TED Talk #5: Pete Alcorn on the world in 2200

In the video, the speaker talks about the belief that in 150 years, the world's population will hit a summit (around 10 billion people) and then start to decrease.  In his speech, he talks about how this decrease in population will impact society.  In the beginning, Alcorn shows the U.N.'s graph of the populations in the regions of the world from 1950 to present/projected future.  It's obvious to see that the populations in all regions of the world are steadily climbing.  While he is talking about the increase in population, he also talks about how ugly thin can come out of it.  To show this, he uses a picture of an orange growing mold.

After this he starts talking of the positive changes that will come from the eventual decrease in the world's population.  One of these postive outcomes, he explains, is the aspect of scrace labor because of the fewer amount of people.  The reason that this is a positive is because scarce labor drives wages upwards.  An example of this that he used was of the die off of people in the black death (he also explains that this isn't the type of drop in population that people are eluding to).  He explains how after its occurance, there were higher wages, land reform, technological innovations, the birth of the middle class and finally forward looking social movements.  The last thing that Alcorn says is that with this eventual decrease in population, people will start romanticizing the future again (before this he talked about how many times people romanticize the past and even all three western religions are rooted in the past).  To conclude his speech, Alcorn explains that powerful people will fear for the future, which could lead them into rash decisions.  His overall message was that a positive outlook on future events can help avoid bad decicion-making.  The one major technique that ALcorn used in his speech was that of putting differnent ideas out on the table and end up bringing them back together in a climax at the end.  Usually I wouldn't like that technique (i.e Clay Shirky video) but in this case I found it interesting throughout the speech and he proved his point well upon me.