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.
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. :)
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.
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.
But surely people who don't have kids are already part of calculating what the fertility rate is? Why would you manually exclude parts of the population, only to add a skew factor later to your number to effectively reinclude them?
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.
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.
Per wikipedia, what you are describing is the Net Reproduction Rate.
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+.
I guess this makes the assumption that each woman is impregnated by different men. If 10 women and one man had a TFR of 1.5 the population is still growing no?
If you mean: some weird tribe that has a population of 10 grown up women and one grown up men then yes, any TFR > 1.1 would mean population growth.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Literally every educated person i know in India (excluding some religions) including me have worried about the impact of our population and consider it the root cause of most (if not) all of our problems. The problem is we do not get a voice in the narratives peddled by the media.
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!
No, they weren’t pulling my leg. There are plenty of highly nationalist middle-class Hindus in India, as I’m sure even you have noticed from political waves.
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 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.
This is more from a finance perspective than an economic one. However, and taking the stock market as an example, we can look at what might happen to equity valuations under our current model. Under a discounted cash flow model, free cash flow is modeled explicitly for a certain period, and then a value is calculated for the terminal year cash flow "in perpetuity." This value in perpetuity depends on, in part, a growth rate, which is usually between inflation and GDP growth. It can account for up to 50% of the value at times. Assuming population growth start to decline, and other factors such as TFP don't outweigh the decrease in labor, GDP growth will become negative and it's clear that this will have an immense downward impact on equity valuations.
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.]
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...)
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.
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.
Farmers sustain their families where they work. Factory workers are separated from their families. China is full of villages with only grand-parents and small children left.
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?
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.
A lot of families are split up as a result of migrant factory work and the factory dorms, so it's probably a drag in multiple ways compared to farming.
Good point. It's hard to have children when you're physically apart for most of the year, and it's even harder to raise them when you're not home. Do children generally stay with family in the rural areas, or do they stay with one or both parents in the industrial zones?
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".
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.
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.