India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
India's TFR is still > 2.1 (2.33), but is fast approaching replacement fertility. Large parts of India (especially in the South), are already below TFR, so while populations will continue to grow for decades (India has a pyramidal population structure), they will eventually start falling.
Essentially, how many children a woman will give birth to, on average. If it drops below 2, population will begin to shrink.
Edit: As the below comment thread points out, > 2 (~2.1) may be required to not drop. :)
[1] http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/data...
Outside of war/post war its unlikely to have a situation where there are 10 woman to each man.
So you are saying India's new-born gender divide is 91% men and 9% women?
Abortion based on gender is illegal in India. Most (all?) gynecologists in India won't reveal gender due to this until a certain stage (20 weeks) in the pregnancy after which abortion is illegal (requires court order).
https://scroll.in/pulse/834701/one-step-forward-two-back-ind...
But in normal circumstances you assume that there is an equal number of men and women in population. Or, to be more precise, you assume 105:100 men:women ratio, because that's what statistics show in most countries. That's why you need TFR slighly higher than 2 to have constant population size.
Say you have 100 females.
25 have no kids 15 have 1 kid 25 have 2 kids each 15 have 3 kids 10 have 4 kids 10 have 5 kids
This would be a 2.0 TFR and would lead to no shrinkage or increase.
The 25 without kids would include those who die before reproducing.
Now a potential reason it might need to be higher than 2.0 is if it is not a 50/50 split between male and female children. I vaguely recall that slightly more male children are born than girls but it averages out by adulthood because boys are slightly more likely to die doing something stupid. This may not actually be the case so do some research before quoting me on the more boys part.
Accidental deaths before having kids
Gay/Lesbian kids
Kids that “want” to have kids but for whatever reason are unable to
The opposite is also likely. People may have "accidental" kids, or they could change their mind.
(I still agree that 2.1 is a good approximation, but it is also likely to vary on cultural and natural effects)
Shouldn't "people who don't have kids" be accounted for by lowering the overall measure of "children a woman will give birth to on average"? So if half of women in a country have exactly four kids, and the other half have zero kids for whatever reason, the average number per woman is 2.
Instead, it is calculated by measuring the average number of children born to women at a specific age (e.g. 15, 16..49). Adding all of these up results in the TFR. Thus mortality rates are not included in the TFR.
TFR is not calculated that way. Instead, it takes women in the child bearing age group (say 15-44 or 15-49), and adds up the age specific fertility rates to calculate the TFR.
What TFR would result in replacement level of the population depends to some extent on mortality rates among women from birth to end of reproductive age, Thus advanced countries may achieve replacement levels at a TFR of 2.05 (say), while countries like India may do so at 2.1, and other countries with higher mortality may do so at 2.3+.
2006 estimate for Nigeria was about 240M, and the 2019 estimate puts them at about 199M, or +59M in 13 years. For Indonesia there is a census count from 2010, ~238M, and a 2016 estimate of 261M, or +23M in 6 years.
Now for the United States: the 2010 census put the US at about 309M, and the 2018 estimate at about 327M or +18M over 8 years.
I think no matter who takes the #3 spot, the United States will be at #5 and maybe lower in my lifetime.
This sentence doesn’t make sense even if you move the numbers around.
That will relegate the US to the 5th place within 20-25 years. And actually, even Pakistan could overtake the US. And if you count the EU as one country, which is increasingly true, then the US could easily be the 7th largest country in 2-3 decades:
India China EU Indonesia Nigeria Pakistan US
And including the EU, which is still catching up with regards to it’s Eastern and Southern European population, all of those places are poised to get much richer in the coming decades.
I guess you read different news than I do.
Most interesting to me is Japan's projected population of 85 million in 2100, compared to 125 million today.
Western GDP depends on body count growth, but GDP per capita does not.
Japan will lead the way in figuring out how fewer people can hopefully avoid deflationary debt-spirals.
I think notion that growth is dependent on body count is very dangerous, and totally unsustainable, among other things.
We need to look at growth, migration, and fertility as separate issues, each with a different set of consequences.
Upping the fertility rate a little bit, normalization migration (by 'normal' I mean the kinds of migration that exist between equal countries, not mass migration), reconfiguring our dysfunctional social security systems (at least they are dysfunctional in terms of how they are paid for by future generations), changing what retirement means, addressing massive costs of later life healthcare, and changing some of our economic targets.
This problem is as big as climate change in the sense that it affects everything and will require a re-think of some issues we haven't had to think about before.
Japan has to face the issues head-on before the rest of us, thank god they are smart because I think we'll inevitably end up following their example on a bunch of these things. At least they'll be providing us the data points.
The current globalist population redistribution policy, promoted by the UN, literally referred to as 'replacement migration' is going to be a staggeringly impossible thing to implement. [1]
As for India: hopefully there's light at the end of the tunnel.
As for Pakistan and Nigeria: it will get much worse before it gets better, they have serious problems.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
I thought this statement was a little outrageous so I clicked the link and read a few segments of the report.
I didn't see any section promoting specific global migration policy.
The report appears to just be a "what-if" paper modeling different levels of migration to countries projected to shrink, and how it would impact population size, age distribution, retirement age and working age/dependent ratios through 2050. Levels modeled included no migration, an extrapolation of 90's migration trends, and levels needed to maintain varying working age population ratios.
No surprises or policy plans there.
It's a popular concept among some groups, and has some very controversial 'anti colonialist' elements.
This strategy did not make it's way into the most recent UN compact on migration (I believe because it would be untenable under current populist conditions) but it's definitely a perennial subject among those types of officials.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of conspiratorial elements out there concerning this, but there is a basis in reality for this agenda.
Also, some nations citizens produce/consume much more than others, for example.
China could handle some more people. Pakistan and Nigeria cannot.
There is already more consumption than our current technology can sustain.
Population growth is the lazy, unsustainable way to get gdp growth.
This is a man made conundrum not a law of physics.
If energy becomes expensive, as it most likely will, then population growth will stop.
Some of the projections appear unrealistic. For example, Mali is projected to grow from about 20 million to 80 million by 2100. Given Mali's geography, this seems unlikely.
The heat poses other problems that affect survival rates, like tropical diseases, but the energy cost of fighting those is far less than heating homes.
The same observation applies to the agricultural sectors of those countries, which can be incredibly productive due to growing regions with consistently warm weather. It's how China and India can support such massive populations (both are largely food self sufficient). And it's also why Brazil can produce sugar cane based ethanol far more efficiently than the US can produce corn based ethanol.
Once this major difference is accounted for, however, change in energy consumption over time is a reasonable proxy for change in standard of living.
But absolute differences in per capita energy consumption fail to capture variations due to things like country size, transportation/energy infrastructure, and socioeconomic structure i.e Russia has a much higher per capita energy consumption than Germany, but a lower standard of living.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...
And indeed, the ski slope is already well started: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nigeria+fertility
I wonder if this is still a common attitude now, ten years on, when environmentalism may have made more inroads among India’s middle class, and when everyone is suffering from the obvious effects of so large a population, like air pollution.
Poverty. Overpopulation. Corruption. Overpopulation. Poor health. Overpopulation.
I have lived in India all my life, and the fraction of people who think overpopulation is not a problem, or who think it is a good thing, is vanishingly small.
Note that the current rate of 2.3 has been reached from a high of 4.97 around 1975. SO regardless of what (some) Indians have told you, their actions speak otherwise!
I don't think the global population will ever reach 11B as predicted by the UN.
The link above makes a good case as to why it will probably reach around 9B and then start declining.
The more important question is what happens to our economic model once the global population stops growing on a global scale, assuming we did not become an interplanetary species by then?
The simple answer is that we don't know. If we don't change our current model, its pretty clear that we will ruin our planet long before we even reach that population level. Some things that could possibly happen:
* AI based automation results in a Golden age of ever increasing productivity and changes all economic models forever, resulting in mass unemployment, social unrest and ultimately, socialized medicine, basic income etc. disengaging most of the populace from the economy.
* Advances in Space Technology lead to colonization of other planets; communities/cults/religious minorities that want freedom to do what they please emigrate and found human colonies across the galaxy. There are various versions of this where humans learn how wormholes work and use it for interstellar travel etc.
* Advances in medicine allow us to upload ourselves into the digital realm where we continue to live after our biological essences are extinguished, allowing a digital economy to be created in parallel to the non-digital one.
A cursory look would imply that each color segment increments population count in some sort of consistent and logical way, but it doesn't.
The increments are like so:
0 to 1 million
1 million to 5 million (5x increase)
5 million to 10 million (2x)
10 million to 20 million (2x)
20 million to 50 million (2.5x)
50 million to 100 million (2x)
100 million to >500 million (5x+)
That last category is the most misleading, because it paints the US, Russia, China, India, and a bunch of other countries as being in the same league, when they're not even close.
The details show the US at 320 million people, Russia at 144 million, the China at 1.4 BILLION and India at 1.3 Billion.
It's insane that these are grouped together. Totally nonsensical. The difference between China and Russia is about 10x. [UPDATE: My initial bad math said it was a 77x difference.]
</rant>
The population of Russia is ~146.7M [0]
The population of China is ~1,403M (~1.4B) [1]
This makes China ~9.6 times larger than Russia.
The US is ~327M [2], which makes China about ~4.3 times as large.
It's a big difference, but not as large as 77x.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia
My 77x was about Russia and China, not the US, but you're right I had a "off my one" error in my math. It's more like 9.6x.
These kinds of models are pretty to look at but rapidly fall apart when you play with base assumptions. The only way to absorb this data is to have an interactive set of adjusters to base data possibilities.
One Child Policy was certainly a huge factor. So is probably a strong rise in wealth and education, which are both linked to lower birth rates.
It's not to say you're wrong, it's just the one child policy is a compounding factor.
Are there plans to do the opposite of OCP? I suppose it's easy-ish to forbid people to have multiple children, but to force them because you now need them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#Caus... describes many associations.
https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_...