25 August

The (F)law of Averages! We misread climbing average life expectancy as meaning ‘everybody is living longer’ (we aren’t). You can see the same flaw in superannuation, how we’re told we need a lot of super because we’re all living longer lives. That lie makes the super industry extremely rich. There’s another very interesting flawed use of averages. Overpopulation. It’s very common to think the world is overpopulated, and getting more so all the time. And that it’s caused by people having more babies - by fertility. Actually that’s backwards, it’s caused by mortality, not fertility. Ted Nordhaus explains it well: “Affluence and modernisation bring falling, not rising fertility rates. As our material circumstances improve, we have fewer children, not more. The explosion of human population over the past 200 years has not been a result of rising fertility rates but rather falling mortality rates.” Population has gone up not because we’ve had more babies, but because far fewer of those babies have died. Population will peak and then come down all by itself, as developing countries become richer.