Scholars mistook a fleeting population boom for a timeless law in 1960. Heinz von Foerster and colleagues published "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026" in Science, identifying the date as the day the global population would reach a mathematical singularity. With that date now weeks away and no singularity in sight, the failure of the prediction deserves explanation rather than dismissal.
Using data from economist Michael Kremer and the United Nations, it took all of human history until 1800 for the global population to reach one billion, but only 125 years for that billion to double, by 1925. The population doubled again to 4 billion in just 50 years, by 1975, and the most recent doubling, from 4 to 8 billion, occurred in less than 50 years. Declining doubling times, characteristic of faster-than-exponential growth, made Malthusian fears of overpopulation appear mathematically inevitable.
The model was not wrong mathematically, but it was historically contingent. It correctly identified accelerating population growth, yet elevated a transient demographic change into a timeless universal law. Unlike physical laws, social patterns are shaped by changing circumstances. Similar misreadings include predicting the dominance of liberal democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union and extrapolating Japan's 1980s growth rates indefinitely. Today, global population growth has fallen below even exponential rates, and most people live in countries with below-replacement fertility.
The paper nonetheless made lasting contributions. It formalized the notion of a singularity, an idea John von Neumann had voiced without an equation or date. It also offered a transparent, parsimonious alternative to Malthus's law of exponential growth, in contrast to the roughly 150-equation Limits to Growth modeling of the same era.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing