ArticlePloS one2015
Socio-Economic Instability and the Scaling of Energy Use with Population Size.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Three centuries of technological innovation: Opportunity is the mother of invention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Sustainable Population Size at the County Level under Limited Development Policy Constraints: Case Study of the Xihaigu Mountain Area, Northwest China.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethnographic record.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Genome-Scale Metabolic Model ofmSystems · 2021Article
- High Modularity Creates Scaling Laws.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The scaling of crime concentration in cities.PloS one · 2017Article
- Life-history theory and climate change: resolving population and parental investment paradoxes.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- What if fertility decline is not permanent? The need for an evolutionarily informed approach to understanding low fertility.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The size of the human population is relevant to the development of a sustainable world, yet the forces setting growth or declines in the human population are poorly understood. Generally, population growth rates depend on whether new individuals compete for the same energy (leading to Malthusian or density-dependent growth) or help to generate new energy (leading to exponential and super-exponential growth). It has been hypothesized that exponential and super-exponential growth in humans has resulted from carrying capacity, which is in part determined by energy availability, keeping pace with or exceeding the rate of population growth. We evaluated the relationship between energy use and population size for countries with long records of both and the world as a whole to assess whether energy yields are consistent with the idea of an increasing carrying capacity. We find that on average energy use has indeed kept pace with population size over long time periods. We also show, however, that the energy-population scaling exponent plummets during, and its temporal variability increases preceding, periods of social, political, technological, and environmental change. We suggest that efforts to increase the reliability of future energy yields may be essential for stabilizing both population growth and the global socio-economic system.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.