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.
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).
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.
That is a good question, and I just checked Wikipedia for modern population estimates. Census counts and non-census estimates tend to be from different years, so the data isn’t perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good and all that, and it is still interesting to look at.
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.
Population growth is a problem, not a competition. Even if you care about the people's rights and humanism, you should be concerned with how much other life each human displaces.
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.
> 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]
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.
The 'replacement migration' concept is definitely under perpetual discussion in the UN, as evidenced by the link.
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.
When it comes to global population growth there is no "they". At this point we are using resources too quickly. In a global economy/ecosystem it doesn't matter that population in Japan has leveled out, global population is still going up far too quickly.
I don't agree. 'Where' the population growth happens is as important as anything, because some nations are much more equipped to handle the growth than otherwise.
Also, some nations citizens produce/consume much more than others, for example.
China could handle some more people. Pakistan and Nigeria cannot.
I agree that nations each handle growth differently. I don't agree that any nation is equipped to handle growth, at least from a long term ecological perspective.
There is already more consumption than our current technology can sustain.
No, they are not. It is not that economy requires growing population, it is the Ponzi scheme of taxing population and diverging govt funds to buying votes. And paying back past debts.
This is a man made conundrum not a law of physics.
Population growth depends on cheap food using cheap energy for tillage, fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides/herbicides, transportation, processing and so forth.
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 nations with the highest total fertility rates (Niger, Chad, Somalia, DRC...) all have far lower rates of energy consumption per capita than sub-replacement-fertility nations like South Korea, Italy, Japan, or Canada. Energy availability isn't a strong proxy for or constraint on fertility rates, at least in the next few decades.
One of the most important needs to enable fertility is a temperature in which an infant can survive. In colder climates, that requires a lot more fuel input to heat homes, whereas in consistently warm climates, like the African countries to mentioned, they get their heat "for free", and therefore fertility is less constrained.
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.
There's plenty of dirty cheap energy reserves to let this problem get a lot worse. India in particular is an interesting scenario, they have huge coal reserves and a large population still living without electricity. Coal will probably be used substantially for increasing their quality of life, that's a really big multiplier on a very dirty energy source.
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.
Counting French and Germans as a single population group doesn't really make sense, since their languages are far more different than, say, the different flavors of Bengali spoken in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. And of course the French government's childcare policies are quite different to Germany's. France is also more liberal than Germany in granting citizenship to those of other ethnic groups.
Did you know that languages even within different states in India can be vastly more different than the differences between French and German, all with a different script and all? Yes, India is probably more diverse all on it's own, compared to all of EU perhaps.
But there is no political union between India, Bangladesh, where as EU is every day becoming a multinational super state, than a collection of independent sovereign nations.
