Quotes About Population

It's much easier for a middle class Indian entrepreneur to start up a computer company than it is for an Indian company to build roads and transportation systems suitable for a population that is getting wealthier and demanding more basic services.

Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.53

As avian diversity declined in the United States, specialist species like woodpeckers and rails disappeared, while generalist species like American robins and crows boomed. (Populations of American robins have grown by 50 to 100 percent over the past twenty-five years.)48 This reordering of the composition of the local bird population steadily increased the chances that the virus would reach a high enough concentration to spill over into humans.

We were bullies in one of the poorest countries on Earth," Rapone said. "We have one of the most technologically advanced militaries of all time and all we were doing is brutalizing and invading and terrorizing a population that had nothing to do with what the United States claimed was a threat

To this day, the percentage of abstainers in the United States—about one-third of the adult population—is, along with Ireland's, the highest among Western nations.

During the forty-year period between 1880 and 1920, 370,000 Greeks (almost one-seventh of the total population of the country) settled in the United States.

The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.

As a matter of fact, if we could communicate the truth, not only to the Hispanics but to the black population, all blacks should be Republican, and all Hispanics should be Republican.

The doctrine of population has been conspicuously absent, not because I doubt in the least its truth and vast importance, but because it forms no part of the direct problem of economics.

The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings.

Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent.

More than half of the Danish adult population—as much as two-thirds, according to some estimates—either works in the public sector or is financially supported by it in the form of benefit payments. The idea, then, of the Danes voting for a reduction in the size of the public sector funded by tax cuts seems about as likely as the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. The majority will always vote for the status quo because their livelihood depends on it.

But it was one thing to release a population of virtual agents inside a computer's memory to solve a problem. It was another thing to set real agents free in the real world.

Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. Paul Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong in nearly all his major predictions. He was wrong about diminishing resources, he was wrong about the population explosion, and he was wrong that we would lose 50% of all species by the year 2000. His lifelong study of these issues did not prevent him from being wrong.

We estimate that by 2050, more than 10 percent of the U.S. population will be 90 years or older—chronologically—and 18 percent will be over age 80.

These numbers demonstrate that we can absolutely afford an aging society. In fact, enhanced longevity is essential for our society. That's because if longevity increases without better health, it will mean higher costs of medicine and health care as people live longer. And that financial burden can overwhelm a country's ability to handle an aging and unhealthy demographic.

Population Control / Pocket Billions $$$; Mass Extinction Event.

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.

Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth—geneticists often use them for research.

From there she moved naturally enough to the Centers for Disease Control, where she led a team seeking answers to basic questions about the overall health of the population. For instance, blood lead levels in children fell by a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s. This welcome development, they figured out, was due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline.

Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.

No single intervention would stop a flu-like disease in its tracks, just as no single safety measure would prevent a doctor from replacing the right hip when it was the left hip that hurt. The trick was to mix and match strategies in response to the nature of the disease and the behavior of the population. Each strategy was like another slice of Swiss cheese; enough slices, properly aligned, would hide the holes.

Between 1845 and 1852 the country experienced the single greatest loss of population in world history: in a nation of 8 million, 1.5 million people left. Another million Irish people starved to death, or died from the effects of hunger. Inside of a decade the nation went from being among the most densely populated in Europe to one of the least.

But because he has misjudged how large the sample needs to be if it is to stand a good chance of reflecting the entire population, he is at the mercy of luck.