# data[].attributes.headline
The Individual, Society, or Both? A Comparison of Black, Latino, and White Beliefs about the Causes of Poverty

# data[].attributes.subject
The Individual, Society, or Both? A Comparison of Black, Latino, and White Beliefs about the Causes of Poverty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
South Texas College's Single Sign-On Page

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pursuant to Texas Administrative Code 202: (1) Unauthorized use is prohibited; (2) Usage may be subject to security testing and monitoring; (3) Misuse is subject to criminal prosecution; and (4) Users have no expectation of privacy except as otherwise provided by applicable privacy laws.

# data[].attributes.headline
Increasing the Complexity of Young Adolescents' Beliefs About Poverty and Inequality Results of an 8th Grade Social Studies Curriculum Intervention

# data[].attributes.subject
Increasing the Complexity of Young Adolescents' Beliefs About Poverty and Inequality Results of an 8th Grade Social Studies Curriculum Intervention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
South Texas College's Single Sign-On Page

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pursuant to Texas Administrative Code 202: (1) Unauthorized use is prohibited; (2) Usage may be subject to security testing and monitoring; (3) Misuse is subject to criminal prosecution; and (4) Users have no expectation of privacy except as otherwise provided by applicable privacy laws.

# data[].attributes.headline
Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural SchemasShape Beliefs About Poverty

# data[].attributes.subject
Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural SchemasShape Beliefs About Poverty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
South Texas College's Single Sign-On Page

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pursuant to Texas Administrative Code 202: (1) Unauthorized use is prohibited; (2) Usage may be subject to security testing and monitoring; (3) Misuse is subject to criminal prosecution; and (4) Users have no expectation of privacy except as otherwise provided by applicable privacy laws.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Any discussion of social class and mobility would be incomplete without a discussion of poverty, which is defined as the lack of the minimum food and shelter necessary for maintaining life. More specifically, this condition is known as absolute poverty. Today it is estimated that more than 35 million Americans-approximately 14 percent of the population-live in poverty. Of course, like all other social science statistics, these are not without controversy. Other estimates of poverty in the United States range from 10 percent to 21 percent, depending on one's political leanings. This is why many sociologists prefer a relative, rather than an absolute, definition of poverty. According to the definition of relative poverty, the poor are those who lack what is needed by most Americans to live decently because they earn less than half of the nation's median income. By this standard, around 20 percent of Americans live in poverty, and this has been the case for at least the past 40 years. Of these 20 percent, 60 percent are from the working class poor. Poverty is an exceptionally complicated social phenomenon, and trying to discover its causes is equally complicated. The stereotypic (and simplistic) explanation persists-that the poor cause their own poverty-based on the notion that anything is possible in America. Some theorists have accused the poor of having little concern for the future and preferring to "live for the moment"; others have accused them of engaging in self‐defeating behavior. Still other theorists have characterized the poor as fatalists, resigning themselves to a culture of poverty in which nothing can be done to change their economic outcomes. In this culture of poverty-which passes from generation to generation-the poor feel negative, inferior, passive, hopeless, and powerless.

The "blame the poor" perspective is stereotypic and not applicable to all of the underclass. Not only are most poor people able and willing to work hard, they do so when given the chance. The real trouble has to do with such problems as minimum wages and lack of access to the education necessary for obtaining a better‐paying job.

More recently, sociologists have focused on other theories of poverty. One theory of poverty has to do with the flight of the middle class, including employers, from the cities and into the suburbs. This has limited the opportunities for the inner‐city poor to find adequate jobs. According to another theory, the poor would rather receive welfare payments than work in demeaning positions as maids or in fast‐food restaurants. As a result of this view, the welfare system has come under increasing attack in recent years.

Again, no simple explanations for or solutions to the problem of poverty exist. Although varying theories abound, sociologists will continue to pay attention to this issue in the years to come.
The effects of poverty are serious. Children who grow up in poverty suffer more persistent, frequent, and severe health problems than do children who grow up under better financial circumstances.

Many infants born into poverty have a low birth weight, which is associated with many preventable mental and physical disabilities. Not only are these poor infants more likely to be irritable or sickly, they are also more likely to die before their first birthday.

Children raised in poverty tend to miss school more often because of illness. These children also have a much higher rate of accidents than do other children, and they are twice as likely to have impaired vision and hearing, iron deficiency anemia, and higher than normal levels of lead in the blood, which can impair brain function.

Levels of stress in the family have also been shown to correlate with economic circumstances. Studies during economic recessions indicate that job loss and subsequent poverty are associated with violence in families, including child and elder abuse. Poor families experience much more stress than middle‐class families. Besides financial uncertainty, these families are more likely to be exposed to series of negative events and "bad luck," including illness, depression, eviction, job loss, criminal victimization, and family death. Parents who experience hard economic times may become excessively punitive and erratic, issuing demands backed by insults, threats, and corporal punishment.

Homelessness, or extreme poverty, carries with it a particularly strong set of risks for families, especially children. Compared to children living in poverty but having homes, homeless children are less likely to receive proper nutrition and immunization. Hence, they experience more health problems. Homeless women experience higher rates of low‐birth‐weight babies, miscarriages, and infant mortality, probably due to not having access to adequate prenatal care for their babies. Homeless families experience even greater life stress than other families, including increased disruption in work, school, family relationships, and friendships.

Sociologists have been particularly concerned about the effects of poverty on the "black underclass," the increasing numbers of jobless, welfare‐dependent African Americans trapped in inner‐city ghettos. Many of the industries (textiles, auto, steel) that previously offered employment to the black working class have shut down, while newer industries have relocated to the suburbs. Because most urban jobs either require advanced education or pay minimum wage, unemployment rates for inner‐city blacks are high.

Even though Hispanic Americans are almost as likely as African Americans to live in poverty, fewer inner‐city Hispanic neighborhoods have undergone the same massive changes as many black neighborhoods have. Middle and working class Hispanic families have not left their barrio, or urban Spanish‐speaking neighborhood, in large numbers, so most Hispanic cultural and social institutions there remain intact. In addition, local Hispanic‐owned businesses and low‐skill industries support the barrio with wage‐based, not welfare‐based, businesses.

Climbing out of poverty is difficult for anyone, perhaps because, at its worst, poverty can become a self‐perpetuating cycle. Children of poverty are at an extreme disadvantage in the job market; in turn, the lack of good jobs ensures continued poverty. The cycle ends up repeating itself until the pattern is somehow broken.
Finally, recent decades have witnessed the feminization of poverty, or the significant increase in the numbers of single women in poverty alone, primarily as single mothers. In the last three decades the proportion of poor families headed by women has grown to more than 50 percent. This feminization of poverty has affected African‐American women more than any other group.
This feminization of poverty may be related to numerous changes in contemporary America. Increases in unwanted births, separations, and divorces have forced growing numbers of women to head poor households. Meanwhile, increases in divorced fathers avoiding child support coupled with reductions in welfare support have forced many of these women‐headed households to join the ranks of the underclass. Further, because wives generally live longer than their husbands, growing numbers of elderly women must live in poverty.

Feminists also attribute the feminization of poverty to women's vulnerability brought about by the patriarchal, sexist, and gender‐biased nature of Western society, which does not value protecting women's rights and wealth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Any discussion of social class and mobility would be incomplete without a discussion of poverty, which is defined as the lack of the minimum food and shelter necessary for maintaining life. More specifically, this condition is known as absolute poverty. Today it is estimated that more than 35 million Americans-approximately 14 percent of the population-live in poverty.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Poverty and Crime

Crime exists everywhere in the United States - in rural and urban areas, in the East and West, and among all types of people. This has led many government officials, especially those in urban areas, to focus largely on the reduction of crime among their respective constituencies and has led others to speculate on the factors that influence the amount of crime and how those factors can be controlled

In the US, urban crime is often perceived as a problem amid areas with high poverty levels. This may be the case; however, many other factors, such as unemployment, population density, minority population, age distribution, and locality in the US, are correlated with crime and affect poverty as well. When these factors are controlled for, how much does poverty affect crime? Knowing more accurately how poverty affects crime can help us know if focusing on the reduction of poverty can aid in crime reduction or if money and effort should go to other areas.

Poverty's effects on crime can be explained through a variety of reasons. There is a higher rate of mental illness in the poor than in the rich (Brill 40). Poverty can lead to high levels of stress that in turn may lead individuals to commit theft, robbery, or other violent acts. Moreover, poverty may lead to an actual or perceived inferior education, which would cause youth to count on less access to quality schools, jobs, and role models, decreasing the opportunity costs of crime and increasing the probability of youth spending time on the street associating with gangs, etc (Ludwig 1).

Crime offers a way in which impoverished people can obtain material goods that they cannot attain through legitimate means. Often threat or force can help them acquire even more goods, this induces them to commit violent acts such as robbery, which is the second most common violent crime. For many impoverished people, the prize that crime yields may outweigh the risk of being caught, especially given that their opportunity cost is lower than that of a wealthier person. Thus, poverty should increase crime rates.

However, many other factors influence crime and are correlated with poverty as well. Higher unemployment would certainly increase poverty and at the same time lead to more crime due to depression associated with being unemployed. Personal income per capita, which is inversely correlated with the poverty level, still may increase crime since greater wealth means greater benefits to thieves and robbers. Furthermore, because of social class gaps, personal income per capita rates may not affect poverty to a great extent (the income may be concentrated in a small percentage of the population). It might even accentuate the difference between the upper and lower classes, thereby inducing more crime.

Variations in the composition of population can affect crime in different ways. First, adolescents are often responsible for crimes committed. "The poor delinquent child... is more apt to be expelled from school or have a police record than a well-to-do delinquent..." (Brill 40). A higher percentage of inhabitants under the age of twenty-five may lead to higher crime rates. On the other hand, the elderly, because of their possessions and vulnerability, are believed to be the most frequent victims of crime.

The degree of minority population in an area is also correlated with poverty due to the disproportional amount of minorities living in impoverished urban areas. In addition, racism towards minorities can lead to lower wages and fewer jobs, resulting in higher poverty rates. In 1995, all Metropolitan Areas with unemployment rates over 12% also had a population composed of at least 30% minorities.

Geographic regions within the US have different characteristics and therefore lead to differing levels of both crime and poverty. The 1999 UCR report, for example, indicates that law enforcement personnel varied between 2.5 and 4.3 persons per 1000 population among differing regions of the US. Climate, associated with geographical location, is also believed to affect crime - more temperate climates being positively correlated with crime. Cultural factors such as recreational activities, religious characteristics, and family cohesiveness are all associated with geographic regions of the US and influence crime.

Because of the manner in which population density influences living conditions (ie: houses vs. apartment complexes), it is also likely to be correlated with both poverty and crime. Studies have found that "more densely populated neighborhoods tend to be poorer, have higher percentages of persons in the age range of 12 to 20, have larger concentrations of single-parent households, and larger nonwhite populations" (Short 52).

This study first examines how poverty affects crime in the simple regression model. Then, controlling for the aforementioned factors - race, unemployment, personal income, population density, geographic location, and age distribution - it again examines the relationship between crime and poverty and how this relationship is influenced when these factors are held constant.

All the data used in this study come from the 1997-1998 State and Metropolitan Area Data Book from the Bureau of the Census. The data covers 322 Metropolitan Areas, including 245 MSA's, 17 CMSA's, 15 PMSA's, and 12 NEMSA's (which are essentially MA's of different sizes and characteristics). Each MA contains a population of at least 100,000 inhabitants of which fifty percent or more live in urban areas. Seventeen of the 322 MA's have been eliminated due to a deficiency in the data.

Since this study is based on crime in urban areas, these data provide an excellent resource for determining the causes of crime. Data from larger areas (such as states) would be too general and too many conflicting characteristics within the area would be incorporated into the data. The Metropolitan Areas provide a sample composed of similar makeup, but with sufficient variation to provide a good model. Each area has different poverty levels, population density, etc.

South Atlantic: DE, MD, DC, VA, WV, NC, SC, GA, FL

The population data from the Data Book are based on the assumption that "population change can be represented by administrative data in a statistical model." The Bureau of the Census conducts a nationwide census every ten years. It then uses data from documents that somehow reflect the change in the population - birth and death certificates for example - to estimate how the population is changing and what its current level is. This paper includes independent variables based on population density, race/ethnic group, and age which are taken from this data ( State and Metropolitan Area Data Book A-1).

The Data Book obtains crime data from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which consists of data voluntarily submitted to either the FBI or state UCR Programs by law enforcement agencies across the United States. The two dependent variables in this study are based on this data. "Total Crime" represents the seven index crimes: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. These are known as "index crimes" because of their seriousness, frequency of occurrence, and likelihood of being reported to police. "Violent Crime" represents the four violent crimes as defined by the UCR program: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The crime data are reported as crime rates - the number of crimes committed per 100,000 inhabitants. Although Violent Crime is incorporated into Total Crime, it is used in this study to determine if poverty has effects specific to violent crimes; it also provides a second data set to observe. (A-9)

Unemployment data are based on the Current Population Survey, which are annual averages of monthly figures. The unemployed "are all civilians who did not work during the survey week, who were available for work during the survey week (except for temporary illness), and who made specific efforts to find a job in the prior 4 weeks. Persons waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off also are counted as unemployed" (A-11).

Personal Income per Capita figures, as found in the Data Book, were taken from the Survey of Current Business conducted by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. They consist of the personal income received by, or on behalf of, all members of the area less personal contributions for social insurance. That total is then divided by the resident population. The figures provide a picture of the overall wealth of the area.

Poverty data is based on the Current Population Survey as well. "Families and persons were classified as below poverty level if their total family income or unrelated individual income was less than the poverty threshold specified for the applicable family size, age of householder, and number of related children under 18 present" (A-12).

The first analysis will examine two simple regressions of total crime and violent crime on poverty. These reflect the affect that poverty has on crime before controlling for other variables.

In both regressions, the estimated coefficient of poverty is very significant. These regressions show that a one percent increase in the population below poverty level will lead to an increase of about 135 total crimes and about 25 violent crimes.

Now the regressions of total and violent crime will be expanded to include all of the previously mentioned variables. The models have been reported with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. The geographic region that has been left out is the South Atlantic. In addition, Caucasians are not included in the race/ethnic group list.

The estimated coefficient of poverty shows that holding all the other variables constant, a 1% increase in the population under the poverty level will increase total crimes by 134 per 100,000 inhabitants. It is surprising that this coefficient is almost identical to the simple model, even after adding and holding constant sixteen independent variables, but the standard error has increased which yields slightly less significance - although it still is significant at the 0.1% level. The coefficient in the multivariate Violent Crime model decreased by about 33% compared with the simple model; its significance decreased as well. In any case, both of these amounts are substantial.

In order to obtain the elasticity of crime with respect to poverty, the regressions will be performed using the natural log of the crime rate and dividing the poverty data by 100 (so that the data reads as a number between 0 and 1 instead of a percentage between 0 and 100).

The estimated coefficient of poverty now yields crime-poverty elasticity. The ln(Total Crime) model shows that holding the other variables constant, a 1% increase in poverty leads to a 2.16% increase in total crime. This coefficient is significant at the 0.6% level. The ln(Violent Crime) model shows that a 1% increase in poverty leads to a 2.57% increase in violent crime and is significant only at the 5.1% level.

The results of this analysis are consistent with other studies that have been conducted by economists, for example:

[Studies] found that homicides were disproportionately concentrated in areas of poverty. Three of these (by Bullock [1955], Beasley and Antunes [1974], and Mladenka and Hill [1976]) studied violent crime in Houston. Like Shaw and McKay [1969], each reported high correlations between violent crime rates and measures of poverty. Areas in Houston with high rates of violent crime were also characterized by high population density and a high proportion of black residents. (Short 51)

These studies as well as the above analysis show that poverty is correlated with violent crimes - increased poverty leads to increased violent crime.

Another study by Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan, and Paul Hirschfield also that teens committed more violent crimes when they lived in high poverty areas than when they were relocated to low poverty areas. "The offer to relocate families from high- to very low-poverty neighborhoods (census tracts with poverty rates below 10 percent) reduces juvenile arrests for violent offenses on the order of 30 to 50 percent of the arrest rate for controls" (Ludwig 13). However, in their paper, Ludwig and his associates state that "high-poverty areas have on average higher rates of violent crime but lower rates of property crime than low-poverty areas" (13). This contradicts the findings in the above analysis. Nevertheless, Ludwig and associates offer explanations as to why this may be the case: "teens are subject to heightened scrutiny in low-poverty areas, and national victimization surveys suggest that victims are more likely to report less-serious crimes to the police in suburbs than cities" (14). They also believe that the experimental group used in their experiment may actually change their behavior when they are moved to a new area.

Although this study did not include regressions of nonviolent crime on poverty, the Total Crime models capture more nonviolent than violent effects. This can be seen by comparing the means of the Total Crime and Violent Crime - Total Crime includes about 4800 nonviolent crimes on average. The crimes Ludwig referred to may be less serious than the three nonviolent index crimes, thus resulting in a different correlation.

Conclusion: Evidence greatly suggests that increases in poverty lead to increased violent crime. Evidence from this paper also suggests the same for all seven index crimes and careful studies can yield more verification of the matter.

Works Cited

Short, James F., Jr. Poverty, Ethnicity, and Violent Crime. Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

1997.

Brill, Norman Q. America's Psychic Malignancy. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas

Publisher, 1993.

Ludwig, Jens, Greg J. Duncan, and Paul Hirschfield. Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime:

Evidence From a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment. 20 April 2000.

< http://www.jcpr.org/wpfiles/duncan.ludwig.revise4-25.PDF>

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Crime exists everywhere in the United States - in rural and urban areas, in the East and West, and among all types of people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Poverty stretches across the globe affecting almost half of the world's population. Its effects reach deeper. Uniquely connected to different causes, the effects of poverty are revolving -one result leads to another source leads to another consequence. To fully understand the effects of poverty, the causes have to be rooted out to develop strategies to end hunger and starvation for good. Let's discuss some of the top effects of poverty.

Poor Health

Globally, millions suffer from poverty-related health conditions as infectious diseases ravage the lives of an estimated 14 million people a year and are of the top effects of poverty. These diseases are contracted through sources like contaminated water, the absence of water and sanitation, and lack of access to proper healthcare. The list is broad and long. Here are the top diseases commonly linked to poverty.

Malaria: Malaria is urbanely referred to as the poor man's disease, as more than a million people living in poverty die from it each year. Caused by a parasite, malaria is contracted through mosquito bites. Most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, malaria affects the lives of many in 97 countries worldwide.

Tuberculosis: Often referred to as TB, tuberculosis is a bacteria-borne disease. The bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, targets the lungs. It also affects the kidneys, brain, and spine. When discussing the effects of TB worldwide, it must be broken down by burden-high burden TB and low burden TB-all of which has to do with the number of cases that impact a country. High burden TB affects more than 22 countries, as low burden TB accounts for 10 cases per 100,000 people in a geographical location.

HIV/AIDS: HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. This infection attacks the immune system and is contracted by contact with certain fluids in the body. If HIV is left untreated, certain infections and diseases can take over the body and cause a person to develop AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome). Thirty-six million people in the world have HIV/AIDS. In countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe, one in five adults live with HIV or AIDS.

Continuing the fight against poverty through economic expansion will help eliminate poverty-related illnesses and raise the value of health in poor communities.

Crime

There's an old adage that says, "If a man don't work, he don't eat." That's not the case for a large number people living in poverty. Lack of economic opportunity leads to impoverishment which then leads to crime.

Global unemployment is at a high point. One hundred ninety-two million people around the world are jobless. In some parts of the world, mainly poor parts, unemployment standings will drive this number higher. In a study done on youth in the Caribbean, it was determined that joblessness fueled criminal activity in those aged 15 through 24.

Because of the struggles in the Caribbean job market, the murder rates are higher there than in any other region in the world. The crime rate affects 6.8 percent of the Caribbean population against the world average of 4.5 percent, calculating the global rate per 100,000 people.

People who live below the poverty line and don't have access to sufficient economic opportunity, live by any dangerous means necessary.

Lack of Education

There is a direct correlation between low academic performance and poverty. Children who are exposed to extreme levels of poverty have difficulty with cognitive development, speech, and managing stress, which leads to adverse behavior.

In the country of Niger-the most illiterate nation in the world-only 15 percent of adults have the ability to read and write. Eritrea follows on the heels of Niger: with a population of 6 million, the average person only achieves four years of school.

In these poor locations, young adults and children have to leave school to work to help provide additional income for their families. Other children don't have access to education due to decent schools being too far for them to travel to. On the other hand, schools nearby don't have enough materials and resources to properly educate children. The conditions of the schools are just as poor as the children's living conditions.

Where there's poverty, there's lack of education, joblessness, and poor health. The key to destroying the top effects of poverty is to attack the causes. More funding is needed for programs such as Child Fund International-a program that brings resources to children in poor communities. The International Economic Development Council supports economic developers by helping them create, retain, and expand jobs in their communities. And then there are the international efforts of the World Health Organization that fights to bring vaccinations and health-related resources to impoverished communities suffering from the infectious diseases of poverty. With these efforts along with other strategies, we can continue making strides to end the effects of poverty.
- Naomi C. Kellogg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top Effects of Poverty | The Borgen Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Poverty stretches across the globe affecting almost half of the world's population. Its effects reach deeper. Uniquely connected to different causes, the effects of poverty are revolving-one result leads to another source leads to another consequence. To fully understand the effects of poverty, the causes have to be rooted out to develop strategies to end [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Home is the absolute foundation through which we can tackle the effects of poverty on society and its vicious cycle. Home is the key to living a life of dignity and opportunity, free from exclusion, fear or neglect.

With your help, we have been able to demonstrate time and time again that the home is vital in helping families break the cycle of poverty for good. It gives families a stable foundation with a sense of dignity and pride. A home leads to improved:

Health - the lack of windows or proper ventilation cause respiratory diseases, while the lack of proper toilets help the spread of diseases such as cholera or typhoid

Safety - from the rain, storms, earthquakes

Security - imagine not having a door in your home (tent or shelter); anything you own is at risk of theft.

Education opportunities - children who live in unsafe shelters have much lower school attendance and completion rates. Their homes often leak in various places, ruining school material and increasing their chance of becoming ill.

Employment opportunities - having a registered address is often essential to find work. A safe, decent home is also key to guarantee good health, which is key to keep a job and perform properly.

Let's dig deeper into the main impact of poverty on health, children, education as well as communities - and how safe, decent homes can become the essential foundation for people to build happy, prosperous lives.

1. Effects of poverty on health

Over 10,000 children die every day because they live in poor housing.

Without effective sanitation in their home, children are especially vulnerable to life-threatening diarrhoea and intestinal infections. And in houses where there's insufficient ventilation, people are especially vulnerable to respiratory diseases.

Clean, warm homes provide protection from the elements and help improve a family's health by preventing illness and diseases such as tuberculosis, diarrhoea, and malaria.

Families who live in a properly constructed home are less likely to fall prey to such diseases and are better equipped to recover from any illnesses they may contract. It goes without saying that the mental health of individuals and families is greatly improved when physical health concerns are taken away.

Seventy-year-old Girma Mihiretu and his wife Yeshi Ali, can testify to this. The couple live with their three-year-old grandson, Zehirun Asefa, in Dessie, Ethiopia, but for a long time they and their six children had just a single plastic sheet to call home.

With no sanitation or proper protection from the weather, the family were at the mercy of the elements.

As Mihiretu recalls,

"I lived in a small and dirty house. We didn't have a toilet. We couldn't help our children with money. Our children's health suffered every day."

To make matters even worse the couple used to suffer with leprosy, and even today bear the scars of this debilitating disease. Life was desperate, until just two years ago when the couple became our homepartners and began to hope for a healthier future.

The couple's only money used to come from begging, but now they have a garden to cultivate crops that they sell to supplement their income.

"Today, we see our new house and know it's good for our children. It has a toilet and a garden. I feel blessed."(Mihiretu)

2. Effects of poverty on education and schooling

Home gives children opportunity for the future by providing a stable foundation where they can study and do as well as they can at school.

Children are also able to develop into responsible adults as they experience security and see their own parents taking care of the home. For adults, home is key to maintaining employment and provides opportunities for income generation by the creation of home-based small businesses.

Yonah Njobvu and his wife Loina have experienced first hand how a good home can help a small business burst into life. The couple live in Lusaka, Zambia with their seven children. They were staying in a neighbour's hut after flooding destroyed their own home and the cramped conditions were far from adequate.

Since moving in February 2008 to a Habitat home, every aspect of the family's life has gone from strength to strength. The additional space has allowed Yonah to start his own business making waterproof underpants for children.

Through this business Yonah can now support his family much better. In his previous home, there simply wasn't the space or security to start a business. Now business is thriving, life is good and the family can get a good night's sleep.

3. Effects of poverty on children and families

Home is indeed where the heart is and a stable, well constructed home is at the centre of family life.

When families have a home where they feel safe and secure they will draw together as a family unit to love and support one another. There is also an added sense of pride and dignity that comes with a decent home which translates to a hopefulness for the future well being and success of the family.

There is plenty enough research showing that growing up in an unsafe environment not only affects children's health seriously but also as a result of this their attendance at school (and ability to get a degree or diploma).

Reducing child mortality, improving school attendance

Ana Maria and Rodrel live with their three small children, Shanely, Marlon and Alan in a neighbourhood nestled in the centre of Chichicastenango, Guatemala. The couple were married seven years ago and have moved home almost every year since. As a nursery nurse and a truck driver, their income doesn't stretch very far.

For the past year their rented house was so cold and damp that their youngest son, just nine months old, suffered with bronchitis. The family also had to share a bathroom and outdoor kitchen leading to restricted use of the facilities and conflict with other families.

Some years ago the couple had purchased a small piece of land but never dreamt they would be able to secure a loan to build a house on it.

When Rodrel's brother introduced them to Habitat for Humanity for the first time the family began to hope that they would have a place of their own. After visiting our office the couple soon had an interest-free loan approved and began constructing their home.

In just a month their brand new home, consisting of four rooms, was completed. It was twice the size of their rented accommodation, and with loan repayments less than their rental payments, the family can even start saving for the future.

"The children have plenty of room to play," says Ana Maria surveying her beautiful home with pride. They now also perform much better at school, having room to do their homework and not falling sick nearly as often as before.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Effects of Poverty on Health, Children & Society: How We Break the Cycle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The impact of a safe, decent Home is living a life free from poverty, fear or neglect. That's why homes are key tackle most causes and effects of poverty.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In economics, inflation refers to a general progressive increase in prices of goods and services in an economy. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation corresponds to a reduction in the purchasing power of money. The opposite of inflation is deflation, a sustained decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualised percentage change in a general price index.

Prices will not all increase at the same rates. Attaching a representative value to a set of prices is an instance of the index number problem. The consumer price index is often used for this purpose; the employment cost index is used for wages in the United States. Differential movement between consumer prices and wages constitutes a change in the standard of living.

The causes of inflation have been much discussed (see below), the consensus being that growth in the money supply, alongside increased velocity of money, is typically the dominant causal factor.

If money were perfectly neutral, inflation would have no effect on the real economy; but perfect neutrality is not generally considered believable. Effects on the real economy are severely disruptive in the cases of very high inflation and hyperinflation. More moderate inflation affects economies in both positive and negative ways. The negative effects include an increase in the opportunity cost of holding money, uncertainty over future inflation which may discourage investment and savings, and if inflation were rapid enough, shortages of goods as consumers begin hoarding out of concern that prices will increase in the future. Positive effects include reducing unemployment due to nominal wage rigidity, allowing the central bank greater freedom in carrying out monetary policy, encouraging loans and investment instead of money hoarding, and avoiding the inefficiencies associated with deflation.

Today, most economists favour a low and steady rate of inflation. Low (as opposed to zero or negative) inflation reduces the severity of economic recessions by enabling the labor market to adjust more quickly in a downturn, and reduces the risk that a liquidity trap prevents monetary policy from stabilising the economy. The task of keeping the rate of inflation low and stable is usually given to monetary authorities. Generally, these monetary authorities are the central banks that control monetary policy through the setting of interest rates, by carrying out open market operations and (more rarely) changing commercial bank reserve requirements.

The term inflation appeared in America in the mid-nineteenth century, "not in reference to something that happens to prices, but as something that happens to a paper currency". Today, however, it is understood as referring to a sustained increase in the general price level (as distinct from short-term fluctuations).

The expression "price inflation" may either be synonymous with "inflation" or reflect some more restrictive definition of "price". Changes to the wage level are described as "wage inflation" and changes to the money supply as " monetary inflation ". These terms are sometimes assumed to identify the causative factor.

More specific forms of inflation refer to sectors whose prices vary semi-independently from the general trend. "House price inflation" applies to changes in the house price index while "energy inflation" is dominated by the costs of oil and gas.

Other economic concepts related to inflation include: deflation - a fall in the general price level; disinflation - a decrease in the rate of inflation; hyperinflation - an out-of-control inflationary spiral; stagflation - a combination of inflation, slow economic growth and high unemployment; reflation - an attempt to raise the general level of prices to counteract deflationary pressures; and asset price inflation - a general rise in the prices of financial assets without a corresponding increase in the prices of goods or services; agflation - an advanced increase in the price for food and industrial agricultural crops when compared with the general rise in prices.

By the nineteenth century, economists categorised three separate factors that cause a rise or fall in the price of goods: a change in the or production costs of the good, a change in the price of money which then was usually a fluctuation in the commodity price of the metallic content in the currency, and currency depreciation resulting from an increased supply of currency relative to the quantity of redeemable metal backing the currency. Following the proliferation of private banknote currency printed during the American Civil War, the term "inflation" started to appear as a direct reference to the currency depreciation that occurred as the quantity of redeemable banknotes outstripped the quantity of metal available for their redemption. At that time, the term inflation referred to the devaluation of the currency, and not to a rise in the price of goods.

This relationship between the over-supply of banknotes and a resulting depreciation in their value was noted by earlier classical economists such as David Hume and David Ricardo, who would go on to examine and debate what effect a currency devaluation (later termed monetary inflation) has on the price of goods (later termed price inflation, and eventually just inflation).

Historically, large infusions of gold or silver into an economy had led to inflation. For instance, when silver was used as currency, the government could collect silver coins, melt them down, mix them with other metals such as copper or lead and reissue them at the same nominal value, a process known as debasement. At the ascent of Nero as Roman emperor in AD 54, the denarius contained more than 90% silver, but by the 270s hardly any silver was left. By diluting the silver with other metals, the government could issue more coins without increasing the amount of silver used to make them. When the cost of each coin is lowered in this way, the government profits from an increase in seigniorage. This practice would increase the money supply but at the same time the relative value of each coin would be lowered. As the relative value of the coins becomes lower, consumers would need to give more coins in exchange for the same goods and services as before. These goods and services would experience a price increase as the value of each coin is reduced.

The adoption of fiat currency by many countries, from the 18th century onwards, made much larger variations in the supply of money possible. Rapid increases in the money supply have taken place a number of times in countries experiencing political crises, producing hyperinflations-episodes of extreme inflation rates much higher than those observed in earlier periods of commodity money. The hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic of Germany is a notable example. Currently, the hyperinflation in Venezuela is the highest in the world, with an annual inflation rate of 833,997% as of October 2018.

However, since the 1980s, inflation has been held low and stable in countries with independent central banks. This has led to a moderation of the business cycle and a reduction in variation in most macroeconomic indicators - an event known as the Great Moderation.

Rapid increases in the quantity of money or in the overall money supply have occurred in many different societies throughout history, changing with different forms of money used.

Song Dynasty China introduced the practice of printing paper money to create fiat currency. During the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, the government spent a great deal of money fighting costly wars, and reacted by printing more money, leading to inflation. Fearing the inflation that plagued the Yuan dynasty, the Ming Dynasty initially rejected the use of paper money, and reverted to using copper coins.

During the Malian king Mansa Musa's hajj to Mecca in 1324, he was reportedly accompanied by a camel train that included thousands of people and nearly a hundred camels. When he passed through Cairo, he spent or gave away so much gold that it depressed its price in Egypt for over a decade, reducing its purchasing power. A contemporary Arab historian remarked about Mansa Musa's visit:

Gold was at a high price in Egypt until they came in that year. The mithqal did not go below 25 dirhams and was generally above, but from that time its value fell and it cheapened in price and has remained cheap till now. The mithqal does not exceed 22 dirhams or less. This has been the state of affairs for about twelve years until this day by reason of the large amount of gold which they brought into Egypt and spent there [...].

"Price revolution" in Western Europe

From the second half of the 15th century to the first half of the 17th, Western Europe experienced a major inflationary cycle referred to as the " price revolution", with prices on average rising perhaps sixfold over 150 years. This is often attributed to the influx of gold and silver from the New World into Habsburg Spain, with wider availability of silver in previously cash-starved Europe causing widespread inflation. European population rebound from the Black Death began before the arrival of New World metal, and may have began a process of inflation that New World silver compounded later in the 16th century.

Since there are many possible measures of the price level, there are many possible measures of price inflation. Most frequently, the term "inflation" refers to a rise in a broad price index representing the overall price level for goods and services in the economy. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and the GDP deflator are some examples of broad price indices. However, "inflation" may also be used to describe a rising price level within a narrower set of assets, goods or services within the economy, such as commodities (including food, fuel, metals), tangible assets (such as real estate), financial assets (such as stocks, bonds), services (such as entertainment and health care), or labor. Although the values of capital assets are often casually said to "inflate," this should not be confused with inflation as a defined term; a more accurate description for an increase in the value of a capital asset is appreciation. The Reuters-CRB Index (CCI), the Producer Price Index, and Employment Cost Index (ECI) are examples of narrow price indices used to measure price inflation in particular sectors of the economy. Core inflation is a measure of inflation for a subset of consumer prices that excludes food and energy prices, which rise and fall more than other prices in the short term. The Federal Reserve Board pays particular attention to the core inflation rate to get a better estimate of long-term future inflation trends overall.

The inflation rate is most widely calculated by determining the movement or change in a price index, typically the consumer price index. The inflation rate is the percentage change of a price index over time. The Retail Prices Index is also a measure of inflation that is commonly used in the United Kingdom. It is broader than the CPI and contains a larger basket of goods and services.

To illustrate the method of calculation, in January 2007, the U.S. Consumer Price Index was 202.416, and in January 2008 it was 211.080. The formula for calculating the annual percentage rate inflation in the CPI over the course of the year is: The resulting inflation rate for the CPI in this one-year period is 4.28%, meaning the general level of prices for typical U.S. consumers rose by approximately four percent in 2007.[42]

Other widely used price indices for calculating price inflation include the following:

Producer price indices (PPIs) which measures average changes in prices received by domestic producers for their output. This differs from the CPI in that price subsidization, profits, and taxes may cause the amount received by the producer to differ from what the consumer paid. There is also typically a delay between an increase in the PPI and any eventual increase in the CPI. Producer price index measures the pressure being put on producers by the costs of their raw materials. This could be "passed on" to consumers, or it could be absorbed by profits, or offset by increasing productivity. In India and the United States, an earlier version of the PPI was called the Wholesale price index.

Commodity price indices, which measure the price of a selection of commodities. In the present commodity price indices are weighted by the relative importance of the components to the "all in" cost of an employee.

Core price indices: because food and oil prices can change quickly due to changes in supply and demand conditions in the food and oil markets, it can be difficult to detect the long run trend in price levels when those prices are included. Therefore, most statistical agencies also report a measure of 'core inflation', which removes the most volatile components (such as food and oil) from a broad price index like the CPI. Because core inflation is less affected by short run supply and demand conditions in specific markets, central banks rely on it to better measure the inflationary effect of current monetary policy.

Other common measures of inflation are:

GDP deflator is a measure of the price of all the goods and services included in gross domestic product (GDP). The US Commerce Department publishes a deflator series for US GDP, defined as its nominal GDP measure divided by its real GDP measure.

∴

Regional inflation The Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks down CPI-U calculations down to different regions of the US.

Historical inflation Before collecting consistent econometric data became standard for governments, and for the purpose of comparing absolute, rather than relative standards of living, various economists have calculated imputed inflation figures. Most inflation data before the early 20th century is imputed based on the known costs of goods, rather than compiled at the time. It is also used to adjust for the differences in real standard of living for the presence of technology.

Asset price inflation is an undue increase in the prices of real or financial assets, such as stock (equity) and real estate. While there is no widely accepted index of this type, some central bankers have suggested that it would be better to aim at stabilizing a wider general price level inflation measure that includes some asset prices, instead of stabilizing CPI or core inflation only. The reason is that by raising interest rates when stock prices or real estate prices rise, and lowering them when these asset prices fall, central banks might be more successful in avoiding bubbles and crashes in asset prices.[dubious ]

Measuring inflation in an economy requires objective means of differentiating changes in nominal prices on a common set of goods and services, and distinguishing them from those price shifts resulting from changes in value such as volume, quality, or performance. For example, if the price of a can of corn changes from $0.90 to $1.00 over the course of a year, with no change in quality, then this price difference represents inflation. This single price change would not, however, represent general inflation in an overall economy. To measure overall inflation, the price change of a large "basket" of representative goods and services is measured. This is the purpose of a price index, which is the combined price of a "basket" of many goods and services. The combined price is the sum of the weighted prices of items in the "basket". A weighted price is calculated by multiplying the unit price of an item by the number of that item the average consumer purchases. Weighted pricing is a necessary means to measuring the effect of individual unit price changes on the economy's overall inflation. The Consumer Price Index, for example, uses data collected by surveying households to determine what proportion of the typical consumer's overall spending is spent on specific goods and services, and weights the average prices of those items accordingly. Those weighted average prices are combined to calculate the overall price. To better relate price changes over time, indexes typically choose a "base year" price and assign it a value of 100. Index prices in subsequent years are then expressed in relation to the base year price. While comparing inflation measures for various periods one has to take into consideration the base effect as well.

Inflation measures are often modified over time, either for the relative weight of goods in the basket, or in the way in which goods and services from the present are compared with goods and services from the past. Basket weights are updated regularly, usually every year, to adapt to changes in consumer behavior. Sudden changes in consumer behavior can still introduce a weighting bias in inflation measurement. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic it has been shown that the basket of goods and services was no longer representative of consumption during the crisis, as numerous goods and services could no longer be consumed due to government containment measures ("lock-downs").

Over time, adjustments are also made to the type of goods and services selected to reflect changes in the sorts of goods and services purchased by 'typical consumers'. New products may be introduced, older products disappear, the quality of existing products may change, and consumer preferences can shift. Both the sorts of goods and services which are included in the "basket" and the weighted price used in inflation measures will be changed over time to keep pace with the changing marketplace.[citation needed ] Different segments of the population may naturally consume different "baskets" of goods and services and may even experience different inflation rates. It is argued that companies have put more innovation into bringing down prices for wealthy families than for poor families.

Inflation numbers are often seasonally adjusted to differentiate expected cyclical cost shifts. For example, home heating costs are expected to rise in colder months, and seasonal adjustments are often used when measuring for inflation to compensate for cyclical spikes in energy or fuel demand. Inflation numbers may be averaged or otherwise subjected to statistical techniques to remove statistical noise and volatility of individual prices.[citation needed ]

When looking at inflation, economic institutions may focus only on certain kinds of prices, or special indices, such as the core inflation index which is used by central banks to formulate monetary policy.

Most inflation indices are calculated from weighted averages of selected price changes. This necessarily introduces distortion, and can lead to legitimate disputes about what the true inflation rate is. This problem can be overcome by including all available price changes in the calculation, and then choosing the median value. In some other cases, governments may intentionally report false inflation rates; for instance, during the presidency of Cristina Kirchner (2007-2015) the government of Argentina was criticised for manipulating economic data, such as inflation and GDP figures, for political gain and to reduce payments on its inflation-indexed debt.

Inflation expectations or expected inflation is the rate of inflation that is anticipated for some period of time in the foreseeable future. There are two major approaches to modeling the formation of inflation expectations. Adaptive expectations models them as a weighted average of what was expected one period earlier and the actual rate of inflation that most recently occurred. Rational expectations models them as unbiased, in the sense that the expected inflation rate is not systematically above or systematically below the inflation rate that actually occurs.

A long-standing survey of inflation expectations is the University of Michigan survey.

Inflation expectations affect the economy in several ways. They are more or less built into nominal interest rates, so that a rise (or fall) in the expected inflation rate will typically result in a rise (or fall) in nominal interest rates, giving a smaller effect if any on real interest rates. In addition, higher expected inflation tends to be built into the rate of wage increases, giving a smaller effect if any on the changes in real wages. Moreover, the response of inflationary expectations to monetary policy can influence the division of the effects of policy between inflation and unemployment (see Monetary policy credibility).

Historically, a great deal of economic literature was concerned with the question of what causes inflation and what effect it has. There were different schools of thought as to the causes of inflation. Most can be divided into two broad areas: quality theories of inflation and quantity theories of inflation.

The quality theory of inflation rests on the expectation of a seller accepting currency to be able to exchange that currency at a later time for goods they desire as a buyer. The quantity theory of inflation rests on the quantity equation of money that relates the money supply, its velocity, and the nominal value of exchanges.

Currently, the quantity theory of money is widely accepted as an accurate model of inflation in the long run. Consequently, there is now broad agreement among economists that in the long run, the inflation rate is essentially dependent on the growth rate of the money supply relative to the growth of the economy. However, in the short and medium term inflation may be affected by supply and demand pressures in the economy, and influenced by the relative elasticity of wages, prices and interest rates.

The question of whether the short-term effects last long enough to be important is the central topic of debate between monetarist and Keynesian economists. In monetarism prices and wages adjust quickly enough to make other factors merely marginal behavior on a general trend-line. In the Keynesian view, prices and wages adjust at different rates, and these differences have enough effects on real output to be "long term" in the view of people in an economy.

Keynesian economics proposes that changes in the money supply do not directly affect prices in the short run, and that visible inflation is the result of demand pressures in the economy expressing themselves in prices.

There are three major sources of inflation, as part of what Robert J. Gordon calls the " triangle model":

Demand-pull inflation is caused by increases in aggregate demand due to increased private and government spending, etc. Demand inflation encourages economic growth since the excess demand and favourable market conditions will stimulate investment and expansion.

Cost-push inflation, also called "supply shock inflation," is caused by a drop in aggregate supply (potential output). This may be due to natural disasters, or increased prices of inputs. For example, a sudden decrease in the supply of oil, leading to increased oil prices, can cause cost-push inflation. Producers for whom oil is a part of their costs could then pass this on to consumers in the form of increased prices. Another example stems from unexpectedly high insured losses, either legitimate (catastrophes) or fraudulent (which might be particularly prevalent in times of recession).[citation needed ] High inflation can prompt employees to demand rapid wage increases, to keep up with consumer prices. In the cost-push theory of inflation, rising wages in turn can help fuel inflation. In the case of collective bargaining, wage growth will be set as a function of inflationary expectations, which will be higher when inflation is high. This can cause a wage spiral. In a sense, inflation begets further inflationary expectations, which beget further inflation.

Built-in inflation is induced by adaptive expectations, and is often linked to the "price/wage spiral". It involves workers trying to keep their wages up with prices (above the rate of inflation), and firms passing these higher labor costs on to their customers as higher prices, leading to a feedback loop. Built-in inflation reflects events in the past, and so might be seen as hangover inflation.

Demand-pull theory states that inflation accelerates when aggregate demand increases beyond the ability of the economy to produce (its potential output). Hence, any factor that increases aggregate demand can cause inflation. However, in the long run, aggregate demand can be held above productive capacity only by increasing the quantity of money in circulation faster than the real growth rate of the economy. Another (although much less common) cause can be a rapid decline in the demand for money, as happened in Europe during the Black Death, or in the Japanese occupied territories just before the defeat of Japan in 1945.

The effect of money on inflation is most obvious when governments finance spending in a crisis, such as a civil war, by printing money excessively. This sometimes leads to hyperinflation, a condition where prices can double in a month or even daily. The money supply is also thought to play a major role in determining moderate levels of inflation, although there are differences of opinion on how important it is. For example, monetarist economists believe that the link is very strong; Keynesian economists, by contrast, typically emphasize the role of aggregate demand in the economy rather than the money supply in determining inflation. That is, for Keynesians, the money supply is only one determinant of aggregate demand.

Some Keynesian economists also disagree with the notion that central banks fully control the money supply, arguing that central banks have little control, since the money supply adapts to the demand for bank credit issued by commercial banks. This is known as the theory of endogenous money, and has been advocated strongly by post-Keynesians as far back as the 1960s. This position is not universally accepted - banks create money by making loans, but the aggregate volume of these loans diminishes as real interest rates increase. Thus, central banks can influence the money supply by making money cheaper or more expensive, thus increasing or decreasing its production.

A fundamental concept in inflation analysis is the relationship between inflation and unemployment, called the Phillips curve. This model suggests that there is a trade-off between price stability and employment. Therefore, some level of inflation could be considered desirable to minimize unemployment. The Phillips curve model described the U.S. experience well in the 1960s but failed to describe the stagflation experienced in the 1970s. Thus, modern macroeconomics describes inflation using a Phillips curve that is able to shift due to such matters as supply shocks and structural inflation. The former refers to such events like the 1973 oil crisis, while the latter refers to the price/wage spiral and inflationary expectations implying that inflation is the new normal. Thus, the Phillips curve represents only the demand-pull component of the triangle model.

Another concept of note is the potential output (sometimes called the "natural gross domestic product"), a level of GDP, where the economy is at its optimal level of production given institutional and natural constraints. (This level of output corresponds to the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, NAIRU, or the "natural" rate of unemployment or the full-employment unemployment rate.) If GDP exceeds its potential (and unemployment is below the NAIRU), the theory says that inflation will accelerate as suppliers increase their prices and built-in inflation worsens. If GDP falls below its potential level (and unemployment is above the NAIRU), inflation will decelerate as suppliers attempt to fill excess capacity, cutting prices and undermining built-in inflation.

However, one problem with this theory for policy-making purposes is that the exact level of potential output (and of the NAIRU) is generally unknown and tends to change over time. Inflation also seems to act in an asymmetric way, rising more quickly than it falls. It can change because of policy: for example, high unemployment under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher might have led to a rise in the NAIRU (and a fall in potential) because many of the unemployed found themselves as structurally unemployed, unable to find jobs that fit their skills. A rise in structural unemployment implies that a smaller percentage of the labor force can find jobs at the NAIRU, where the economy avoids crossing the threshold into the realm of accelerating inflation.

A connection between inflation and unemployment has been drawn since the emergence of large scale unemployment in the 19th century, and connections continue to be drawn today. However, the unemployment rate generally only affects inflation in the short-term but not the long-term. In the long term, the velocity of money is far more predictive of inflation than low unemployment.

In Marxian economics, the unemployed serve as a reserve army of labor, which restrain wage inflation. In the 20th century, similar concepts in Keynesian economics include the NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) and the Phillips curve.

Monetarists believe the most significant factor influencing inflation or deflation is how fast the money supply grows or shrinks. They consider fiscal policy, or government spending and taxation, as ineffective in controlling inflation. The monetarist economist Milton Friedman famously stated, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon."

Monetarists assert that the empirical study of monetary history shows that inflation has always been a monetary phenomenon. The quantity theory of money, simply stated, says that any change in the amount of money in a system will change the price level. This theory begins with the equation of exchange:

where

is the nominal quantity of money;

is the velocity of money in final expenditures;

is the general price level;

is an index of the real value of final expenditures;

In this formula, the general price level is related to the level of real economic activity ( Q), the quantity of money ( M) and the velocity of money ( V). The formula is an identity because the velocity of money ( V) is defined to be the ratio of final nominal expenditure ( ) to the quantity of money ( M).

Monetarists assume that the velocity of money is unaffected by monetary policy (at least in the long run), and the real value of output is determined in the long run by the productive capacity of the economy. Under these assumptions, the primary driver of the change in the general price level is changes in the quantity of money. With exogenous velocity (that is, velocity being determined externally and not being influenced by monetary policy), the money supply determines the value of nominal output (which equals final expenditure) in the short run. In practice, velocity is not exogenous in the short run, and so the formula does not necessarily imply a stable short-run relationship between the money supply and nominal output. However, in the long run, changes in velocity are assumed to be determined by the evolution of the payments mechanism. If velocity is relatively unaffected by monetary policy, the long-run rate of increase in prices (the inflation rate) is equal to the long-run growth rate of the money supply plus the exogenous long-run rate of velocity growth minus the long run growth rate of real output.

If economic growth matches the growth of the money supply, inflation should not occur when all else is equal. A large variety of factors can affect the rate of both. For example, investment in market production, infrastructure, education, and preventive health care can all grow an economy in greater amounts than the investment spending.

Rational expectations theory holds that economic actors look rationally into the future when trying to maximize their well-being, and do not respond solely to immediate opportunity costs and pressures. In this view, while generally grounded in monetarism, future expectations and strategies are important for inflation as well.

A core assertion of rational expectations theory is that actors will seek to "head off" central-bank decisions by acting in ways that fulfill predictions of higher inflation. This means that central banks must establish their credibility in fighting inflation, or economic actors will make bets that the central bank will expand the money supply rapidly enough to prevent recession, even at the expense of exacerbating inflation. Thus, if a central bank has a reputation as being "soft" on inflation, when it announces a new policy of fighting inflation with restrictive monetary growth economic agents will not believe that the policy will persist; their inflationary expectations will remain high, and so will inflation. On the other hand, if the central bank has a reputation of being "tough" on inflation, then such a policy announcement will be believed and inflationary expectations will come down rapidly, thus allowing inflation itself to come down rapidly with minimal economic disruption.

Additionally, there are theories about inflation accepted by economists outside of the mainstream.[citation needed ]

The Austrian School stresses that inflation is not uniform over all assets, goods, and services. Inflation depends on differences in markets and on where newly created money and credit enter the economy. Ludwig von Mises said that inflation should refer to an increase in the quantity of money, that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money, and that price inflation will necessarily follow, always leaving a poorer nation.

The real bills doctrine asserts that banks should issue their money in exchange for short-term real bills of adequate value. As long as banks only issue a dollar in exchange for assets worth at least a dollar, the issuing bank's assets will naturally move in step with its issuance of money, and the money will hold its value. Should the bank fail to get or maintain assets of adequate value, then the bank's money will lose value, just as any financial security will lose value if its asset backing diminishes. The real bills doctrine (also known as the backing theory) thus asserts that inflation results when money outruns its issuer's assets. The quantity theory of money, in contrast, claims that inflation results when money outruns the economy's production of goods.

Currency and banking schools of economics argue the RBD, that banks should also be able to issue currency against bills of trading, which is "real bills" that they buy from merchants. This theory was important in the 19th century in debates between "Banking" and "Currency" schools of monetary soundness, and in the formation of the Federal Reserve. In the wake of the collapse of the international gold standard post 1913, and the move towards deficit financing of government, RBD has remained a minor topic, primarily of interest in limited contexts, such as currency boards. It is generally held in ill repute today, with Frederic Mishkin, a governor of the Federal Reserve going so far as to say it had been "completely discredited."

The debate between currency, or quantity theory, and the banking schools during the 19th century prefigures current questions about the credibility of money in the present. In the 19th century, the banking schools had greater influence in policy in the United States and Great Britain, while the currency schools had more influence "on the continent", that is in non-British countries, particularly in the Latin Monetary Union and the earlier Scandinavia monetary union.

In 2019 monetary historians Thomas M. Humphrey and Richard H. Timberlake published "Gold, the Real Bills Doctrine, and the Fed: Sources of Monetary Disorder 1922-1938".

Inflation is the decrease in the purchasing power of a currency. That is, when the general level of prices rise, each monetary unit can buy fewer goods and services in aggregate. The effect of inflation differs on different sectors of the economy, with some sectors being adversely affected while others benefitting. For example, with inflation, those segments in society which own physical assets, such as property, stock etc., benefit from the price/value of their holdings going up, when those who seek to acquire them will need to pay more for them. Their ability to do so will depend on the degree to which their income is fixed. For example, increases in payments to workers and pensioners often lag behind inflation, and for some people income is fixed. Also, individuals or institutions with cash assets will experience a decline in the purchasing power of the cash. Increases in the price level (inflation) erode the real value of money (the functional currency) and other items with an underlying monetary nature.

Debtors who have debts with a fixed nominal rate of interest will see a reduction in the "real" interest rate as the inflation rate rises. The real interest on a loan is the nominal rate minus the inflation rate. The formula R = N-I approximates the correct answer as long as both the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate are small. The correct equation is r = n/i where r, n and i are expressed as ratios (e.g. 1.2 for +20%, 0.8 for −20%). As an example, when the inflation rate is 3%, a loan with a nominal interest rate of 5% would have a real interest rate of approximately 2% (in fact, it's 1.94%). Any unexpected increase in the inflation rate would decrease the real interest rate. Banks and other lenders adjust for this inflation risk either by including an inflation risk premium to fixed interest rate loans, or lending at an adjustable rate.

High or unpredictable inflation rates are regarded as harmful to an overall economy. They add inefficiencies in the market, and make it difficult for companies to budget or plan long-term. Inflation can act as a drag on productivity as companies are forced to shift resources away from products and services to focus on profit and losses from currency inflation. Uncertainty about the future purchasing power of money discourages investment and saving. Inflation can also impose hidden tax increases. For instance, inflated earnings push taxpayers into higher income tax rates unless the tax brackets are indexed to inflation.

With high inflation, purchasing power is redistributed from those on fixed nominal incomes, such as some pensioners whose pensions are not indexed to the price level, towards those with variable incomes whose earnings may better keep pace with the inflation. This redistribution of purchasing power will also occur between international trading partners. Where fixed exchange rates are imposed, higher inflation in one economy than another will cause the first economy's exports to become more expensive and affect the balance of trade. There can also be negative effects to trade from an increased instability in currency exchange prices caused by unpredictable inflation.

People buy durable and/or non-perishable commodities and other goods as stores of wealth, to avoid the losses expected from the declining purchasing power of money, creating shortages of the hoarded goods.

Social unrest and revolts

Inflation can lead to massive demonstrations and revolutions. For example, inflation and in particular food inflation is considered one of the main reasons that caused the 2010-11 Tunisian revolution and the 2011 Egyptian revolution, according to many observers including Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank. Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was also ousted after only 18 days of demonstrations, and protests soon spread in many countries of North Africa and Middle East.

Hyperinflation

If inflation becomes too high, it can cause people to severely curtail their use of the currency, leading to an acceleration in the inflation rate. High and accelerating inflation grossly interferes with the normal workings of the economy, hurting its ability to supply goods. Hyperinflation can lead to the abandonment of the use of the country's currency (for example as in North Korea) leading to the adoption of an external currency (dollarization).

Allocative efficiency

A change in the supply or demand for a good will normally cause its relative price to change, signaling the buyers and sellers that they should re-allocate resources in response to the new market conditions. But when prices are constantly changing due to inflation, price changes due to genuine relative price signals are difficult to distinguish from price changes due to general inflation, so agents are slow to respond to them. The result is a loss of allocative efficiency.

Shoe leather cost

High inflation increases the opportunity cost of holding cash balances and can induce people to hold a greater portion of their assets in interest paying accounts. However, since cash is still needed to carry out transactions this means that more "trips to the bank" are necessary to make withdrawals, proverbially wearing out the "shoe leather" with each trip.

With high inflation, firms must change their prices often to keep up with economy-wide changes. But often changing prices is itself a costly activity whether explicitly, as with the need to print new menus, or implicitly, as with the extra time and effort needed to change prices constantly.

Labour-market adjustments

Nominal wages are slow to adjust downwards. This can lead to prolonged disequilibrium and high unemployment in the labor market. Since inflation allows real wages to fall even if nominal wages are kept constant, moderate inflation enables labor markets to reach equilibrium faster.

Room to maneuver

The primary tools for controlling the money supply are the ability to set the discount rate, the rate at which banks can borrow from the central bank, and open market operations, which are the central bank's interventions into the bonds market with the aim of affecting the nominal interest rate. If an economy finds itself in a recession with already low, or even zero, nominal interest rates, then the bank cannot cut these rates further (since negative nominal interest rates are impossible) to stimulate the economy - this situation is known as a liquidity trap.

Mundell-Tobin effect

The Nobel laureate Robert Mundell noted that moderate inflation would induce savers to substitute lending for some money holding as a means to finance future spending. That substitution would cause market clearing real interest rates to fall. The lower real rate of interest would induce more borrowing to finance investment. In a similar vein, Nobel laureate James Tobin noted that such inflation would cause businesses to substitute investment in physical capital (plant, equipment, and inventories) for money balances in their asset portfolios. That substitution would mean choosing the making of investments with lower rates of real return. (The rates of return are lower because the investments with higher rates of return were already being made before.) The two related effects are known as the Mundell-Tobin effect. Unless the economy is already overinvesting according to models of economic growth theory, that extra investment resulting from the effect would be seen as positive.

Instability with deflation

Economist S.C. Tsiang noted that once substantial deflation is expected, two important effects will appear; both a result of money holding substituting for lending as a vehicle for saving. The first was that continually falling prices and the resulting incentive to hoard money will cause instability resulting from the likely increasing fear, while money hoards grow in value, that the value of those hoards are at risk, as people realize that a movement to trade those money hoards for real goods and assets will quickly drive those prices up. Any movement to spend those hoards "once started would become a tremendous avalanche, which could rampage for a long time before it would spend itself." Thus, a regime of long-term deflation is likely to be interrupted by periodic spikes of rapid inflation and consequent real economic disruptions. The second effect noted by Tsiang is that when savers have substituted money holding for lending on financial markets, the role of those markets in channeling savings into investment is undermined. With nominal interest rates driven to zero, or near zero, from the competition with a high return money asset, there would be no price mechanism in whatever is left of those markets. With financial markets effectively euthanized, the remaining goods and physical asset prices would move in perverse directions. For example, an increased desire to save could not push interest rates further down (and thereby stimulate investment) but would instead cause additional money hoarding, driving consumer prices further down and making investment in consumer goods production thereby less attractive. Moderate inflation, once its expectation is incorporated into nominal interest rates, would give those interest rates room to go both up and down in response to shifting investment opportunities, or savers' preferences, and thus allow financial markets to function in a more normal fashion.

The real purchasing power of fixed payments is eroded by inflation unless they are inflation-adjusted to keep their real values constant. In many countries, employment contracts, pension benefits, and government entitlements (such as social security) are tied to a cost-of-living index, typically to the consumer price index. A cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) adjusts salaries based on changes in a cost-of-living index. It does not control inflation, but rather seeks to mitigate the consequences of inflation for those on fixed incomes. Salaries are typically adjusted annually in low inflation economies. During hyperinflation they are adjusted more often. They may also be tied to a cost-of-living index that varies by geographic location if the employee moves.

Annual escalation clauses in employment contracts can specify retroactive or future percentage increases in worker pay which are not tied to any index. These negotiated increases in pay are colloquially referred to as cost-of-living adjustments ("COLAs") or cost-of-living increases because of their similarity to increases tied to externally determined indexes.

Although both fiscal and monetary policy can affect inflation, ever since the 1980s, most countries primarily rely on monetary policy to control inflation. When inflation beyond an acceptable level is taking place, the country's central bank can increase the interest rate, which typically will tend to slow or stop the growth of the money supply. Some central banks have a symmetrical inflation target while others only control inflation when it rises above a threshold, whether publicly disclosed or not.

In the 21st century, most economists favor a low and steady rate of inflation. In most countries, central banks or other monetary authorities are tasked with keeping their interbank lending rates at low stable levels, and the target inflation rate of about 2% to 3%. Central banks target a low inflation rate because they believe that high inflation is economically costly because it would create uncertainty about differences in relative prices and about the inflation rate itself. A low positive inflation rate is targeted rather than a zero or negative one because the latter could cause or worsen recessions; low (as opposed to zero or negative) inflation reduces the severity of economic recessions by enabling the labor market to adjust more quickly in a downturn, and reduces the risk that a liquidity trap prevents monetary policy from stabilizing the economy.

Higher interest rates reduce the economy's money supply because fewer people seek loans. When banks make loans, the loan proceeds are generally deposited in bank accounts that are part of the money supply. Therefore, when a person pays back a loan and no other loans are made to replace it, the amount of bank deposits and hence the money supply decrease. For example, in the early 1980s, when the federal funds rate exceeded 15%, the quantity of Federal Reserve dollars fell 8.1%, from US$8.6 trillion down to $7.9 trillion.

In the latter part of the 20th century, there was a debate between Keynesians and monetarists about the appropriate instrument to use to control inflation. Monetarists emphasize a low and steady growth rate of the money supply, while the Keynesians emphasize reducing aggregate demand during economic expansions and increasing demand during recessions to keep inflation stable. Control of aggregate demand can be achieved using both monetary policy and fiscal policy (increased taxation or reduced government spending to reduce demand).

Under a fixed exchange rate currency regime, a country's currency is tied in value to another single currency or to a basket of other currencies (or sometimes to another measure of value, such as gold). A fixed exchange rate is usually used to stabilize the value of a currency, vis-a-vis the currency it is pegged to. It can also be used as a means to control inflation. However, as the value of the reference currency rises and falls, so does the currency pegged to it. This essentially means that the inflation rate in the fixed exchange rate country is determined by the inflation rate of the country the currency is pegged to. In addition, a fixed exchange rate prevents a government from using domestic monetary policy to achieve macroeconomic stability.

Under the Bretton Woods agreement, most countries around the world had currencies that were fixed to the U.S. dollar. This limited inflation in those countries, but also exposed them to the danger of speculative attacks. After the Bretton Woods agreement broke down in the early 1970s, countries gradually turned to floating exchange rates. However, in the later part of the 20th century, some countries reverted to a fixed exchange rate as part of an attempt to control inflation. This policy of using a fixed exchange rate to control inflation was used in many countries in South America in the later part of the 20th century (e.g. Argentina (1991-2002), Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Pakistan, etc.).

The gold standard is a monetary system in which a region's common medium of exchange is paper notes (or other monetary token) that are normally freely convertible into pre-set, fixed quantities of gold. The standard specifies how the gold backing would be implemented, including the amount of specie per currency unit. The currency itself has no innate value, but is accepted by traders because it can be redeemed for the equivalent specie. A U.S. silver certificate, for example, could be redeemed for an actual piece of silver.

The gold standard was partially abandoned via the international adoption of the Bretton Woods system. Under this system all other major currencies were tied at fixed rates to the US dollar, which itself was tied by the US government to gold at the rate of US$35 per ounce. The Bretton Woods system broke down in 1971, causing most countries to switch to fiat money - money backed only by the laws of the country.

Under a gold standard, the long term rate of inflation (or deflation) would be determined by the growth rate of the supply of gold relative to total output. Critics argue that this will cause arbitrary fluctuations in the inflation rate, and that monetary policy would essentially be determined by gold mining.

Another method attempted in the past have been wage and price controls ("incomes policies"). Wage and price controls have been successful in wartime environments in combination with rationing. However, their use in other contexts is far more mixed. Notable failures of their use include the 1972 imposition of wage and price controls by Richard Nixon. More successful examples include the Prices and Incomes Accord in Australia and the Wassenaar Agreement in the Netherlands.

In general, wage and price controls are regarded as a temporary and exceptional measure, only effective when coupled with policies designed to reduce the underlying causes of inflation during the wage and price control regime, for example, winning the war being fought. They often have perverse effects, due to the distorted signals they send to the market. Artificially low prices often cause rationing and shortages and discourage future investment, resulting in yet further shortages. The usual economic analysis is that any product or service that is under-priced is overconsumed. For example, if the official price of bread is too low, there will be too little bread at official prices, and too little investment in bread making by the market to satisfy future needs, thereby exacerbating the problem in the long term.

Temporary controls may complement a recession as a way to fight inflation: the controls make the recession more efficient as a way to fight inflation (reducing the need to increase unemployment), while the recession prevents the kinds of distortions that controls cause when demand is high. However, in general the advice of economists is not to impose price controls but to liberalize prices by assuming that the economy will adjust and abandon unprofitable economic activity. The lower activity will place fewer demands on whatever commodities were driving inflation, whether labor or resources, and inflation will fall with total economic output. This often produces a severe recession, as productive capacity is reallocated and is thus often very unpopular with the people whose livelihoods are destroyed (see creative destruction).

1. ^ Why price stability? Archived October 14, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, Central Bank of Iceland, Accessed on September 11, 2008.

2. Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers. "Death and Taxes, Including Inflation: the Public versus Economists" (January 2007).[1] p. 56

3. "Escaping from a Liquidity Trap and Deflation: The Foolproof Way and Others" Lars E.O. Svensson, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 17, Issue 4 Fall 2003, pp. 145-166

4. Bryan, Michael F., ^ "On the Origin and Evolution of the Word Inflation", Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary, 15 October 1997.

5. ^ Bryan, Michael F. (October 15, 1997). "On the Origin and Evolution of the Word "Inflation"". Economic Commentary. Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary (October 15, 1997).

6. ^ Dobson, Roger (January 27, 2002). "How Alexander caused a great Babylon inflation". The Independent. Archived from the original on May 15, 2011.

7. ^ Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 Harvard Economic Studies, 43 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1934)

8. ^ "John Munro: The Monetary Origins of the 'Price Revolution':South Germany Silver Mining, Merchant Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540, Toronto 2003" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 6, 2009.

9. ^ Bernholz, Peter; Kugler, Peter (August 1, 2007). "The Price Revolution in the 16th Century: Empirical Results from a Structural Vectorautoregression Model" - via ideas.repec.org.

10. ^ Kiley, Michael J. (July 2008). Estimating the common trend rate of inflation for consumer prices and consumer prices excluding food and energy prices (PDF). Finance and Economic Discussion Series. Federal Reserve Board.

11. ^ See: The consumer price index measures movements in prices of a fixed basket of goods and services purchased by a "typical consumer".

12. ^ Seiler, Pascal (September 16, 2020). "Weighting bias and inflation in the time of COVID-19: evidence from Swiss transaction data". Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics. 156 (1): 13. doi:10.1186/s41937-020-00057-7. ISSN 2235-6282. PMC . PMID 32959014.

13. ^ "Median Price Changes: An Alternative Approach to Measuring Current Monetary Inflation" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 15, 2011.

14. ^ "University of Michigan: Inflation Expectation". Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. January 1978.

15. ^ Bank, European Central (July 1, 2004). "Introductory statement to the press conference". European Central Bank. Archived from the original on August 12, 2015.

16. Robert J. Gordon (1988), ^ Macroeconomics: Theory and Policy, 2nd ed., Chap. 22.4, 'Modern theories of inflation'. McGraw-Hill.

17. ^ O'Sullivan, Arthur; Sheffrin, Steven M. (2003) [January 2002]. Economics: Principles in Action. The Wall Street Journal:Classroom Edition (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458: Pearson Prentice Hall: Addison Wesley Longman. p. 341. ISBN 0-13-063085-3.

18. ^ Coe, David T. "Nominal Wages. The NAIRU and Wage Flexibility" (PDF). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

19. Chang, R. (1997) ^ "Is Low Unemployment Inflationary?" Archived November 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review 1Q97:4-13

20. Oliver Hossfeld (2010) ^ "US Money Demand, Monetary Overhang, and Inflation Prediction" Archived November 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine International Network for Economic Research working paper no. 2010.4

21. ^ Friedman, Milton; Schwartz, Anna Jacobson (1963). A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton University Press.

22. ^ Von Mises, Ludwig (1912). The Theory of Money and Credit (PDF) (1953 ed.). Yale University Press. p. 240. In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression Inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the demand for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.

23. ^ Bulkley, George (March 1981). "Personal Savings and Anticipated Inflation". The Economic Journal. 91 (361): 124-135. doi:10.2307/2231702. JSTOR 2231702.

24. ^ AFP (January 27, 2011). "Egypt protests a ticking time bomb: Analysts". The New Age. Archived from the original on February 9, 2011.

25. ^ Steve H. Hanke (July 2013). "North Korea: From Hyperinflation to Dollarization?".

26. ^ Cooley, Thomas F.; Hansen, Gary D. (1989). "The Inflation Tax in a Real Business Cycle Model". The American Economic Review. 79 (4): 733-748. ISSN 0002-8282. JSTOR 1827929.

27. Flanagan, Tammy (September 8, 2006). "COLA Wars". Government Executive. National Journal Group. Archived from the original on October 5, 2008.

28. ^ Bordo, Michael D. (2002). "Gold Standard". The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty.

29. ^ Barsky, Robert B; DeLong, J Bradford (1991). "Forecasting Pre-World War I Inflation: The Fisher Effect and the Gold Standard". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 106 (3): 815-36. doi:10.2307/2937928. JSTOR 2937928.

Abel, Andrew; Bernanke, Ben (2005). "Macroeconomics" (5th ed.). Pearson. Measurement of inflation is discussed in Ch. 2, pp. 45-50; Money growth & Inflation in Ch. 7, pp. 266-269; Keynesian business cycles and inflation in Ch. 9, pp. 308-348.

Barro, Robert J. (1997). Macroeconomics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 895. ISBN 0-262-02436-5.

Blanchard, Olivier (2000). Macroeconomics (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-013306-X.

Mankiw, N. Gregory (2002). "Macroeconomics" (5th ed.). Worth. Measurement of inflation is discussed in Ch. 2, pp. 22-32; Money growth & Inflation in Ch. 4, pp. 81-107; Keynesian business cycles and inflation in Ch. 9, pp. 238-255.

Burda, Michael C.; Wyplosz, Charles (1997). Macroeconomics: a European text. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-877468-0.

World Bank, 2018. Inflation in Emerging and Developing Economies: Evolution, Drivers and Policies. Edited by Jongrim Ha, M. Ayhan Kose, and Franziska Ohnsorge.

Auernheimer, Leonardo, "The Honest Government's Guide to the Revenue From the Creation of Money," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 82, No. 3, May/June 1974, pp. 598-606.

Baumol, William J. and Alan S. Blinder, Macroeconomics: Principles and Policy, Tenth edition. Thomson South-Western, 2006. ISBN 0-324-22114-2

Friedman, Milton, Nobel lecture: Inflation and unemployment 1977

Mishkin, Frederic S., The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, New York, Harper Collins, 1995.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, "Understanding Inflation and the Implications for Monetary Policy: A Phillips Curve Retrospective", Conference Series 53, June 9-11, 2008, Chatham, Massachusetts. (Also cf. Phillips curve article)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In economics, inflation refers to a general progressive increase in prices of goods and services in an economy. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation corresponds to a reduction in the purchasing power of money.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period.

Unemployment can have many sources, such as the following:

Unemployment and the status of the economy can be influenced by a country through, for example, fiscal policy. Furthermore, the monetary authority of a country, such as the central bank, can influence the availability and cost for money through its monetary policy.

In addition to theories of unemployment, a few categorisations of unemployment are used for more precisely modelling the effects of unemployment within the economic system. Some of the main types of unemployment include structural unemployment, frictional unemployment, cyclical unemployment, involuntary unemployment and classical unemployment. Structural unemployment focuses on foundational problems in the economy and inefficiencies inherent in labor markets, including a mismatch between the supply and demand of laborers with necessary skill sets. Structural arguments emphasize causes and solutions related to disruptive technologies and globalization. Discussions of frictional unemployment focus on voluntary decisions to work based on individuals' valuation of their own work and how that compares to current wage rates added to the time and effort required to find a job. Causes and solutions for frictional unemployment often address job entry threshold and wage rates.

Because of the difficulty in measuring the unemployment rate by, for example, using surveys (as in the United States) or through registered unemployed citizens (as in some European countries), statistical figures such as the employment-to-population ratio might be more suitable for evaluating the status of the workforce and the economy if they were based on people who are registered, for example, as taxpayers.

Definitions, types, and theories

The state of being without any work yet looking for work is called unemployment. Economists distinguish between various overlapping types of and theories of unemployment, including cyclical or Keynesian unemployment, frictional unemployment, structural unemployment and classical unemployment. Some additional types of unemployment that are occasionally mentioned are seasonal unemployment, hardcore unemployment, and hidden unemployment.

Though there have been several definitions of "voluntary" and " involuntary unemployment" in the economics literature, a simple distinction is often applied. Voluntary unemployment is attributed to the individual's decisions, but involuntary unemployment exists because of the socio-economic environment (including the market structure, government intervention, and the level of aggregate demand) in which individuals operate. In these terms, much or most of frictional unemployment is voluntary since it reflects individual search behavior. Voluntary unemployment includes workers who reject low-wage jobs, but involuntary unemployment includes workers fired because of an economic crisis, industrial decline, company bankruptcy, or organizational restructuring.

On the other hand, cyclical unemployment, structural unemployment, and classical unemployment are largely involuntary in nature. However, the existence of structural unemployment may reflect choices made by the unemployed in the past, and classical (natural) unemployment may result from the legislative and economic choices made by labour unions or political parties.

The clearest cases of involuntary unemployment are those with fewer job vacancies than unemployed workers even when wages are allowed to adjust and so even if all vacancies were to be filled, some unemployed workers would still remain. That happens with cyclical unemployment, as macroeconomic forces cause microeconomic unemployment, which can boomerang back and exacerbate those macroeconomic forces.

Classical, or real-wage, unemployment, occurs when real wages for a job are set above the market-clearing level, causing the number of job-seekers to exceed the number of vacancies. On the other hand, most economists argue that as wages fall below a livable wage, many choose to drop out of the labour market and no longer seek employment. That is especially true in countries in which low-income families are supported through public welfare systems. In such cases, wages would have to be high enough to motivate people to choose employment over what they receive through public welfare. Wages below a livable wage are likely to result in lower labor market participation in the above-stated scenario. In addition, consumption of goods and services is the primary driver of increased demand for labor. Higher wages lead to workers having more income available to consume goods and services. Therefore, higher wages increase general consumption and as a result demand for labor increases and unemployment decreases.

Many economists[who? ] have argued that unemployment increases with increased governmental regulation. For example, minimum wage laws raise the cost of some low-skill laborers above market equilibrium, resulting in increased unemployment as people who wish to work at the going rate cannot (as the new and higher enforced wage is now greater than the value of their labour). Laws restricting layoffs may make businesses less likely to hire in the first place, as hiring becomes more risky.

However, that argument overly simplifies the relationship between wage rates and unemployment by ignoring numerous factors that contribute to unemployment. Some, such as Murray Rothbard, suggest that even social taboos can prevent wages from falling to the market-clearing level.

In Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in the Twentieth-Century America, economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway argue that the empirical record of wages rates, productivity, and unemployment in America validates classical unemployment theory. Their data shows a strong correlation between adjusted real wage and unemployment in the United States from 1900 to 1990. However, they maintain that their data does not take into account exogenous events.

Cyclical, deficient-demand, or Keynesian unemployment occurs when there is not enough aggregate demand in the economy to provide jobs for everyone who wants to work. Demand for most goods and services falls, less production is needed and consequently, fewer workers are needed, wages are sticky and do not fall to meet the equilibrium level, and unemployment results. Its name is derived from the frequent ups and downs in the business cycle, but unemployment can also be persistent, such as during the Great Depression.

With cyclical unemployment, the number of unemployed workers exceeds the number of job vacancies and so even if all open jobs were filled, some workers would still remain unemployed. Some associate cyclical unemployment with frictional unemployment because the factors that cause the friction are partially caused by cyclical variables. For example, a surprise decrease in the money supply may suddenly inhibit aggregate demand and thus inhibit labor demand.

Keynesian economists, on the other hand, see the lack of supply of jobs as potentially resolvable by government intervention. One suggested intervention involves deficit spending to boost employment and goods demand. Another intervention involves an expansionary monetary policy to increase the supply of money, which should reduce interest rates, which, in turn, should lead to an increase in non-governmental spending.

Unemployment under "full employment"

In demand-based theory, it is possible to abolish cyclical unemployment by increasing the aggregate demand for products and workers. However, the economy eventually hits an " inflation barrier" that is imposed by the four other kinds of unemployment to the extent that they exist. Historical experience suggests that low unemployment affects inflation in the short term but not the long term. In the long term, the velocity of money supply measures such as the MZM ("money zero maturity", representing cash and equivalent demand deposits) velocity is far more predictive of inflation than low unemployment.

Some demand theory economists see the inflation barrier as corresponding to the natural rate of unemployment. The "natural" rate of unemployment is defined as the rate of unemployment that exists when the labour market is in equilibrium, and there is pressure for neither rising inflation rates nor falling inflation rates. An alternative technical term for that rate is the NAIRU, the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. Whatever its name, demand theory holds that if the unemployment rate gets "too low," inflation will accelerate in the absence of wage and price controls (incomes policies).

One of the major problems with the NAIRU theory is that no one knows exactly what the NAIRU is, and it clearly changes over time. The margin of error can be quite high relative to the actual unemployment rate, making it hard to use the NAIRU in policy-making.

Another, normative, definition of full employment might be called the ideal unemployment rate. It would exclude all types of unemployment that represent forms of inefficiency. This type of "full employment" unemployment would correspond to only frictional unemployment (excluding that part encouraging the McJobs management strategy) and so would be very low. However, it would be impossible to attain this full-employment target using only demand-side Keynesian stimulus without getting below the NAIRU and causing accelerating inflation (absent incomes policies). Training programs aimed at fighting structural unemployment would help here.

To the extent that hidden unemployment exists, it implies that official unemployment statistics provide a poor guide to what unemployment rate coincides with "full employment."

Structural unemployment occurs when a labour market is unable to provide jobs for everyone who wants one because there is a mismatch between the skills of the unemployed workers and the skills needed for the available jobs. Structural unemployment is hard to separate empirically from frictional unemployment except that it lasts longer. As with frictional unemployment, simple demand-side stimulus will not work to abolish this type of unemployment easily.

Structural unemployment may also be encouraged to rise by persistent cyclical unemployment: if an economy suffers from longlasting low aggregate demand, it means that many of the unemployed become disheartened, and their skills (including job-searching skills) become "rusty" and obsolete. Problems with debt may lead to homelessness and a fall into the vicious circle of poverty.

That means that they may not fit the job vacancies that are created when the economy recovers. The implication is that sustained high demand may lower structural unemployment. This theory of persistence in structural unemployment has been referred to as an example of path dependence or " hysteresis."

Much technological unemployment, caused by the replacement of workers by machines might be counted as structural unemployment. Alternatively, technological unemployment might refer to the way in which steady increases in labour productivity mean that fewer workers are needed to produce the same level of output every year. The fact that aggregate demand can be raised to deal with the problem suggests that the problem is instead one of cyclical unemployment. As indicated by Okun's law, the demand side must grow sufficiently quickly to absorb not only the growing labour force but also the workers who are made redundant by the increased labour productivity.

Seasonal unemployment may be seen as a kind of structural unemployment since it is linked to certain kinds of jobs (construction and migratory farm work). The most-cited official unemployment measures erase this kind of unemployment from the statistics using "seasonal adjustment" techniques. That results in substantial and permanent structural unemployment.

Frictional unemployment is the time period between jobs in which a worker searches for or transitions from one job to another. It is sometimes called search unemployment and can be voluntary, based on the circumstances of the unemployed individual. Frictional unemployment exists because both jobs and workers are heterogeneous, and a mismatch can result between the characteristics of supply and demand. Such a mismatch can be related to skills, payment, work-time, location, seasonal industries, attitude, taste, and a multitude of other factors. New entrants (such as graduating students) and re-entrants (such as former homemakers) can also suffer a spell of frictional unemployment.

Workers and employers accept a certain level of imperfection, risk or compromise, but usually not right away. They will invest some time and effort to find a better match. That is, in fact, beneficial to the economy since it results in a better allocation of resources. However, if the search takes too long and mismatches are too frequent, the economy suffers since some work will not get done. Therefore, governments will seek ways to reduce unnecessary frictional unemployment by multiple means including providing education, advice, training, and assistance such as daycare centers.

The frictions in the labour market are sometimes illustrated graphically with a Beveridge curve, a downward-sloping, convex curve that shows a correlation between the unemployment rate on one axis and the vacancy rate on the other. Changes in the supply of or demand for labour cause movements along the curve. An increase or decrease in labour market frictions will shift the curve outwards or inwards.

Official statistics often underestimate unemployment rates because of hidden, or covered, unemployment. That is the unemployment of potential workers that are not reflected in official unemployment statistics because of how the statistics are collected. In many countries, only those who have no work but are actively looking for work and/or qualifying for social security benefits are counted as unemployed. Those who have given up looking for work and sometimes those who are on government "retraining" programs are not officially counted among the unemployed even though they are not employed.

The statistic also does not count the " underemployed", those working fewer hours than they would prefer or in a job that fails to make good use of their capabilities. In addition, those who are of working age but are currently in full-time education are usually not considered unemployed in government statistics. Traditional unemployed native societies who survive by gathering, hunting, herding, and farming in wilderness areas may or may not be counted in unemployment statistics.

Long-term unemployment (LTU) is defined in European Union statistics as unemployment lasting for longer than one year (while unemployment lasting over two years is defined as very long-term unemployment). The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which reports current long-term unemployment rate at 1.9 percent, defines this as unemployment lasting 27 weeks or longer. Long-term unemployment is a component of structural unemployment, which results in long-term unemployment existing in every social group, industry, occupation, and all levels of education.

In 2015 the European Commission published recommendations on how to reduce long-term unemployment. These advised governments to:

encourage long-term unemployed people to register with an employment service;

provide each registered long-term unemployed person with an individual in-depth assessment to identify their needs and potential within 18 months;

offer a tailor-made job integration agreement (JIA) to all registered long-term unemployed within 18 months. These might include measures such as mentoring, help with job search, further education and training, support for housing, transport, child and care services and rehabilitation. Each person would have a single point of contact to access this support, which would be implemented in partnership with employers.

In 2017-2019 it implemented the Long-Term Unemployment project to research solutions implemented by EU member states and produce a toolkit to guide government action. Progress was evaluated in 2019.

It is in the very nature of the capitalist mode of production to overwork some workers while keeping the rest as a reserve army of unemployed paupers.

Marxists share the Keynesian viewpoint of the relationship between economic demand and employment, but with the caveat that the market system's propensity to slash wages and reduce labor participation on an enterprise level causes a requisite decrease in aggregate demand in the economy as a whole, causing crises of unemployment and periods of low economic activity before the capital accumulation (investment) phase of economic growth can continue. According to Karl Marx, unemployment is inherent within the unstable capitalist system and periodic crises of mass unemployment are to be expected. He theorized that unemployment was inevitable and even a necessary part of the capitalist system, with recovery and regrowth also part of the process. The function of the proletariat within the capitalist system is to provide a " reserve army of labour" that creates downward pressure on wages. This is accomplished by dividing the proletariat into surplus labour (employees) and under-employment (unemployed). This reserve army of labour fight among themselves for scarce jobs at lower and lower wages. At first glance, unemployment seems inefficient since unemployed workers do not increase profits, but unemployment is profitable within the global capitalist system because unemployment lowers wages which are costs from the perspective of the owners. From this perspective low wages benefit the system by reducing economic rents. Yet, it does not benefit workers; according to Karl Marx, the workers (proletariat) work to benefit the bourgeoisie through their production of capital. Capitalist systems unfairly manipulate the market for labour by perpetuating unemployment which lowers laborers' demands for fair wages. Workers are pitted against one another at the service of increasing profits for owners. As a result of the capitalist mode of production, Marx argued that workers experienced alienation and estrangement through their economic identity. According to Marx, the only way to permanently eliminate unemployment would be to abolish capitalism and the system of forced competition for wages and then shift to a socialist or communist economic system. For contemporary Marxists, the existence of persistent unemployment is proof of the inability of capitalism to ensure full employment.

There are also different ways national statistical agencies measure unemployment. The differences may limit the validity of international comparisons of unemployment data. To some degree, the differences remain despite national statistical agencies increasingly adopting the definition of unemployment of the International Labour Organization. To facilitate international comparisons, some organizations, such as the OECD, Eurostat, and International Labor Comparisons Program, adjust data on unemployment for comparability across countries.

Though many people care about the number of unemployed individuals, economists typically focus on the unemployment rate, which corrects for the normal increase in the number of people employed caused by increases in population and increases in the labour force relative to the population. The unemployment rate is expressed as a percentage and calculated as follows:

As defined by the International Labour Organization, "unemployed workers" are those who are currently not working but are willing and able to work for pay, currently available to work, and have actively searched for work. Individuals who are actively seeking job placement must make the effort to be in contact with an employer, have job interviews, contact job placement agencies, send out resumes, submit applications, respond to advertisements, or some other means of active job searching within the prior four weeks. Simply looking at advertisements and not responding will not count as actively seeking job placement. Since not all unemployment may be "open" and counted by government agencies, official statistics on unemployment may not be accurate. In the United States, for example, the unemployment rate does not take into consideration those individuals who are not actively looking for employment, such as those who are still attending college.

According to the OECD, Eurostat, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed people as a percentage of the labour force.

"An unemployed person is defined by Eurostat, according to the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, as:

someone aged 15 to 74 (in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway: 16 to 74 years);

without work during the reference week;

available to start work within the next two weeks (or has already found a job to start within the next three months);

actively having sought employment at some time during the last four weeks."

The labour force, or workforce, includes both employed (employees and self-employed) and unemployed people but not the economically inactive, such as pre-school children, school children, students and pensioners.

The unemployment rate of an individual country is usually calculated and reported on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis by the National Agency of Statistics. Organisations like the OECD report statistics for all of its member states.

In many countries like in Germany, the unemployment rate is based on the number of people who are registered as unemployed. Other countries like the United States use a labour force survey to calculate the unemployment rate.

The ILO describes four different methods to calculate the unemployment rate:

Labour Force Sample Surveys are the most preferred method of unemployment rate calculation since they give the most comprehensive results and enables calculation of unemployment by different group categories such as race and gender. This method is the most internationally comparable.

Official Estimates are determined by a combination of information from one or more of the other three methods. The use of this method has been declining in favor of labour surveys.

Social Insurance Statistics, such as unemployment benefits, are computed base on the number of persons insured representing the total labour force and the number of persons who are insured that are collecting benefits. This method has been heavily criticized because if the expiration of benefits before the person finds work.

Employment Office Statistics are the least effective since they include only a monthly tally of unemployed persons who enter employment offices. This method also includes those who are not unemployed by the ILO definition.

The primary measure of unemployment, U3, allows for comparisons between countries. Unemployment differs from country to country and across different time periods. For example, in the 1990s and 2000s, the United States had lower unemployment levels than many countries in the European Union, which had significant internal variation, with countries like the United Kingdom and Denmark outperforming Italy and France. However, large economic events like the Great Depression can lead to similar unemployment rates across the globe.

In 2013, the ILO adopted a resolution to introduce new indicators to measure the unemployment rate.

LU1: Unemployment rate: [persons in unemployment / labour force] × 100

LU2: Combined rate of time-related underemployment and unemployment: [(persons in time-related underemployment + persons in unemployment) / labour force]

x 100

LU3: Combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force: [(persons in unemployment + potential labour force) / (extended labour force)] × 100

LU4: Composite measure of labour underutilization: [(persons in time-related underemployment + persons in unemployment + potential

labour force) / (extended labour force)] × 100

European Union (Eurostat)

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, defines unemployed as those persons between age 15 and 74 who are not working, have looked for work in the last four weeks, and are ready to start work within two weeks; this definition conforms to ILO standards. Both the actual count and the unemployment rate are reported. Statistical data are available by member state for the European Union as a whole (EU28) as well as for the eurozone (EA19). Eurostat also includes a long-term unemployment rate, which is defined as part of the unemployed who have been unemployed for more than one year.

The main source used is the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). It collects data on all member states each quarter. For monthly calculations, national surveys or national registers from employment offices are used in conjunction with quarterly EU-LFS data. The exact calculation for individual countries, resulting in harmonized monthly data, depends on the availability of the data.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures employment and unemployment (of those over 17 years of age) by using two different labor force surveys conducted by the United States Census Bureau (within the United States Department of Commerce) and/or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (within the United States Department of Labor) that gather employment statistics monthly. The Current Population Survey (CPS), or "Household Survey," conducts a survey based on a sample of 60,000 households. The survey measures the unemployment rate based on the ILO definition.

The Current Employment Statistics survey (CES), or "Payroll Survey," conducts a survey based on a sample of 160,000 businesses and government agencies, which represent 400,000 individual employers. Since the survey measures only civilian nonagricultural employment, it does not calculate an unemployment rate, and it differs from the ILO unemployment rate definition. Both sources have different classification criteria and usually produce differing results. Additional data are also available from the government, such as the unemployment insurance weekly claims report available from the Office of Workforce Security, within the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration. The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides up-to-date numbers via a PDF linked here. The BLS also provides a readable concise current Employment Situation Summary, updated monthly.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also calculates six alternate measures of unemployment, U1 to U6, which measure different aspects of unemployment:

U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.

U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.

U3: Official unemployment rate, per the ILO definition, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks.

U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.

U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers," or "loosely attached workers," or those who "would like" and are able to work but have not looked for work recently.

U6: U5 + Part-time workers who want to work full-time, but cannot for economic reasons (underemployment).

Note: "Marginally attached workers" are added to the total labour force for unemployment rate calculation for U4, U5, and U6. The BLS revised the CPS in 1994 and among the changes the measure representing the official unemployment rate was renamed U3 instead of U5. In 2013, Representative Hunter proposed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics use the U5 rate instead of the current U3 rate.

The unemployment rate is included in a number of major economic indices including the US Conference Board's Index of Leading Indicators a macroeconomic measure of the state of the economy.

Some critics believe that current methods of measuring unemployment are inaccurate in terms of the impact of unemployment on people as these methods do not take into account the 1.5% of the available working population incarcerated in US prisons (who may or may not be working while they are incarcerated); those who have lost their jobs and have become discouraged over time from actively looking for work; those who are self-employed or wish to become self-employed, such as tradesmen or building contractors or information technology consultants; those who have retired before the official retirement age but would still like to work (involuntary early retirees); those on disability pensions who do not possess full health but still wish to work in occupations that suitable for their medical conditions; or those who work for payment for as little as one hour per week but would like to work full time.

The last people are "involuntary part-time" workers, those who are underemployed, such as a computer programmer who is working in a retail store until he can find a permanent job, involuntary stay-at-home mothers who would prefer to work, and graduate and professional school students who are unable to find worthwhile jobs after they graduated with their bachelor's degrees.

Internationally, some nations' unemployment rates are sometimes muted or appear less severe because of the number of self-employed individuals working in agriculture. Small independent farmers are often considered self-employed and so cannot be unemployed. That can impact non-industrialized economies, such as the United States and Europe in the early 19th century, since overall unemployment was approximately 3% because so many individuals were self-employed, independent farmers; however, non-agricultural unemployment was as high as 80%.

Many economies industrialize and so experience increasing numbers of non-agricultural workers. For example, the United States' non-agricultural labour force increased from 20% in 1800 to 50% in 1850 and 97% in 2000. The shift away from self-employment increases the percentage of the population that is included in unemployment rates. When unemployment rates between countries or time periods are compared, it is best to consider differences in their levels of industrialization and self-employment.

It is possible to be neither employed nor unemployed by ILO definitions by being outside of the "labour force." Such people have no job and are not looking for one. Many of them go to school or are retired. Family responsibilities keep others out of the labour force. Still others have a physical or mental disability that prevents them from participating in the labour force. Some people simply elect not to work and prefer to be dependent on others for sustenance.

In particular, as of 2005, roughly 0.7% of the US population is incarcerated (1.5% of the available working population). Additionally, children, the elderly, and some individuals with disabilities are typically not counted as part of the labour force and so are not included in the unemployment statistics. However, some elderly and many disabled individuals are active in the labour market.

In the early stages of an economic boom, unemployment often rises. That is because people join the labour market (give up studying, start a job hunt, etc.) as a result of the improving job market, but until they have actually found a position, they are counted as unemployed. Similarly, during a recession, the increase in the unemployment rate is moderated by people leaving the labour force or being otherwise discounted from the labour force, such as with the self-employed.

For the fourth quarter of 2004, according to OECD ( Employment Outlook 2005 ISBN 92-64-01045-9), normalized unemployment for men aged 25 to 54 was 4.6% in the US and 7.4% in France. At the same time and for the same population, the employment rate (number of workers divided by population) was 86.3% in the US and 86.7% in France. That example shows that the unemployment rate was 60% higher in France than in the US, but more people in that demographic were working in France than in the US, which is counterintuitive if it is expected that the unemployment rate reflects the health of the labour market.

Those deficiencies make many labour market economists prefer to look at a range of economic statistics such as labour market participation rate, the percentage of people between 15 and 64 who are currently employed or searching for employment, the total number of full-time jobs in an economy, the number of people seeking work as a raw number and not a percentage, and the total number of person-hours worked in a month compared to the total number of person-hours people would like to work. In particular, the National Bureau of Economic Research does not use the unemployment rate but prefers various employment rates to date recessions.

The labor force participation rate is the ratio between the labor force and the overall size of their cohort (national population of the same age range). In the West, during the later half of the 20th century, the labor force participation rate increased significantly because of an increase in the number of women entering the workplace.

In the United States, there have been four significant stages of women's participation in the labour force: increases in the 20th century and decreases in the 21st century. Male labor force participation decreased from 1953 to 2013. Since October 2013, men have been increasingly joining the labour force.

From the late 19th century to the 1920s, very few women worked outside the home. They were young single women who typically withdrew from the labor force at marriage unless family needed two incomes. Such women worked primarily in the textile manufacturing industry or as domestic workers. That profession empowered women and allowed them to earn a living wage. At times, they were a financial help to their families.

Between 1930 and 1950, female labor force participation increased primarily because of the increased demand for office workers, women's participation in the high school movement, and electrification, which reduced the time that was spent on household chores. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, most women were secondary earners working mainly as secretaries, teachers, nurses, and librarians ( pink-collar jobs).

A common theory in modern economics claims that the rise of women participating in the US labor force in the 1950s to the 1990s was caused by the introduction of a new contraceptive technology, birth control pills, as well as the adjustment of age of majority laws. The use of birth control gave women the flexibility of opting to invest and to advance their career while they maintained a relationship. By having control over the timing of their fertility, they were not running a risk of thwarting their career choices. However, only 40% of the population actually used the birth control pill.

That implies that other factors may have contributed to women choosing to invest in advancing their careers. One factor may be that an increasing number of men delayed the age of marriage, which allowed women to marry later in life without them worrying about the quality of older men. Other factors include the changing nature of work, with machines replacing physical labor, thus eliminating many traditional male occupations, and the rise of the service sector in which many jobs are gender neutral.

Another factor that may have contributed to the trend was the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex. Such legislation diminished sexual discrimination and encouraged more women to enter the labor market by receiving fair remuneration to help raising families and children.

At the turn of the 21st century, the labor force participation began to reverse its long period of increase. Reasons for the change include a rising share of older workers, an increase in school enrollment rates among young workers, and a decrease in female labor force participation.

The labor force participation rate can decrease when the rate of growth of the population outweighs that of the employed and the unemployed together. The labor force participation rate is a key component in long-term economic growth, almost as important as productivity.

Participation rates are defined as follows:

Pop = total population

LF = labor force = U + E

LFpop = labor force population
(generally defined as all men and women aged 15-64)

p = participation rate = LF / LFpop

E = number employed

e = rate of employment = E / LFpop

U = number of unemployed

u = rate of unemployment = U / LF

The labor force participation rate explains how an increase in the unemployment rate can occur simultaneously with an increase in employment. If a large number of new workers enter the labor force but only a small fraction become employed, then the increase in the number of unemployed workers can outpace the growth in employment.

The unemployment-to-population ratio calculates the share of unemployed for the whole population. This is in contrast to the unemployment rate, which calculates the percentage of unemployed persons in relation to the active population. Particularly, many young people between 15 and 24 are studying full-time and so are neither working nor looking for a job. That means that they are not part of the labor force, which is used as the denominator when the unemployment rate is calculated.

High and the persistent unemployment, in which economic inequality increases, has a negative effect on subsequent long-run economic growth. Unemployment can harm growth because it is a waste of resources; generates redistributive pressures and subsequent distortions; drives people to poverty; constrains liquidity limiting labor mobility; and erodes self-esteem promoting social dislocation, unrest, and conflict. The 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert J. Shiller, said that rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the most important problem.

Unemployed individuals are unable to earn money to meet financial obligations. Failure to pay mortgage payments or to pay rent may lead to homelessness through foreclosure or eviction. Across the United States the growing ranks of people made homeless in the foreclosure crisis are generating tent cities.

Unemployment increases susceptibility to cardiovascular disease, somatization, anxiety disorders, depression, and suicide. In addition, unemployed people have higher rates of medication use, poor diet, physician visits, tobacco smoking, alcoholic beverage consumption, drug use, and lower rates of exercise. According to a study published in Social Indicator Research, even those who tend to be optimistic find it difficult to look on the bright side of things when unemployed. Using interviews and data from German participants aged 16 to 94, including individuals coping with the stresses of real life and not just a volunteering student population, the researchers determined that even optimists struggled with being unemployed.

In 1979, M. Harvey Brenner found that for every 10% increase in the number of unemployed, there is an increase of 1.2% in total mortality, a 1.7% increase in cardiovascular disease, 1.3% more cirrhosis cases, 1.7% more suicides, 4.0% more arrests, and 0.8% more assaults reported to the police.

A study by Christopher Ruhm in 2000 on the effect of recessions on health found that several measures of health actually improve during recessions. As for the impact of an economic downturn on crime, during the Great Depression, the crime rate did not decrease. The unemployed in the US often use welfare programs such as food stamps or accumulating debt because unemployment insurance in the US generally does not replace most of the income that was received on the job, and one cannot receive such aid indefinitely.

Not everyone suffers equally from unemployment. In a prospective study of 9,570 individuals over four years, highly-conscientious people suffered more than twice as much if they became unemployed. The authors suggested that may because of conscientious people making different attributions about why they became unemployed or through experiencing stronger reactions following failure. There is also the possibility of reverse causality from poor health to unemployment.

Some researchers hold that many of the low-income jobs are not really a better option than unemployment with a welfare state, with its unemployment insurance benefits. However, since it is difficult or impossible to get unemployment insurance benefits without having worked in the past, those jobs and unemployment are more complementary than they are substitutes. (They are often held short-term, either by students or by those trying to gain experience; turnover in most low-paying jobs is high.)

Unemployment can also bring personal costs in relation to gender. One study found that women are more likely to experience unemployment than men and that they are less likely to move from temporary positions to permanent positions. Another study on gender and unemployment found that men, however, are more likely to experience greater stress, depression, and adverse effects from unemployment, largely stemming from the perceived threat to their role as breadwinner. The study found that men expect themselves to be viewed as "less manly" after a job loss than they actually are and so they engage in compensating behaviors, such as financial risk-taking and increased assertiveness. Unemployment has been linked to extremely adverse effects on men's mental health. Professor Ian Hickie of the University of Sydney said that evidence showed that men have more restricted social networks than women and that men have are heavily work-based. Therefore, the loss of a job for men means the loss of a whole set of social connections as well. That loss can then lead to men becoming socially isolated very quickly. An Australian study on the mental health impacts of graduating during an economic downturn found that the negative mental health outcomes are greater and more scarring for men than women. The effect was particularly pronounced for those with vocational or secondary education.

Costs of unemployment also vary depending on age. The young and the old are the two largest age groups currently experiencing unemployment. A 2007 study from Jacob and Kleinert found that young people (ages 18 to 24) who have fewer resources and limited work experiences are more likely to be unemployed. Other researchers have found that today's high school seniors place a lower value on work than those in the past, which is likely because they recognize the limited availability of jobs. At the other end of the age spectrum, studies have found that older individuals have more barriers than younger workers to employment, require stronger social networks to acquire work, and are also less likely to move from temporary to permanent positions. Additionally, some older people see age discrimination as the reason for them not getting hired.

An economy with high unemployment is not using all of the resources, specifically labour, available to it. Since it is operating below its production possibility frontier, it could have higher output if all of the workforce were usefully employed. However, there is a tradeoff between economic efficiency and unemployment: if all frictionally unemployed accepted the first job that they were offered, they would be likely to be operating at below their skill level, reducing the economy's efficiency.

During a long period of unemployment, workers can lose their skills, causing a loss of human capital. Being unemployed can also reduce the life expectancy of workers by about seven years.

High unemployment can encourage xenophobia and protectionism since workers fear that foreigners are stealing their jobs. Efforts to preserve existing jobs of domestic and native workers include legal barriers against "outsiders" who want jobs, obstacles to immigration, and/or tariffs and similar trade barriers against foreign competitors.

High unemployment can also cause social problems such as crime. If people have less disposable income than before, it is very likely that crime levels within the economy will increase.

A 2015 study published in , estimates that unemployment causes 45,000 suicides a year globally.

High levels of unemployment can be causes of civil unrest, in some cases leading to revolution, particularly totalitarianism. The fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power, which culminated in World War II and the deaths of tens of millions and the destruction of much of the physical capital of Europe, is attributed to the poor economic conditions in Germany at the time, notably a high unemployment rate of above 20%; see Great Depression in Central Europe for details.

However the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic is not directly blamed for the Nazi rise. Hyperinflation occurred primarily in 1921 to 1923, the year of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. Although hyperinflation has been blamed for damaging the credibility of democratic institutions, the Nazis did not assume government until 1933, ten years after the hyperinflation but in the midst of high unemployment.

Rising unemployment has traditionally been regarded by the public and the media in any country as a key guarantor of electoral defeat for any government that oversees it. That was very much the consensus in the United Kingdom until 1983, when Thatcher's Conservative government won a landslide in the general election, despite overseeing a rise in unemployment from 1.5 million to 3.2 million since the 1979 election.

The primary benefit of unemployment is that people are available for hire, without being headhunted away from their existing employers. That permits both new and old businesses to take on staff.

Unemployment is argued to be "beneficial" to the people who are not unemployed in the sense that it averts inflation, which itself has damaging effects, by providing (in Marxian terms) a reserve army of labour, which keeps wages in check. However, the direct connection between full local employment and local inflation has been disputed by some because of the recent increase in international trade that supplies low-priced goods even while local employment rates rise to full employment.

Full employment cannot be achieved because workers would shirk if they were not threatened with the possibility of unemployment. The curve for the no-shirking condition (labelled NSC) thus goes to infinity at full employment. The inflation-fighting benefits to the entire economy arising from a presumed optimum level of unemployment have been studied extensively. The Shapiro-Stiglitz model suggests that wages never bid down sufficiently to reach 0% unemployment. That occurs because employers know that when wages decrease, workers will shirk and expend less effort. Employers avoid shirking by preventing wages from decreasing so low that workers give up and become unproductive. The higher wages perpetuate unemployment, but the threat of unemployment reduces shirking.

Before current levels of world trade were developed, unemployment was shown to reduce inflation, following the Phillips curve, or to decelerate inflation, following the NAIRU/ natural rate of unemployment theory since it is relatively easy to seek a new job without losing a current job. When more jobs are available for fewer workers (lower unemployment), that may allow workers to find the jobs that better fit their tastes, talents and needs.

As in the Marxian theory of unemployment, special interests may also benefit. Some employers may expect that employees with no fear of losing their jobs will not work as hard or will demand increased wages and benefit. According to that theory, unemployment may promote general labour productivity and profitability by increasing employers' rationale for their monopsony-like power (and profits).

Optimal unemployment has also been defended as an environmental tool to brake the constantly-accelerated growth of the GDP to maintain levels that are sustainable in the context of resource constraints and environmental impacts. However, the tool of denying jobs to willing workers seems a blunt instrument for conserving resources and the environment. It reduces the consumption of the unemployed across the board and only in the short term. Full employment of the unemployed workforce, all focused toward the goal of developing more environmentally-efficient methods for production and consumption, might provide a more significant and lasting cumulative environmental benefit and reduced resource consumption.

Some critics of the "culture of work" such as the anarchist Bob Black see employment as culturally overemphasized in modern countries. Such critics often propose quitting jobs when possible, working less, reassessing the cost of living to that end, creation of jobs that are "fun" as opposed to "work," and creating cultural norms in which work is seen as unhealthy. These people advocate an " anti-work" ethic for life.

As a result of productivity, the work week declined considerably during the 19th century. By the 1920s, the average workweek in the US was 49 hours, but it was reduced to 40 hours (after which overtime premium was applied) as part of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. During the Great Depression, the enormous productivity gains caused by electrification, mass production, and agricultural mechanization were believed to have ended the need for a large number of previously-employed workers.

Societies try a number of different measures to get as many people as possible into work, and various societies have experienced close to full employment for extended periods, particularly during the post-World War II economic expansion. The United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s averaged 1.6% unemployment, and in Australia, the 1945 White Paper on Full Employment in Australia established a government policy of full employment, which lasted until the 1970s.

However, mainstream economic discussions of full employment since the 1970s suggest that attempts to reduce the level of unemployment below the natural rate of unemployment will fail but result only in less output and more inflation.

Increases in the demand for labour move the economy along the demand curve, increasing wages and employment. The demand for labour in an economy is derived from the demand for goods and services. As such, if the demand for goods and services in the economy increases, the demand for labour will increase, increasing employment and wages.

There are many ways to stimulate demand for goods and services. Increasing wages to the working class (those more likely to spend the increased funds on goods and services, rather than various types of savings or commodity purchases) is one theory that is proposed. Increased wages are believed to be more effective in boosting demand for goods and services than central banking strategies, which put the increased money supply mostly into the hands of wealthy persons and institutions. Monetarists suggest that increasing money supply in general increases short-term demand. As for the long-term demand, the increased demand is negated by inflation. A rise in fiscal expenditures is another strategy for boosting aggregate demand.

Providing aid to the unemployed is a strategy that is used to prevent cutbacks in consumption of goods and services, which can lead to a vicious cycle of further job losses and further decreases in consumption and demand. Many countries aid the unemployed through social welfare programs. Such unemployment benefits include unemployment insurance, unemployment compensation, welfare, and subsidies to aid in retraining. The main goal of such programs is to alleviate short-term hardships and, more importantly, to allow workers more time to search for a job.

A direct demand-side solution to unemployment is government-funded employment of the able-bodied poor. This was notably implemented in Britain from the 17th century until 1948 in the institution of the workhouse, which provided jobs for the unemployed with harsh conditions and poor wages to dissuade their use. A modern alternative is a job guarantee in which the government guarantees work at a living wage.

Temporary measures can include public works programs such as the Works Progress Administration. Government-funded employment is not widely advocated as a solution to unemployment except in times of crisis. That is attributed to the public sector jobs' existence depending directly on the tax receipts from private sector employment.

According to classical economic theory, markets reach equilibrium where supply equals demand; everyone who wants to sell at the market price can do so. Those who do not want to sell at that price do not; in the labour market, this is classical unemployment. Monetary policy and fiscal policy can both be used to increase short-term growth in the economy, increasing the demand for labour and decreasing unemployment.

However, the labor market is not 100% efficient although it may be more efficient than the bureaucracy. Some[who? ] argue that minimum wages and union activity keep wages from falling, which means that too many people want to sell their labour at the going price but cannot. That assumes perfect competition exists in the labour market, specifically that no single entity is large enough to affect wage levels and that employees are similar in ability.

Advocates[who? ] of supply-side policies believe those policies can solve the problem by making the labour market more flexible. These include removing the minimum wage and reducing the power of unions. Supply-siders argue that their reforms increase long-term growth by reducing labour costs. The increased supply of goods and services requires more workers, increasing employment. It is argued[by whom? ] that supply-side policies, which include cutting taxes on businesses and reducing regulation, create jobs, reduce unemployment, and decrease labor's share of national income. Other supply-side policies include education to make workers more attractive to employers.

There are relatively limited historical records on unemployment because it has not always been acknowledged or measured systematically. Industrialization involves economies of scale, which often prevent individuals from having the capital to create their own jobs to be self-employed. An individual who cannot join an enterprise or create a job is unemployed. As individual farmers, ranchers, spinners, doctors and merchants are organized into large enterprises, those who cannot join or compete become unemployed.

Recognition of unemployment occurred slowly as economies across the world industrialized and bureaucratized. Before then, traditional self-sufficient native societies have no concept of unemployment. The recognition of the concept of "unemployment" is best exemplified through the well documented historical records in England. For example, in 16th-century England no distinction was made between vagrants and the jobless; both were simply categorized as " sturdy beggars", who were to be punished and moved on.

The closing of the monasteries in the 1530s increased poverty, as the Roman Catholic Church had helped the poor. In addition, there was a significant rise in enclosures during the Tudor period. Also, the population was rising. Those unable to find work had a stark choice: starve or break the law. In 1535, a bill was drawn up calling for the creation of a system of public works to deal with the problem of unemployment, which were to be funded by a tax on income and capital. A law that was passed a year later allowed vagabonds to be whipped and hanged.

The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, one of the world's first government-sponsored welfare programs, made a clear distinction between those who were unable to work and those able-bodied people who refused employment. Under the Poor Law systems of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, a workhouse was a place For people unable to support themselves could go to live and work.

Poverty was a highly visible problem in the eighteenth century, both in cities and in the countryside. In France and Britain by the end of the century, an estimated 10 percent of the people depended on charity or begging for their food.

By 1776, some 1,912 parish and corporation workhouses had been established in England and Wales and housed almost 100,000 paupers.

A description of the miserable living standards of the mill workers in England in 1844 was given by Fredrick Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In the preface to the 1892 edition, Engels noted that the extreme poverty he had written about in 1844 had largely disappeared. David Ames Wells also noted that living conditions in England had improved near the end of the 19th century and that unemployment was low.

The scarcity and the high price of labor in the US in the 19th century was well documented by contemporary accounts, as in the following:

"The laboring classes are comparatively few in number, but this is counterbalanced by, and indeed, may be one of the causes of the eagerness by which they call in the use of machinery in almost every department of industry. Wherever it can be applied as a substitute for manual labor, it is universally and willingly resorted to.... It is this condition of the labor market, and this eager resort to machinery wherever it can be applied, to which, under the guidance of superior education and intelligence, the remarkable prosperity of the United States is due." Joseph Whitworth, 1854

Scarcity of labor was a factor in the economics of slavery in the United States.

As new territories were opened and federal land sales were conducted, land had to be cleared and new homesteads established. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants annually came to the US and found jobs digging canals and building railroads. Almost all work during most of the 19th century was done by hand or with horses, mules, or oxen since there was very little mechanization. The workweek during most of the 19th century was 60 hours. Unemployment at times was between one and two percent.

The tight labor market was a factor in productivity gains by allowing workers to maintain or to increase their nominal wages during the secular deflation that caused real wages to rise at various times in the 19th century, especially in its final decades.

In the US, the Works Progress Administration (1935-43) was the largest make-work program. It hired men (and some women) off the relief roles ("dole") typically for unskilled labor. During the New Deal, over three million unemployed young men were taken out of their homes and placed for six months into more than 2600 work camps managed by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Unemployment in the United Kingdom fell later in the 1930s as the Depression eased, and it remained low (in six figures) after World War II.

Fredrick Mills found that in the US, 51% of the decline in work hours was due to the fall in production and 49% was from increased productivity.

By 1972, unemployment in the United Kingdom had crept back up above 1,000,000, and it was even higher by the end of the decade, with inflation also being high. Although the monetarist economic policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government saw inflation reduced after 1979, unemployment soared in the early 1980s and in 1982, it exceeded 3,000,000, a level that had not been seen for some 50 years. That represented one in eight of the workforce, with unemployment exceeding 20% in some places that had relied on declining industries such as coal mining.

However, it was a time of high unemployment in all other major industrialised nations as well. By the spring of 1983, unemployment had risen by 6% in the previous 12 months, compared to 10% in Japan, 23% in the US, and 34% in West Germany (seven years before Reunification).

Unemployment in the United Kingdom remained above 3,000,000 until the spring of 1987, when the economy enjoyed a boom. By the end of 1989, unemployment had fallen to 1,600,000. However, inflation had reached 7.8%, and the following year, it reached a nine-year high of 9.5%; leading to increased interest rates.

The official unemployment rate in the 16 European Union (EU) countries that use the euro rose to 10% in December 2009 as a result of another recession. Latvia had the highest unemployment rate in the EU, at 22.3% for November 2009. Europe's young workers have been especially hard hit. In November 2009, the unemployment rate in the EU27 for those aged 15-24 was 18.3%. For those under 25, the unemployment rate in Spain was 43.8%. Unemployment has risen in two thirds of European countries since 2010.

Into the 21st century, unemployment in the United Kingdom remained low and the economy remaining strong, and several other European economies, such as France and Germany, experienced a minor recession and a substantial rise in unemployment.

In 2008, when the recession brought on another increase in the United Kingdom, after 15 years of economic growth and no major rises in unemployment. In early 2009, unemployment passed the 2 million mark, and economists were predicting it would soon reach 3 million. However, the end of the recession was declared in January 2010 and unemployment peaked at nearly 2.7 million in 2011, appearing to ease fears of unemployment reaching 3 million. The unemployment rate of Britain's young black people was 47.4% in 2011. 2013/2014 has seen the employment rate increase from 1,935,836 to 2,173,012 as supported by showing the UK is creating more job opportunities and forecasts the rate of increase in 2014/2015 will be another 7.2%.

The 2008-2012 global recession has been called a "mancession" because of the disproportionate number of men who lost their jobs as compared to women. The gender gap became wide in the United States in 2009, when 10.5% of men in the labor force were unemployed, compared with 8% of women. Three quarters of the jobs that were lost in the recession in the US were held by men.

A 26 April 2005 Asia Times article noted, "In regional giant South Africa, some 300,000 textile workers have lost their jobs in the past two years due to the influx of Chinese goods". The increasing US trade deficit with China cost 2.4 million American jobs between 2001-2008, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). From 2000-2007, the United States lost a total of 3.2 million manufacturing jobs. 12.1% of US military veterans who had served after the September 11 attacks in 2001 were unemployed as of 2011; 29.1% of male veterans aged 18-24 were unemployed. As of September 2016, the total veteran unemployment rate was 4.3 percent. By September 2017, that figure had dropped to 3 percent.

About 25,000,000 people in the world's 30 richest countries lost their jobs between the end of 2007 and the end of 2010, as the economic downturn pushed most countries into recession. In April 2010, the US unemployment rate was 9.9%, but the government's broader U-6 unemployment rate was 17.1%. In April 2012, the unemployment rate was 4.6% in Japan. In a 2012 story, the Financial Post reported, "Nearly 75 million youth are unemployed around the world, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007. In the European Union, where a debt crisis followed the financial crisis, the youth unemployment rate rose to 18% last year from 12.5% in 2007, the ILO report shows." In March 2018, according to US Unemployment Rate Statistics, the unemployment rate was 4.1%, below the 4.5-5.0% norm.

1. ^ Opocher, Arrigo; Steedman, Ian (2009). "Input Price-Input Quantity Relations and the Numéraire". Cambridge Journal of Economics. 3 (5): 937-948. doi:10.1093/cje/bep005.

2. ^ Anyadike-Danes, Michael; Godley, Wyne (1989). "Real Wages and Employment: A Skeptical View of Some Recent Empirical Work". The Manchester School. 62 (2): 172-187. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9957.1989.tb00809.x.

3. ^ White, Graham (2001). "The Poverty of Conventional Economic Wisdom and the Search for Alternative Economic and Social Policies". The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs. 2 (2): 67-87.

4. Keynes, John Maynard (2007) [1936]. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-00476-4. Archived from the original on 16 March 2009.

5. ^ Chang, R. (1997) "Is Low Unemployment Inflationary?" Archived 13 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review 1Q97:4-13

6. International Labour Organization Bureau of Statistics Measurement of employment, unemployment and underemployment - Current international standards and issues in their application. Retrieved August 2010 Archived 24 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine

7. ^ Coy, P. (11 September 2012). U.S. jobless rate drops for the worst of all reasons. Businessweek.Com, 5.

8. ^ "Resolution I Resolution concerning statistics of work, employment and labour underutilization" (PDF). ILO.

9. Marco Giugni, ed. ^ The Contentious Politics of Unemployment in Europe: Welfare States and Political Opportunities(Palgrave Macmillan; 2011) covers Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.

10. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, "The Employment Situation: January 2008," January 2008

11. ^ U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table A-15. Alternative measures of labour underutilization Retrieved 5 August 2010.

12. ^ International Labor Organization (October 1982). "Resolution concerning statistics of the economically active population, employment, unemployment, and underemployment, adopted by the Thirteenth International Conference of Labor Statisticians; see page 4" (PDF).

13. ^ Bregger, John E.; Haugen, Steven E. (1995). "BLS introduces new range of alternative unemployment measures" (PDF). Monthly Labor Review, October: 19-29. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

14. ^ "The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium" (PDF). Justice Policy Institute. May 2000.

15. ^ Lebergott, Stanley (1964). Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 164-190.

16. ^ "Historical Comparability" (PDF). Employment and Earnings. Household Data Explanatory Notes, February 2006. 2006.

17. Raymond Torres, OECD head of Employment Analysis, ^ Avec 1,2 % de baisse fin avril, le taux de chômage continue sa décrue Le Monde, 30 mai 2007 : unemployment measure is less and less meaningful to measure labour market efficiency.

18. Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: Women Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

19. ^ Van Zandweghe, Willem. "Interpreting the Recent Decline in Labor Force Participation" (PDF). KC Fed Economic Review, First Quarter, 2012: 5-34. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 January 2013.

20. ^ Richard Ashley (2007). "Fact sheet on the impact of unemployment" (PDF). Virginia Tech, Department of Economics. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 October 2007.

21. ^ Boyce, Christopher J.; Wood, Alex M.; Brown, Gordon D.A. (2010). "The dark side of conscientiousness: Conscientious people experience greater drops in life satisfaction following unemployment". Journal of Research in Personality. 44 (4): 535-539. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2010.05.001.

22. ^ Bockerman, Petri; Ilmakunnas, Pekka (2009). "Unemployment and self-assessed health: evidence from panel data" (PDF). Health Economics. 18 (2): 161-179. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.719.5903. doi:10.1002/hec.1361. PMID 18536002.

23. ^ Blustein, David L.; Kozan, Saliha; Connors-Kellgren, Alice (2013). "Unemployment and underemployment: A narrative analysis about loss". Journal of Vocational Behavior. 82 (3): 256-265. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2013.02.005.

24. ^ Amato, Paul R.; Beattie, Brett (1 May 2011). "Does the unemployment rate affect the divorce rate? An analysis of state data 1960-2005". Social Science Research. 40 (3): 705-715. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.12.012.

25. ^ Meer, Peter H. van der (21 November 2012). "Gender, Unemployment and Subjective Well-Being: Why Being Unemployed Is Worse for Men than for Women". Social Indicators Research. 115 (1): 23-44. doi:10.1007/s11205-012-0207-5. ISSN 0303-8300. S2CID 145056657.

26. Fang, Tony; MacPhail, Fiona (27 November 2007). "Transitions from Temporary to Permanent Work in Canada: Who Makes the Transition and Why?". Social Indicators Research. 88 (1): 51-74. doi:10.1007/s11205-007-9210-7. hdl:. ISSN 0303-8300. S2CID 154555810.

27. ^ Michniewicz, Kenneth S.; Vandello, Joseph A.; Bosson, Jennifer K. (19 January 2014). "Men's (Mis)Perceptions of the Gender Threatening Consequences of Unemployment". Sex Roles. 70 (3-4): 88-97. doi:10.1007/s11199-013-0339-3. ISSN 0360-0025. S2CID 144321429.

28. ^ Facing the Challenge: The Impact of Recession and Unemployment on Men's Health in Ireland (PDF), Institute of Public Health in Ireland, June 2011

29. ^ Social isolation a key risk factor for suicide among Australian men - study. The Guardian. Author - Melissa Davey. Published 25 June 2015. Retrieved 9 August 2018.

30. ^ Li, Ang; Toll, Mathew (2021). "Effects of graduating during economic downturns on mental health". Annals of Epidemiology. 55 (55): 41-49. doi:10.1016/j.annepidem.2020.12.005. ISSN 1047-2797. PMID 33359536. S2CID 229693054.

31. Kaberi Gayen; Ronald McQuaid; Robert Raeside (22 June 2010). "Social networks, age cohorts and employment". International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 30 (5/6): 219-238. doi:10.1108/01443331011054208. ISSN 0144-333X.

32. ^ Jacob, Marita; Kleinert, Corinna (1 April 2008). "Does Unemployment Help or Hinder Becoming Independent? The Role of Employment Status for Leaving the Parental Home". European Sociological Review. 24 (2): 141-153. doi:10.1093/esr/jcm038. hdl:10419/31878. ISSN 0266-7215.

33. ^ Wray-Lake, Laura; Syvertsen, Amy K.; Briddell, Laine; Osgood, D. Wayne; Flanagan, Constance A. (1 September 2011). "Exploring the Changing Meaning of Work for American High School Seniors From 1976 to 2005". Youth & Society. 43 (3): 1110-1135. doi:10.1177/0044118X10381367. ISSN 0044-118X. PMC . PMID 22034546.

34. ^ McVittie, Chris; McKinlay, Andy; Widdicombe, Sue (2008). "Passive and active non-employment: Age, employment and the identities of older non-working people". Journal of Aging Studies. 22 (3): 248-255. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2007.04.003.

35. Sarah Boseley (11 February 2015). ^ Unemployment causes 45,000 suicides a year worldwide, finds study. The Guardian. Retrieved 13 February 2015.

36. ^ Sulich, Adam (2016). "The young people's labour market and crisis of integration in European Union". International Conference on European Integration. 2: 926-934.

37. ^ Shapiro, Carl; Stiglitz, Joseph E. (1984). "Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device". American Economic Review. 74 (3): 433-444. JSTOR 1804018.

38. ^ Badham, Van (26 July 2019). "Having a constant pool of unemployed workers is deliberate policy | Van Badham". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077.

39. ^ R. O. Bucholz, Newton Key, Early modern England, 1485-1714, p176

40. "^ Social Classes in Shakespeare's England" Archived 16 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine

41. "^ British social policy, 1601-1948 Archived 30 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine", The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.

42. ^ Roe, Joseph Wickham (1916), English and American Tool Builders, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, LCCN 16011753. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (LCCN 27-24075); and by Lindsay Publications, Inc., Bradley, Illinois, (ISBN 978-0-917914-73-7). Report of the British Commissioners to the New York Industrial Exhibition, London 1854

43. ^ Wells, David A. (1891). Recent Economic Changes and Their Effect on Production and Distribution of Wealth and Well-Being of Society. New York: D. Appleton and Co. ISBN 978-0-543-72474-8. RECENT ECONOMIC CHANGES AND THEIR EFFECT ON DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND WELL BEING OF SOCIETY WELLS.

44. ^ 1929-1939 - The Great Depression Archived 27 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine, Source: Bank of Canada

45. ^ Economic Recovery in the Great Depression, Frank G. Steindl, Oklahoma State University Archived 28 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine

46. Nancy E. Rose, ^ Put to Work: The WPA and Public Employment in the Great Depression (2nd ed. 2009)

47. ^ Finegan, Chance (11 September 2008). "National Park History: "The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps"". National Parks Traveler. Archived from the original on 5 September 2010.

48. ^ Rifkin, Jeremy (1995). The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-87477-779-6.

49. ^ Phelps, Edmund S.; Zoega, Gylfi (2002). "The Incidence of Increased Unemployment in the Group of Seven, 1970-94". In Bitros, George; Katsoulacos, Yannis (eds.). Essays in Economic Theory, Growth and Labor Markets. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. pp. 177-210. ISBN 978-1-84064-739-6.

Beveridge, William H. (1944). Full Employment in a Free Society (1st ed.). Allen & Unwin., in Great Britain.

Broadberry, Stephen N., and Albrecht Ritschl. "Real Wages, Productivity, and Unemployment in Britain and Germany during the 1920′s." Explorations in Economic History 32.3 (1995): 327-349.

Dimsdale, Nicholas H., Nicholas Horsewood, and Arthur Van Riel. "Unemployment in interwar Germany: an analysis of the labor market, 1927-1936." Journal of Economic History (2006): 778-808. online

Heimberger, Philipp, Jakob Kapeller, and Bernhard Schütz. "The NAIRU determinants: What's structural about unemployment in Europe?." Journal of Policy Modeling 39.5 (2017): 883-908. online

Kato, Michiya. "Unemployment and Public Works Policy in Interwar Britain and Japan: An International Comparison." (2010): 69-101. online

Kaufman, Roger T. "Patterns of Unemployment in North America, Western Europe and Japan." Unemployment in Western countries (Palgrave Macmillan, 1980). 3-35.

Nickell, Stephen, Luca Nunziata, and Wolfgang Ochel. "Unemployment in the OECD since the 1960s. What do we know?." Economic Journal 115.500 (2005): 1-27 online.

Stachura, Peter D., ed. Unemployment and the great depression in Weimar Germany (Springer, 1986).

Topp, Niels-Henrik. "Unemployment and Economic Policy in Denmark in the 1930s." Scandinavian Economic History Review 56.1 (2008): 71-90.

Webb, Sidney (1912). How the Government Can Prevent Unemployment. The National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution. (First ed.). Letchworth, Herts.: Garden City Press Ltd., in Great Britain

Jensen, Richard J. "The causes and cures of unemployment in the Great Depression." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19.4 (1989): 553-583 online.

Keyssar, Alexander (1986). Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23016-2.

Margo, Robert A. "Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s." Journal of Economic Perspectives 7.2 (1993): 41-59. online

Stricker, Frank. American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future (University of Illinois Press, 2020) online review

Sundstrom, William A. "Last hired, first fired? Unemployment and urban black workers during the Great Depression." Journal of Economic History (1992): 415-429. online

Temin, Peter. "Socialism and Wages in the Recovery from the Great Depression in the United States and Germany." Journal of Economic History (1990): 297-307 online.

Quotations related to unemployment at Wikiquote The dictionary definition of unemployment at Wiktionary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period. Unemployment can have many sources, such as the following: Unemployment and the status of the economy can be influenced by a country through, for example, fiscal policy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Human overpopulation (or human population overshoot) describes a concern that human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. The topic is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.

Since 1804, the global human population has increased from 1 billion to 8 billion due to medical advancements and improved agricultural productivity. Annual world population growth peaked at 2.1% in 1968, and has since dropped to 1.1%. According to the most recent United Nations' projections, "[t]he global population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100." The UN's projections report predicts that the human population will peak at around 10.4 billion people, before decreasing, noting that fertility rates are falling worldwide. Other models agree that the population will stabilize before or after 2100.

Early discussions of overpopulation in English were spurred by the work of Thomas Malthus. Discussions of overpopulation follow a similar line of inquiry as Malthusianism and its Malthusian catastrophe, a hypothetical event where population exceeds agricultural capacity, causing famine or war over resources, resulting in poverty and depopulation. More recent discussion of overpopulation was popularized by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb and subsequent writings. Ehrlich described overpopulation as a function of overconsumption, arguing that overpopulation should be defined by a population being unable to sustain itself without depleting non-renewable resources.

The belief that global population levels will become too large to sustain is a point of contentious debate. Those who believe global human overpopulation to be a valid concern, argue that increased levels of resource consumption and pollution exceed the environment's carrying capacity, leading to population overshoot. The population overshoot hypothesis is often discussed in relation to other population concerns such as population momentum, biodiversity loss, hunger and malnutrition, resource depletion, and the overall human impact on the environment.

Critics of the belief note that human population growth is decreasing and the population will likely peak, and possibly even begin to decrease, before the end of the century. They argue the concerns surrounding population growth are overstated, noting that quickly declining birth rates and technological innovation make it possible to sustain projected population sizes. Other critics claim that the concept is too narrowly focused, ignores more pressing issues, like poverty, and places an undue burden on the global south.

Modern proponents of the concept have suggested that overpopulation, population growth and overconsumption are interdependent and collectively are the primary drivers of human-caused environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Many scientists have expressed concern about population growth, and argue that creating sustainable societies will require decreasing the current global population. Advocates have suggested implementation of population planning strategies to reach a proposed sustainable population.

Overpopulation hypotheses are controversial, with many demographers and environmentalists disputing the core premise that the world cannot sustain the current trajectory of human population. Additionally, many economists and historians have noted that sustained shortages and famines have historically been caused by war, price controls, political instability, and repressive political regimes (often employing central planning) rather than overpopulation, and that population growth historically has led to greater technological development and advancement of scientific knowledge that has enabled the engineering of substitute goods and technology that better conserves and more efficiently uses natural resources, produces greater agricultural output with less land and less water, and addresses human impacts on the environment due to there being greater numbers of scientists, engineers, and inventors and subsequent generations of scientists overturning scientific paradigms maintained by previous generations of scientists. Instead, social scientists argue that disputes between themselves and biologists about human overpopulation are over the appropriateness of definitions being used (and often devolve into social scientists and biologists simply talking past each other).

Annual world population growth peaked at 2.1% in 1968, has since dropped to 1.1%, and could drop even further to 0.1% by 2100. Based on this, the United Nations projects the world population, which is 7.8 billion as of 2020, to level out around 2100 at 10.9 billion with other models proposing similar stabilization before or after 2100. Some experts believe that a combination of factors (including technological and social change) would allow global resources to meet this increased demand, avoiding global overpopulation. Additionally, some critics dismiss the idea of human overpopulation as a science myth connected to attempts to blame environmental issues on overpopulation, oversimplify complex social or economic systems, or place blame on developing countries and poor populations- reinscribing colonial or racist assumptions and leading to discriminatory policy. These critics often suggest overconsumption should be treated as an issue separate from population growth.

UN population estimates and projection 1950-2100

Map of countries and territories by fertility rate (See List of countries and territories by fertility rate.)

Human population growth rate in percent, with the variables of births, deaths, immigration, and emigration - 2018

World population has been rising continuously since the end of the Black Death, around the year 1350. The fastest doubling of the world population happened between 1950 and 1986: a doubling from 2.5 to 5 billion people in 37 years, mainly due to medical advancements and increases in agricultural productivity. Due to its impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process enabled the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018 and, according to the United Nations, eight billion as of November 2022. Some researchers have analyzed this growth in population like other animal populations, human populations predictably grow and shrink according to their available food supply as per the Lotka-Volterra equations, including agronomist and insect ecologist David Pimentel, behavioral scientist Russell Hopfenberg, and anthropologist Virginia Abernethy.

World population has gone through a number of periods of growth since the dawn of civilization in the Holocene period, around 10,000 BCE. The beginning of civilization roughly coincides with the receding of glacial ice following the end of the Last Glacial Period. Farming allowed for the growth of populations in many parts of the world, including Europe, the Americas and China through the 1600s, occasionally disrupted by plagues or other crises. For example, the Black Death is thought to have reduced the world's population, then at an estimated 450 million in 1350, to between 350 and 375 million by 1400.

After the start of the Industrial Revolution, during the 18th century, the rate of population growth began to increase. By the end of the century, the world's population was estimated at just under 1 billion. At the turn of the 20th century, the world's population was roughly 1.6 billion. By 1940, this figure had increased to 2.3 billion. Even more dramatic growth beginning in 1950 (above 1.8% per year) coincided with greatly increased food production as a result of the industrialization of agriculture brought about by the Green Revolution. The rate of human population growth peaked in 1964, at about 2.1% per year. Recent additions of a billion humans happened very quickly: 33 years to reach three billion in 1960, 14 years for four billion in 1974, 13 years for five billion in 1987, 12 years for six billion in 1999, 11 years for seven billion in 2010, and 12 years for 8 billion toward the end of 2022.

Map of population density by country, per square kilometer (See List of countries by population density.)

Population projections are attempts to show how the human population might change in the future. These projections help to forecast the population's impact on this planet and humanity's future well-being. Models of population growth take trends in human development, and apply projections into the future to understand how they will affect fertility and mortality, and thus population growth.

The most recent report from the United Nations Population Division issued in 2022 (see chart) projects that global population will peak around the year 2086 at about 10.4 billion, and then start a slow decline (the median line on the chart). As with earlier projections, this version assumes that the global average fertility rate will continue to fall, but even further from 2.5 births per woman during the 2015-2020 period to 1.8 by the year 2100.

World population prospects (2022). Note that half a child more or less per woman would cause a difference of about 8 billion people by the end of the century (blue dotted lines).

However, other estimates predict additional downward pressure on fertility (such as more education and family planning) which could result in peak population during the 2060-2070 period rather than later.

According to the UN, of the predicted growth in world population between 2020 and 2050, all of that change will come from less developed countries, and more than half will come from just 8 African countries. It is predicted that the population of sub-Saharan Africa will double by 2050. The Pew Research Center predicts that 50% of births in the year 2100 will be in Africa. As an example of uneven prospects, the UN projects that Nigeria will gain about 340 million people, about the present population of the US, to become the 3th most populous country, and China will lose almost half of its population.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.

Concerns about population size or density have a long history: Tertullian, a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, criticized population at the time: "Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Despite those concerns, scholars have not found historic societies that have collapsed because of overpopulation or overconsumption.

Table of population growth in England 1780-1810 in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1826) by Thomas Malthus, which would go on to be an influential text on Malthusianism

By the early 19th century, intellectuals such as Thomas Malthus predicted that humankind would outgrow its available resources because a finite amount of land would be incapable of supporting a population with limitless potential for increase. During the 19th century, Malthus' work, particularly An Essay on the Principle of Population, was often interpreted in a way that blamed the poor alone for their condition and helping them was said to worsen conditions in the long run. This resulted, for example, in the English poor laws of 1834 and a hesitating response to the Irish Great Famine of 1845-52.

The first World Population Conference was held in 1927 in Geneva, organized by the League of Nations and Margaret Sanger.

Paul R. Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb became a bestseller upon its release in 1968 and created renewed interest in overpopulation. The book predicted population growth would lead to famine, societal collapse, and other social, environmental and economic strife in the coming decades, and advocated for policies to curb it. The Club of Rome published the influential report The Limits to Growth in 1972, which used computer modeling to similarly argue that continued population growth trends would lead to global system collapse. The idea of overpopulation was also a topic of some works of English-language science fiction and dystopian fiction during the latter part of the 1960s. The United Nations held the first of three World Population Conferences in 1974. Human population and family planning policies were adopted by some nations in the late 20th century in an effort to curb population growth, including in China and India. Albert Allen Bartlett gave more than 1,742 lectures on the threat of exponential population growth starting in 1969.

American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich generated renewed interest in the topic of overpopulation with The Population Bomb (1968).

However, many predictions of overpopulation during the 20th century did not materialize. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich stated, "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," with later editions changing to "in the 1980s". Despite admitting some of his earlier predictions did not come to pass, Ehrlich continues to advocate that overpopulation is a major issue.

As the profile of environmental issues facing humanity increased during the end of the 20th and the early 21st centuries, some have looked to population growth as a root cause. In the 2000s, E. O. Wilson and Ron Nielsen discussed overpopulation as a threat to the quality of human life. In 2011, Pentti Linkola argued that human overpopulation represents a threat to Earth's biosphere. A 2015 survey from Pew Research Center reports that 82% of scientists associated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science were concerned about population growth. In 2017, more than one-third of 50 Nobel prize-winning scientists surveyed by the Times Higher Education at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings said that human overpopulation and environmental degradation are the two greatest threats facing mankind. In November that same year, the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, signed by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries, indicated that rapid human population growth is "a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats." Ehlrich and other scientists at a conference in the Vatican on contemporary species extinction linked the issue to population growth in 2017, and advocated for human population control, which attracted controversy from the Catholic church. In 2019, a warning on climate change signed by 11,000 scientists from 153 nations said that human population growth adds 80 million humans annually, and "the world population must be stabilized-and, ideally, gradually reduced-within a framework that ensures social integrity" to reduce the impact of "population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss."

In 2020, a quote from David Attenborough about how humans have "overrun the planet" was shared widely online and became his most popular comment on the internet.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Footprint Network have argued that the annual biocapacity of Earth has exceeded, as measured using the ecological footprint. In 2006, WWF's Living Planet Report stated that in order for all humans to live with the current consumption patterns of Europeans, we would be spending three times more than what the planet can renew. According to these calculations, humanity as a whole was using by 2006 40% more than what Earth can regenerate. Another study by the WWF in 2014 found that it would take the equivalent of 1.5 Earths of bio-capacity to meet humanity's current levels of consumption. However, Roger Martin of Population Matters states the view: "the poor want to get rich, and I want them to get rich," with a later addition, "of course we have to change consumption habits,... but we've also got to stabilize our numbers".

Critics have questioned the simplifications and statistical methods used in calculating ecological footprints. Therefore, Global Footprint Network and its partner organizations have engaged with national governments and international agencies to test the results-reviews have been produced by France, Germany, the European Commission, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Some point out that a more refined method of assessing Ecological Footprint is to designate sustainable versus non-sustainable categories of consumption.

Attempts have been made to estimate the world's carrying capacity for humans; the maximum population the world can host. A 2004 meta-analysis of 69 such studies from 1694 until 2001 found the average predicted maximum number of people the Earth would ever have was 7.7 billion people, with lower and upper meta-bounds at 0.65 and 98 billion people, respectively. They conclude: "recent predictions of stabilized world population levels for 2050 exceed several of our meta-estimates of a world population limit".

A 2012 United Nations report summarized 65 different estimated maximum sustainable population sizes and the most common estimate was 8 billion. Advocates of reduced population often put forward much lower numbers. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion. In 2022 Ehrlich and other contributors to the "Scientists' warning on population", including Eileen Crist, William J. Ripple, William E. Rees and Christopher Wolf, stated that environmental analysts put the sustainable level of human population at between 2 and 4 billion people. Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number.

Critics of overpopulation criticize the basic assumptions associated with these estimates. For example, associate professor of gender and sexuality Jade Sasser believes that calculating a maximum of number of humanity is unethical claiming that only some, mostly European former colonial powers, are mostly responsible for unsustainably using up Earth's resources.

Poverty, and infant and child mortality

Although proponents of human overpopulation have expressed concern that growing population will lead to an increase in global poverty and infant mortality, both indicators have declined over the last 200 years of population growth.

A number of scientists have argued that human impacts on the environment and accompanying increase in resource consumption threatens the world's ecosystems and the survival of human civilization. The InterAcademy Panel Statement on Population Growth, which was ratified by 58 member national academies in 1994, states that "unprecedented" population growth aggravates many environmental problems, including rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming, and pollution. Indeed, some analysts claim that overpopulation's most serious impact is its effect on the environment. Some scientists suggest that the overall human impact on the environment during the Great Acceleration, particularly due to human population size and growth, economic growth, overconsumption, pollution, and proliferation of technology, has pushed the planet into a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene.

Some studies and commentary link population growth with climate change. Critics have stated that population growth alone may have less influence on climate change than other factors, such as greenhouse gas emissions per capita. The global consumption of meat is projected to rise by as much as 76% by 2050 as the global population increases, with this projected to have further environmental impacts such as biodiversity loss and increased greenhouse gas emissions. A July 2017 study published in Environmental Research Letters argued that the most significant way individuals could mitigate their own carbon footprint is to have fewer children, followed by living without a vehicle, forgoing air travel, and adopting a plant-based diet. However, even in countries which have both large population growth and major ecological problems, it is not necessarily true that curbing the population growth will make a major contribution towards resolving all environmental problems that can be solved simply with an environmentalist policy approach.

Continued population growth and overconsumption, particularly by the wealthy, have been posited as key drivers of biodiversity loss and contemporary species extinction, with some researchers and environmentalists specifically suggesting this indicates a human overpopulation scenario. The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, released by IPBES in 2019, states that human population growth is a factor in biodiversity loss. IGI Global has uncovered the growth of the human population caused encroachment in wild habitats which have led to their destruction, "posing a potential threat to biodiversity components".

Some scientists and environmentalists, including Jared Diamond, E. O. Wilson, Jane Goodall and David Attenborough, contend that population growth is devastating to biodiversity. Wilson for example, has expressed concern when Homo sapiens reached a population of six billion their biomass exceeded that of any other large land dwelling animal species that had ever existed by over 100 times. Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, stated in December 2022 as the human population reached a milestone of 8 billion and as delegates were meeting for the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference, that "we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure. As far as biodiversity is concerned, we are at war with nature."

Human overpopulation and continued population growth are also considered by some, including animal rights attorney Doris Lin and philosopher Steven Best, to be an animal rights issue, as more human activity means the destruction of animal habitats and more direct killing of animals.

Some commentary has attributed depletion of non-renewable resources, such as land, food and water, to overpopulation and suggested it could lead to a diminished quality of human life. Ecologist David Pimentel was one such proponent, saying "with the imbalance growing between population numbers and vital life sustaining resources, humans must actively conserve cropland, freshwater, energy, and biological resources. There is a need to develop renewable energy resources. Humans everywhere must understand that rapid population growth damages the Earth's resources and diminishes human well-being."

Growth in food production has been greater than population growth.

Although food shortages have been warned as a consequence of overpopulation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, global food production exceeds increasing demand from global population growth. Food insecurity in some regions is attributable to the globally unequal distribution of food supplies.

The notion that space is limited has been decried by skeptics, who point out that the Earth's population of roughly 6.8 billion people could comfortably be housed an area comparable in size to the state of Texas in the United States (about 269,000 square miles or 696,706.80 square kilometres). Critics and agricultural experts suggest changes to policies relating to land use or agriculture to make them more efficient would be more likely to resolve land issues and pressures on the environment than focusing on reducing population alone.

Water scarcity, which threatens agricultural productivity, represents a global issue that some have linked to population growth. Colin Butler wrote in in 1994 that overpopulation also has economic consequences for certain countries due to resource use.

It was speculated by Aldous Huxley in 1958 that democracy is threatened by overpopulation, and could give rise to totalitarian style governments. Physics professor Albert Allen Bartlett at the University of Colorado Boulder warned in 2000 that overpopulation and the development of technology are the two major causes of the diminution of democracy. However, over the last 200 years of population growth, the actual level of personal freedom has increased rather than declined. John Harte has argued population growth is a factor in numerous social issues, including unemployment, overcrowding, bad governance and decaying infrastructure. Daron Acemoglu and others suggested in a 2017 paper that since the Second World War, countries with higher population growth rates experienced the most social conflict.

Some advocates have suggested societal problems such as hunger and mass unemployment are linked to overpopulation.

According to anthropologist Jason Hickel, the global capitalist system creates pressures for population growth: "more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers." He and his colleagues have also demonstrated that capitalist elites throughout recent history have "used pro-natalist state policies to prevent women from practicing family planning" in order to grow the size of their workforce. Hickel has however argued that the cause of negative environmental impacts is resource extraction by wealthy countries. He concludes that "we should not ignore the relationship between population growth and ecology, but we must not treat these as operating in a social and political vacuum."

A 2021 article in Ethics, Medicine and Public Health argued in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that epidemics and pandemics were made more likely by overpopulation, globalization, urbanization and encroachment into natural habitats.

They both play a significant role impacting human populations, including widespread illness, death, and social disruption. While they can leave a temporary loss of population, it is followed by significant loss and suffering. These events are not the sole reason for overpopulation, but lack of access to family planning and reproductive contraptions, poverty and resource depletion.

Several strategies have been proposed to mitigate overpopulation.

Several scientists (including Paul Ehrlich, Gretchen Daily and Tim Flannery) proposed that humanity should work at stabilizing its absolute numbers, as a starting point towards beginning the process of reducing the total numbers. They suggested several possible approaches, including:

There is good evidence from many parts of the world that when women and couples have the freedom to choose how many children to have, they tend to have smaller families.

Some scientists, such as Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook, suggest that, given the "inexorable demographic momentum of the global human population," sustainability can be achieved more rapidly with a short term focus on technological and social innovations, along with reducing consumption rates, while treating population planning as a long-term goal.

However, most scientists believe that achieving genuine sustainability is a long-term project, and that addressing population and consumption levels are both essential to achieving it.

In 1992, more than 1700 scientists from around the world signed onto a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," including a majority of the living Nobel prize-winners in the sciences. "The earth is finite," they wrote. "Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth's limits." The warning noted:

Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth.

Two of the five areas where the signatories requested immediate action were "stabilize population" and "ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions."

In a follow-up message 25 years later, William Ripple and colleagues issued the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice." This time more than 15,000 scientists from around the world signed on. "We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats," they wrote. "By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere." This second scientists' warning urged attention to both excessive consumption and continued population growth. Like its predecessor, it did not specify a definite global human carrying capacity. But its call to action included "estimating a scientifically defensible, sustainable human population size for the long term while rallying nations and leaders to support that vital goal."

Subsequent scientists' calls to action have also included calls for population planning. The 2020 "World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency" stated: "Economic and population growth are among the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion." "Therefore," the study noted: "we need bold and drastic transformations regarding economic and population policies." "The world population must be stabilized-and, ideally, gradually reduced," it concluded, implying that humanity is overpopulated given current and expected levels of resource use and waste generation.

A follow-up scientists' warning on climate change in 2021 reiterated the need to plan and limit human numbers to achieve sustainability, proposing as a goal "stabilizing and gradually reducing the [global] population by providing voluntary family planning and supporting education and rights for all girls and young women, which has been proven to lower fertility rates."

Family planning

A family planning placard in Ethiopia. It depicts negative effects of having more children than people can care for.

Education and empowerment of women and giving access to family planning and contraception have a demonstrated impact on reducing birthrates. Many studies conclude that educating girls reduces the number of children they have. One option according to some activists is to focus on education about family planning and birth control methods, and to make birth-control devices like condoms, contraceptive pills and intrauterine devices easily available. Worldwide, nearly 40% of pregnancies are unintended (some 80 million unintended pregnancies each year). An estimated 350 million women in the poorest countries of the world either did not want their last child, do not want another child or want to space their pregnancies, but they lack access to information, affordable means and services to determine the size and spacing of their families. In the developing world, some 514,000 women die annually of complications from pregnancy and abortion, with 86% of these deaths occurring in the sub-Saharan Africa region and South Asia. Additionally, 8 million infants die, many because of malnutrition or preventable diseases, especially from lack of access to clean drinking water.

Women's rights and their reproductive rights in particular are issues regarded to have vital importance in the debate. Anthropologist Jason Hickel asserts that a nation's population growth rapidly declines - even within a single generation - when policies relating to women's health and reproductive rights, children's health (to ensure parents they will survive to adulthood), and expanding education and economic opportunities for girls and women are implemented.

A 2020 paper by William J. Ripple and other scientists argued in favor of population policies that could advance social justice (such as by abolishing child marriage, expanding family planning services and reforms that improve education for women and girls) and at the same time mitigate the impact of population growth on climate change and biodiversity loss. In a 2022 warning on population published by Science of the Total Environment, Ripple, Ehrlich and other scientists appealed to families around the world to have no more than one child and also urged policy-makers to improve education for young females and provide high-quality family-planning services.

Despite the increase in population density within cities (and the emergence of megacities), UN Habitat Data Corp. states in its reports that urbanization may be the best compromise in the face of global population growth. Cities concentrate human activity within limited areas, limiting the breadth of environmental damage. UN Habitat says this is only possible if urban planning is significantly improved.

Paul R. Ehrlich proposed in The Population Bomb that rhetoric supporting the increase of city density is a means of avoiding dealing with what he views as the root problem of overpopulation and has been promoted by what he views as the same interests that have allegedly profited from population increase (such as property developers, the banking system which invests in property development, industry, and municipal councils). Subsequent authors point to growth economics as driving governments seek city growth and expansion at any cost, disregarding the impact it might have on the environment.

Global fertility rates as of 2020. About half of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility.[221]

The concept of human overpopulation, and its attribution as a cause of environmental issues, are controversial.

Some critics, including Nicholas Eberstadt, Fred Pearce, Dominic Lawson and Betsy Hartmann, refer to overpopulation as a myth. Predicted exponential population growth or any "population explosion" did not materialise; instead, population growth slowed. Critics suggest that enough resources are available to support projected population growth, and that human impacts on the environment are not attributable to overpopulation.

According to libertarian think tank the Fraser Institute, both the idea of overpopulation and the alleged depletion of resources are myths; most resources are now more abundant than a few decades ago, thanks to technological progress. The institute also questions the sincerity of advocates of population control in poor countries.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist, has criticised the idea of overpopulation, saying that "overpopulation is not really overpopulation. It is a question of poverty".

A 2020 study in concluded that "continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth", with projections suggesting world population would peak at 9.73 billion in 2064 and fall by 2100. Media commentary interpreted this as suggesting overconsumption represents a greater environmental threat as an overpopulation scenario may never occur.

Some human population planning strategies advocated by proponents of overpopulation are controversial for ethical reasons. Those concerned with overpopulation, including Paul Ehrlich, have been accused of influencing human rights abuses including forced sterilisation policies in India and under China's one-child policy, as well as mandatory or coercive birth control measures taken in other countries.

Women's rights

Influential advocates such as Betsy Hartmann consider the "myth of overpopulation" to be destructive as it "prevents constructive thinking and action on reproductive rights," which acutely affects women and communities of women in poverty. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) defines reproductive rights as "the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information to do so." This oversimplification of human overpopulation leads individuals to believe there are simple solutions and the creation of population policies that limit reproductive rights.

In response, philosopher Tim Meijers asks the question: "To what extent is it fair to require people to refrain from procreating as part of a strategy to make the world more sustainable?" Meijers rejects the idea that the right to reproduce can be unlimited, since this would not be universalizable: "in a world in which everybody had many children, extreme scarcity would arise and stable institutions could prove unsustainable. This would lead to violation of (rather uncontroversial) rights such as the right to life and to health and subsistence." In the actual world today, excessive procreation could also undermine our descendants' right to have children, since people are likely to refrain (and perhaps should refrain) from bringing children into an insecure and dangerous world. Meijers, Sarah Conly, Diana Coole, and other ethicists conclude that people have a right to found a family, but not to unlimited numbers of children.

Ehrlich advocated in The Population Bomb that "various forms of coercion", such as removing tax benefits for having additional children, be used in cases when voluntary population planning policies fail. Some nations, like China, have used strict or coercive measures such as the one-child policy to reduce birth rates. Compulsory or semi-compulsory sterilization, such as for token material compensation or easing of penalties, has also been implemented in many countries as a form of population control.

Another choice-based approach is financial compensation or other benefits by the state offered to people who voluntarily undergo sterilization. Such policies have been introduced by the government of India.

The Indian government of Narendra Modi introduced population policies in the 21st century, including offering incentives for sterilization by citing the risks of a "population explosion" although demographers have criticized that basis, with India thought to be undergoing demographic transition and its fertility rate falling. The policies have also received criticism from human and women's rights groups.

The concept of human overpopulation has been criticized by some scholars and environmentalists as being racist and having roots in colonialism and white supremacy, since control and reduction of human population is often focused on the global south, instead of on overconsumption and the global north, where it occurs. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb begins with him describing first knowing the "feel of overpopulation" from a visit to Delhi, which some critics have accused of having racial undertones. George Monbiot has said "when affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces [ Great Replacement and white genocide conspiracy] narratives. It is inherently racist." Overpopulation is a common component of ecofascist ideology.

Scholar Heather Alberro rejects the overpopulation argument, stating that the human population growth is rapidly slowing down, the underlying problem is not the number of people, but how resources are distributed and that the idea of overpopulation could fuel a racist backlash against the population of poor countries.

In response, population activists argue that overpopulation is a problem in both rich and poor countries, and arguably a worse problem in rich countries, where residents' higher per capita consumption ratchets up the impacts of their excessive numbers. Feminist scholar Donna Haraway notes that a commitment to enlarging the moral community to include nonhuman beings logically entails people's willingness to limit their numbers and make room for them. Ecological economists like Herman Daly and Joshua Farley believe that reducing populations will make it easier to achieve steady-state economies that decrease total consumption and pollution to manageable levels. Finally, as Karin Kuhlemann observes, "that a population's size is stable in no way entails sustainability. It may be sustainable, or it may be far too large."

According to the writer and journalist Krithika Varagur, myths and misinformation about overpopulation of Rohingya people in Myanmar is thought to have driven their genocide in the 2010s.

The following organizations advocate for a limit to human population growth, although their focus may be on related issues such as environmental protection:

Organization advocate against limits to human population growth.

1. Ehrlich, Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. (1990). The population explosion. London: Hutchinson. pp. 39-40. ISBN 978-0091745516. When is an area overpopulated? When its population cannot be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources [39] (or converting renewable resources into nonrenewable ones) and without decreasing the capacity of the environment to support the population. In short, if the long-term carrying capacity of an area is clearly being degraded by its current human occupants, that area is overpopulated.

2. ^ Ehrlich, Paul R; Ehrlich, Anne H (2004), One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future, Island Press/Shearwater Books, pp. 76-180, 256

3. ^ Ehrlich, Paul R; Ehrlich, Anne H (1991), Healing the Planet: Strategies for Resolving the Environmental Crisis, Addison-Wesley Books, pp. 6-8, 12, 75, 96, 241

4. ^ Daily, Gretchen; Ehrlich, Anne; Ehrlich, Paul (1994). "Optimum human population size". Population and Environment. 15 (6): 469-475. doi:10.1007/BF02211719. S2CID 153761569.

5. ^ Dasgupta, Partha (2019). Time and the Generations: Population Ethics for a Diminishing Planet. Columbia University Press.

6. ^ Bradshaw, Corey J. A.; Ehrlich, Paul R.; Beattie, Andrew; Ceballos, Gerardo; Crist, Eileen; Diamond, Joan; Dirzo, Rodolfo; Ehrlich, Anne H.; Harte, John; Harte, Mary Ellen; Pyke, Graham; Raven, Peter H.; Ripple, William J.; Saltré, Frédérik; Turnbull, Christine; Wackernagel, Mathis; Blumstein, Daniel T. (2021). "Response: Commentary: Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future". Frontiers in Conservation Science. 2. doi:10.3389/fcosc.2021.700869. On the contrary, we devoted an entire section to the interacting and inter-dependent components of overpopulation and overconsumption, which are, for instance, also central tenets of the recent Economics of Biodiversity review (Dasgupta, 2021). Therein, the dynamic socio-ecological model shows that mutual causation drives modern socio-ecological systems. Just as it is incorrect to insist that a large global population is the sole underlying cause of biodiversity loss, so too is it naïve and incorrect to claim that high consumption alone is the cause, and so forth.

7. Dasgupta, Partha (2021). "The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review Headline Messages" (PDF). UK government. p. 3. Growing human populations have significant implications for our demands on Nature, including for future patterns of global consumption.

8. ^ Crist, Eileen; Kopnina, Helen; Cafaro, Philip; Gray, Joe; Ripple, William J.; Safina, Carl; Davis, John; DellaSala, Dominick A.; Noss, Reed F.; Washington, Haydn; Rolston, Holmes; Taylor, Bron; Orlikowska, Ewa H.; Heister, Anja; Lynn, William S. (2021). "Protecting Half the Planet and Transforming Human Systems Are Complementary Goals". Frontiers in Conservation Science. 2. doi:10.3389/fcosc.2021.761292. ISSN 2673-611X. Population growth can end and numbers can be gradually lowered within a human-rights framework. Lowering human numbers is achievable by expanding and protecting human rights, especially for children and women . . . A smaller human population will facilitate the conservation of a biodiverse planet while also supporting a higher quality of life for people by lowering pollution levels, preempting resource conflicts, ameliorating overcrowding in urban centers, and empowering girls and women

9. ^ Schuettinger, Robert; Butler, Eamonn (1979). Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation. Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation. ISBN 978-0891950257.

10. ^ Rockoff, Hugh (2004) [1984]. Drastic Measures: A History of Wage and Price Controls in the United States (Paperback ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521522038.

11. ^ Courtois, Stéphane; Werth, Nicolas; Panné, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartošek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis (1999) [1997]. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Translated by Murphy, Jonathan; Kramer, Mark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674076082.

12. ^ Dikötter, Frank (2017) [2010]. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. London, England: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1408886366.

13. ^ Kuznets, Simon; Quandt, Richard E.; Friedman, Milton (1960). "Population Change and Aggregate Output" (PDF). Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Reprint ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 324-351. ISBN 978-0870143021.

14. Simon, Julian L. (1981). . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 069109389X.

15. ^ Kremer, Michael (1993). "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 108 (3): 681-716. doi:10.2307/2118405. JSTOR 2118405. S2CID 139085606.

16. Simon, Julian L. (1996). The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691042691.

17. ^ Ausubel, Jesse H.; Wernick, Iddo K.; Waggoner, Paul E. (2013). "Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing". Population and Development Review. 38 (s1): 221-242. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2013.00561.x.

18. ^ Ritchie, Hannah (22 August 2017). "Yields vs. Land Use: How the Green Revolution enabled us to feed a growing population". Our World in Data. Global Change Data Lab.

19. ^ Azoulay, Pierre; Fons-Rosen, Christian; Graff Zivin, Joshua S. (2019). "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?". American Economic Review. American Economic Association. 109 (8): 2889-2920. doi:10.1257/aer.20161574. PMC . PMID 31656315.

20. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2022). ^ World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results. UN DESA/POP/2022/TR/NO. 3, p. 1

21. Hopfenberg, Russell and Pimentel, David, "^ Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply", Environment, Development and Sustainability, vol. 3, no. 1, March 2001, pp. 1-15

22. ^ Hopfenberg, Russel. "A Summary of Human Population Dynamics" (PDF). Population institute of Canada.

23. ^ Max Roser; Hannah Ritchie; Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013). "World Population Growth". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 22 November 2021.

24. ^ "World Population Prospects 2019, Volume II: Demographic Profiles" (PDF). United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2019. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 July 2021.

25. ^ World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results (PDF) (Report). United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2022. UN DESA/POP/2022/TR/NO.3.

26. ^ "World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision" (PDF). United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2017. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 December 2018.

27. ^ Kaneda, Toshiko (June 2014). "Understanding Population Projections: Assumptions Behind the Numbers" (PDF). Population Reference Bureau.

28. ^ Joseph A. Tainter (2006). "Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse". Annual Review of Anthropology. 35: 59-74. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123136.

29. ^ "VII, paragraph 10, lines 8-10". An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson. 1798. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race

30. Gregory Claeys: The "Survival of the Fittest" and the Origins of Social Darwinism, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2002, p. 223-240

31. Cormac Ó Gráda: Famine. A Short History, Princeton University Press 2009, ^ ISBN 978-0-691-12237-3 (pp. 20, 203-206)

32. Ron Nielsen, The Little Green Handbook: Seven Trends Shaping the Future of Our Planet, Picador, New York (2006) ISBN 978-0-312-42581-4

33. Pentti Linkola, "Can Life Prevail?", Arktos Media, 2nd Revised ed. 2011. pp. 120-121. ^ ISBN 1907166637

34. ^ Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh; Harmen Verbruggen (1999). "Spatial sustainability, trade and indicators: an evaluation of the 'ecological footprint'" (PDF). Ecological Economics. 29 (1): 61-72. doi:10.1016/S0921-8009(99)00032-4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 October 2007.

35. Cohen, J.E. (1995). ^ How many people can the earth support? W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, USA.

36. ^ Van Den Bergh, Jeroen C. J. M.; Rietveld, Piet (2004). "Reconsidering the Limits to World Population: Meta-analysis and Meta-prediction". BioScience. 54 (3): 195. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2004)054[0195:RTLTWP]2.0.CO;2. ISSN 0006-3568.

37. ^ Sasser, Jade (13 November 2018). On infertile ground : population control and women's rights in the era of climate change. New York. ISBN 978-1-4798-7343-2. OCLC 1029075188.

38. ^ Bologna, M.; Aquino, G. (2020). "Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis". Scientific Reports. 10 (7631): 7631. arXiv:. Bibcode:2020NatSR..10.7631B. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-63657-6. PMC . PMID 32376879. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation.

39. Bradshaw, Corey J. A.; Ehrlich, Paul R.; Beattie, Andrew; Ceballos, Gerardo; Crist, Eileen; Diamond, Joan; Dirzo, Rodolfo; Ehrlich, Anne H.; Harte, John; Harte, Mary Ellen; Pyke, Graham; Raven, Peter H.; Ripple, William J.; Saltré, Frédérik; Turnbull, Christine; Wackernagel, Mathis; Blumstein, Daniel T. (2021). "Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future". Frontiers in Conservation Science. 1. doi:10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419. S2CID 231589034. Large populations and their continued growth are also drivers of soil degradation and biodiversity loss. More people means that more synthetic compounds and dangerous throw-away plastics are manufactured, many of which add to the growing toxification of the Earth.

40. ^ Subramanian, Meera (2019). "Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth's new epoch". Nature News. Twenty-nine members of the AWG supported the Anthropocene designation and voted in favour of starting the new epoch in the mid-twentieth century, when a rapidly rising human population accelerated the pace of industrial production, the use of agricultural chemicals and other human activities.

41. ^ John T. Houghton (2004)."Global warming: the complete briefing Archived 3 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine". Cambridge University Press. p.326. ISBN 0-521-52874-7

42. ^ Ceballos, Gerardo; Ehrlich, Paul R.; Barnosky, Anthony D.; García, Andrés; Pringle, Robert M.; Palmer, Todd M. (2015). "Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction". Science Advances. 1 (5): e1400253. Bibcode:2015SciA....1E0253C. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1400253. PMC . PMID 26601195. All of these are related to human population size and growth, which increases consumption (especially among the rich), and economic inequity.

43. ^ Stokstad, Erik (5 May 2019). "Landmark analysis documents the alarming global decline of nature". . AAAS. Driving these threats are the growing human population, which has doubled since 1970 to 7.6 billion, and consumption. (Per capita of use of materials is up 15% over the past 5 decades.)

44. ^ Uniyal, Shivani; Paliwal, Rashmi; Kaphaliya, Bhumija; R.K., Sharma (2017). "1". Environmental issues surrounding human overpopulation. Information Science Reference. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-1683-5.ch001. ISBN 978-1-5225-1684-2. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 January 2022.

45. ^ Lin, Doris (3 July 2019). "Human Overpopulation". . Human overpopulation is an animal rights issue as well as an environmental issue and a human rights issue. Human activities, including mining, transportation, pollution, agriculture, development, and logging, take habitat away from wild animals as well as kill animals directly.

46. David Pimentel, et al. ^ "Will Limits of the Earth's Resources Control Human Numbers?" Archived 10 July 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Dieoff.org

47. Lester R. Brown, Gary Gardner, Brian Halweil (September 1998). ^ Worldwatch Paper #143: Beyond Malthus: Sixteen Dimensions of the Population Problem Archived 3 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Worldwatch Institute, ISBN 1-878071-45-9

48. ^ Young, A. (1999). "Is there Really Spare Land? A Critique of Estimates of Available Cultivable Land in Developing Countries". Environment, Development and Sustainability. 1: 3-18. doi:10.1023/A:1010055012699. S2CID 153970029.

49. ^ Harte, John (2007). "Human population as a dynamic factor in environmental degradation". Population and Environment. 28 (4-5): 223-236. doi:10.1007/s11111-007-0048-3. S2CID 18611090.

50. ^ Acemoglu, Daron; Fergusson, Leopoldo; Johnson, Simon (2017). "Population and Civil War". National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper Series. doi:10.3386/w23322.

51. ^ Hickel, Jason (2021). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Windmill Books. pp. 110-111. ISBN 978-1786091215. And of course capitalism itself creates pressures for population growth: more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers. These pressures filter into our culture, and even into national policy: countries like France and Japan are offering incentives to get women to have more children, to keep their economies growing.

52. ^ Spernovasilis, N.; Markaki, I.; Papadakis, M.; Tsioutis, C.; Markaki, L. (19 December 2021). "Epidemics and pandemics: Is human overpopulation the elephant in the room?". Ethics, Medicine, and Public Health. 19: 100728. doi:10.1016/j.jemep.2021.100728. ISSN 2352-5525. PMC . PMID 34703871.

53. ^ Ehrlich, Paul R; Ehrlich, Anne H (2004), One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future, Island Press/Shearwater Books, pp. 181-205 (chapter 6)

54. ^ Ehrlich, Paul R.; Ehrlich, Anne H.; Daily, Gretchen C. (1995), The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma, Grosset/Putnam Books

55. ^ Greguš, Jan; Guillebaud, John (11 September 2023). "Scientists' Warning: Remove the Barriers to Contraception Access, for Health of Women and the Planet". World. 4 (3): 589-597. doi:10.3390/world4030036. ISSN 2673-4060.

56. Ryerson, William N. (2010). The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, "Ch.12: Population: The Multiplier of Everything Else". Healdsburg, Calif.: Watershed Media. pp. 153-174. ISBN 978-0970950062.

57. Crist, Eileen (2019). Abundant Earth. University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226596945.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-226-59680-8. S2CID 134956670.

58. ^ McGrath, Matt (27 October 2014). "Population controls 'will not solve environment issues'". BBC.

59. ^ Bradshaw, Corey J. A.; Brook, Barry W. (2014). "Human population reduction is not a quick fix for environmental problems". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 111 (46): 16610-16615. Bibcode:2014PNAS..11116610B. doi:10.1073/pnas.1410465111. PMC . PMID 25349398.

60. ^ Vajk, J.Peter (1 January 1976). "The impact of space colonization on world dynamics". Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 9 (4): 361-99. doi:10.1016/0040-1625(76)90019-6. ISSN 0040-1625.

61. G. K. O'Neill. ^ The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. Morrow, 1977.

62. Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (1999) Arthur C. Clarke, Voyager ISBN 0-00-224698-8

63. ^ "Figure 8: Population by Total Fertility (millions)" in World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2011)

64. Hartmann, Betsy (2016) [1987]. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (3rd ed.). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. p. 26. ISBN 978-1608467334.

65. ^ Vollset, Stein Emil; Goren, Emily; Yuan, Chun-Wei; Cao, Jackie; Smith, Amanda E.; Hsiao, Thomas; Bisignano, Catherine; Azhar, Gulrez S.; Castro, Emma; Chalek, Julian; Dolgert, Andrew J. (17 October 2020). "Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study". The Lancet. 396 (10258): 1285-1306. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2. ISSN 0140-6736. PMC . PMID 32679112.

66. ^ UNFPA (1994). Programme of Action: Adopted at the International Conference of Population and development, Cairo, 5-13 September 1994. UN Population Fund. pp. Section 7.3. ISBN 0-89714-696-4.

67. Hedberg T (2021) ^ The moral imperative to reduce global population. The Ecological Citizen 5(1): 47-54.

68. Vinay Lal. ^ Indira Gandhi Archived 29 July 2016 at the Wayback Machine, UCLA College of Letters and Science

69. ^ "'Cars for sterilisation' campaign". 1 July 2011. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 - via bbc.com.

70. ^ Daly, H. E.; Farley, J (2011). Ecological economics: principles and applications (2nd ed.). Island press.

71. Kuhlemann, K. (2018). Any size population will do?': The fallacy of aiming for stabilization of human numbers. ^ The Ecological Citizen, 1(2), 181-189.

Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Harvard University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780674034600

David Foreman, Man Swarm: How Overpopulation is Killing the Wild World. Livetrue Books, 2015. ISBN 978-0986383205

Karen Shragg, Move Upstream: A Call to Solve Overpopulation. ISBN 978-0988493834 (published November 2015). Discussion of the book by the author, March 2017 (video, 91 minutes).

Alan Weisman. Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Little, Brown and Company, (2013) ISBN 0316097756

Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (2012), Rutgers University Press

J.R. McNeill, Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2016)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Human overpopulation (or human population overshoot ) describes a concern that human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. The topic is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Extreme weather or extreme climate events includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution-the range that has been seen in the past. Often, extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history and defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent.

There is evidence to suggest that human-induced global warming is increasing the periodicity and intensity of some extreme weather events. Confidence in the attribution of extreme weather and other events to anthropogenic climate change is highest in changes in frequency or magnitude of extreme heat and cold events with some confidence in increases in heavy precipitation and increases in intensity of droughts.

Extreme weather has significant impacts on human society as well as natural ecosystems. For example, a global insurer Munich Re estimates that natural disasters cause more than $90 billion global direct losses in 2015.

Early research in extreme weather focused on statements about predicting certain events, contemporary research has focused more on attribution of causes to trends in events. In particular the field is focusing on human-induced global warming alongside other causal factors for these events.

Definitions of extreme weather vary in different parts of the scientific community, changing the outcomes of research from those fields. Generally speaking, one event in extreme weather cannot be attributed to any one cause; however, certain system wide changes to global weather systems can lead to increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather events.

A 2016 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, recommended investing in improved shared practices across the field working on attribution research, improving the connection between research outcomes and weather forecasting.

Changes in the frequency and type of extreme weather over long windows of time can be attributed to natural variability.

In general, climate models show that with climate change, the planet will experience more extreme weather. In particular, temperature record highs outpaced record lows consistently from the 1980s through the 2000s and extreme weather types such as extreme heat, intense precipitation, and drought became more frequent or severe during these decades.[when? ] As of 2016, confidence in the attribution of specific extreme weather events to anthropocentric climate change is highest in changes in frequency of extreme heat and cold events, increases in heavy precipitation, and increases in droughts.

Some studies assert a connection between rapidly warming arctic temperatures and thus a vanishing cryosphere to extreme weather in mid-latitudes.

Heat waves are periods of abnormally high temperatures and heat index. Definitions of a heatwave vary because of the variation of temperatures in different geographic locations. Excessive heat is often accompanied by high levels of humidity, but can also be catastrophically dry.

Because heat waves are not visible as other forms of severe weather are, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, they are one of the less known forms of extreme weather. Severe heat weather can damage populations and crops due to potential dehydration or hyperthermia, heat cramps, heat expansion and heat stroke. Dried soils are more susceptible to erosion, decreasing lands available for agriculture. Outbreaks of wildfires can increase in frequency as dry vegetation has increased likeliness of igniting. The evaporation of bodies of water can be devastating to marine populations, decreasing the size of the habitats available as well as the amount of nutrition present within the waters. Livestock and other animal populations may decline as well.

During excessive heat plants shut their leaf pores ( stomata), a protective mechanism to conserve water but also curtails plants' absorption capabilities. This leaves more pollution and ozone in the air, which leads to higher mortality in the population. It has been estimated that extra pollution during the hot summer 2006 in the UK, cost 460 lives. The European heat waves from summer 2003 are estimated to have caused 30,000 excess deaths, due to heat stress and air pollution. Over 200 U.S cities have registered new record high temperatures. The worst heat wave in the USA occurred in 1936 and killed more than 5000 people directly. The worst heat wave in Australia occurred in 1938-39 and killed 438. The second worst was in 1896.

Power outages can also occur within areas experiencing heat waves due to the increased demand for electricity (i.e. air conditioning use). The urban heat island effect can increase temperatures, particularly overnight.

A cold wave is a weather phenomenon that is distinguished by a cooling of the air. Specifically, as used by the U.S. National Weather Service, a cold wave is a rapid fall in temperature within a 24-hour period requiring substantially increased protection to agriculture, industry, commerce, and social activities. The precise criterion for a cold wave is determined by the rate at which the temperature falls, and the minimum to which it falls. This minimum temperature is dependent on the geographical region and time of year. Cold waves generally are capable of occurring any geological location and are formed by large cool air masses that accumulate over certain regions, caused by movements of air streams.

A cold wave can cause death and injury to livestock and wildlife. Exposure to cold mandates greater caloric intake for all animals, including humans, and if a cold wave is accompanied by heavy and persistent snow, grazing animals may be unable to reach necessary food and water, and die of hypothermia or starvation. Cold waves often necessitate the purchase of fodder for livestock at considerable cost to farmers. Human populations can be inflicted with frostbites when exposed for extended periods of time to cold and may result in the loss of limbs or damage to internal organs.

Extreme winter cold often causes poorly insulated water pipes to freeze. Even some poorly protected indoor plumbing may rupture as frozen water expands within them, causing property damage. Fires, paradoxically, become more hazardous during extreme cold. Water mains may break and water supplies may become unreliable, making firefighting more difficult.

Cold waves that bring unexpected freezes and frosts during the growing season in mid-latitude zones can kill plants during the early and most vulnerable stages of growth. This results in crop failure as plants are killed before they can be harvested economically. Such cold waves have caused famines. Cold waves can also cause soil particles to harden and freeze, making it harder for plants and vegetation to grow within these areas. One extreme was the so-called Year Without a Summer of 1816, one of several years during the 1810s in which numerous crops failed during freakish summer cold snaps after volcanic eruptions reduced incoming sunlight.

There has been long ongoing debate about a possible increase of tropical cyclones as an effect of global warming. However, the 2012 IPCC special report on extreme events SREX states that "there is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities." Increases in population densities increase the number of people affected and damage caused by an event of given severity. The World Meteorological Organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have in the past linked increasing extreme weather events to global warming, as have Hoyos et al. (2006), writing that the increasing number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes is directly linked to increasing temperatures. Similarly, Kerry Emanuel in writes that hurricane power dissipation is highly correlated with temperature, reflecting global warming.

Hurricane modeling has produced similar results, finding that hurricanes, simulated under warmer, high CO ₂ conditions, are more intense than under present-day conditions. Thomas Knutson and Robert E. Tuleya of the NOAA stated in 2004 that warming-induced by greenhouse gas may lead to the increasing occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms. Vecchi and Soden find that wind shear, the increase of which acts to inhibit tropical cyclones, also changes in model-projections of global warming. There are projected increases of wind shear in the tropical Atlantic and East Pacific associated with the deceleration of the Walker circulation, as well as decreases of wind shear in the western and central Pacific. The study does not make claims about the net effect on Atlantic and East Pacific hurricanes of the warming and moistening atmospheres, and the model-projected increases in Atlantic wind shear.

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.

Too much rain (heavy downpours) = floods and landslides

Too much hot weather and no rain (heatwave) = drought and wildfires

Strong winds, such as hurricanes and tornadoes = damage to man made structures and animal habitats

Large snowfalls = avalanches and blizzards

According to IPCC (2011) estimates of annual losses have ranged since 1980 from a few billion to above US$200 billion (in 2010 dollars), with the highest value for 2005 (the year of Hurricane Katrina). The global weather-related disaster losses, such as loss of human lives, cultural heritage, and ecosystem services, are difficult to value and monetize, and thus they are poorly reflected in estimates of losses. Yet, recent abnormally intense storms, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, droughts and associated large-scale wildfires have led to unprecedented negative ecological consequences for tropical forests and coral reefs around the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Extreme weather or extreme climate events includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution-the range that has been seen in the past. Often, extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history and defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent.