World Population Trends and the Rise of homo sapiens literata

16214 11 89042 2 256185 document 89042 WP-19-012.pdf application/pdf 2c6f27988f8c2220d89278c3cb1bb975 MD5 683094 2019-12-09 13:58:35 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/16214/1/WP-19-012.pdf 16214 1 1 application/pdf text en public cc_by_nc_4

WP-19-012.pdf

published 89044 2 256197 document 89044 lightbox.jpg image/png a0b216ee0fe04250e1af4ba3e76ebdc0 MD5 14778 2019-12-09 14:08:55 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/16214/2/lightbox.jpg 16214 2 2 image/png other Thumbnails conversion from text to thumbnail_lightbox en public

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http://eprints.org/relation/isVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/89042 http://eprints.org/relation/isVolatileVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/89042 http://eprints.org/relation/isIndexCodesVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/89042 archive 353 disk0/00/01/62/14 2019-12-09 13:59:50 2023-08-05 05:01:23 2019-12-09 13:59:50 monograph show 2 Lutz W. 1124 0000-0001-7975-8145 Albert van Jaarsveld, Director General and Chief Executive Officer World Population Trends and the Rise of homo sapiens literata pub prog_pop World population has increased remarkably from one billion around 1804, to two billion by 1927, to the current 7.7 billion. While growth in absolute terms is still at record high levels, the rate of increase has declined over the past decades and there is a credible prospect of world population peaking during the second half of the 21st century before reaching the 10 billion mark. This prospect will largely depend on whether female literacy continues to spread in Africa and Western Asia as it already has in other parts of the world. While throughout history literacy has been limited to tiny and mostly male elites, it was only over the course of the 20th century that mass education of both men and women rapidly spread on the global scale, leaving only limited pockets of female illiteracy concentrated in Africa. In this paper I argue that this phenomenal rise in global literacy – and in particular female literacy – has been a primary driver of human development through the cognitive changes associated with learning to assign abstract meaning to a combination of signs and thus discouraged fatalism in favor of more rational planning in one’s behavior. Because of this overriding importance of female literacy for demographic and socioeconomic development in this paper I coin the notion of “homo sapiens literata” to highlight the decisive role of female education and point to the fact that educated humans tend to behave in a qualitatively different way from their illiterate counterparts. The paper concludes with discussing alternative scenarios for population and education trends, up to 2100, following the SSP (Shared Socioeconomic Pathway) narratives. The dramatically divergent paths illustrate how investments in the near future, particularly in the universal education of girls, will be highly relevant for future resilience of the human species and the adaptive capacity to already unavoidable environmental change. 2019-12-09 published WP-19-012 190 public working_paper Laxenburg, Austria http://www.pas.va/content/accademia/en/publications/acta/acta25/lutz.html publ FALSE no info:eu-repo/semantics/book