For me this stood out:
"The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India (1·09 billion [0·72–1·71], Nigeria (791 million [594–1056]), China (732 million [456–1499]), the USA (336 million
[248–456]), and Pakistan (248 million [151–427])."
The big surprise being China,of-course. A drastic decrease projected in the coming 80 years.Should have policy consequences as well, I would think.
Added to this, their economy has boomed due to not having to invest in future generations. At some point of course these chickens will come home to roost when the current population hump gets to an age where they retire, but for a good 20 years it can be a massive economic boon.
This is a non-issue for most asian countries. Grandparents and women who couldn't keep up with men in professional settings become caretakers. China's biggest issue is its population bomb not a lack of people to watch the kids.
By productive if you mean only time-wise, don't forget that single kid families can increase consumption of goods with the saved Yuan leading to higher GDP as well.
The most interesting thing for me in this report coming out is that societies/governments taking note of this might incentivise outcomes. E.g., if China thinks that 750M is too low keeping its longer term interests, it might tweak the 1-child policy or encourage immigration etc by 2050.
Isn’t this too much of variability. For example it projects India’s population range from 0.72B to 1.71B . That is like either being number one by a wide margin or dropping to 10th spot or lower.
I find these predictions fascinating to think about. Did we get them right this time? I remember that we were taught about the idea of overpopulation in school. As I understand, it was believed in the 60s and 70s that the world population would keep massively increasing. People were worried about overpopulation. At this point we know that that's not true - it seems that essentially all rich countries see a decline in birthrates. They might increase in population, but it happens due to immigration. However, will this pattern hold?
As I understand it, before the industrial revolution, the population was what's described as Malthusian. As a country became richer it tended to have a population increase, which meant that an estimate of GDP per capita remained relatively similar. Over thousands of years you'd see maybe a doubling or quadrupling of it. Ie the median person in the year 500 AD lived rather similarly to the median person in the year 1500 AD.
When the industrial revolution rolled around, things changed. The estimate of GDP per capita increased faster than the population. People became richer and their lives became significantly better. This came with a substantial population increase, because people started living longer. The fruits of progress spread to poorer areas. The increase in food availability and medicine made many population counts skyrocket.
At some point during this it turned out that the richest areas started seeing a significant decrease in birthrates though. Why? I'm unsure. Perhaps people wanted better lives for their children and they couldn't afford to have as many children? Perhaps it wasn't necessary to have as many children anymore (social security)? Regardless what the reason is, birthrates have declined in developed countries. This allows us to plot a peak for the human population and decline afterwards. We don't need to worry about overpopulation anymore.
Will this pattern hold though? What if it turns out that when a society hits a GDP per capita of $500k of today's money that the birthrates start increasing again? 3% growth of GDP per capita plotted over 80 years would put US GDP per capita at $668k. What's the chance that there is no societal break point in the future that reverses the birthrate decline? Quite a few countries seem to be actively working on trying to find something like that.
Female empowerment is what is listed in the paper and what is generally accepted.
I've typically heard two drivers:
1) children turned from an economic boon/necessity to a sink. They can start helping with farm work pretty early, not quite so much when the industry work, they have to be somewhat older and can't tag along when the parents are working.
2) women could spend their time working and earning money. They could start to support themselves.
We've been able to accelerate this trend by offering access to contraception and decreasing infant mortality.
> we were taught about the idea of overpopulation in school
That's a problem with school education. They give the wrong models. Exponential growth is impossible in nature because at some point it runs out of steam and fizzles out. Logistic curve or probit is a much better abstraction.
I think the assumption was that humans would continue growing exponentially until they reach the carrying capacity where they're all fighting for the same resources. Then the population stops increasing because there's not enough food/water/shelter to go around.
What actually happened is people in rich countries have plenty of food/water/shelter to continue reproducing... if they wanted to. The thing the models didn't account for is that people would choose to have fewer children based on standard of living.
To me it seems this had nothing to do with the standard limits of nature, but based on individuals' choices. Given those models' assumptions, I think they were valid. I would have made the same assumption based on past data as well.
I recently heard about a survey where people on average said that they do want to have 2.something (lets say 2.4, but I don't remember the exact number) kids. I guess it is easier to prevent overshooting, but sometimes life circumstances prevent them from having as many as they wanted. That can be as simple reasons as not finding the right partner, etc.
What you see less often though, is people that want to have 4 or 5 kids, which I think is stigmatized, but it could even out those that don't have kids.
> What you see less often though, is people that want to have 4 or 5 kids, which I think is stigmatized
That might vary by culture, but I can't think of a time when I've seen it be stigmatized. I imagine that current generations chose to have less than 4 kids for economic and quality of life reasons, not because they see having many kids as somehow wrong.
That's not a new idea. Walter Greiling projected back in the 1950s that world population would reach a peak of about nine billion, in the 21st century, and then stop growing [0]
These studies are fascinating but I think they should stay away from such detailed predictions as 'in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098'. That's just way too far out to make any meaningful statements about a simple ordering of economies in relative size.
Is that really a prediction in the study? Or does their reference scenario use that (unknowable assumption) as a necessary input in calculating their population predictions?
Yeah the Lancet has had some questionable publishing standards as of late, but the thing about science is that you should always hold everything loosely, run more experiments, try to disprove pást studies' findings, and take everything with a grain of salt until it's confirmed by several peer reviewed studies. So, we shouldn't trust the Lancet, and we don't need to, because everything in proper science should always be taken with a grain of salt.
It stands out that a worldwide event like coved won't alter the trajectory as far as I an see, on these trends. If i missed something long lasting on the natural reproductive rates of these economies id love to know.
Whats strongly causative of the decline is literacy, especially women's literacy, and women's body autonomy and reproductive rights.
US opposition to WHO and to funding contraception and abortion is (thankfully) being counterbalanced by the gates foundations work, and other funding sources. A pox on the religious right, and American foreign policy.
The sheer scale of the natural birth and death rate is hard to comprehend. Most major world events with major death and suffering barely show up in the population chart
> It stands out that a worldwide event like coved won't alter the trajectory as far as I an see, on these trends. If i missed something long lasting on the natural reproductive rates of these economies id love to know.
If covid leads to a long term increase in remote work that itself could lead to a change in demographics as people reduce moving to cities and away from family support networks, which could impact on fertility rates.
I refuse to believe that the only way for economic growth is population growth. Thats not sustainable. More investment in replacing the workforce with automation.
It's not. People used to believe we couldn't go to the moon. They just didn't see other models, or benefited from old models.
Even more than economic growth is growth in standard of living, quality of life, health, and other things that population growth is now causing to decline, however much it helped before. Plenty of human populations have lived peacefully, stably, and abundantly without economic growth. Plenty have grown to overshoot and collapse.
In Thailand, for example, Mechai Viravaidya helped lead a nation go from 7 children per woman to below replacement level. Think the opposite of the One Child policy -- instead of forced abortions and sterilizations, all voluntary, fun teaching kids about condoms and making them available everywhere. It increased stability, peace, and abundance. Here's his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/mechai_viravaidya_how_mr_condom_ma... "Thailand's 'Mr. Condom,' Mechai Viravaidya, retells the country's bold plan to raise its standard of living, starting in the 1970s. First step: population control. And that means a lot of frank, funny -- and very effective -- talk about condoms."
"The global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100."
Baseline of 9.73 billion.
"China was forecasted to become the largest economy by 2035 but in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098"
That sounds like they they forecast war?
Also
"meeting the Sustainable Development Goals targets for education and contraceptive met need would result in a global population of 6·29 billion (4·82–8·73) in 2100"
Is the 2.4 billion people missing people a form of genocide or just good heath?
They explained their methodology on forecasting these populations by factors such as birth rates, migration, and mortality rates. Where did you read the part that mentioned wars?
> The Gates foundation has a interest in keeping estimates of the population down low.
The paper says:
Role of the funding source
The funders had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. All authors had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
> But it's not how it will go down, look at attempts 80 year ago what they thought 2020 would be
They estimated 2025 US population to be between 225M and 392M depending on the projection methodology used. The current population of the US is 328M, so this seems pretty good for an estimate 70 years ago!
> Longevity will mean increased fertility.
This would seem a bold claim. It hasn't anywhere in the world so far, and the correlation between increased longevity and decreased birthrates is very strong.
Studies don't take into account the leaps that will happen because we don't know what they are. Things don't just continue as the previous 80 years. These jumps happened even when we didn't have the internet to super charge stuff.
> 2025 US population to be between 225M and 392M
That's 2050 in the document.
2020 is 210 - 305 million estimate. (pdf p29)
> decreased birthrates is very strong.
But not fertility. You won't be living to 120 without being a healthy and fertile 60 year old. It's fun to have work as number one for 20 years, but if it's easy to have kids in your 40's without IVF things will change.
> Increased life expectancy for women so far hasn't been matched by an increase in fertility beyond 40 years old.
You've said this with some certainty, were are you getting this from? This doesn't fit with all current data about general health and longevity, so I'd like to see who's saying this and what their case is.
The ovarian reserve only decreases from birth, so it becomes less and less likely for a woman to conceive as they get older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility also notes: A review in 2012 came to the result that therapeutic interventions to halt or reverse the process of reproductive ageing in women is limited, despite recent reports of the potential existence of stem cells which may be used to restore the ovarian reserve
I don't see how. We already live long enough to have a dozen kids per family. It's just that our society is structured such that raising kids is an expensive nightmare.
It’s not just about money, the enjoyment/benefits of having a child decreases dramatically with each child you have. Having more than 1/2 children is really tough on, particularly on the mother, both physically and mentally. If you have the choice most people will not opt for more than 2 or 3.
I heard the opposite, directly from people who have a lot of kids (one person I know has 13): it doesn't matter all that much in terms of labor how many you have if you have 3 or more. The first one is a lot of work, after that the increase is marginal. They begin to take care of each other more, which I think you will agree is a desirable thing for any human to learn early on. It's _slightly_ easier in terms of _marginal_ cost, too (younger kids can re-use clothing, toys, etc), but only marginal, the cost largely goes up linearly due to the impacts of daycare, tutoring, extracurriculars, and higher education, all of which are expensive AF in the US.
The big surprise being China,of-course. A drastic decrease projected in the coming 80 years.Should have policy consequences as well, I would think.