The Slice of Pie per Human – and the Whole Pie
Summary: Our modern media constantly focuses on wealth inequality and how some few humans get large portions of “pie” while most get crumbs. While we’re focused on who gets what, we neglect to see the entire pie (total human consumption) is vastly bigger than even the recent past. Our fossil armies have allowed us big profits, large wages, cheap stuff, and full landfills, but the surplus they’ve created has also turbocharged the food supply and therefore the number of humans alive. To reiterate: human population grew at a very small rate through most of prehistory. At the time of the Toba volcano 75 thousand years ago, human population was as low as 2,000 breeding individuals. At the dawn of agriculture ten thousand years ago, we numbered four million individuals. This increased to around 200 million at 1 CE. 152 We hit our first billion after the discovery of coal opened the fossil energy spigot around 1800. In 2020, we are at 7.7 billion humans en route to what the UN predicts to ove r 11 billion by 2100. 153 Global population growth peaked in 1963 at 2.1% and is now down to 1.1%. 154 However, this still results in over 360,000 new human babies every day 155 – about as much as the entire extant population of all the other great apes put together. 156
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