Episode 9– (Joel Cohen) “The Millennium Project”: Human Populations and Livelihood in the 21st Century

In 1999, the American Philosophical Society held a symposium that gathered experts from around the world to make predictions about humanity in the 21st century. One of those experts, demographer and statistician Joel Cohen, met with host Patrick Spero to discuss this millennium’s trends and if we got them right in 1999. In this episode of Useful Knowledge, Cohen reviews his 1999 predictions on topics like population growth, economic equality, immigration, family dynamics, and more to share the outcomes, for better or worse, making recommendations for the coming decades. 

Joel E. Cohen is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations at the Rockefeller University, New York. He studies the demography, ecology, epidemiology, and social organization of human and non-human populations using mathematical, statistical, and
computational concepts and tools. He earned doctorates in applied mathematics in 1970 and population sciences and tropical public health in 1973 from Harvard University. He has published 14 books and more than 480 papers and chapters. His books include How
Many People Can the Earth Support? and a book of scientific and mathematical jokes. He was named a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1981 and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1997. In 1992, he received the Mindel C. Sheps Award of the Population Association of America.