Population, Sustainability, and Malthus: Crash Course World History 215
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In which John Green teaches you about population. So, how many people can reasonably live on the Earth? Thomas Malthus got it totally wrong in the 19th century, but for some reason, he keeps coming up when we talk about population. In 1800, the human population of the Earth passed 1 billion, and Thomas Malthus posited that growth had hit its ceiling, and the population would level off and stop growing. He was totally right. Just kidding, he was totally wrong! There are like 7 billion people on the planet now! John will teach a little about how Malthus made his calculations, and explain how Malthus came up with the wrong answer. As is often the case, it has to do with making projections based on faulty assumptions. Man, people do that a lot. You can directly support Crash Course at https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse Subscribe for as little as $0 to keep up with everything we're doing. Free is nice, but if you can afford to pay a little every month, it really helps us to continue producing this content.
Comments
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is this real? I mean Everyone heard about hitler/genghis khan...etc but not this man killing 1M people?
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P. infestans is not a fungus, it is a Oomycete. Among the differences between the groups is:
Oomycetes use cellulose to construct cell walls without septation (no wall separating nuclei) rather than fungal chitin.
Oomycetes are normally diploid, fungi are normally haploid.
Oomycete spores have a tinsel flagellum, unique to the heterokonts, which fungi are not.
There are numerous metabolic and catabolic reaction pathway differences.
Oomycetes have tubular mitochondrial cristae (the internal folds of mitochondria where ATP synthesis occurs) and Fungi have flat cristae. -
That Trevelyan guy is really a monster
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I think the biggest part the conventional historians miss out on is how technology was growing in that time even before the enclosures began and while the commons was still prevalent. There is an argument to be made that, while it may have happened differently and been slower, the Industrial Revolution was inevitable, even without significant land grabs in the form of the enclosure movement. We were seeing the beginnings of things like trade guilds, and we were also witnessing peasant farmers devising their own means of pastoral crop rotation and other ways of governing the commons without the need of so-called privatization. I will note that there was mention of the innovations of the Chinese in farming independent of the enclosure movement, and I know that this is Crash Course world history, not Crash Course "what might've happened in an alternative universe", but at least noting strongly that these happenings were independent I think is highly important.
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could malthus have failed to take industrial revolution into account??
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Ugh. Even a cursory glance at High Medieval records or peasant traditions will refute the "Europeans did not consider land to be owned" thing. Land ownership, as in, the right to use or sell land, has a clear, unbroken tradition since at the least roman times.
Yes, this might be in some cases sanctioned from up high (aka in church legal terms, God owns the land), or be a temporary arrangement (aka un-inheritable feudal latifundia), but the notion that European civilisation had no concept of private land ownership is bonkers.
I mean, this is what the enclosure laws were about, abolishing the communal land ownership of the village in favor of the individual land ownership of the landlords and wealthier peasants. Its not "open to everyone", its "open to the inhabitants of that specific village". They are only common goods in the same way that roads in Germany are a common good for a driver IN the US. -
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success 11:45
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um pouco dificil de entender kkk
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haaaaate him
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Malthus wasn't wrong. Food production may have increased exponentially, for a short while in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it is impossible for food production to increase exponentially forever. Yeah, we have 7 billion people now, but do you really think there will be a day when the earth holds 7 trillion people and we can feed them all? What about 700 trillion, or 700 quadrillion? The only thing Malthus didn't consider was contraception, mainly because reliable forms of it (latex condoms, hormonal pills, ect...) weren't available in his time. Birth control is the single most important invention in human history, because it's the only one that affords a permanent escape from the cycle of misery.
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2 MISTAKES NOTED - Britain did send potatoes to Ireland during the famine, an for free - but the Irish catholic church instead sold them to rich folks, an so the poor suffered. The church covered this up.
Also, the virus did not affect carrots or meat or fish or fruit, etc, so there was NO famine ! -
negrooooo
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Haha turtles reference
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Didn't you already tell Past you who you married in one of the original series episodes? "Remember that girl" 'Yeah she's two or three leagues away from us' "Yeah, well I married her, so shut up"
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I wonder if you can speak slower... I'm still studying English too.. :D
But great vid! -
So the British fucked the British over as well? Not just everyone else around the world?
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Damn, Trevelyan was a prick.
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If everybody would be vegan we could increase our population 6x without using more land... not that we would need that, but the other way around could be cool. We become vegan and use 6x less land. Thats a climate impact that would make a difference. Unfortunately there is god bacon...
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