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
Many reasons as others have stated, though I’ll add that this reaction curve is very common in population studies. More resources and less death lead to sharp increase till reaching a new capacity of the system.
Advance in technology and colonization allow for such technology to spread widely across the globe.
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.
Lots of advances but also this is exponential growth.
It’s like lily pads on a pond that double every generation.
The first day there is 1, then 2 then 4 etc. If it takes 100 days for the pond to be completely covered, when is the pond half covered? On the 50th day? No. It will be half covered on the 99th day. The graph will look like this.
As few others explained, the Haber-Bosh process of making synthetic ammonia and produce large quantities of fertilizers is considered the single most important cause. Technology and medicine, discovery of vaccines and antibiotics helped but without producing more and more food you can’t feed a growing population!
People have mentioned that human growth is exponential, but technically, it’s actually logistic growth. The more people there are, the more new babies we can produce. If every couple has 4 children, then each generation doubles in size. This is pure exponential growth. However, if the population gets too high, there aren’t enough resources to maintain it, so the growth will slow. Alternatively, deaths will start to equal the amount of growth, so the net total population growth gets lower. The maximum sustainable population is called the capacity, and factoring capacity into an exponential growth model creates a logistic growth model.
Other people have mentioned factors like medicine/transportation/etc. What these factors actually contribute to is increasing the capacity of the population. By increasing resources to maintain living population and increasing medicine to keep them from dying, the two major factors limiting the capacity are improved. Without further improvements, we will eventually reach our capacity again and growth will slow down over time.
1. The development of synthetic fertilizers -> massive increase in agricultural output.
2. The production of cheap steel (the production of steel increased by more than 20-fold between 1880 and 1910), leading to rapid expansion of railroads.
3. Development of the internal combustion engine cargo truck. Effective link between the trainstation and the store.
4. Development of practical refrigeration units and the refrigerated train car. Fruit, fish, meat etc could now be transported vast distances. From 1910-ish we also see the development of home refrigerators.
5. Major cities developing a comprehensive sewage network, plus other advances in sanitation.
6. Increasing advances in medicine. Things like effective disinfectants and anaesthesia (meaning that internal surgery was no longer just a pipedream or a measure of last resort).
If I had to pick one cause, I will say it was the availability of cheap energy. Cheap coal and oil fuels our society, be it via fertilizers or our machines. This leaves us free to chase other endeavors.
For a long time people would have large families but only a few made it to adulthood and reproduce the selves, so population didn’t grow very quickly. With technological, medical, and agricultural advancements, suddenly most kids made it to adulthood. The population began doubling every generation.
It’s slowing now because everyone is realising that if you want two adult children, you only need to have 2 children, rather than 6.
Hand washing!
Doctors weren’t in the practice of washing hands, and could go from one sick person to the next, basically passing along any germs from the previous patients.
Doctors were also responsible for dead body management, so if you happened to see a dr after they attended to the dead, you may be introduced to a large array of dangerous pathogens.
Around the turn of the century was when a few doctors started advocating for hand washing practices and the numbers spoke for themselves.
Latest Answers