8 ms·

India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world

172 points by okket 8y ago

pseudolus 8y ago
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".
nickelcitymario 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    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.
thtthings 8y ago
How do they even know the current population(India and China)? I doubt everyone is tracked in the census.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    I'm curious to know how overpopulation causes corruption.
- newyankee 8y ago
  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.
- umeshunni 8y ago
  If Uttar Pradesh was a country, it would be the 4th most populous after China, India and the US.
- sseth 8y ago
  They must have been pulling your leg. 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!
KyleOS 8y ago
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-comes-to-economic-growth https://kyso.io/KyleOS/does-population-size-matter-when-it-c...)
- KyleOS 8y ago
  Original source: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/04/17/where-growth-is-concerned-is-population-destiny https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/04/17/w...
plurby 8y ago
Watch https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7Bgv... everything explained.
rdm_blackhole 8y ago
Relevant link: https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-global-population-will-start-to-shrink-2f606c1ef088 https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-gl... 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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    It's probably all of them, except the wormholes. However, all of them are far away and 9 billion will happen way before that.
- formercoder 8y ago
  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.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
If there where hacks, for the young to gather knowledge and aquire skills, without giving up there daily work to supply there lifelihood. What is needed, is some mix of audiobook, show & tell device, to educate those generations outside the citys.
zavi 8y ago
Also significantly younger on average. China has a serious aging problem, with average age on par with many wealthier countries.
- ghomrassen 8y ago
  Yes, absolutely. You'll see China having the same issues as Japan about 15-20 years down the line.
  - billfruit 8y ago
    May be that is why they are starting to incentivize families to have more than one child.
billfruit 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      How does demographic momentum account for the fact that Nigeria cannot support that many people?
  - zeropnc 8y ago
    I mean, look at how many people tiny Bangladesh is supporting.
- SllX 8y ago
  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.
immichaelwang 8y ago
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.
bdamm 8y ago
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.
- occamschainsaw 8y ago
  This is a nice explanation of different models: https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348 https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348
- ghomrassen 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - sct202 8y ago
      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.
aatharuv 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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/chi/TFR/en/ http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/data...
  - qeternity 8y ago
    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?
    - steve19 8y ago
      Populations usually have close to 50% split, although I think there are usually slightly more woman. Outside of war/post war its unlikely to have a situation where there are 10 woman to each man.
      - irrational 8y ago
        India has a history of favoring males, so many females are aborted. You are more likely to see 10 men to each woman.
        8y ago

172 points by okket 8y ago

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".

nickelcitymario 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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.

thtthings 8y ago

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

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I'm curious to know how overpopulation causes corruption.
newyankee 8y ago
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.
umeshunni 8y ago
If Uttar Pradesh was a country, it would be the 4th most populous after China, India and the US.
sseth 8y ago
They must have been pulling your leg. 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!

KyleOS 8y ago

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-comes-to-economic-growth https://kyso.io/KyleOS/does-population-size-matter-when-it-c...)

KyleOS 8y ago
Original source: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/04/17/where-growth-is-concerned-is-population-destiny https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/04/17/w...

plurby 8y ago

Watch https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7Bgv... everything explained.

rdm_blackhole 8y ago

Relevant link: https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-global-population-will-start-to-shrink-2f606c1ef088 https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-gl... 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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  It's probably all of them, except the wormholes. However, all of them are far away and 9 billion will happen way before that.
formercoder 8y ago
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.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

If there where hacks, for the young to gather knowledge and aquire skills, without giving up there daily work to supply there lifelihood. What is needed, is some mix of audiobook, show & tell device, to educate those generations outside the citys.

zavi 8y ago

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

ghomrassen 8y ago
Yes, absolutely. You'll see China having the same issues as Japan about 15-20 years down the line.
- billfruit 8y ago
  May be that is why they are starting to incentivize families to have more than one child.

billfruit 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    How does demographic momentum account for the fact that Nigeria cannot support that many people?
- zeropnc 8y ago
  I mean, look at how many people tiny Bangladesh is supporting.
SllX 8y ago
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.

immichaelwang 8y ago

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.

bdamm 8y ago

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.

occamschainsaw 8y ago
This is a nice explanation of different models: https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348 https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348
ghomrassen 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - sct202 8y ago
    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.

aatharuv 8y ago

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 8y ago
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/chi/TFR/en/ http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/data...
- qeternity 8y ago
  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?
  - steve19 8y ago
    Populations usually have close to 50% split, although I think there are usually slightly more woman. Outside of war/post war its unlikely to have a situation where there are 10 woman to each man.
    - irrational 8y ago
      India has a history of favoring males, so many females are aborted. You are more likely to see 10 men to each woman.
      - 8y ago