'Is the human species slowing down?' with Prof Danny Dorling

In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described how a population explosion occurs and called the time of population explosion “ favourable seasons", he was not to know it, but such circumstances arose for his own species at around the time of his own birth. However, the favourable seasons for human population growth were not experienced favourably, with times of great social dislocation from small scale enclosure to global colonisation. Now those seasons are over, we have experienced the first ever sustained slowdown in the rate of global human population growth. This has been the case for at least one human generation. However, we are not just slowing down in terms of how many children we have, but in almost everything else we do, other than in the rise in global temperatures that we are recording and that we have to live with. It can be argued that there is even a slowdown in such unexpected areas as debt, publishing, and in the total amount useful information being produced.

If this is true - that humanity is slowing down in almost everything that we do – what does this mean? What measurements suggest that slowdown is true? And if so much is still rising, albeit at slower and slower rates - is that such a great change? Finally how might the slowdown impact on economic thought. In many ways economics was the science of the great acceleration; a science that makes most sense when markets are expanding and demand is rising. What kind of an economics is needed in a world where enormous and accelerating growth has stopped being the normality?

Danny Dorling joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2013 to take up the Halford Mackinder Professorship in Geography. He was previously a professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He has also worked in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and New Zealand, went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne, and to school in Oxford.

Sole authored books include, So you think you know about Britain; and Fair Play, both in 2011; in 2012 The No-nonsense Guide to Equality, The Visualization of Social Spatial Structure and The Population of the UK Unequal Health, The 32 Stops and Population Ten Billion in 2013; All That is Solid in 2014; and Injustice: Why social inequalities persist revised in 2015. In 2016 with Bethan Thomas he authored People and Places: A 21st century atlas of the UK, A Better Politics: How government can make us happier and with Carl Lee Geography: ideas in profile. In 2017 with Dimitris Ballas and Ben Hennig he produced The Human Atlas of Europe and in 2017 he also wrote the sole authored book The Equality Effect: Improving life for everyone.

Before a career in academia Danny was employed as a play-worker in children's play-schemes and in pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, a former Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a current patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.

Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford

[AndrewCharnley]

Prof Danny Dorling: I have reached this talk you gave in May 2019 after your interview discussing your book, ‘Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration’ on the RT TV UNDERGROUND programme with Afshin Rattansi one year later on the 6th May 2020. I admit the pandemic COVID-19 is not a happy time for any of us and I take some good comfort from your observations, especially as you wrote your book a good time before this current mandatory and fear-driven World Stoppage and your content is a good fit for today! Your clarity of observation, using the rear-view mirror of history, and calmly observing subtle, and less subtle, changes is what you have sensibly identified. I very much enjoyed hearing some of your perspective of the content of your book and look forward to more of the same.  
Your book might be a necessary mental-health uplift for the world to read... as they need to have their hopes and belief systems uplifted or even re-engineered... A slowdown will be good for our health and just what the doctor, or even the professor ordered...

[AndreasDelleske]

„For every graph you put in a book you halve the number of sales“ - fantastic. I’m gonna steal that.

[martynhaggerty]

Would be interested to see what Danny would say now we have chat gtp and super computers. Exponential rise in tech now.

[BarriosGroupie]

There's also the increase in renewable energy such as solar and wind, and dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. In the 1980s the average room needed a 60W tungsten filament light bulb whereas today 6W LED will do. Likewise the average TV then needed 300W of power compared to 20W for a larger 32" TV. And electric cars will eventually place the responsibility of CO2 emissions at the energy supplier rather than the driver.
Climate change is the beginning of the human species controlling the climate, preventing another possible future ice age, rather than being at the mercy of it up to now which is pretty extraordinary.