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Its an interesting visualization. Another site that shows this for individual countries is https://www.populationpyramid.net/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/

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 7y 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 7y 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.
sschueller 7y ago
The China chart is very interesting in comparison with India where there was no one child policy.
evrydayhustling 7y ago
I actually love viz that demand some decoding, if decoding forces you to think about data a new way. But this graph added a ton of complexity by separating male and female populations across the axis. It's impossible to read the ratio between men and women, except to the trivial point that it's about 50/50 - which is the only thing forcing the pyramid metaphor. Feels like a purely aesthetic choice - data viz equivalent of clickbait?

jetrink 7y 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 7y 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.

sschueller 7y ago

The China chart is very interesting in comparison with India where there was no one child policy.

evrydayhustling 7y ago

I actually love viz that demand some decoding, if decoding forces you to think about data a new way. But this graph added a ton of complexity by separating male and female populations across the axis. It's impossible to read the ratio between men and women, except to the trivial point that it's about 50/50 - which is the only thing forcing the pyramid metaphor. Feels like a purely aesthetic choice - data viz equivalent of clickbait?