by Ian Mortimer
3 Data for the period 1904–77 are from Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, pp. 557–8. Data for 1977–2000 are from Vehicle Licensing Statistics, http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/series/vehicle-licensing//. Downloaded 17 February 2014.
4 Data on cars worldwide were taken from Joyce Dargay, Dermot Gately and Martin Sommer, ‘Vehicle Ownership and Income Growth, Worldwide: 1960–2030’, Energy Journal, 28 (January 2007), pp. 143–70, at pp. 146–7.
5 Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, p. 561.
6 http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/80/airport_data/2000Annual/02.3_Use_of_UK_Airports%201975_2000.xls. Downloaded 18 February 2014. Note these CAA figures do not exactly tally with those in British Historical Statistics, quoted above, for the period 1975–80.
7 227 million in Europe, 71.1 million in USA, 4.5 million in Canada, 3.7 million in Australia and just under 1 million in New Zealand.
8 David Colman, ‘Food Security in Great Britain: Past Experience and the Current View’, http://www.agr.kyushu-u.ac.jp/foodsci/4_paper_Colman.pdf. Downloaded 1 July 2014.
9 The House of Lords Act 1999 permitted just 92 hereditary peers to remain as members of the House of Lords.
10 http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-III.pdf. Downloaded 20 February 2014.
11 Female life expectancy at birth was as follows: Australia (82.1), Austria (81.4), Belgium (80.9), Canada (81.5), Finland (80.9), France (83.1), Germany (80.6), Greece (80.8), Iceland (81.8), Italy (82.4), Japan (84.7), New Zealand (80.9), Norway (81.4), Singapore (80.2), Spain (82.3), Sweden (82.0) and Switzerland (82.5). Male life expectancy at birth: Australia (76.6), Canada (76.0), France (75.2), Greece (75.4), Iceland (77.1), Italy (76.0), Japan (77.5), New Zealand (75.9), Norway (75.7), Singapore (80.2), Spain (75.4), Sweden (77.3) and Switzerland (76.7). Data from http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/FAEAAFF60030CC23CA257BF00020641A/$File/cm02002_17.pdf. Downloaded 20 February 2014.
12 This 10% figure is based on the figures for the various countries in the chart: http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/FAEAAFF60030CC23CA257BF00020641A/$File/cm02002_17.pdf. This indicates that the average active life ranges from 84.5% of life expectancy at birth in Russia to 92.8% in Denmark. Most countries are around the 91% figure. The UK is 91.3%.
13 Brian Moseley’s online encyclopedia of Plymouth history, http://www.plymouthdata.info/Cinemas.htm (downloaded 23 February 2014), mentions the Theatre de Luxe, Union Street, opened 10 April 1909; Andrews’ Picture Palace, Union Street, opened 10 August 1910; Belgrave Hall, Mutley Plain, opened 11 September 1911; Cinedrome, Ebrington Street, opened 27 November 1911; Cinema de Luxe, Union Street, licensed 23 March 1910; Cinema Picture Palace, Saint Aubyn Street, opened 21 May 1910; Empire Electric Theatre, Union Street, opened by 29 July 1910; Morice Town and District Picture Palace, William Street, Devonport, licensed 20 October 1910; Paragon Picture Hall, Vauxhall Street, licensed December 1912; People’s Popular Picture Palace, Lower Street, licensed 21 December 1910; Theatre Elite Picture Playhouse, Ebrington Street, opened 9 May 1910; Tivoli Picture Theatre, Fore Street, Devonport, opened 26 January 1911. Also the Cinedrome, Mutley Plain, opened before 6 February 1914; Electric Cinema, Fore Street, Devonport, before January 1912; Picturedrome, Cattedown, licensed before January 1912.
14 http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/cinemas/sect3.html. Downloaded 23 February 2014.
15 Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, p. 569.
16 http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/oftel/publications/research/int1000.htm. Downloaded 23 February 2014.
17 http://uk.russellhobbs.com/blog/kettles-guide/the-electric-ketde-a-brief-historical-overview/. Downloaded 24 February 2014.
18 http://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/Online/object.aspx?objectID=object-739956&rows=1&start=1. Downloaded 24 February 2014.
19 There is an interesting risk assessment from Sir John Beddington dated 18 December 2012 on this subject and the implications of a Carrington Event for the UK. It states that the risk to the UK is less than to the USA due to the much shorter power lines in this country. The National Grid estimates that 1% of transformer assets could be lost, disrupting electrical supplies for several months, and that aviation would be affected. The effect on digital communications is less well understood. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/defence/121220-PM-to-Chair-re-EMP.pdf. Downloaded 2 July 2014.
20 The Earl of Birkenhead, The World in 2030 AD (1930), p. 27.
Conclusion: Which century saw the most change?
1 Abraham Maslow, ‘A theory of human motivation’, Psychological Review, 50 (1943), pp. 370–96. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm. Downloaded 4 January 2014.
2 It perhaps should be added that, even if there was a large immigrant population, the immigration itself led to increased demands on the community’s food supply, so this factor does not need to be treated separately from natural population growth.
3 Twentieth-century population growth was limited by factors other than the food supply – the choice not to have large families, for instance – and thus the relationship between population growth and increments in the food supply was broken. The achievement of being able to cater for all people with respect to all their dietary requirements was certainly a twentieth-century one. However, achievement is not the same as change. The change from meeting 90% of dietary requirements to meeting 105% of them (and therefore wasting some) is less significant in terms of need than the increase from 75% to 90%. Even if the twentieth century saw exactly the same level of change in meeting the physiological needs of society as the nineteenth, the oversupply in the twentieth would mean that some of that supply was not related to need and unnecessary, and thus a ‘frippery’ (to use Maslow’s word). However, such is the gap that there seems to be no doubt that the nineteenth century saw more significant advances in meeting the need for food than the twentieth. Obviously this only applies to the West: circumstances elsewhere in the world were very different; the developing world, for example, changed far more in the twentieth century in this regard than the nineteenth.
4 Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (4 vols, 1943).
5 Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe 1550–1660 (1971), p. 43
6 Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1962, single vol. edn), p. 550.
7 Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (2004), p. 251.
8 Ibid., p. 252; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, English Population from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (1997), p. 614.
9 Massimo Livi Bacci, Population of Europe (2000), pp. 135, 166. These tables do not give a figure for Spain in 1750, so the figure for 1800 has been used. The data for 2000 are from the list in Chapter 10, Note 11, averages of the male and female figures. The figure for Sweden in 1950 is from International Health: How Australia Compares, http://www.aihw.gov.au/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=6442459112. Downloaded 3 March 2014.
10 An examination of the English data provided by E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield in 1997 (later figures than those used in the above table) shows that life expectation at birth in 1591–1611 averaged 38.18; in 1691–1711 it was 37.98 and in 1791–1811 it was 40.19 – so the effect of the early professionalisation of medicine in the seventeenth century was negligible when combined with the greater adversities of life. The increase of life expectancy in the eighteenth century was relatively small.
11 B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (1988, paperback edn, 2011), pp. 166–9.
12 Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (2001), p. 264
13 Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth 1270–1870 (2011). http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/ModernAndComparative/papers2011-12/Papers/Broadberry.pdf. Downloaded 3 March 2014.
14 R. B. Gordon, M. Bertram and T. E. Graedel, ‘Metal Stocks and Sustainability’, Proceedings of the Natio
nal Academy of Sciences, 103, 5 (2006), pp. 1209–14.
15 http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/coal-steel-statistics//. Downloaded 4 March 2014.
16 Various newspapers carried Professor Hawking’s piece at the end of April 2010, which was a promotion for a TV series. It seems first to have appeared in the Daily Mail on 27 April 2010.
17 The figure of 58.6 years is derived as follows: four years speeding up, covering 1.4 light years, the same to slow down, and 21.3 years crossing the 19.2 light years in between reaching maximum speed and starting to slow down. And then the same coming home.
Envoi: Why it matters
1 1,668.9 billion barrels in 2012 compared to 1,258.1 billion barrels in 2000. Fossil fuel statistics in this section are from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy (2013) unless otherwise stated, http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/excel/Statistical-Review/statistical_review_of_world_energy_2013_workbook.xlsx. Downloaded 7 March 2014.
2 Currently 14% of the electricity in this country is produced by sustainable methods, equating to 5.2% of our total energy consumption. See Renewable Energy in 2013, pp. 1–2, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/323429/Renewable_energy_in_2013.pdf. Downloaded 28 June 2014. Obviously, to increase the sustainable energy supply from 14% to 100% will require not just another 86% of today’s needs but a further 100% of the needs of the additional population living in the country by 2050, which could easily be another 12 million people.
3 One hectare of rapeseed produces 1.1 tonnes of biodiesel per year, which equates to 1,311 litres. One acre of sugar beet produces 4.4 tonnes of bioethanol, 5,553 litres (figures from http://www.biomassenergycentre.org.uk, downloaded 23 March 2014). UK road fuel consumption is currently 68 million litres of diesel and 56 million litres of petrol per day (http://www.ukpia.com/industry_information/industry-overview.aspx, downloaded 22 March 2014). So, all other things being equal, we need almost 18.9 million hectares of land for all our diesel needs and almost 3.7 million hectares for our petrol. The total is 22.6 million hectares: halving this gives the figure of 11.3 million hectares in the text.
4 Current world annual consumption is about 68,000 tonnes of uranium per year. Known recoverable resources amount to 5.327 million tons in 2011. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Uranium-Resources/Supply-of-Uranium/. Downloaded 28 June 2014.
5 Woodland accounts for 9% (a small proportion compared to our European neighbours); coastal fringes such as dunes and estuaries make up just under 1%; freshwater lakes and rivers represent just over 1%; and 4.8% is mountain, moorland and heath, most of which is in a national park or similarly protected landscape. See UN National Ecosystem Assessment (2012), Chapter 10.
6 Statistics from http://www.agr.kyushu-u.ac.jp/foodsci/4_ paper_Colman.pdf. Downloaded 16 June 2014.
7 Robyn Vinter, ‘UK Becomes Net Importer of Wheat’, Farmers Weekly (10 October 2012).
8 We only produced 82% of the beef we needed in 2008, 52% of the pork, 88% of the mutton and lamb and 92% of the chicken. Figures are from Table 7.4 of the UN National Ecosystem Assessment (2012).
9 The incremental figure 0.76% is the annual increment between the English census population in 2001 (49,138,831) and 2011 (53,012,456). The figures released by the Office for National Statistics in June 2014, after these calculations were made, indicated that the population of England is still growing at 0.7% per year.
10 At present about 75% of new housing is on previously developed land. But there is a limit to how much land of this sort is available. This sum presumes that for every decade that passes, two thirds as much development can take place on brownfield sites as in the previous decade; so, after 2020, only 50% of new housing is on previously developed sites, 33% after 2030, 22% after 2040, and so on, and only 10% after 2060 – but that it stays constant at that level thereafter. The actual current rate of building is difficult to determine. Looking purely at the domestic housing stock, according to the Office for National Statistics, in 2007–8 there were 223,000 new homes built in England, 1.1% of the total housing stock of 22,288,000. In 2012–13 only 125,000 houses were built: 0.54% of the total housing stock of 23,236,000. The average of those two figures is slightly higher than our assumption of 0.76%; however, the current government and all other parties want to see the number of houses built dramatically increase, as illustrated in the 2014 Queen’s Speech. We should expect house building therefore to be significantly in excess of the figures quoted.
11 The figure of 110 comes from Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report (2013), as reported widely in the UK press. As for slavery, although officially abolished, it exists in many countries. The top ten offenders are India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, Thailand, Congo, Myanmar and Bangladesh. The estimate was just under 30 million people in slavery in 2013, India dominating with almost 14 million. See http://www.ungift.org/doc/knowledgehub/resource-centre/2013/GlobalSlaveryIndex_2013_Download_WEB1.pdf. Downloaded 23 March 2014.
12 Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (2014), p. 165.
13 Ibid., p. 25.
14 Ibid., p. 356.
15 To illustrate this, imagine the opposite: a completely undeveloped economy, in a sparsely inhabited region. If a man has surplus seed and wants to farm an extra few acres for his family, then he can just claim them from the wasteland. There is no payment for the use of the new land and thus r does not have a value. But g does: his work results in economic growth. Therefore while an economy is in its initial stages of development, it is inevitable that the return on capital is less than growth, r < g. However, after all the land is claimed, r will start to be positive, as any new farmer looking for land will have to pay rent to the landowner. Initially, while there are no other people competing for the land, it is likely that r will remain low, but as the population increases and the demand for land grows, the price farmers have to pay for it will increase. It is still possible for r to be less than g at this point, for the discovery of a glut of new resources such as oil might permit some unprecedented levels of economic output to be achieved, but ultimately these will prove unsustainable. Either the resources will dry up or they will increase the demand for the land and act as an inflationary force on r, as people compete more intensely for the land and pay higher rents. After a while, when all the land in the region is claimed and fully exploited, and non-renewable resources start running out, it will become harder and harder to maintain positive economic growth, so g will diminish and r > g will become the norm.
16 Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics (forthcoming, 2014).
17 Figures for countries other than England are from the World Bank statistics: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST. Downloaded 12 July 2014. The 2013 English population estimate of 53.5 million is from http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estimates-for-uk-england-and-wales-scotland-and-northem-ireland/mid-2011-and-mid-2012/index.html. Downloaded 12 July 2014. The area of England was taken as 130,400 square kilometres.
18 Statistics from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy (2014).
19 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, ‘Can a Collapse of Global Civilisation be Avoided?’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 280: 20122845. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2845. Downloaded 24 March 2014.
20 Geoffrey Parker, The Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 19.
21 http://www.gallup.com/poll/142727/religiosity-highest-world-poorest-nations.aspx. Downloaded 8 March 2014.
Appendix: Population estimates
1 Paolo Malanima, ‘Energy and Population in Europe: The Medieval Growth’ (2010), pp. 3–4. http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Papers /MEDIEVAL_GROWTH.pdf. Downloaded 12 February 2014.
2 Massimo Livi Bacci, Population of Europe (2000), pp. 8–10.
3 Draft version d
ownloaded from http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/pdf/Broadberry/Medievalpopulation.pdf, 15 January 2014.
4 Ole Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History (2004), p. 383.
5 The figures in Table 1.2 for the period 1541–1871 have been taken from the revised figures for the country in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (1997), p. 614. The figures for 1900 and 2000 are actually from the censuses of 1901 and 2001: Office for National Statistics, Census 2001: First Results on Population for England and Wales (2002), p. 5.
6 They are actually taken from David E. Davis, ‘Regulation of Human Population in Northern France and Adjacent Lands in the Middle Ages’, Human Ecology 14 (1986), pp. 245–67, at p. 252. The figures for 1798 boundaries have been amplified by a factor of 1.3 to represent the whole of France and make it compatible with later calculations.
7 Norman Pounds and Charles C. Roome, ‘Population Density in Fifteenth Century France and the Low Countries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 61 (1971), pp. 116–30.
8 ‘Le recensement de la population dans l’Histoire’, http://www.insee.ff/fr/ppp/sommaire/imethsoic.pdf. Downloaded 3 February 2014.
9 Livi Bacci, Population of Europe, pp. 8–10.
10 The figures for 1600 and 1700 are from ibid., p. 8; those for 1800 and 1900 from Jacques Dupaquier, Histoire de la population Française (4 vols, Paris, 1988), and those for 2000 from the French 2001 census.
11 Giovanni Federico and Paolo Malanima, ‘Progress, Decline, Growth: Product and Productivity in Italian Agriculture 1000–2000’, Economic History Review, 57 (2004), pp. 437–64.
12 The figures for 1500–1800 have been taken from ibid., p. 446. Those for 1900 and 2000 are from the census data published by ISTAT.
13 https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php. Downloaded 3 February 2013.