15 ms·

The global population pyramid

176 points by wormold 8y ago

jstanley 8y ago
It took me a few minutes to understand the chart shown here, I think because it has the dependent and independent axes inverted. To look at the number of people of a given age in a given year, you follow the line for that year, go down the left to find the given age, and see where it lines up at the top to get the number of people. The shading between the lines is irrelevant and just serves to confuse: the area under the line doesn't mean much.
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  The area under a line is the global population, no?
  - jstanley 8y ago
    Ah, yes, you're right.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  This is a very standard graph.
dollarsand 8y ago
That visualization of the population pyramid is just very beautifully done. And I was saying this exact point for some time. "We are at a turning point in global population history. ... Not children will be added to the world population, but people of working age and old age." Super important post this one!
rlue 8y ago
This is a really interesting visual presentation of the data. Some cool observations: 1. The first five curves (1950–1990) are all in 10-year increments, so for instance, 1950's 20-year-old population maps very directly to 1960's 30-year-old population (hence the "rippling" effect produced by those six curves). 2. What's with the sudden pinch in the population of 20-year-olds in 2018? It tapers in very heavily from the corresponding point on the 1990 curve, and apart from the newborn population, is the only local maximum anywhere on the chart. Did I miss something in the news? Why would such a large number of kids born in 1990 be dead by now, compared to previous generations? 3. Why do curves for previous years have such pronounced staggering, while projections for the future are comparatively much smoother?
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  I’m also curious about 2. From my reading it looks more like these children weren’t born at all rather than that they all died. My best guess is something related to the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a decrease in birth rates.
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  For 3. I would guess that the “staggering” happens due to big geopolitical events causing significant changes to global birth rates, and the future lines do not show that because they can’t predict these events happening in the future, so they just try to give an average guess.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  > What's with the sudden pinch in the population of 20-year-olds in 2018? I'm no expert on this but I would guess the peak of China's one-child policy? Someone more knowledgeable might know more about the history of specific exemptions (city vs rural) and such. There's also implications for reporting bias, which might explain why the older data doesn't look so peaky.
- ourworldindata 8y ago
  Hi rlue! This is largely due to China's population dynamics. Here I've made a chart that shows the number of births (and deaths) in China over the last 69 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-projected-to-2100?time=1950..2019&country=CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-project... 30 and also 50 years ago China had large cohorts of newborns, these are the 'ripples' you see going through the global population pyramid. The number of births is always determined by two factors: the number of children per woman in the reproductive age bracket (called the Total Fertility Rate). And the number in the reproductive age bracket. Here is the Total Fertility Rate for China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..2015&country=OWID_WRL+CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab... The large cohort born around 50 years ago is the parent generation of the large cohort born 30 years ago. So the question is what explains the large cohort in the 1960s? That is the cohort born right before the rapid reduction of the Total Fertility Rate (from 6.4 children per woman in 1965 to half of that 15 years later as the chart above shows; this is largely before the introduction of the strict one-child-policy by the way). And it is the cohort born after one of the largest mass deaths in history. The Great Leap Forward Famine from around 1951 to 61 https://ourworldindata.org/famines#great-leap-forward-famine-china-1959-61 https://ourworldindata.org/famines#great-leap-forward-famine... Around 30 million died and as in all famines the fertility rate declined substantially, to then jump again right after the famine. Good questions! I should have mentioned them in the post. Let me know if you want to know more.
doorbellguy 8y ago
I went through the interactive chart following the references. Asia seems to be on a bell curve with the continent reaching saturation in the next 3 to 4 decades. Will be really interesting to see how the world deals with population explosion about to happen in Africa. Will be it the next Asia? The next continent we outsource our industries to? Does it have any significant advantages or disadvantages owing to its geographical location?
- alecco 8y ago
  It will be also interesting what will happen when the population pyramid inverts in Europe and North America.
philshem 8y ago
These types of graphs are one unique example where using “time” not on the x-axis is preferred. I think because it highlights the symmetry around x=0.
distant_hat 8y ago
Its an interesting visualization. Another site that shows this for individual countries is https://www.populationpyramid.net/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/ It is interesting to contrast countries at different points on their development. E.g., in Japan, where the population has already started contracting, vs say, Kenya, where the population is still growing rapidly. However, these curves should come with error bars that grow as you go farther out. There could be all kinds of black swan events we know nothing about right now. A major antibiotic resistant bug could sweep the world, there could a nuclear war, risks of climate change could be worse than we are projecting. If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out.
- jetrink 8y ago
  > If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out. Thomas Malthus attempted to describe the future of the world population in 1798 in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted a doubling of the global population every 25 years until a lack of food limited the population through hardship or famine and death. Pierre François Verhulst went on to mathematically model this bounded exponential growth and, in doing so, created the logistic function. The necessary data to create a chart like the one in the article didn't exist then, but Malthus' book did contribute to the passage of the Census Act of 1800, which enabled the first census of England, Scotland and Wales.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Mathus didn't quite predict that, he was smarter than that. The fact that exponential growth of population was a rare and short-lived phenomenon in world history (he had numbers from new england or quebec, and knew they were highly unusual) led him to conclude that there must be other forces. The equilibrium population is set by the balance of such forces. And not just in humans, obviously. Any animal could reproduce exponentially, but the world is not 100-km-deep in rabbits just yet. And this observation was an important ingredient for Darwin.
lordnacho 8y ago
Perhaps a bit grim, but I'm actually visting my dad, who ended up in hospital a couple of days ago. He's survived, but he's not been in great health recently and I've been thinking a lot about life and death. In 1950 he'd have been about 6 years old. If you then look at the 2018 curve for 74 year olds, you can see a fairly large part of his cohort has passed. Looks like more than half actually, if I'm interpreting this right. If you look at it, he's also on that part of the chart where your annual hurdle rate is rapidly increasing. Nobody's surprised that people in their 80s and 90s pass away. What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable. I'm also of an age where a few of those have started to hit home. I went to a small high school, maybe 90 people in my year plus the two adjacent years. At least 4 have passed away.
- scruple 8y ago
  We're around the same age, and our fathers are, as well. My father was recently hospitalized, another minor heart attack. He's been alive for the past 14 years thanks to a pacemaker. My oldest living uncle had bypass (5 bypasses!) surgery last week. My wife and I are well into the third trimester of a spontaneous multiples pregnancy. It feels like life and death are literally chomping at the bit on either side of me right now, and it's bringing out a lot of emotion. I'm trying to funnel that emotion and it's raw energy into journaling, to keep it from spilling out into my personal or professional life. All of this backstory lends this visualization a bit of a different meaning or context for people like us who are in the middle of these situations. > What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable. This struck me, as well. But, for different reasons. My graduating class was marked with death by the 5th grade. We lost 7 kids between the 5th grade and graduation (a couple of suicides and a terrible car accident involving 2 cars of class mates). We lost 3 or 4 more before we had turned 20 (suicide, drugs and alcohol related deaths). Another half dozen or so in our 20s (drug and alcohol related deaths). In our 30s, cancer and other terminal disease have claimed a few. My graduating class was < 100 people, so for a while there this was a frequent topic with the group of people that I remain in contact with. I suppose that there have to be instances like this but it's interesting to see it presented in this visualization. Thinking about it now, we actually haven't lost anyone that I'm aware of since in the second half of our 30s. Maybe we're turning a new leaf.
atemerev 8y ago
At this point it is useful to reiterate that global population growth right now is no longer exponential. Not even linear. It is sublinear, and the population expected to be stabilized around 2070, in the vicinity of 9-10B.
- ourworldindata 8y ago
  Yes, that is right the population growth rate started declining more than half a century ago. In 1962 the growth rate peaked at 2.2% and has halved since then: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#the-global-population-growth-rate-peaked-long-ago https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#the-globa... The projections from different research teams differ in when they expect the population population to peak. IIASA suggests what you say, the UN expects it later. I looked at the different projections (and what is behind the differences) here https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child
gxwmg 8y ago
Looks like half a vagina to me.
- golergka 8y ago
  What are you thoughts on violin plots?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bhouston 8y ago
My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable. Japan is the future of all other rich societies, rapid shrinkage if you exclude immigration. And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. Right now the only societies that are growing or even stable are either developing/poor or highly conservative/religious societies. If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor or highly religious (most likely both) as demographics is the future whether we like it or not. Also societies with shrinking populations will tend to have horrid economies and probably negative growth as the pyramid is inverted. Probably again like Japan.
- kiliantics 8y ago
  It's going to be shrinking much sooner and probably much more in the developing world due to actual next (rather current) global issue: climate change.
- koonsolo 8y ago
  I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home". Because let's face it, being only a mom as a girl is not socially acceptable. It's a weak position to be in. We are told to push them into engineering, STEM fields, becoming CEO's, world leaders, whatever. That's what we should do. But my girls, at this age, just want to become a mom. Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. I have no problem with women working in tech fields, and I worked with many great ones. But the question needs to be asked is if our society will survive such a thing. On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights, are getting more "equal" to men. But if your own culture is unable to produce enough children, and you have to import families and children from regions where womens rights are questionable, you need to ask how sustainable your democratic equal society is. This is still a big question for myself, so any real discussion is welcome, because maybe I'm overlooking something (so please don't just downvote). Maybe if we want our society to survive, we need to accept that although women are equal to men, they are very different. A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. Maybe our society should steer away from pushing women into a 'male' role that on one hands makes sense, but on the other hand is questionable. Maybe instead of pushing women into 'male' roles, we should support them better in how they benefit our society. I know this comes across as really terrible, because history has shown that stay at home moms are in a really weak position. But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids, and so import people from 'stay at home mom' cultures. Any constructive discussion is welcome.
harimau777 8y ago
It seems to me that the segment of the population that is most affected by societal/political policies are the young to middle age adults who are raising kids, establishing their careers, building wealth, etc. My understanding is that in the past, due to shorter life expectancies, this was also the generation that was generally in the majority; so each generation got a fair shot at making sure society served their needs during those key years. However, as life expectancy has increased, it now seems like there is a large enough cohort of people who have already established themselves that they can push for society/government not to spend resources on the policies that benefited them during their formative years.
- granshaw 8y ago
  Aka “How brexit came true”
- ThePhysicist 8y ago
  This surely is a problem in many western societies and in Germany politicians are currently eager to give such “gifts” to the older generation e.g. in the form of more retirement money. However it’s clear that the whole retirement system will collapse in 20-30 years if we don’t find some radical new approach of financing it, as currently it’s not capital based but financed by the active workforce (actually there is a small capital based supplementary system but it will not suffice to compensate for the changing demographics). When the ratio between old and young people will flip in 20-30 years there won’t be enough active workers to pay for the retired people. Right now the government desperately tries to fix this, recently they e.g. discussed ways to force freelancers and entrepreneurs - which currently don’t pay into the public retirement system - to pay into it as well (which is only a temporary fix at best). Another strategy is fostering massive immigration from both Europe and elsewhere (e.g. we recently took in almost one million people from Syria), which caused a significant uptick of the popularity of right-wing parties though and is also no guarantee for a stable system as many of the immigrants are hard to integrate into the labor market. Difficult times ahead it seems.
- rogerkirkness 8y ago
  People seem to like asking for and getting things but slamming the door behind them. Can't have it both ways, although which default is better is an open question.
throw0101a 8y ago
There's a good presentation by Hans Rosling about why population will peak at 11B (stick with until 26m): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=19m12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=19m12s Further on he explains why we may not have to worry about resource use given growing prosperity: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=35m36s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=35m36s
diNgUrAndI 8y ago
Pensions are not sustainable. Current mandatory CPP contribution in Canada seems like that. It's a promise that government makes that we contribute now which is taken to cover the current senior citizens. What if there isn't enough working force when we get older? How would the government keep the promise?
- snarf21 8y ago
  That's right, pensions are all pyramid schemes. Even when you factor in "stealing" back the money from anyone who dies early. We need a more standard X% towards retirement for people who are working and anything else is a needs based system. If you are retired and poor you get $X each month. If you have lots of money, you get nothing.
- Sileni 8y ago
  Social Security in the US as well. Most of my generation that I've talked to have just accepted it as another tax; there's not going to be anything left of it by the time we would actually expect to withdraw from it.
  - goodells 8y ago
    I (and many others) maintain that social security at the federal level is completely unconstitutional, and lament the system that has evolved around using it as the de-facto national identification in the United States. Of course there are externalities associated with the lack of a social safety net for the elderly, and at this point it very well may be "worth it" for the younger generation to pay it to avoid the consequences. What a mess.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Not only pensions. Individuals cannot save any kind of money for retirement on their own if there will be no one to give to in exchange for services after retirement. We cannot save without children, and the only answer is more automation, or just tough it out until the hump is past and we can have a more stable population. Toughing it out is not easy: young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it. Of course, young people today don't have to deal with the privations of yesteryear -- they have no idea, but no matter, they won't have children if it feels too difficult.
_nalply 8y ago
I just had an idea how to visualize the population pyramid by an animation. Start with 1950 then show the pyramid for each year till 2100. But also have black dots representing a group of people of same age moving upwards as to show their age with time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jrochkind1 8y ago
It kind of seems like wealthier countries, as their population demographics become tipped toward older people, would benefit from immigration of younger people, no?
cerealbad 8y ago
Religious and wealthy people will continue above replacement forever. Probably why these two strategies persist. Who is the poorest person you know? Are they religious and do they have many children? Who is the wealthiest and how many children do they have? Flattening this curve has been the world project of the Anglo-American establishment post WW2, with dubious results - unless replacing themselves and their own populations was the goal. The demographic winter largely of their own making, a case of idealism meeting unintended consequences which may go down as the biggest blunder in world history.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Are you really saying that Anglo-American's not having enough children is the biggest blunder in world history?
  - cerealbad 8y ago
    The Anglo-American establishment is a power consensus after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, two world wars and decolonisation. It refers to the hand off of power from Great Britain to the US. It has nothing to do with "Anglo-Americans" unless you're talking about a specific small group of anglophile elite families from the north-east of America with political and industrial wealth. A ruling consensus was established after the Yalta conference and Bretton Woods accord. In the immediate post war period the USSR has lost 30 million people and there is only one global nuclear power. Losing this dominance to the degree of the present world order is the second biggest blunder, should these people also then be completely minimized inside their own nation states by the force of global capital they allowed to emerge would be the biggest yes. It's the equivalent of receiving the entire wealth of the world then losing it in a few generations. What do you find controversial about this? A blunder is an unforced error which greatly diminishes your own position in a game, perhaps leading to a total loss. Or do you believe all human beings are playing equally for the interest of all others?
    - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
      I believe calling it a game and using those analogies trivializes the ethical implication of some of your views. And while I definitely don't think "all human beings are playing equally for the interest of all others", I do think if the "ruling consensus" elects to share power with a more diverse group of people that would be in the greater interest of humanity in the long term.

176 points by wormold 8y ago

It took me a few minutes to understand the chart shown here, I think because it has the dependent and independent axes inverted. To look at the number of people of a given age in a given year, you follow the line for that year, go down the left to find the given age, and see where it lines up at the top to get the number of people. The shading between the lines is irrelevant and just serves to confuse: the area under the line doesn't mean much.

dan-robertson 8y ago
The area under a line is the global population, no?
- jstanley 8y ago
  Ah, yes, you're right.
cryptonector 8y ago
This is a very standard graph.

dollarsand 8y ago

That visualization of the population pyramid is just very beautifully done. And I was saying this exact point for some time. "We are at a turning point in global population history. ... Not children will be added to the world population, but people of working age and old age." Super important post this one!

rlue 8y ago

This is a really interesting visual presentation of the data. Some cool observations: 1. The first five curves (1950–1990) are all in 10-year increments, so for instance, 1950's 20-year-old population maps very directly to 1960's 30-year-old population (hence the "rippling" effect produced by those six curves). 2. What's with the sudden pinch in the population of 20-year-olds in 2018? It tapers in very heavily from the corresponding point on the 1990 curve, and apart from the newborn population, is the only local maximum anywhere on the chart. Did I miss something in the news? Why would such a large number of kids born in 1990 be dead by now, compared to previous generations? 3. Why do curves for previous years have such pronounced staggering, while projections for the future are comparatively much smoother?

dan-robertson 8y ago
I’m also curious about 2. From my reading it looks more like these children weren’t born at all rather than that they all died. My best guess is something related to the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a decrease in birth rates.
dan-robertson 8y ago
For 3. I would guess that the “staggering” happens due to big geopolitical events causing significant changes to global birth rates, and the future lines do not show that because they can’t predict these events happening in the future, so they just try to give an average guess.
lordnacho 8y ago
> What's with the sudden pinch in the population of 20-year-olds in 2018? I'm no expert on this but I would guess the peak of China's one-child policy? Someone more knowledgeable might know more about the history of specific exemptions (city vs rural) and such. There's also implications for reporting bias, which might explain why the older data doesn't look so peaky.
ourworldindata 8y ago
Hi rlue! This is largely due to China's population dynamics. Here I've made a chart that shows the number of births (and deaths) in China over the last 69 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-projected-to-2100?time=1950..2019&country=CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-project... 30 and also 50 years ago China had large cohorts of newborns, these are the 'ripples' you see going through the global population pyramid. The number of births is always determined by two factors: the number of children per woman in the reproductive age bracket (called the Total Fertility Rate). And the number in the reproductive age bracket. Here is the Total Fertility Rate for China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..2015&country=OWID_WRL+CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab... The large cohort born around 50 years ago is the parent generation of the large cohort born 30 years ago. So the question is what explains the large cohort in the 1960s? That is the cohort born right before the rapid reduction of the Total Fertility Rate (from 6.4 children per woman in 1965 to half of that 15 years later as the chart above shows; this is largely before the introduction of the strict one-child-policy by the way). And it is the cohort born after one of the largest mass deaths in history. The Great Leap Forward Famine from around 1951 to 61 https://ourworldindata.org/famines#great-leap-forward-famine-china-1959-61 https://ourworldindata.org/famines#great-leap-forward-famine... Around 30 million died and as in all famines the fertility rate declined substantially, to then jump again right after the famine. Good questions! I should have mentioned them in the post. Let me know if you want to know more.

doorbellguy 8y ago

I went through the interactive chart following the references. Asia seems to be on a bell curve with the continent reaching saturation in the next 3 to 4 decades. Will be really interesting to see how the world deals with population explosion about to happen in Africa. Will be it the next Asia? The next continent we outsource our industries to? Does it have any significant advantages or disadvantages owing to its geographical location?

alecco 8y ago
It will be also interesting what will happen when the population pyramid inverts in Europe and North America.

philshem 8y ago

These types of graphs are one unique example where using “time” not on the x-axis is preferred. I think because it highlights the symmetry around x=0.

distant_hat 8y ago

Its an interesting visualization. Another site that shows this for individual countries is https://www.populationpyramid.net/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/ It is interesting to contrast countries at different points on their development. E.g., in Japan, where the population has already started contracting, vs say, Kenya, where the population is still growing rapidly. However, these curves should come with error bars that grow as you go farther out. There could be all kinds of black swan events we know nothing about right now. A major antibiotic resistant bug could sweep the world, there could a nuclear war, risks of climate change could be worse than we are projecting. If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out.

jetrink 8y ago
> If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out. Thomas Malthus attempted to describe the future of the world population in 1798 in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted a doubling of the global population every 25 years until a lack of food limited the population through hardship or famine and death. Pierre François Verhulst went on to mathematically model this bounded exponential growth and, in doing so, created the logistic function. The necessary data to create a chart like the one in the article didn't exist then, but Malthus' book did contribute to the passage of the Census Act of 1800, which enabled the first census of England, Scotland and Wales.
- iguy 8y ago
  Mathus didn't quite predict that, he was smarter than that. The fact that exponential growth of population was a rare and short-lived phenomenon in world history (he had numbers from new england or quebec, and knew they were highly unusual) led him to conclude that there must be other forces. The equilibrium population is set by the balance of such forces. And not just in humans, obviously. Any animal could reproduce exponentially, but the world is not 100-km-deep in rabbits just yet. And this observation was an important ingredient for Darwin.

lordnacho 8y ago

Perhaps a bit grim, but I'm actually visting my dad, who ended up in hospital a couple of days ago. He's survived, but he's not been in great health recently and I've been thinking a lot about life and death. In 1950 he'd have been about 6 years old. If you then look at the 2018 curve for 74 year olds, you can see a fairly large part of his cohort has passed. Looks like more than half actually, if I'm interpreting this right. If you look at it, he's also on that part of the chart where your annual hurdle rate is rapidly increasing. Nobody's surprised that people in their 80s and 90s pass away. What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable. I'm also of an age where a few of those have started to hit home. I went to a small high school, maybe 90 people in my year plus the two adjacent years. At least 4 have passed away.

scruple 8y ago
We're around the same age, and our fathers are, as well. My father was recently hospitalized, another minor heart attack. He's been alive for the past 14 years thanks to a pacemaker. My oldest living uncle had bypass (5 bypasses!) surgery last week. My wife and I are well into the third trimester of a spontaneous multiples pregnancy. It feels like life and death are literally chomping at the bit on either side of me right now, and it's bringing out a lot of emotion. I'm trying to funnel that emotion and it's raw energy into journaling, to keep it from spilling out into my personal or professional life. All of this backstory lends this visualization a bit of a different meaning or context for people like us who are in the middle of these situations. > What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable. This struck me, as well. But, for different reasons. My graduating class was marked with death by the 5th grade. We lost 7 kids between the 5th grade and graduation (a couple of suicides and a terrible car accident involving 2 cars of class mates). We lost 3 or 4 more before we had turned 20 (suicide, drugs and alcohol related deaths). Another half dozen or so in our 20s (drug and alcohol related deaths). In our 30s, cancer and other terminal disease have claimed a few. My graduating class was < 100 people, so for a while there this was a frequent topic with the group of people that I remain in contact with. I suppose that there have to be instances like this but it's interesting to see it presented in this visualization. Thinking about it now, we actually haven't lost anyone that I'm aware of since in the second half of our 30s. Maybe we're turning a new leaf.

atemerev 8y ago

At this point it is useful to reiterate that global population growth right now is no longer exponential. Not even linear. It is sublinear, and the population expected to be stabilized around 2070, in the vicinity of 9-10B.

ourworldindata 8y ago
Yes, that is right the population growth rate started declining more than half a century ago. In 1962 the growth rate peaked at 2.2% and has halved since then: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#the-global-population-growth-rate-peaked-long-ago https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#the-globa... The projections from different research teams differ in when they expect the population population to peak. IIASA suggests what you say, the UN expects it later. I looked at the different projections (and what is behind the differences) here https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child

gxwmg 8y ago

Looks like half a vagina to me.

golergka 8y ago
What are you thoughts on violin plots?
- deleted 8y ago
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bhouston 8y ago

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable. Japan is the future of all other rich societies, rapid shrinkage if you exclude immigration. And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. Right now the only societies that are growing or even stable are either developing/poor or highly conservative/religious societies. If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor or highly religious (most likely both) as demographics is the future whether we like it or not. Also societies with shrinking populations will tend to have horrid economies and probably negative growth as the pyramid is inverted. Probably again like Japan.

kiliantics 8y ago
It's going to be shrinking much sooner and probably much more in the developing world due to actual next (rather current) global issue: climate change.
koonsolo 8y ago
I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home". Because let's face it, being only a mom as a girl is not socially acceptable. It's a weak position to be in. We are told to push them into engineering, STEM fields, becoming CEO's, world leaders, whatever. That's what we should do. But my girls, at this age, just want to become a mom. Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. I have no problem with women working in tech fields, and I worked with many great ones. But the question needs to be asked is if our society will survive such a thing. On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights, are getting more "equal" to men. But if your own culture is unable to produce enough children, and you have to import families and children from regions where womens rights are questionable, you need to ask how sustainable your democratic equal society is. This is still a big question for myself, so any real discussion is welcome, because maybe I'm overlooking something (so please don't just downvote). Maybe if we want our society to survive, we need to accept that although women are equal to men, they are very different. A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. Maybe our society should steer away from pushing women into a 'male' role that on one hands makes sense, but on the other hand is questionable. Maybe instead of pushing women into 'male' roles, we should support them better in how they benefit our society. I know this comes across as really terrible, because history has shown that stay at home moms are in a really weak position. But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids, and so import people from 'stay at home mom' cultures. Any constructive discussion is welcome.

harimau777 8y ago

It seems to me that the segment of the population that is most affected by societal/political policies are the young to middle age adults who are raising kids, establishing their careers, building wealth, etc. My understanding is that in the past, due to shorter life expectancies, this was also the generation that was generally in the majority; so each generation got a fair shot at making sure society served their needs during those key years. However, as life expectancy has increased, it now seems like there is a large enough cohort of people who have already established themselves that they can push for society/government not to spend resources on the policies that benefited them during their formative years.

granshaw 8y ago
Aka “How brexit came true”
ThePhysicist 8y ago
This surely is a problem in many western societies and in Germany politicians are currently eager to give such “gifts” to the older generation e.g. in the form of more retirement money. However it’s clear that the whole retirement system will collapse in 20-30 years if we don’t find some radical new approach of financing it, as currently it’s not capital based but financed by the active workforce (actually there is a small capital based supplementary system but it will not suffice to compensate for the changing demographics). When the ratio between old and young people will flip in 20-30 years there won’t be enough active workers to pay for the retired people. Right now the government desperately tries to fix this, recently they e.g. discussed ways to force freelancers and entrepreneurs - which currently don’t pay into the public retirement system - to pay into it as well (which is only a temporary fix at best). Another strategy is fostering massive immigration from both Europe and elsewhere (e.g. we recently took in almost one million people from Syria), which caused a significant uptick of the popularity of right-wing parties though and is also no guarantee for a stable system as many of the immigrants are hard to integrate into the labor market. Difficult times ahead it seems.
rogerkirkness 8y ago
People seem to like asking for and getting things but slamming the door behind them. Can't have it both ways, although which default is better is an open question.

throw0101a 8y ago

There's a good presentation by Hans Rosling about why population will peak at 11B (stick with until 26m): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=19m12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=19m12s Further on he explains why we may not have to worry about resource use given growing prosperity: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=35m36s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=35m36s

diNgUrAndI 8y ago

Pensions are not sustainable. Current mandatory CPP contribution in Canada seems like that. It's a promise that government makes that we contribute now which is taken to cover the current senior citizens. What if there isn't enough working force when we get older? How would the government keep the promise?

snarf21 8y ago
That's right, pensions are all pyramid schemes. Even when you factor in "stealing" back the money from anyone who dies early. We need a more standard X% towards retirement for people who are working and anything else is a needs based system. If you are retired and poor you get $X each month. If you have lots of money, you get nothing.
Sileni 8y ago
Social Security in the US as well. Most of my generation that I've talked to have just accepted it as another tax; there's not going to be anything left of it by the time we would actually expect to withdraw from it.
- goodells 8y ago
  I (and many others) maintain that social security at the federal level is completely unconstitutional, and lament the system that has evolved around using it as the de-facto national identification in the United States. Of course there are externalities associated with the lack of a social safety net for the elderly, and at this point it very well may be "worth it" for the younger generation to pay it to avoid the consequences. What a mess.
cryptonector 8y ago
Not only pensions. Individuals cannot save any kind of money for retirement on their own if there will be no one to give to in exchange for services after retirement. We cannot save without children, and the only answer is more automation, or just tough it out until the hump is past and we can have a more stable population. Toughing it out is not easy: young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it. Of course, young people today don't have to deal with the privations of yesteryear -- they have no idea, but no matter, they won't have children if it feels too difficult.

_nalply 8y ago

I just had an idea how to visualize the population pyramid by an animation. Start with 1950 then show the pyramid for each year till 2100. But also have black dots representing a group of people of same age moving upwards as to show their age with time.

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jrochkind1 8y ago

It kind of seems like wealthier countries, as their population demographics become tipped toward older people, would benefit from immigration of younger people, no?

cerealbad 8y ago

Religious and wealthy people will continue above replacement forever. Probably why these two strategies persist. Who is the poorest person you know? Are they religious and do they have many children? Who is the wealthiest and how many children do they have? Flattening this curve has been the world project of the Anglo-American establishment post WW2, with dubious results - unless replacing themselves and their own populations was the goal. The demographic winter largely of their own making, a case of idealism meeting unintended consequences which may go down as the biggest blunder in world history.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Are you really saying that Anglo-American's not having enough children is the biggest blunder in world history?
- cerealbad 8y ago
  The Anglo-American establishment is a power consensus after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, two world wars and decolonisation. It refers to the hand off of power from Great Britain to the US. It has nothing to do with "Anglo-Americans" unless you're talking about a specific small group of anglophile elite families from the north-east of America with political and industrial wealth. A ruling consensus was established after the Yalta conference and Bretton Woods accord. In the immediate post war period the USSR has lost 30 million people and there is only one global nuclear power. Losing this dominance to the degree of the present world order is the second biggest blunder, should these people also then be completely minimized inside their own nation states by the force of global capital they allowed to emerge would be the biggest yes. It's the equivalent of receiving the entire wealth of the world then losing it in a few generations. What do you find controversial about this? A blunder is an unforced error which greatly diminishes your own position in a game, perhaps leading to a total loss. Or do you believe all human beings are playing equally for the interest of all others?
  - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
    I believe calling it a game and using those analogies trivializes the ethical implication of some of your views. And while I definitely don't think "all human beings are playing equally for the interest of all others", I do think if the "ruling consensus" elects to share power with a more diverse group of people that would be in the greater interest of humanity in the long term.