Kerala is the new Malapuram

 

"People Under 50 Should Quit the UK!"

 

A Level Economics 14: Factors Influence Demand and Supply

Identify and explain the main factors that effect demand and supply

The main influences on demand and supply in product markets are numerous and can be categorized into various factors. Here are the key influences on demand and supply:

Factors Influencing Demand:

1. Price: The price of a product has a significant impact on demand. Generally, as the price of a product decreases, the quantity demanded tends to increase, and vice versa. This relationship is known as the law of demand.

2. Consumer Income: The income of consumers affects their purchasing power and, consequently, demand. As income increases, consumers tend to buy more goods and services, especially for normal goods. Conversely, for inferior goods, as income rises, demand may decrease.

3. Consumer Preferences and Tastes: Consumer preferences, tastes, and trends play a crucial role in shaping demand. Changes in consumer preferences can significantly impact the demand for certain products. For example, if there is a growing preference for healthier food options, the demand for organic or plant-based products may increase.

4. Population and Demographics: Changes in population size and demographics can influence product demand. An increase in population or shifts in age groups can lead to changes in demand patterns. For instance, a growing aging population may result in increased demand for healthcare products and services.

5. Consumer Expectations: Consumer expectations about future prices, income levels, or product availability can influence current demand. If consumers anticipate higher future prices or expect their income to decrease, they may increase their current demand to avoid potential cost increases.

Factors Influencing Supply:

1. Price: Similar to demand, the price of a product also impacts supply. As the price of a product rises, producers are typically willing to supply more of it, leading to an upward-sloping supply curve. Conversely, a decrease in price may result in a decrease in supply.

2. Input Costs: The cost of inputs, such as labor, raw materials, energy, and capital, significantly influences supply. If input costs rise, it becomes more expensive to produce goods, which may lead to a decrease in supply. Conversely, if input costs decrease, it can stimulate increased supply.

3. Technological Advances: Technological advancements can improve production processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs, leading to an increase in supply. For example, advancements in manufacturing techniques or automation can enhance productivity and enable higher levels of production.

4. Government Regulations and Policies: Government regulations and policies can have a substantial impact on supply. Changes in taxation, subsidies, trade policies, environmental regulations, and labor laws can influence the costs of production, access to resources, and overall supply levels.

5. Natural Factors: Natural factors such as weather conditions, natural disasters, and climate patterns can affect the supply of certain goods, particularly in industries such as agriculture and energy. Droughts, floods, or adverse weather events can disrupt production and reduce supply.

It's important to note that these influences on demand and supply are interconnected and can interact with each other. Changes in one factor can trigger responses in other factors, leading to shifts in demand and supply curves. Understanding these influences is crucial for analyzing market dynamics, predicting price movements, and making informed economic decisions.

Ram Madhav on The Partition of India

 

Other democracies should beware taking pleasure in the UK’s travails

Voters in most developed countries feel that their contract with the state is fraying writes Bronwen Maddox in the FT 

I can barely think of a meeting I’ve had since September that didn’t begin with jokes about Britain’s newfound instability. I started a job a few days before Liz Truss became prime minister, and the “lasted longer than the lettuce” one has been inescapable. “Three prime ministers in a year!” (Ambassadors from European countries still incredulous at Brexit particularly like this one.) Now, there are the strikes — although the meltdown of the NHS’s emergency services is no joke at all. 

But these are rash quips if coming from other democracies. The joke may be on them, too. Older democratic countries share many of the same problems and are struggling to show that they have a system that can solve them. “If you don’t have a political system that can make short-term sacrifices for the long-term good of the country, how can you expect your system of government to survive?” asked one senior Chinese official of a distinguished British former minister. 

It’s a good question. In Britain, the NHS is a symbol of these problems above all others. The stand-off with the government by nurses and ambulance workers is of course about worker pay, but is also about how much the government wants to pay for the health service at all. 

Much of the problem stems from the demands of an ageing population, and that is something that many older democracies share. Even if other countries may no longer envy the NHS, they share some of the same troubles. On many fronts, the contract that voters thought they had with their governments — over them paying for healthcare, education, pensions — is being rewritten, and not in their favour. Perhaps the best-known saying of Jean Claude Juncker, when prime minister of Luxembourg, was: “We know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” 

Those sceptical of democracy have prophesied that this is how it consumes itself. It is easier to make promises than to keep them, so the temptation is for politicians to make extravagant commitments to get into office, and then try somehow to stay there. Following this recipe, democracy decays into populism and then autocracy. 

To some degree, yes. Boris Johnson and the unfulfillable Brexit promises were a symptom of the need to assemble an expansive coalition, built on impossibilities. The antidote — the “grown-up conversation with the nation” that politicians sometimes desperately invoke — seems pitifully weak. 

All the same, that is what is needed. The pandemic does offer some encouragement, showing that people are prepared to give up an extraordinary amount if persuaded it is necessary. But there are also more practical things that governments could do to help. 

First, they need to make the case for growth and the steps required to bring it about. Truss was not wrong in her ambition, just in recklessly ignoring the constraints on any country seeking to borrow money. For Britain, that means closer relations with Europe. A US trade deal is not coming any time soon; the only alternative of a large market is China, and Rishi Sunak’s government has chosen not to lean that way. It also means telling people that more legal immigration is needed. It means championing the creativity in science and culture that are themselves the product of the intellectual freedom at the heart of democracies. 

The second thing to do is change voting systems and improve legislatures. In the UK, the House of Lords is indefensible, as former prime minister Gordon Brown has pointed out. He is right that regions need more representation, too. And first past the post is increasingly hard to defend in a country of many different kinds of people and views. 

Third, is to stand up for the values that underpin liberal democracy but not try to couple them with all the other deals on the world stage. Insisting on a human rights agenda in every diplomatic relationship can jeopardise the pursuit of environmental and security accords that are desperately needed on their own account. It can lead to accusations of double standards — as shown by the controversy over Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup despite its treatment of LGBTQ people. 

It is right, though, to pursue those liberal principles, while acknowledging that not all countries share them. They are, along with economic prospects, one of the reasons people risk their lives in small boats trying to come to the UK — one of the best arguments that liberal democracy has a future.

TG Mohandas on Radicalisation in Kerala, Halal certification, spitting in food

 

Will UK house prices ever rise again?

The recent gains could turn out to be a huge historical anomaly writes Merryn Somerset Webb in The FT

If there is one thing that drives financial journalists in the UK to distraction it is celebrities. Every weekend the money pages of newspapers carry interviews with various semi-famous people asking them about how they invest. Every weekend the semi-famous people say they don’t invest in the stock market or save into a pension because it is too complicated. They invest in property instead. Buy houses, they say, and you have something “you can see”: You “know where you are with bricks and mortar”. 

The problem with this is simple. You might think you know where you are with bricks and mortar. But the truth is that you probably don’t — unless you have a complete grasp of how population trends, interest rates and political priorities have shifted over the past century and how they might shift again over the next. Just because the period in which most of us have become adults has been one of almost nonstop property price growth does not mean that it makes sense to extrapolate that growth indefinitely. It might not.

The latest Deutsche Bank Long Term Asset Return Study (written by Jim Reid and his team of analysts) takes a proper look at the evidence. It turns out that fast-rising house prices in the UK are a relatively recent phenomenon. They have risen on average 3 per cent a year in inflation-adjusted terms since 1939 (a total of 834 per cent). But before that they mostly fell — 50 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms from 1290 to 1939. These data are obviously not precise — Reid points out that the housing market has changed beyond all recognition over the past 800 years and that the numbers have been collated using “many assumptions”. However, you get the general idea. Perhaps our celebrities should be spending less time assuming their financial future will be the same as their financial past, and more time asking two questions: What changed in the middle of the last century? And will it change back? 

The answer to the first question brings us to demographics. The world began to change in 1796 when Edward Jenner introduced the first vaccine for smallpox (the major killer of the time) and so created a dramatic rise in life expectancy and the beginnings of a rise in the number of people in the world: the global population rose by a mere 0.17 per cent a year until 1820 but 0.98 per cent a year from then to 2000 (this rise was what allowed the industrial revolution to happen, by the way). However, it is the past 70 years — the ones most of us use as our map for the future — that have been genuinely dramatic: from 1950 to 2000 the global population more than doubled, from 2.5bn to around 6.1bn.

That has had all sorts of consequences — ones that have long looked mystifying if you don’t understand population but which have looked rather predictable if you do. If you had looked properly at birth rates in the G7 in the postwar period you would not have been surprised that inflation and unemployment rose in the 1970s as the baby boomers began to both “jostle for their first jobs” and to consume global resources on a huge scale, says Paul Hodges chairman of London-based strategy consultancy IeC. 

You would have expected stock markets to start to boom in the 1980s as those same boomers moved into their thirties and forties and started to pour cash into investments to finance their retirements. And you surely would have known that all those babies growing up in the affluent stability of the postwar world would want to form their own households and would be encouraged by rising global affluence to want to do so in bigger and better houses than their parents. You might also have noted the political power of the boomers and guessed that the regulatory environment would be shaped to suit them — think tax relief on mortgage payments and no capital gains tax on the sale of primary homes in the UK, for example. And so it began. Demand pushed up prices — and pushed them up even more in low-supply Britain than elsewhere. 

As prices rose baby boomers figured that homes looked like a hot tip of an investment and, enabled by the rise of the fiat money system (the final collapse of any link to the dollar to gold in 1971 meant money supply was able to rise with the population), bought more. Nearly half the 2.5m buy-to-let investors in the UK now say they are “pension pot” investors. They own one house to live in and another as an investment. Perhaps, says Reid, “housing is the ultimate population-sensitive asset”. “As a small island with heavy control over new home building, high population growth but limited supply has put massive upward pressure on prices over the last several decades.” 

He is right of course. But it is worth noting that the whole thing could never have happened without the full support of the central banks. One of the consequences of population growth was the abolition of a formal connection between currencies and gold, something that has allowed governments and central banks to print money and shift interest rates around as they like. That, in turn, has given us a long period of very low interest rates — which have shoved a rocket booster under house prices. In the UK, the actual monthly cost of buying a home fell dramatically after the financial crisis and has been more or less flat for several years. Even as the price of houses has risen, the fall in interest rates has kept the mortgage cost of buying much the same. 

On to the second question: will this all change back? Is it possible that we might be moving into an age of static to falling house prices? It is. Listen to the pessimists and you might think the global population will soon double again. But the rate of growth peaked long ago (in 1968 at just over 2 per cent a year). It is now down to more like 1 per cent. The main driver behind the extraordinary past 70 years is receding: the baby boomers are more likely now to be sellers than buyers. You could argue that the attractiveness of the UK as a place to live means our population will rise indefinitely and so will property prices — but to do so you would have to pile a lot of assumptions on top of each other: that the UK remains desirable; that it remains desirable enough that people are happy to pay a hefty premium for a house in it; and that it remains open to high levels of immigration. 

At the same time interest rates are beginning to drift up again. Jim Reid notes that the 1950-2000 period has been “like no other in human or financial history in terms of population growth, economic growth, inflation or asset prices”. It may stay that way. 

Worse (for those who want house prices to rise forever), legislation is on the turn. In the UK, the fast rise in house prices has created a class of winners and another of losers. The losers have had enough — and our cash-strapped government is now on their side. 

So second-homebuyers have been hit with council tax rises and an additional rate of stamp duty (an extra three percentage points). Buy-to-let investors have seen a sharp reduction in the scope of the tax relief available to them on their rental income as well as a shift in power back towards tenants (in Scotland in particular), stricter affordability requirements on their mortgage applications and a raft of new energy efficiency rules and licensing laws. They also pay capital gains tax at 28 per cent when they sell their properties (it is 20 per cent on everything else). There are also calls for new wealth taxes on all UK property — or sharp rises to council taxes at the top end. All four major UK parties are now showing interest in land value taxes and in scrapping what tax exemptions there are left for property owners. 

The recent budget didn’t have much in it, but space was found for two measures — a cut in the capital gains tax relief on houses that were once main residences, and a consultation on a 1 per cent surcharge for non-UK residents buying UK property. It doesn’t look good does it? 

So when will the shift to what was normal in the housing market 80 years ago begin? You could argue (and Hodges does) that it began in 2000 as the baby boomers started to shift down — and that the boom since 2009 has been a last gasp of a soon-to-slow market. With the Brexit fog all about us and fallout from the financial crisis still clearing, it is hard to tell what is causing what. But look to London and that makes some sense: prime London house and flat prices are down 30 and 25 per cent, respectively, since their peak several years ago and most data now show nationwide prices rising slightly less than inflation. 

There’ll be volatility here for a while — a post-Brexit bounce seems inevitable, for example, and a bout of consumer price inflation is likely over the next decade (you can see it coming in rising wages), something that might make holding real assets such as property not the worst idea in the world. But if prices revert to very long-term means, the period in which all our celebrities have made their property fortunes is going to turn out to have been a huge historical anomaly. I wonder what the ones who are being asked “property or pension” in 30 years will say.

There’s a population crisis all right. But probably not the one you think

While all eyes are on human numbers, it’s the rise in farm animals that is laying the planet waste

 

‘By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals.’ Illustration by Nate Kitch


GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian


This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.

You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means that they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.

At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62 million. But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations that they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.

At their worst, population campaigners seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.

Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If 2 billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.

If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it is consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.

So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals.

Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land.A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. And now the grain that farm animals consume is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.

A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population does. The dairy farms in Tulare County, California, produce five times as much as New York City.

Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England the system designed to protect us from the tide of slurry has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.

Livestock farming creates around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.

So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity?

A factory farm in Missouri, USA. ‘Why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room?’ Photograph: Daniel Pepper/Getty Images

A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change diets once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.

It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.

But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.

Mumbai - On the verge of an implosion

Bachi Karkaria in The Guardian

It used to be India’s urban showpiece. Today, its sceptre and crown have fallen down and, in a phase of cynical destruction masquerading as “development”, Mumbai has become a metaphor for urban blight. 

Consider these statistics. Rubbish could be its Mount Vesuvius. Some 7,000 metric tonnes of refuse is spewed out each day. Dumping grounds are choked, yet there is no government-mandated separation or recycling.

Around 7.5 million commuters cram themselves into local trains every day and the fledgling metro and monorail are unlikely to make a perceptible difference in the near future.

There are 700,000 cars on the road and the authorities indirectly encourage private vehicle ownership by adding flyovers and expressways, instead of building or speeding up mass rapid transit systems. Private vehicle numbers have grown by 57% in the past eight years, compared with a 23% increase in public buses.

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There are around 700,000 cars on the roads of Mumbai causing untold congestion, air and noise pollution. Their number has grown by 57% over the past eight years. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP

Toxic nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide levels stand at 252 microgrammes per cubic metre (mcg/m3) more than three times the safe limit of 80 mcg/m3. Protests against sound pollution fall on deaf ears.

There’s less than 0.03 acres of open space per 1,000 people. The global norm is four; London has a profligate 12.

There are 12.7 million people jammed into the 480 sq km that comprise today’s Greater Mumbai, that’s 20,680 people per sq km. We are the world’s eighth most-populated city – and dying to prove it.

As a consequence, every sixth Mumbaikar lives in a slum. The premium on land was exacerbated by the Rent Control Act of 1947, which wasn’t amended till 1999. Too little, too late. Real estate prices are unreal. It’s cheaper to buy a flat in Manhattan than in Malabar Hill, and you can be sure that shoddy materials will shortchange you in Mumbai.

Considering that housing is the city’s biggest shortfall, it’s ironic that unbridled construction is indisputably its biggest problem. Many villains have been blamed for Mumbai’s descent into urban hell, from mafia dons to impoverished migrants, but for the past three decades the main culprit is the “politician-builder nexus”. 

In 2005, the entire city was held hostage for three days. On 26 July, suburban Mumbai was lashed by 668 mm of rain in just 12 hours. Unwarned commuters and children in school buses were left high, but not dry, as roads and railway tracks disappeared. Slums and BMWs went under the deluge without discernment for their economic standing. It may have been the country’s financial capital, but in the photographs that followed, swaggering Mumbai didn’t look much different from a monsoon-marooned Bihar village.

For this humbling disaster, the finger pointed at that same culprit: the developer and his facilitator, the politician. There was nowhere for the rainwater to go. For decades the concrete army had been allowed to commandeer all open spaces, and illegal encroachments had done the rest. Public parks, verdant hills, salt-pans, school compounds, private garden plots, beaches, mangroves – nothing was spared.

The built environment in Mumbai had increased fourfold since 1925 – and at its fastest rate over the past 30 years – all at the cost of green cover and wetlands.

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Around 7.5 million commuters cram themselves into local trains every day.Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

The 2005 deluge brought to light the little-known fact that Mumbai had a river. The Mithi had been reduced to little more than a turgid drain, bubbling with the putrefactions of one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi. Why blame its desperate inhabitants when the authorities had built an airport runway and much of the swanky new business district of the Bandra Kurla complex over it?

The traumatising flood was a flash-point. Citizens rose against all the civic atrocities heaped upon them. Why must they suffer such acute and chronic brutalising when Mumbai was the biggest contributor to the national economy? It accounts for 33% of income-tax, 20% of central excise collections, 6.16% of GDP (the largest single contribution in India), 25% of industrial output, 40% of foreign trade and 70% of capital transactions.

Activists demanded it should be administered separately under a chief executive-like head, instead of politicians who siphoned off its wealth to their rural constituencies. The municipal commissioner should be answerable to the elected corporate leaders not, illogically, to the state chief minister. But all this sound and fury receded with the flood waters, and it was soon business as usual.

The unequal war between profiteering and civic wisdom was in unabashed evidence some 20 years before this great flood. An eagerly anticipated shot in the arm turned into a wound that still festers. The cotton mills, on which Mumbai’s original fame and fortunes were built, had been killed off by the prolonged strike of 1982 (and chronic neglect by their owners).

After nearly a decade of legal wrangling, especially over the laid-off workers’ dues, it was decided to redevelop the defunct land – an eye-popping 600 acres in prime south and central Bombay. Recreational spaces, public housing and private enterprise were each to get a one-third share of the total area.

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The 27-storey personal residence of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani is named after Antilia, a mythical island in the Atlantic. It has three helicopter pads, underground parking for 160 cars and requires some 600 staff to run. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty

But in 1991, the relevant Development Control rule 58 was unilaterally changed by the chief minister, making only “open” land in the mills eligible for the division. This left the lion’s share to the owners, their builder accomplices and, naturally, the obliging politicians. The city got a mere fifth of its desperately needed windfall.

Instead of the imaginative, integrated development plan drawn up by Charles Correa, the renowned Mumbai-based architect, the former mill-hub of Lalbaug-Parel is a soulless cram of skyscrapers, mall-to-mall carpeting and snarled traffic clashing with the tenements housing the dispossessed worker families.

The opportunity for Mumbai’s redemption was obscenely squandered. The greedy, selfish “development” has worsened, instead of alleviating, its two biggest headaches: housing and traffic.

Now, a new phoenix is projected to rise from the 800 acres of decrepit dockland along the city’s eastern shoreline, again in the prime south. Will the city finally get its life-saving leisure space and affordable housing? Or will it be one more land-grab hastening its death by “development”?

Mumbai waits with more cynicism than hope.

Humanity's 'inexorable' population growth is so rapid that even a global catastrophe wouldn't stop it

Steve Conor in The Independent

The global human population is “locked in” to an inexorable rise this century and will not be easily shifted, even by apocalyptic events such as a third world war or lethal pandemic, a study has found.

There is no “quick fix” to the population time-bomb, because there are now so many people even unimaginable global disasters won't stop growth, scientists have concluded.

Although measures designed to reduce human fertility in the parts of the world where the population growth is fastest will eventually have a long-term impact on numbers, this has to go hand-in-hand with policies aimed at reducing the consumption of natural resources, they said.

Two prominent ecologists, who normally study animal populations in the wild, have concluded that the number of people in the world today will present one of the most daunting problems for sustainable living on the planet in the coming century – even if every country adopts a draconian “one child” policy.

“The inexorable demographic momentum of the global human population is rapidly eroding Earth’s life-support system,” say Professor Corey Bradshaw of the University of Adelaide and Professor Barry Brook of the University of Tasmania in their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Assuming a continuation of current trends in mortality reduction, even a rapid transition to a worldwide one-child policy leads to a population similar to today’s by 2100,” they say.

“Even a catastrophic mass mortality event of 2bn deaths over a hypothetical window in the mid-21st century would still yield around 8.5bn people by 2100,” they add.

There are currently about 7.1bn people on Earth, and demographers estimate that this number could rise to about 9bn by 2050 - and as many as 25bn by 2100, although this is based on current fertility rates, which are expected to fall over the coming decades.

The number of people in the world today will present one of the most daunting problems for sustainable living on the planet in the coming century (Getty)

Professor Bradshaw told The Independent that the study was designed to look at human numbers with the insight of an ecologist studying natural impacts on animals to determine whether factors such pandemics and world wars could dramatically influence the population projections.

“We basically found that the human population size is so large that it has its own momentum. It’s like a speeding car travelling at 150mph. You can slam on the brakes but it still takes time to stop,” Professor Bradshaw said.

“Global population has risen so fast over the past century that roughly 14 per cent of all the human beings that have ever lived are still alive today – that’s a sobering statistic,” he said.

“We examined various scenarios for global human population change to the year 2100 by adjusting fertility and mortality rates to determine the plausible range of population sizes at the end of the century.

“Even a worldwide one-child policy like China’s, implemented over the coming century, or catastrophic mortality events like global conflict or a disease pandemic, would still likely result in 5bn to 10bn people in 2100,” he added.

The researchers devised nine different scenarios that could influence human numbers this century, ranging from “business as usual” with existing fertility rates, to an unlikely one-child-per-family policy throughout the world, to broad-scale global catastrophes in which billions die.

“We were surprised that a five-year WWIII scenario mimicking the same proportion of people killed in the First World War and Second World War combined, barely registered a blip on the human population trajectory this century,” said Professor Brook.

Measures to control fertility through family planning policies will eventually have an impact on reducing the pressure on limited resources, but not immediately, he said.

“Our great-great-great-great-grandchildren might ultimately benefit from such planning, but people alive today will not,” Professor Brook said.

Simon Ross, the chief executive of the charity Population Matters, said that introducing modern family planning to the developing world would cost less than $4bn – about one third of the UK’s annual aid budget.

“So, while fertility reduction is not a quick fix, it is relatively cheap, reliable, and popular with most, with generally positive side effects. We welcome the recognition of the potential of family planning and reproductive education to alleviate resource availability in the longer term,” Mr Ross said.

Saving the planet from short-termism will take man-on-the-moon commitment

JFK's lunar vision is needed if business is to see the long-term benefits of greening the economy as well as the short-term costs

President John F Kennedy's moon speech was made in an age when both sides on Capitol Hill were prepared to invest in the future. Photograph: John Rous/AP

We choose to go to the moon. So said John F Kennedy in September 1962 as he pledged a manned lunar landing by the end of the decade.

The US president knew that his country's space programme would be expensive. He knew it would have its critics, but he took the long-term view. Warming to his theme in Houston that day, JFK went on: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too."

That was the world's richest country at the apogee of its power in an age where both Democrats and Republicans were prepared to invest in the future. Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, took a plan for a system of interstate highways and made sure it happened.

Contrast that with today's America, which looks less like the leader of the free world than a banana republic with a reserve currency. Planning for the long term now involves last-ditch deals on Capitol Hill to ensure the federal government can remain open until January and debts can be paid at least until February.

The US is not the only country with advanced short-termism. It merely provides the most egregious example of the disease. This is a world of fast food and short attention spans, of politicians so dominated by a 24/7 news agenda that they have lost the habit of planning for the long term.

Britain provides another example of the trend. Governments of both left and right have for years put energy policy in the "too hard to think about box". They have not been able to make up their minds whether to commit to renewables as Germany has done, or to nuclear as France has done. So, the nation of Rutherford is now prepared to have a totalitarian country take a majority stake in a new generation of nuclear power stations.

Politics, technology and human nature all militate in favour of kicking the can down the road. The most severe financial and economic crisis in more than half a century has further discouraged policymakers from raising their eyes from the present to the distant horizon.

Clearly, though, the world faces long-term challenges that will only become more acute through prevarication. These include coping with a bigger and ageing global population, ensuring growth is sustainable and equitable, providing resources to pay for modern transport and energy infrastructure, and reshaping international institutions so they represent the world as it is in the early 21st century rather than as it was in 1945.

Pascal Lamy had a stab at tackling some of these difficult issues last week when he presented the findings of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, which the former World Trade Organisation chief has been chairing for the past year.

The commission's report, Now for the Long Term, looks at some "mega trends" that will shape the world in the decades to come, and lists the challenges under five headings: society, resources, health, geopolitics, governance.

Change will be difficult, the study suggests, because problems are complex, institutions are inadequate, faith in politicians is low and short-termism is well-entrenched.

It cites examples of collective success, such as the Montreal convention to prevent ozone depletion, the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals, and the G20 action to prevent the great recession of 2008-09 turning into a full-blown global slump. It also cites examples of collective failure – fish stocks depletion, the deadlocked Copenhagenclimate change summit of 2009.

The report suggests a range of long-term ideas worthy of serious consideration. It urges a coalition between the G20, 30 companies and 40 cities to lead the fight against climate change. It would like "sunset clauses" for all publicly funded international institutions to ensure they are fit for purpose; removal of perverse subsidies on hydrocarbons and agriculture with the money redirected to the poor; introduction of CyberEx, an early warning platform aimed at preventing cyber attacks; a Worldstat statistical agency to collect and ensure quality of data; and investment in the younger generation through conditional cash transfers and job guarantees.

Lamy expressed concern that the ability to address challenges was being undermined by the absence of a collective vision for society. The purpose of the report, he said, was to build "a chain from knowledge to awareness to mobilising political energy to action".

Full marks for trying, but this is easier said than done. Take trade, where Lamy has spent the past decade, first as Europe's trade commissioner then as head of the WTO, trying to piece together a new multilateral deal. This is an area in which all 150-plus WTO members agree in principle about the need for greater liberalisation but in which it has proved impossible to reach agreement in talks that started in 2001.

Nor will a shakeup of the international institutions be plain sailing. It is a given that developing countries, especially the bigger ones such as China, India and Brazil, should have a bigger say in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are run. Yet it's proved hard to persuade developed world countries to cede some of their voting rights, and the deal is still being held up by US foot dragging. These, remember, are the low-hanging fruit.

Another conclave of the global great and good is looking at what should be done in the much trickier area of climate change. The premise of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is that nothing will be done unless finance ministers are convinced of the need for action, especially given the damage caused by a deep recession and sluggish recovery.

Instead of preaching to the choir the plan is to show how to achieve key economic objectives – growth, investment, secure public finances, fairer distribution of income – while at the same time protecting the planet. The pitch to finance ministers will be that tackling climate change will require plenty of upfront investment that will boost growth rather than harm it.

Will this approach work? Well, maybe. But it will require business to see the long-term benefits of greening the economy as well as the short-term costs, because that would lead to the burst of technological innovation needed to accelerate progress. And it will require the same sort of commitment it took to win a world war or put a man on the moon.