Most people see crowding, pollution, and decreasing purchasing power. Some put the blame on immigration, the success of competing economies, peak oil, soil loss, and water scarcity,

In this talk I suggest these problems are but the tip of an iceberg. We are underestimating how these problems will affect us and overestimating our ability to manage them.

Part of these estimation failures are due to the way we gather, process, and value information. For example we leave out the

system momentum. Or we just don't see problems until normal behavior has little power to address them.

The human predicament is akin to a driver who does not appreciate the meaning of a future crash from his or her driving experience. Normal driving forces don't help him or her understand crash forces.

The reason is a little understood descriptor of systems called nonlinearity. The following slides and audio introduce nonlinearity into the over- population discussion.

Part-1 Understanding nonlinearity