Interim report

Breaking a long standing custom, I notice a book before finishing, 'Population 10 billion' by one Danny Dorling, hitherto unknown to me. Oddly, for a chap who appears to be quite into (self) publicity - see http://www.dannydorling.org/ - and to be quite a lefty, no less than the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford - and these the people who would not make A. J. P. Taylor a prof. because he had been on the box.

The book has a rather irritating style and despite appearing to be organised into 8 straightforward chapters charting the growth of the world's population up to the 10 billion now scheduled for some time around 2100 CE, is in fact a sort of car boot sale of all sorts of stuff which might otherwise be culled over a rather longer period from the pages of the Guardian. Rather like a blog blown up to an unappetising if not unnatural size: perhaps he needed a fiercer editor to inject more discipline and to get the size down from the present 444 or so pages to 333 or so. As it is, I am finding sequential reading difficult and have resorted to dipping - which I would not have thought was the idea. Proper books, for this reader anyway, should tell a coherent story.

All of which is a pity, because the message that I get is both interesting and important: that is to say that the population of the world is not rising exponentially and will probably stabilise at or around 10 billion (up from rather more than 7 now), a level which we can probably cope with if we could only learn how to do something to curb waste & excess and something to make the distribution of food & other goodies a bit fairer than it is now. Or as the great man famously said: 'Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!'.

As a former demographer of sorts, I was amused at the amount of time & effort Dorling spends on rubbishing UN demographers, who, it seems, were foolish enough to publish projections several hundred years into the future.

He also spends a lot of time & effort on various topics peripheral to the population theme, as I said before, a regular car-boot sale of a book. But apart from finding it hard to read, I am suspicious; a book that skates over so much ground is probably skating on thin ice. The chatty style does not give one confidence that the chap has spent quality time checking all his facts; reliable enough to use in the pub, but I am not sure that they are reliable enough to use in the formulation of policy.

PS 1: while writing the foregoing I became curious about how much a Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford might earn, but I failed to find out, beyond establishing that it is probably rather less than £100,000 and a lot less than the £250,000 and more which university vice chancellors award themselves these days. On the other hand, the royalties on books are probably to be added on, with no rules about not making money out of research and writing done while on the public payroll. In any event, some way above the median wage. Maybe even what used to be called a champagne lefty.

PS 2: is he any relation of the now retired Christopher Dorling, the now retired co-founder of DK books, now swallowed up in Pearson? See 3rd November.