty Planet about demographic slowing.
And if it wasn't for demographic slowing, I wouldn't be talking about this.
What I do is collect data, lots of data data on almost everything I can measure and slow down.
It's very, very simple. I work out the speed at which is changing, and I find it slowing down almost everything that you can measure.
And this is the problem because my worry is that there are things you can't measure which is speeding up.
But with you, measure appears at the moment to be slowing.
And the question is, if that's true, what what does it tell us? This man Charles Darwin.
Amazingly, the origin of species described a population explosion.
He was talking,
I think about elephants and talking about what happened when there were a few favourable seasons and foodstuff was plentiful and so on.
And how the size of a population could suddenly explode.
And the irony was that he was watching this just as this thing began for his own species he wasn't aware of.
It was beginning for human beings.
But we've had a population explosion that I'm sure you're aware of, and now it's it's been slowing down for some time.
The only thing which is still rising and not slowing down that I could measure
and you can certainly is the wonderful day out there is the temperature.
The surface temperature of the planet is not advancing because it's actually rising at a slightly accelerating rate, which obviously occupies here.
Lots of other things are going up, but they're not going up as fast as they were.
Here's the basic graph This is a book I wrote six years ago called Population 10 billion.
And this is a graph of the first derivative, which just means to change its global population.
It was rising 1820s 1930s 1940s by less than half a percent that fall.
By the way, that slowdown in the rate of growth was associated with what happens when we and others went into Africa.
The acceleration globally begins around about 1850. By 1910, you've got world population growing at one percent a year.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse intervene at various points.
A pandemic more important than the First World War was tiny. From a global point of view.
It wasn't really a world war, but it was much bigger the flu pandemic in 1919, you could see the effect the Second World War,
much bigger World War, the soldiers return and also, crucially at the time of this World War.
Shortly afterwards, India gets independence. Enormous disruption in India, millions of people forced to move between Pakistan and India.
China has a revolution.
And while population growth quickly moves up to over two percent a year, two percent a year, the 1960s was obviously unsustainable,
obvious only to a few statisticians and a lovely mathematician who will tell that in just a couple of hundred years,
the entire planet will be receiving massive bodies if it were to continue peaks sometime between 1968 and 1971, and then the rate begins to go down.
You only seen the beginning of the to go down there because this book was published six years ago.
The date was that the little blip that kind of spikes what looks like a heart attack towards the end was principally the East African famine.
Whenever things go bad for human beings, we have more babies anyway.
This is old news. These are the rates of growth of different continents.
And again, this is what we knew at about 2013 and what we or more appropriately, the UN thought was going to happen.
And all the continents Africa heading towards that same old line.
It's a slow down. Africa's a really interesting one.
Paper came out in February of this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
which is one of the first papers I've seen has helped explain partly why fertility decline in Africa wasn't as fast as in other continents.
And it's very crude, to put it. I'll tell you it just in a nutshell,
it is possible that the intervention of the IMF and the World Bank and structural adjustment had an effect in Africa in the 80s and 90s,
and more recently, that meant that girls education was damaged by what happens on the continent.
And women, young women had more babies, and now that has ended.
We have a fertility decline acceleration. But if anybody wants to complain about the number of people on the continent of Africa,
we need to think very carefully about what was it that happened in the 80s and 90s.
But they can't do that. They may have had an effect, but that's the reference.
I'm going to go for these lines very quickly, not least because this is recorded.
So if you're fascinated by this, you've got a chance to look back.
And also, most of you will not find most of these slides interesting, and I have too many slides.
This is the second derivative of change. Apologies if you don't know what it will do to change it.
This is a changing change from the UN projections, and these were the UN projections as of 2011.
And you have reality up until about 2011 and then you have the projections going forward.
Clearly, that isn't going to happen. So suddenly, can they go smooth? But demographers can't really be less exciting.
Well, times it is true that this is six years ago, one that I thought that because I think what we're looking at is a series of population booms.
The gap between those peaks was 18 years, then twenty one years human beings and not elephants.
We're not flurries. We do things we used to do worldwide every 18 years now, every 21 years we do it in this country, every 31 years now.
You can make it look more sophisticated if you just copy the pattern for the
past or months and you end up with a planet at 9.3 million people by 2060.
I hit this 300 pages into that book. So that they will criticise me.
I'm just pointing out now because it's kind of becoming more accepted that we may not
get to the current U.N. projections eleven point two billion by the end of the century,
the U.N. will revise this year, possibly as early as the end of June.
That projection name I it every two years, it'll come down from eleven point two billion and people are going to ask why.
Part of the reason why is it should never have gone up to eleven point two billion.
Here's a graph again. But now with the actual population on it.
And so they were saying 10 billion on the day.
I think of the publication of that book called Population 10 billion.
The United Nations demographer announced they thought it was going to be 11 just to annoy me, which is why I'm kind of happy it's going down.
I think in this graph, I'm just trying to show you these things. This is GDP falling everywhere.
We kind of knew we've known this for two or three decades,
but those darker cells are parts of the world, and the rate of GDP growth not going up is slowing down.
Mobile weaver Stuart Little [INAUDIBLE] of this manor,
formerly we wrote in 2018 a more detailed book about demography, fertility and everything that's going on.
I'm going to get off demography them in a minute. The graphs get more complicated, but the new graphs allow sixty five of them.
I negotiate graphs when I do book contracts. Both advances a face portrays face portraits.
How many people know what a face portrait is? Phew.
Great. Okay, we got a smattering there.
You've got a picture of a pendulum goes from side to side.
In the middle, you've got a graph over time that you're used to, and it's showing the position of the pendulum.
It goes to one side and the other side is showing the velocity where the pensioners lie to one side to floss.
It goes to zero when it's in the middle of the velocities of the maximum, it slows down, so the velocity in the position are doing different things.
If you put velocity on one axis and position on another, you get the phase diagram and you're about to see.
Probably about 40, five thousand comes very, very quickly. OK.
Remember, the title of this lecture series is evolving economic fault and the this is evolving.
Here's a really simple one if you don't get this, I'm afraid the next half of that was going to be a baseball for you.
This is a country which has 100 million people in 1950.
It is growing at a rate of two percent two percent every year since 1950, one has 102 million.
Along the x axis is the absolute increase in people along the y axis is the total number of people,
and you'll see that by 1995 he's got 200 million, but two thousand six is called 300 million.
By 2020 is getting faster. It's called for an immediate.
So one of these diagrams, that's what an acceleration of growth looks like two percent growth a year.
And that's a quote from Darwin. And it was recorded cases of the astonishing rapid increase in various animals,
the nature when circumstances have been favourable to them during two or three following seasons.
Here is a slowdown. And again, we're starting with 100 million people in 1950, and again we're starting with a two percent population growth rate.
But every year we're going to take that 1.4 percent. So in 1951, it drops to 1.9 1950 to just one point eight percent and so on.
By 1970, you've got zero growth. So it's back on the middle of the axis.
And then is this a bit like the the book Children of Men? You kind of you for the film if you see that we're heading down towards zero?
That's what a rapid deceleration of the questions later becomes a pointer, a curve the province's two screens because,
oh, I can't, because I've got too many graphs, so I'll never get to the end.
This is not a well-honed presentation. This is in the middle of thinking.
This is what stability looks like for those of you who basically think it's a miraculous spiral.
This one is oscillating at around every thirty one years, but one point four one five nine,
which you may recognise, also happens to be the average age at which Europeans are having their babies that spiral.
On a normal graph, looks like that, and I've written the kind of Daily Mail story about the terrible population increase and decline that that is.
And let's get towards the real data. This is babies in the world.
Those of you who like Hans Rosling, what he used to do remember Hans falsely talking about Big Baby in 1990 is almost correct.
He was almost correct in 2015 with just most of 1990,
but is absolutely going to go going to go down like some things which are not population are going to get loads of population later.
But the reason I'm excited about this is like trying to write the chapter for this
book about things that are still speeding up and they were all slowing down.
And when that happens is when it's wet, when you get what you don't expect to get.
You begin to think, Well, something's going on here. So you have to meet the y axis and what these graphs are.
The first, these two classes total United States student debt. It is still rising by about 2012.
It's past the trillion mark. It is currently at the 1.5 trillion dollar mark.
But the point is that depends how you can see it. It was accelerating up to 2009.
Can you see it's the graph is kind of leading the other way?
Well, this is one of these talks where I'm going to try to convince you that still rising, but it's slowing down.
It peaks every October because that's when you turn up in college full of hope and move your enormous debt in the United States.
The second graph is the total car loan that the United States, which of course, crashed in 2008 with the financial crash.
The car companies were not car companies, they were that companies, which just kind of that companies with an automobile attached to them.
But again, you can see a 2018 quarter for we will not see very life for the amount of money that Americans are going to buy that cars mortgage debt.
OK, still completely in the doldrums. But let's show you later some some UK data on that.
Total US public debt and there may be. You have to be a bit hopeful to kind of see the thing veering toward zero.
So is that still visible, bouncing more slowly? It cannot carry on going up forever.
At some point, the Chinese will stop sending ravaging refrigerators and the Americans will not be able to issue that to buy them.
The question is when? How fast? Wikipedia.
Wikipedia begins well, about 2001. The number of articles accelerate and accelerate to maximum acceleration in 2007 because
there's a limit to how many things you can describe that it's actually worth doing.
And it carries on rising but at a slower rate. 2008 2009 10 to 11 12, 2014.
Somebody has a for the idea of inventing stops,
and then you invited on Wikipedia to actually write another definition of something and that managed to get a little bit of acceleration.
2015. Let's slow it down again.
There's a limited number of things trying to get lots more data about the total size of the cloud, all these kinds of things.
For every one of these graphs, I'm getting another 10 or 12 datasets to kind of confirm.
I should say I think it's 48. The Max Roser who's based in this place.
This data is unbelievable, and he gets data for people.
This graph of a dramatic slide that his book production in the Netherlands, but we have the check book production in every country.
Of course, book production is slowing down. There are lovely stories with these graphs.
I have a feeling that book production was at its maximum acceleration in the 70s,
1970s and 80s because you showed off by how many books you have in your house.
You couldn't possibly read them all. And then other things come along and it does that.
And the lovely thing about this data centre actually begins at the time of the printing press is you can actually
see when people decide to burn books because publishers get a bit reticent to publish in the years immediately.
After all, the books are piled up outside the cathedral and burned for heresy.
So, OK, things which are not slowing down climate change as the hallmark kindly produce this graph.
This particular illustration what is a gigaton? It's a billion metric tons because we have been talking about billions of tons of CO2.
Is equal to 100 million. I think it's African elephants, the decaying carcases of six million blue whales.
It's the big numbers here since 1750 are the estimates of the rise in CO2 emissions over time.
And I will ignore the old data of those fascinating and I'll just look at the graph from 1960 onwards.
And the problem is that for most of the time, it's on the accelerating side.
It's going up from 10 billion tonnes in 1960 to 20 million tonnes by 1979 to over 35 billion tonnes a year.
Now worldwide being admitted,
CO2 via Kyoto and Paris agreements look a bit miserable on this graph because I do wonder whether governments kind of think,
How can we do a great thing? We came together in the May Day agreement because after each one, there's actually an acceleration of pollution.
And currently we're at an acceleration.
The good news in this desperately sad Typekit this is is that the doubling time of worldwide CO2 emissions has gone from 22 years,
doubling every 22 years to 23. I mean, it's pathetic, and for something to hang on to is not great,
and we're all going to this game over if we don't do something dramatic with that.
So, yes, emissions are still going up. Ridiculously, this is what the graph looks like with this one.
Normally, in case you're wondering, why is he playing with these weird graphs?
Slightly the same data, you should find a traditional graph very, very easy to understand.
The problem with the traditional graph is it hides all the really exciting thing, which is is it going up fast or slow?
It is going up before in a tiny amount of space. The graph was what the graph, the iPhone, which physicists tool and so on.
And I'll end by showing the social scientists in Japan have been doing this for over 20 years since we were a bit slow.
What the graph, which shows the rate of change, as well as the absolute amount this is,
is put all the emphasis on the direction to try and give you give you a clean temperature.
It will get simpler in a minute.
Three different time series of temperature one is the national space contact series The Office, the Met Office adjusted series.
It depends on the data point. So one of them is comparing to the 1951 2018 average, where we are almost one degree over it.
The average is comparing to May not 1961 2019, nor will it be much more in the area because the normal claims now for all the 2018.
Points are worrying because it's accelerating, not just going up.
It's actually over there on the side, but have a look back at 2000 like 1990 1992.
Global recessions are the best thing you can hope for if I see not seeing a rise in CO2 emissions.
The last graph I have a dear old friend who doesn't believe in climate change.
He sent me this data and this data comes from the satellite estimates.
And he begins in 1979 and it's all over the place so you can look at us as they called it, that's a bit warming.
I'm now going to show you to the normal graph.
So somebody who doesn't believe in climate change said to me that data need to alter the normal refugee gut, huh?
It's heating up, isn't it? So why does it look like a mess on the graphite tool?
It's like listening data. Because of things like 1998, something went wrong in the ratings for the satellites in 1998.
And if you draw the rate of change, it really highlights that 1998 is very, very exciting.
But even the data, the people who tell you that climate change isn't happening shows that climate change is happening.
People, I'm going to show you quite a lot now about numbers of people, the numbers of babies, because this is very recent and I think interesting.
This is the lot is wearing a Superman cape.
Give it to him by students from the University of Sheffield when they were visiting the refugee camp in Lesbos a few years ago,
worrying about numbers of people. Here's the global figures.
The current latest UN figures on total world population amount about 1930,
you've got two billion roundabout, now you've got heading towards eight million.
And the projections this is the current projections, not the ones we should expect to get soon.
Show it peaking shortly after 21:00. That's a slowdown that's well known.
The exciting thing is just is it going to slow down faster than that or not?
The other graph you can see there is exactly the same data, but with two long scales,
which helps you visualise that turning up in the Americas with your disease is it's devastating.
Going into Africa with your wonderful civilisation is devastating.
And what's great at the moment, the current slowdown is not about disease or war or slavery, it's about women saying no to men.
To put it quite crudely, the United States.
So we've drawn a wall.
We try to make these diagrams a bit more exciting because although all of you are loving the fact that you have to see all these graphs,
but you know, every graph you put into a book, you have no sales.
As the United States, it's slowing down quite slowly.
Is China. And of course, China is slowing down dramatically quickly.
Not just because of the one-child policy. It will slow down well before that.
That's the one child policy. And hey, people have got used to having one child.
It turns out Africa.
The whole of Africa, three to this one goes from well over a billion now to, in theory,
well over four billion by the end of this century, but probably not given what we know most recently.
And next to Africa, I put the piddling, dramatically unimportant British Isles just in case you're interested if you wanted the wine, by the way.
It really matters what we did to Ireland in the 1840s.
Just have a look at that. It's the British Isles, including Ireland.
Alternatively, if you want to know whether our invitation in 2003, we're going to do these invitations.
Enoch Powell, whether this is the Caribbean and to India in the 1960s, please come.
We need you to fast and pray. We issued an invitation to Eastern Europe.
And we said, Please, can you come? We need you. It's called opening up to the AITORNEY.
They came and we did it again. And OK, it's a big spike.
We were lucky to get it. It's going now. They're not coming anymore. That's where we're heading.
We have everything the whole country does is of relative importance in this world, India.
And these are the estimates who knew in India before the UN revises its figures,
which will be an even faster slowdown that is peaking at two thousand sixty four.
Japan, a small country, and I had just had so many things and it had in population slowdown.
All the text is there for anybody who's completely fascinated,
but every week on these is a story that there's a story about a war or an embargo or something else.
This is the rest of Europe, Asia, so the rest of Europe and Asia, but taking out China, Japan and India because of what he said.
And again, slowing down very rapidly. Oceania is mainly Australia and New Zealand and slowing down.
The US, again, I'm sorry, no, the Americans without the US say first,
the Americans without the US is slowing down faster than the USA and put the USA back up.
That's equal. Compare. It's stunning. This is total population.
These figures have been out for years now, so not really showing anything that's exciting.
Hopefully, speed up and go on to that babies. This is total fertility rates which have their issues because sometimes people have their babies.
Early and later we put some birds on is a stork.
As I go through this, the birds will change the national bird of each country.
I'm trying to be sort of less US centric, but anyway.
1960 in the world, the average woman was having five children.
Barring slow down comes in fast as deceleration in the 60s to the 70s.
By 1976, you dropped to four, by 1963, 12 to 16.
We're looking at around about a point for the second graph here, zooming in on these last few years.
And the really exciting thing is 2014 15 or 16, which is the latest year for which we can get what we think is accurate data.
And it's moved away from the excess, which means that the rate of slowed down off fertility is accelerating,
so it's going down even faster than before. You may think I'm obsessed by this line, though I am a bit obsessive.
But tiny changes in the middle of this graph alters the population at the end of this century, just 81 years by a billion billion and a half people.
And it is much easier to have a happier world, I suspect, with fewer people voting for the United States.
Well, over three and a half children in the 1960s,
the pill comes along magical thing seam down and down and down and then kind of get locked in that the spa spot with a man about two children.
The US has the highest fertility of the rich world, so imagine again if you kind of obsessive about it.
But just look at 2016 with down to below 0.8, what's going on in the US right now?
That's why I made the last abortion clinic illegal in a particular state.
I look at generations, this why I show you this just to break up the graphs, but you're going to get some more graphs in the minute.
If you want to consider the speed of change of these things, you've got to not think in decades, but think of generations.
Things really, really change over generations.
This is my best estimate to actually put some limits on generations based on the life table and fertility vehicles in England.
This is what had the audience. So if you were born between 1991 and 1928 inclusive, your generation of fee, generation fee,
people know if you were born between 1929 and 1955 inclusive, your generation and generation ws consigli know well done.
If you're born between 1956 and 1991, I quote Youth Generation X earlier before I'm Generation X.
Well, then between 1992 and 2011, your Generation Y Williams.
Thank you. And I guess we don't have any sense 2012.
I'm estimating 2014. Anyway, I do a lot about trying to look at those generations.
The first two generations saw the first chapter survive in the fields.
You'd be amazed at the Chinese, this happened over these five generations.
These five generations have seen change that five generations have never seen before human beings.
They've been single generations that have seen the Black Death life or the plague or an earthquake wipe out Lisbon.
That's the single generation. These five generations have seen absolutely everything altered out of again so that
your fundamental beliefs about the world have changed for the next generation.
Go into thinking you're going to burn in [INAUDIBLE].
If you say a naughty word food to believing that available to me, the are going to take over is incredibly fast.
I go back to generation and one you can take generations back before 10 66 anyway, early on.
Just just to give you a sense of the speed of change. The biggest change happened for Queen Elizabeth generation.
The really big one electricity coming everywhere. Sewage systems just proliferating.
My generation, not much change, and I know this is not what the common narrative is.
I fly in 747s a 747.
Firstly, when I was born, I'm 51 years old. I used a Windows computer as a teenager.
This system produced by ACORN. I'm geeky. I still use a Windows computer system.
It is the kind of the lifeblood of universities to pretend.
Yes, to pretend that we are constantly making new discoveries and you never know what graphene is going to do next door.
I was a big thing in 1968. I had a lot of I in my thesis in Nineteen Ninety One about how it wasn't working.
I think the conditions got really good Catholic condition allows you to see faces that allows you to translate.
People talk about lawyers losing their jobs because of artificial intelligence. That might be why lawyers lose their jobs to accountants.
By some estimates, we have more lawyers and accountants working in this country than the whole of the rest of the continent combined.
You know, if you don't want to have lots of lawyers and accountants and ways to do it without AI,
and you've got to ask why on earth would you create an increase in AI on America, by the way basis?
So I'm an AI sceptic. I know I'm probably the one place to say it.
You know, prove me wrong. Maybe I'm just old warcraft's. Let's do more more for these birds.
China has the Chinese data, and it is dramatic and has a huge effect on the world picture.
Zooming in to the most recent years, very tiny lies 1.6 children per woman to 1.6 one 1.6 to the polls of 2017 2018.
The final slide that we can. But you know the Chinese is slowing down.
Well, you may not know is if we take the countries of the world with the highest fertility rates in each continent is dramatic.
This is Niger, the highest fertility rate in Africa. Look at what is thought to have happened between 2000 and 2016 in Niger.
And that's the covered area with the highest fertility rate, I think, in the world.
East Timor. The about this being invaded by another country is biathletes.
You really want to avoid wars and pandemics and so on.
But even East Timor now is heading below 5.5 and plummeting down.
Guatemala, the country itself, a man with the highest fertility rates at the moment of only three children a woman.
Even with wars, terrorism and selection the United States.
Even then, he managed to get slow down. Haiti crisis facility rates in the Caribbean and again,
sometimes when these patterns of taste may be suggested, the estimates are a bit dodgy, I suspect.
But you never know. It's hard to know, but Haiti heading rapidly down towards just two children.
Fertility across the whole Caribbean is well below two in many parts France.
And at various points, I put on things about access to abortion because it does matter.
And the UK and the EU probably know that, but we've gone from something to something else in a generation.
How many children you expected to have? We have four people worrying about you having too many.
I started putting clothes on now this is Korea, Portugal and Brazil.
The country is absolutely plummeting in Korea.
Now they're bringing people's grandmothers into the primary schools.
Because they need somebody to sit at a desk in the primary school and often the grandmothers are illiterate,
so why not teach the grandmothers well as a child how to read?
Because then the child has somebody to read with and the ones that have children in Korea?
For those of you who like numbers, these are the numbers of highlighted just for you an event.
So if you very fast track record of achievement of free trade is the current total fertility rate in the whole of the continent of Africa.
2015 4.7 2016 4.6 2017 4.5.
If you wanted to give you something was come new and current and not known that incredible acceleration in
the rate has slowed down in Africa at the moment and trying to work out why is particularly interesting.
Exactly the same numbers in a minute, but just the changes are all negative.
Apart from China and China's never going to get up to two children again,
the way things are going and highlighting the particular needs of the changes each year recently across Africa.
So total human beings are slowing down. But I've got to wrap up because you've got to ask questions and you want to find out more things, just people.
GDP or GDP. And again, I'll ask you to look from 2006 to 2018.
Ignore 2008. I think it's leading off that way.
US GDP. Go forward.
GDP in China, which you'll know from reports of the moment, is slowing down.
Bloomberg cited Chinese data can now be relied upon. We think it is the United States, not so much.
Maybe you can look at, of course, all the countries of the world in this way, but the GDP numbers that they report to the IMF.
Earnings, US medium earnings. Now, about three hundred fifty five dollars a week for somebody lucky enough to have a full time permanent job.
Oh, very much appears to be stabilising. Interest rates, of course, used to be very low.
Two years ago, if we live again, we think it's temporary.
It carries on, goes on, maybe goes in this country.
We might be able to engineer a situation by the thirty first of October where the Bank of England has to desperately raise interest rates,
the fed the pound. But other than that, we seem to have entered a new era.
House prices, I promised you something about this.
The world's longest house price series, as far as I know, is the series about the Particulars Canal in Amsterdam,
where of course, prices because they are everywhere, stable.
That's what stability looks like over a house price savings that goes from 16 to 18 ended in 1973.
In that period, there was 200 years when real terms of prices fell.
Have since I want to start with the most expensive part of here for house prices, where is now the most expensive part of you up for house prices?
Welcome to Oxford. We actually beat London for the average person May 17 times average incomes if they could never afford in Oxford.
They always eventually. As the UK House price data gains 2017, one of those graphs is absolute,
one is relative and the relative one, you can see that moving towards slow down faster.
The highest rate of house price rises for the 1970s.
For those of you to remember, in the 1970s, my mom and dad bought a house before the Credit Co. Six years later,
the whole bit, like all eight years later, they bought one.
A twenty one thousand pounds, advising first because of only summertime was twenty two thousand pounds.
My mum and dad were never good economists. I would be a millionaire now if they happened anyway, and you have to worry about this anymore.
There is no we need to buy houses in the future, usually inflated prices and none of you are going to get rich on buying a house now.
Price of gold. It's really interesting, based almost entirely on speculation, favourite movie,
be on selling jewellery and a little bit about Connexions and computers, but that's less needed.
That's where it is. Stocks and shares.
Imagine that you are trader in 1996 looking at the Nasdaq. You know, you'd be amazed.
And then, of course, you can see the dot com crash, but two dot com crashes in it, and then we are.
The state is only about a week old 2019 or if things happening with the Nasdaq.
You know, there wasn't the fortune-telling thing in any of this.
This is just looking at the numbers in this case, averaging them over an entire year to get them safe enough and having a look.
Unbelievable change. A century ago, one in 10 of the children, the surfing conservancy and classes died before they reached age five.
That's why we're paranoid about child death. It's an amazing change that we've gone through.
Things really can change the big fear of my life with my teenage years.
Here was when was I going to be annihilated in the nuclear war then?
Because got a lot of the weapons still to go with, that is the best estimate of the top 10 warheads from the worst times in 1983 to them.
And the same with climate change. It's just not impossible.
The change almost at the last graph, this is propensity to marry, and you go from one system in the 1970s when my mom at that,
my 60s when they got married and then you got this sudden drop to actually
becoming a choice to marry now wasn't really a choice you had to marry then.
Now you can choose to marry.
So you had Tony Stark comes in that way and say to, I think, change his politics, I think is the most fascinating one for slow down.
This was the most dramatic change in polling in Britain ever for every single poll we've ever had.
This is the voice of support for Labour in February, March, April, May and June 2017,
the biggest, fastest change in the politics of the people in Britain. The mandatory summary couldn't form majority government.
That year was the most exciting change until the bloody Brexit Party came along,
and I really don't want to put a graph of the Brexit Party in the book unless they absolutely plummet.
Which case is going in? But just a time.
Share with you the agony of thinking about these things. Do you think politics is slowing down?
How many isms have we invented recently? Essentially, isn't that different from other kinds of socialism, so chant,
so this would be one environmental system where we had that well before the 1960s and 70s,
you could find Thatcherism as a specialism, you know, with a 79 80.
I don't think many new ideas. But I could be getting old. Great.
Well, I half of all of this is.
The ones you can measure something it's slowing down, but the example I give you is disease with almost all diseases in Britain.
If you if you plot the chances of you getting a disease and drops over time because
one of the key things about curing a disease is actually knowing it is a disease.
And once you recognise it as tuberculosis, it generally means you can do something about it.
There's only one exception, which is cancer the actual rates of people dying from cancer virus after we identified cancers, but that is now falling.
So I have a well about don't want to give you a few questions.
I have a worry that the reason I'm finally finding everything slowing down is the things we get
good enough to be able to measure by the time we get good enough to measure them are slowing down.
I stuck in the picture swimming pools in California to tell me that I had to stop talking.
We really do need to slow down the death traps.
They don't particularly make you happy. You may think swimming pool is a lovely thing to have.
You certainly don't need so many. You can go around and talk to the neighbours and use their swimming pool that you
wouldn't have to try and fill them all up with a diminishing quantity of water. There are lots of good reasons to think we're slowing down.
The last graphic I put up is the CO2 one because it is depressing, and that's the one we need to slow down the most.
But nice and simple. Pretty nice and simple. We're so lucky. Absolute linear relationship between CO2 enough and carbon gases and temperature,
you know, for largely a dying world population, luckily kind of got decided.
Let's make this one easy for you to understand. The final graph is from colleagues in Japan who've been told these graphs in 20 years.
This graph happens to be of the growth of Tokyo and whichever country was growing
at the edges or in the middle of all the entries in the middle of rather, mountain mound sets us on the middle because Tokyo's stock changing.
So what a slowdown means. She stopped changing.
Population, folks rising in carry on living in the same places you've been living before with much the same things that you had before.
And for the first time, we get what we've had for most of human history.
We get two generations who experience a very similar life, have the same number of children, same kind of clothes, same expectations.
Same living standards. That's where we appear to be heading.
Thank you so much for your patience. Thanks, Tony.
That was great. I saw the number of slots you had. I didn't think you'd get through it, so congratulations.
Do we have some questions? Who would like to give someone over there?
Sure. Thank you. And you said in passing at some point that if population continues to go down, that's a good thing because we'll be happier in 2100.
Assume for the sake of argument, just purely hypothetical that climate change is solved tomorrow by some ingenious method.
Would you still say that I'm an automobile optimist, so I think you could actually,
if you were well organised, then with 15 billion people on the planet.
But. Those people who do worry, you can suddenly calm them down.
So all the people who worry about too many people.
And there were a lot I think they'd be happier, though better ways to get happier than worrying about migrants, though.
The worst thing to do is live in an area where migrants don't come. I've lived in places where migrants don't come, and it's miserable.
I am not too worried about where if we have five million people on the planet or 15 million.
Currently, we have one billion people who behave so badly they can't be by far the bulk of all that carbon.
I don't tend to worry about population numbers, but it's it's interesting what you could do in a more stable world.
We're getting more and more wilderness at the moment.
There's actually more places to go away to get away from everything else because people are still coming off the land into cities.
Cities are great for their urban heat islands,
the kind of self-hate from our bodies as a as the head of an air conditioning system working in this way.
And he'd know about that if there was one today. But I don't think the population level is that important.
It's just the most easy one to demonstrate slow down.
If I was to show you the speed of semiconductors and so on, but it's a lot more boring.
And then we have a whole argument about what the [INAUDIBLE] is that semiconductor being used for?
It's very hard to measure technological change. I'm very sceptical.
The papers I've read that I believe the most say the 1930s was the period the fastest before the war.
The first is that logical change, but we don't actually have a measure.
You could do the same with drugs. You know, drugs measure them by what they've achieved and then say, So what we've invented the last 10 or 20 years,
given how many more people we have for searching drugs so that for the planet, it doesn't compare well to the easy wins at the start.
But once you get into an argument, you tend to defend it to the hilt.
There is a danger. There must be things of the temperature which are accelerating.
Still, the I have just not thought of a question there and then one over.
Thank you very much. Presentation an impressive number of growths, which I don't think I've ever seen so many, certainly in my discipline.
What's in your view then underpins this evolutionary change.
This reduction and are the same changes in processes and principles driving the increase in global warming as well.
So is there a unifying principle that you see or principles that are leading to these changes?
Industrialisation that destroys global warming and it happened earlier and it also happened in China a lot earlier.
But then they called a halt to it. This is centuries ago. The reason why the acceleration took off in the first place.
It's difficult to tie down and probably related to the invasion of the Americas and then the growing wealth of Europe as a result,
and then you begin to see Europe is the place that produced the most babies early on that then flooded the rest of the planet.
The deceleration is much easier to understand because we can get data and it's women getting power.
It is. It is the revolution from women in this place being subhuman.
A century ago, you can't possibly have them studying with us, man, because we're the clever ones to.
When the figures released in two weeks time for the first time ever,
the University of Oxford will be solidly majority female undergraduate, but it's taken this long time.
It's a slow university, this one. But that change in a century from seeing women as subhuman to women being a long way on equal power.
The average woman in the world wants half a child less than the average man,
and the average woman in the world now gets her way as opposed to the past, and he was all about education and so on.
But above all else, it's it's that why that happened.
I don't know. That's beyond me, but I can tie it down to the changing position of women.
I mean, the other thing to say this is a bit trite is something have to happen. This is a change is temporary.
We think of it as an era we live in. We think of it as a mode of production.
We call it the capitalist mode of production because we like to think that we're in something that's a bit stable.
But it isn't. It's a change from one thing to another.
And for five generations, we've been on the runaway train, and for the first few generations, that train was going faster, faster, faster.
And what's happened right now is that somebody slammed the brakes on, and it feels really bad because we used train to moving forward.
We think we should get a new kind of invention, a new TV set. We should be able to press the button and teleport somewhere else in the future
because the rate of change was so fast in the past that when that happens,
when you still got a washing machine and tumble dryer and that was invented, the boxer will iron your clothes.
Yet, you know, things really have slowed down. And that's how you GDP's are going to hardly lose.
Your children aren't going to be better off than you. We think it's a terrible thing that has to happen at some point.
But all I do is look at data, try to make sure it's correct to always in a particular way and keep on seeing class, the things slowing down.
You just have to say it really, really is slowing. And not only is it slowing in the last few years, the speed of slowdown has accelerated.
Thanks, gentlemen, the. Could you use a microphone during the period of growing population?
We had rapid urbanisation as well from your figures, do you know urbanisation is affected by this slowdown?
Do people more people live in the countryside now? No, no.
The world still urbanising and there is a tiny I start the book off with this.
I start the book off of a couple of couples I actually want to know.
One his move to live in less force than and another Japanese companies move further because this is kind of rural little idea with some of the young.
If we want to go and live in the village in the middle of nowhere,
they are really where I got because if many, many other people have that dream, they will.
Their dreams will be ruined. So for every couple that moves away to the very little island, another 100 are coming into the city.
But as we head towards being an 80 percent urbanised world, the generations that.
It will stop. There have to be some people out there, and some may want to be out in the countryside to go.
I think the rate of urbanisation is now slowing,
but it's one of those kind of cheesy things because anything that could only ever get to 100 percent has to slow.
It's hard, but it is satisfying, but we all still urbanising.
And the young really want to be if you give them a choice in cities around the world as far as we can see.
So will Japan is old Japan. But it's kind of stopped at this point.
And there are luckily enough young people who will move to villages in the middle of nowhere up in the north of
Japan to actually help keep the village going because you can't just keep villagers going by retirees moving in.
That's what happens in this country.
Retirees move into their villages and you do need somebody under 60 in the village where there are lots of questions.
And I'm sorry, we just have time for one more over there. Thank you very much.
My question is, what do you mean, how do you measure women's education?
How do you actually analyse a lot between the achievement?
And then you to. The second in my thirties, I talked the name of social development will take place.
The argument was not that it was female education, but that it was Social Security.
It was state interventions which reduced the risk of children dying.
Once those interventions are in place, then women can have fewer children.
And so it's not necessarily women decision, either it's a male or female decision.
Yeah, they what I say not too long involves, but you're like the my grandmother when when she got Alzheimer's would talk endlessly
about babies on the cushions because she comes from an era where babies died.
We are now in this country. We have an infant mortality rate of three point six per thousand is actually rising.
Tragically, there's only 3.6 in the best parts of the world is just two.
You can have a single child and expect that single child to outlive you.
And it's the first time you'd be really lucky that way, and he changes your behaviour as something.
Education we measure now by the number of days or years spent in secondary education.
And the numbers who are graduating from universities and the majority of graduates in the world are now female.
But that's that's the way in which you measure it. But you were also very light that when you see increases in fertility,
it's partly when you need to have more children for your own Social Security later
in life when things fall apart because you hope one of them will look after you.
And when you can rely on the state and think that the state will look after you and
particularly somebody will be provided to wash your body in the last year of your life,
then you can have fewer to do it.
So creating that situation is just as important as the increased education that is there, but the wonderful, magical thing.
Is going from a situation.
In which most people would see one of their children die before reaching adulthood to a situation in which that is almost completely unknown.
And the great irony in our lives,
leave it with you is we still have the inbuilt fear and paranoia that you need to deal with those circumstances and the tragedy.
As we now transfer that fear about what can I do to my child doesn't die to?
How am I going to get them to get an a star in their GCSE and the astounding GCSE really, really doesn't matter.
But the gut feeling of absolute paranoia about the children comes from the time when they could die.
And we've got to somehow learn to calm down and realise that they're almost certainly going to be OK.
Thanks so much.
So thanks again for dining, for a really fascinating talk and go and plot all your grass growth phase diagrams rather than against time.
And just a reminder that next week we have Diana Coyle, who will be speaking.
So I do come along for the next in our series of evolving economic thought.
Join me by thanking Diana again.