8 Billion And Counting
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8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World
Author: Jennifer D. Sciubba
language: en
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Release Date: 2022-03-29
A provocative description of the power of population change to create the conditions for societal transformation. As the world nears 8 billion people, the countries that have led the global order since World War II are becoming the most aged societies in human history. At the same time, the world’s poorest and least powerful countries are suffocating under an imbalance of population and resources. In 8 Billion and Counting, political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba argues that the story of the twenty-first century is less a story about exponential population growth, as the previous century was, than it is a story about differential growth—marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries. Drawing from decades of research, policy experience, and teaching, Sciubba employs stories and statistics to explain how demographic trends, like age structure and ethnic composition, are crucial signposts for future violence and peace, repression and democracy, poverty and prosperity. Although we have a diverse global population, demographic trends often follow predictable patterns that can help professionals across the corporate, nonprofit, government, and military sectors understand the global strategic environment. Through the lenses of national security, global health, and economics, Sciubba demonstrates the pitfalls of taking population numbers at face value and extrapolating from there. Instead, she argues, we must look at the forces in a society that amplify demographic trends and the forces that dilute them, particularly political institutions, or the rules of the game. She shows that the most important skills in demographic analysis are naming and being aware of your preferences, rethinking assumptions, and asking the right questions. Provocative and engrossing, 8 Billion and Counting is required reading for business leaders, policy makers, and anyone eager to anticipate political, economic, and social risks and opportunities. A deeper understanding of fertility, mortality, and migration promises to point toward the investments we need to make today to shape the future we want tomorrow.
Homo Ecophagus
Home Ecophagus by Warren M. Hern is a wide-ranging look at the major problems for the survival of not just the human species, but all other species on Earth due to human activities over the past tens of thousands years. The title of the book indicates Hern’s new name for the human species: "The man who devours the ecosystem." Over the course of its evolution, Hern observes, humans have evolved cultures and adaptations that have now become malignant and that the human species, at the global level, has all the major characteristics of a malignant neoplasm – converting all plant, animal, organic, and inorganic material into human biomass or its adaptive adjuncts and support systems. Hern contends that this process is incompatible with continued survival of the human species and most other species on the planet, offering a diagnosis and prognosis of the current environmental impasse.
Asia's Aging Security
Author: Andrew L. Oros
language: en
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Release Date: 2025-09-09
Major demographic transitions are underway in Asia and the Pacific. The populations of China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Russia are aging and shrinking, while India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Australia, among others, continue to grow. How will these striking changes affect regional security dynamics and the United States–led alliance structure in the Indo-Pacific? Andrew L. Oros offers an expert analysis of how rapid aging and population shifts are transforming the military strategies and capabilities of regional powers in Asia. Examining sixteen states, he provides a comparative view of the developing landscape and explores ways to address the consequences. Oros demonstrates that, contrary to what many have claimed, states with shrinking populations will continue to be formidable military powers. He develops a novel theoretical and empirical argument for why rapid aging does not necessarily dampen security competition. Nonetheless, demographic shifts in the coming decades will fundamentally alter the security challenges facing the United States and its allies. Oros considers how technological change and health care advances are mitigating the drawbacks of aging populations as well as how factors such as autonomous defense systems and artificial intelligence present new challenges. Rigorous and timely, Asia’s Aging Security makes a forceful case that adjustment to demographic change is a necessity for twenty-first-century foreign policy.