Excuse me, if this is the wrong sub for this but I’m genuinly confused. According to [this graph](https://flic.kr/p/5T5hkE) I found by accident, the world population barely increased at all between 1300 and 1900. And then it suddenly took off like crazy. What caused this sudden fast increment of the world population?
In: 78
It sounds like the biggest point of confusion here actually stems from a misunderstanding of the graph.
Human population growth is exponential, but this graph is linear (which can produce some misconceptions if you aren’t careful).
For example, it would definitely be wrong to say that the world population “barely increased” between 1300 and 1900.
It went from ~350 million to ~1.6 billion in that time, a roughly ~357% increase.
That’s actually a LARGER population increase than what took place from 1900 to 2000 (~1.6 billion to ~6.1 billion would only be a ~281% increase).
Granted, 100 years is a much shorter time frame than 600 years (so per unit time, the growth since 1900 is definitely higher, but not nearly as much as this graph makes it appear). This can be explained by a number of factors that people have already mentioned (industrialization, ease of travel, improvements in farming, etc.).
Despite the very real reasons that populations increased around 1900, I still think the main takeaway here is to be more careful when interpreting graphs like these.
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