
India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world - okket
https://ourworldindata.org/india-will-soon-overtake-china-to-become-the-most-populous-country-in-the-world
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aatharuv
The thing to note is that India is enroute to negative population growth.

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.

~~~
alehul
For those wondering, TFR = total fertility rate and means "total number of
children born or likely to be born to a woman in her life time if she were
subject to the prevailing rate of age-specific fertility in the population".
[1]

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...](http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/data/chi/TFR/en/)

~~~
steve19
Not to be pedantic but I think it needs to be a higher than 2 in order to not
shrink. The number usually stated is 2.1. This is to account for people who
die before having reproduced themselves.

~~~
birdman3131
Pretty sure that it already accounts for that. As far as I understand it is
for the entire female population.

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.

~~~
0xB31B1B
The academics/experts in the field generally consider 2.1 to be replacement
level fertility because:

Accidental deaths before having kids

Gay/Lesbian kids

Kids that “want” to have kids but for whatever reason are unable to

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I totally believe you that 2.1 is the standard, but I don't understand why
based on the explanations in this thread.

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.

~~~
sseth
The reason is that TFR is not the average number of children per woman over
her lifetime.

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.

------
billfruit
What I find amazing is who will become the third most populous? Looks like
Indonesia is fast catching up on the US, but longer term predictions are
showing Nigeria moving to the third spot by 2050.

~~~
brohee
I find the long term projections incredibly dubious, I cannot fathom how
Nigeria could support 800M inhabitants, and Niger 200M. and why the fertility
would not fall like it did in the rest of the world. Fertility can and often
do fall in a ski slope fashion, like it did in e.g. Iran
([https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iran+fertility](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iran+fertility)).

And indeed, the ski slope is already well started:
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nigeria+fertility](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nigeria+fertility)

~~~
nyolfen
even if nigeria’s fertility falls dramatically there’s what’s called
demographic momentum[1] which will continue population growth through the rest
of the century barring unprecedented migration or catastrophe. 800m is the
UN’s middle of the road estimate. the low estimate is around 600m iirc, and
the high estimate is over 1b.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_momentum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_momentum)

~~~
turndown
How does demographic momentum account for the fact that Nigeria cannot support
that many people?

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Mediterraneo10
A decade ago I traveled shoestring over India and spent time in a lot of rural
areas. In the north (especially Uttar Pradesh) I was overwhelmed by the
overpopulation. When I mentioned this to middle-class Indians as a problem for
the country, they generally didn’t agree that it was a problem. Some would
respond that a larger population surely equates to more global clout, so this
was a way for India to grow strong and assert itself on the world stage.
Sometimes they would accuse me of wanting to undermine India’s growth, since
family-planning strategies were supposedly just a way for the West to keep the
Third World down.

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.

~~~
rrrazdan
This is completely opposite to my experience of living and growing up in
India. Overpopulation is considered the root of almost every evil afflicting
India.

Poverty. Overpopulation. Corruption. Overpopulation. Poor health.
Overpopulation.

~~~
IA21
I'm curious to know how overpopulation causes corruption.

------
rdm_blackhole
Relevant link: [https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-
gl...](https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-global-
population-will-start-to-shrink-2f606c1ef088)

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?

~~~
pm90
> 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.

~~~
Mirioron
It's probably all of them, except the wormholes. However, all of them are far
away and 9 billion will happen way before that.

------
nickelcitymario
This graph is awful and misleading. (The article is fine, I think, but the
graph is ridiculous.)

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>

~~~
dsp1234
> The difference between China and Russia is 77x.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia)

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States)

~~~
nickelcitymario
I based my numbers on the data in the article itself, but it's a minor
quibble.

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.

------
KyleOS
There's an argument to be made that GDP per capita in India will catch up with
that of China if this is indeed the case, as made in a recent article from the
economist. Although it's important to remember that it won't be strictly
because of population growth, it surely plays a part.
([https://kyso.io/KyleOS/does-population-size-matter-when-
it-c...](https://kyso.io/KyleOS/does-population-size-matter-when-it-comes-to-
economic-growth))

~~~
KyleOS
Original source: [https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2019/04/17/w...](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2019/04/17/where-growth-is-concerned-is-population-destiny)

------
bdamm
Can anyone explain the population reversal? There's vague references to
changing fertility rates, but that doesn't explain the reversal. There are
complex economic factors at play and so just observed changes to fertility
aren't enough to make the prediction of population reduction. For example,
does the model include expected advancements in agriculture, or does the model
assume there is some challenges in growing our food supply? Also, China used
to have a one-baby policy but I don't think that is still in effect. Does the
model include that?

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.

~~~
ghomrassen
One child policy was in effect and Chinese people got used to it. It's been
enforced as a social norm and the subsequent generations seldom have more than
two kids. You can add China's increased urbanisation, increased work hours and
smaller houses/apartments into the mix.

~~~
luckylion
Are the work hours very different between working extremely long hours in a
factory and working extremely long hours on a farm 70 years ago?

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.

~~~
ghomrassen
Absolutely. More children meant more farmhands. In the city, it's a net
negative.

It's not to say you're wrong, it's just the one child policy is a compounding
factor.

~~~
luckylion
True, there's less incentive to have large families, and it's a practical
issue as well, I suppose. You can have your child around and keep an eye on
them while you're working on the family farm, but you can't take them with you
into a factory and sit them down next to the assembly line.

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?

~~~
awa
Forcing can be in terms of incentives like tax rebates etc.

~~~
luckylion
It might be that the incentives offered in Western European countries aren't
large enough, but it seems counter-intuitive - we had much larger families
when the incentives were much smaller. The long established population has
very few children, recent immigrants (from poorer countries) have more, but
also show falling birth rates within a few generations. And that's in
countries with free education, usually free healthcare for children, tax
rebates, financial support from the government et cetera.

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pseudolus
I'd take the long term predictions with a grain of salt. If demographic
predictions were performed in 1938 and then were matched up with the
demographic reality we experience in 2019 the results would be incredibly off.
Over time, behavior changes and intervening and superseding factors come about
that make these predictions meaningless. Demographics is up there with
economics in being a "dismal science".

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zavi
Also significantly younger on average. China has a serious aging problem, with
average age on par with many wealthier countries.

~~~
ghomrassen
Yes, absolutely. You'll see China having the same issues as Japan about 15-20
years down the line.

~~~
billfruit
May be that is why they are starting to incentivize families to have more than
one child.

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plurby
Watch
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7Bgv...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE)
everything explained.

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immichaelwang
Does this functionally change anything though? Both countries are so massive
businesses will already be targeting each location. Furthermore, the
respective countries are both planning for scale.

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thtthings
How do they even know the current population(India and China)? I doubt
everyone is tracked in the census.

