What an amazing new tool Hannah, we'll done to you and team!
Now that I am using it (and publicising widely in the office), i really would appreciate the "working population, childen, retired" bars at the top of the population pyramid in the tool as well. It just removes a lot of the adding up one has to do otherwise.
Ageing population in democracies are a challenge and can distort the politics significantly as the pollies chase popular votes. Fortunately in Australia the Baby Boomers are no longer the largest demographic and surprise, our government introduces new tax laws which mostly impact older, wealthier Aussies.
This is an exercise that could best be described as “demographic fiction.” It is completely illusory to think that we can even begin to predict what the population of any country will be in the year 2100. There are so many known unknowns, and we cannot say anything about the unknowns we are unaware of. Will South Korea even exist by then?
Governments and some companies need to know what the demographics of a country will be in the future. Maybe not on a 75 year scale but definitely 25. This is why the UN and national stats bodies have these projections.
RU insane? 363,000 born today, minus 174,000 deaths = 189,000 NET NEW HUMANS! With the current massive human overpopulation, and consequential heat energy production, we will have burned-up by 2,100! YOU ARE EITHER AN EMPLOYEE OF BIG OIL OR NAIVE', or just STUPID. We are 3,000 times more numerous today than were our migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestral clan/band members, and we have been engineered as maximal consumers of natural resources and energy (coal, oil, gas, sunlite, wind). We/you are at the end of time and Gaia is expecting our extinction shortly.
At the rate that we're squandering non-renewable resources, we could see a precipitous decline in population, as the WORLD3 model from "Limits to Growth" seems to indicate.
We are right on track for the "Business As Usual" model run, which indicates a sudden end of growth by the end of the decade, with significant population declines by mid-century — about the time the UN model says we'll hit ten billion.
Neither Ehrlich or Malthus was wrong… they just didn't get the timing right.
The "Limits to Growth" standard model, "Business as Usual", is right on track. It has been reviewed and fine-tuned at least a dozen times. It is still indicating a collapse before mid-century.
As for your first question, what about "non-renewable" do you not understand? ANY continuous use of non-renewables must eventually run out!
In particular, fossil sunlight is near its peak of extraction rate, and will go into decline before the end of the decade. Nobody believed US production was going to peak in 1970 as predicted, until it was in the rear-view mirror.
Then fracking happened. That's like licking the bottom of the bowl. It doesn't increase the ultimate amount available.
Will some new development "create" more oil in the ground? Perhaps, but at a cost. When I was a child, you could spend one barrel of oil to poke o hole in the ground, and get one hundred barrels of oil out.
Today, investing one barrel of oil returns only four or five.
It should be obvious that, when it requires investing a barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out, you might as well not even try!
All this is well-documented in scientific literature, if one cares to look!
Limits to Growth predicts similar populations but for the wrong reasons. It keeps the fertility rate constant and assumes that our birth rate goes down due to kids dying, which is not what's happening. There is no scope for social decisions in LImit to Growth.
Instead our fertility goes down because of social decisions and prosperity and improved health and fewer kids dying, the opposite of Limits to Growth.
It's too simple to be used nowadays for projection, we have the far more sophisticated Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) which combine economics, energy systems, land use, social and political decisions, and the outputs of climate models. They are used by the IPCC, IEA, and IPBES.
We can feed everyone on all scenarios and food security is increasing year on year as the FAO shows. We have hunger still but because of gnarly economic / political / social issues not shortage of food. Sub Saharan Africa particularly has huge potential for increased crop yields, far larger than India with a far smaller population. https://ourworldindata.org/africa-yields-problem
"Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the productivity of both input factors is low. Agricultural productivity across the region needs to improve to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity."
That article gets it wrong. Productivity in Africa is low *because it is sustainable!*
About half the humans on this planet have literally been conjured out of thin air, thanks to the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas, both as an energy source and a feedstock, to "fix" non-reactive atmospheric nitrogen into a biologically available form.
If you're rich enough to be reading this, an isotopic analysis of the nitrogen in YOUR BODY shows that about half of it came from natural gas. (A similar analysis done on lifetime organic subsistence farmers/eaters shows considerably less nitrogen from atmospheric nitrogen.)
Natural gas is a non-renewable resource. Period. Please don't go on about creating it from seawater using solar panels, or about using alternative energy sources (I refuse to call them "renewable" because they use less diesel to produce than simply burning that diesel; they still *require* diesel.)
Alternative sources of bioavailable nitrogen is not currently available for one reason: it is enegetically much more expensive.
Note the difference between energetic expense and fiat currency expense. We can continue printing bits of coloured paper or bits on a spinning magnetic platter, but we cannot defeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Evidence suggests that producing nitrogen fertilizer using nothing but alternative energy is underwater; it is a net energy loss!
I grew up on a farm, and did organic Permaculture farming for fifteen years as an adult. I think I understand better than most here what it takes, and it takes diesel and natural gas to "feed the world" at even today's population, let alone the ten billion the UN predicts for mid-century.
We *might* be able to feed half our population without fossil sunlight, but that's only accounting for the lack of nitrogen fertilizer. Phosphorous from non-renewable mineral deposits is rapidly reaching limits. We mine it, then we shît it into the ocean.
And we haven't even talked about diesel. There are no electric tractors even on the drawing boards that are capable of 450 horsepower continuously for the sixteen-hour days of planting and harvest season. This is no Tesla, cruising on twenty horsepower or less!
Each calorie we eat came from the good graces of ten calories of fossil sunlight. Can we turn that around? Maybe, but the odds don't look good!
When will Ehrlich be right? there is no sign of population decline reversing, and fertility decline has been accelerating in the decades after he published his screed. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize, Pau Ehrlich impressed Johnny Carson.
That prestigious Smithsonian article is two paragraphs written by an editor of Air and Space magazine in 2012. The Club of Rome ignores technology adaptations and global population is nowhere near increasing exponentially now.
Known fossil fuel reserves have increased steadily, oil from 600 billion barrels in 1970 to 1,700 billion barrels now and coal has increased by at least 5x to over 1,000 billion tons. Natural gas from 70 trillion cubic meters to over 200 trillion cubic meters now. Fracking is only used on a small portion of available deposits. Uranium is renewable using fast breeder reactors. Metals are renewable by recycling. Fusion will be the next unlimited energy resource. Food production in terms of calories per person have been steadily increasing, and that includes wasting lots of food production to make unneeded ethanol and biodiesel.
Since global fertility shows no signs of increasing, even if there is a limit to growth we are not on path to ever hitting it.
One question. I think pne of the biggest changes will be extending the fertility years if people (in this case mai ly women). We can see it already, and how each year birthd after 40 are increasing. Can the model take that into account? If south korea manages to keep women "fertile" until 50, is it the same as having a 2.1 fertility again?
No, our simple model does not take that into account. See https://docs.owid.io/projects/etl/analyses/population_tool/ for details. For the population calculation, the difference is not too big though - whether older women are able to get more children or you attribute these numbers to younger women instead but keep the total fertility rate the same matters mostly for the timing of when these children are born - the population dynamics in terms of total population wouldn't be very different over this time horizon.
If you use all three you can get it to be level by 2100 with somewhat more reasonable levels. First - continue the life expectancy as a straight line reaches around 107 by 2100. Keep immigration steady at its current 1.7%. And increase fertility from 0.7 to 1.5. That last may be the most implausible however as nothing they've done has increased fertility.
If you keep fertility at 0.7 you need to increase immigration to 6%. In a more mobile world that may be possible - the population is still growing rapidly in Africa.
Not saying that this needs to be South Korea's goal. They can also adapt to an ageing population and promote healthy ageing and technology to increase productive life span.
The three variables act independently in the model.
Will changing net immigration rate not affect fertility? I had assumed that migrants typically have higher fertility rates than incumbents in more developed countries.
yes, they can, but you can tweak both yourself independently. Otherwise someone would need to programme some relationship between the two that works the same for all countries which is just not gonna be reliable. Immigrant profile for those coming to Switzerland is going to be different to the ones coming to South Africa for example.
What's the age distribution that is used for immigration?
It depends on the country, but by default net migration is assumed to be young families since fine grained data is not available. Find out more about the details here: https://docs.owid.io/projects/etl/analyses/population_tool/
That's a really good question!
What an amazing new tool Hannah, we'll done to you and team!
Now that I am using it (and publicising widely in the office), i really would appreciate the "working population, childen, retired" bars at the top of the population pyramid in the tool as well. It just removes a lot of the adding up one has to do otherwise.
Ageing population in democracies are a challenge and can distort the politics significantly as the pollies chase popular votes. Fortunately in Australia the Baby Boomers are no longer the largest demographic and surprise, our government introduces new tax laws which mostly impact older, wealthier Aussies.
Unfortunately, that is going in the opposite direction in the world’s largest economy.
This is an exercise that could best be described as “demographic fiction.” It is completely illusory to think that we can even begin to predict what the population of any country will be in the year 2100. There are so many known unknowns, and we cannot say anything about the unknowns we are unaware of. Will South Korea even exist by then?
Governments and some companies need to know what the demographics of a country will be in the future. Maybe not on a 75 year scale but definitely 25. This is why the UN and national stats bodies have these projections.
They're necessary so... What's your alternative?
RU insane? 363,000 born today, minus 174,000 deaths = 189,000 NET NEW HUMANS! With the current massive human overpopulation, and consequential heat energy production, we will have burned-up by 2,100! YOU ARE EITHER AN EMPLOYEE OF BIG OIL OR NAIVE', or just STUPID. We are 3,000 times more numerous today than were our migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestral clan/band members, and we have been engineered as maximal consumers of natural resources and energy (coal, oil, gas, sunlite, wind). We/you are at the end of time and Gaia is expecting our extinction shortly.
In addition, the ability to select regions would be nice
"Life expectancy" is the real wildcard.
At the rate that we're squandering non-renewable resources, we could see a precipitous decline in population, as the WORLD3 model from "Limits to Growth" seems to indicate.
We are right on track for the "Business As Usual" model run, which indicates a sudden end of growth by the end of the decade, with significant population declines by mid-century — about the time the UN model says we'll hit ten billion.
Which non-renewable resources is the world running out of? Limits to Growth is no more plausible than Erhlich’s comically wrong Population Bomb.
Neither Ehrlich or Malthus was wrong… they just didn't get the timing right.
The "Limits to Growth" standard model, "Business as Usual", is right on track. It has been reviewed and fine-tuned at least a dozen times. It is still indicating a collapse before mid-century.
Even the prestigious Smithsonian Magazine has covered this favourably: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/looking-back-on-the-limits-of-growth-125269840/
As for your first question, what about "non-renewable" do you not understand? ANY continuous use of non-renewables must eventually run out!
In particular, fossil sunlight is near its peak of extraction rate, and will go into decline before the end of the decade. Nobody believed US production was going to peak in 1970 as predicted, until it was in the rear-view mirror.
Then fracking happened. That's like licking the bottom of the bowl. It doesn't increase the ultimate amount available.
Will some new development "create" more oil in the ground? Perhaps, but at a cost. When I was a child, you could spend one barrel of oil to poke o hole in the ground, and get one hundred barrels of oil out.
Today, investing one barrel of oil returns only four or five.
It should be obvious that, when it requires investing a barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out, you might as well not even try!
All this is well-documented in scientific literature, if one cares to look!
Limits to Growth predicts similar populations but for the wrong reasons. It keeps the fertility rate constant and assumes that our birth rate goes down due to kids dying, which is not what's happening. There is no scope for social decisions in LImit to Growth.
Instead our fertility goes down because of social decisions and prosperity and improved health and fewer kids dying, the opposite of Limits to Growth.
It's too simple to be used nowadays for projection, we have the far more sophisticated Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) which combine economics, energy systems, land use, social and political decisions, and the outputs of climate models. They are used by the IPCC, IEA, and IPBES.
We can feed everyone on all scenarios and food security is increasing year on year as the FAO shows. We have hunger still but because of gnarly economic / political / social issues not shortage of food. Sub Saharan Africa particularly has huge potential for increased crop yields, far larger than India with a far smaller population. https://ourworldindata.org/africa-yields-problem
"Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the productivity of both input factors is low. Agricultural productivity across the region needs to improve to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity."
That article gets it wrong. Productivity in Africa is low *because it is sustainable!*
About half the humans on this planet have literally been conjured out of thin air, thanks to the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas, both as an energy source and a feedstock, to "fix" non-reactive atmospheric nitrogen into a biologically available form.
If you're rich enough to be reading this, an isotopic analysis of the nitrogen in YOUR BODY shows that about half of it came from natural gas. (A similar analysis done on lifetime organic subsistence farmers/eaters shows considerably less nitrogen from atmospheric nitrogen.)
Natural gas is a non-renewable resource. Period. Please don't go on about creating it from seawater using solar panels, or about using alternative energy sources (I refuse to call them "renewable" because they use less diesel to produce than simply burning that diesel; they still *require* diesel.)
Alternative sources of bioavailable nitrogen is not currently available for one reason: it is enegetically much more expensive.
Note the difference between energetic expense and fiat currency expense. We can continue printing bits of coloured paper or bits on a spinning magnetic platter, but we cannot defeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Evidence suggests that producing nitrogen fertilizer using nothing but alternative energy is underwater; it is a net energy loss!
I grew up on a farm, and did organic Permaculture farming for fifteen years as an adult. I think I understand better than most here what it takes, and it takes diesel and natural gas to "feed the world" at even today's population, let alone the ten billion the UN predicts for mid-century.
We *might* be able to feed half our population without fossil sunlight, but that's only accounting for the lack of nitrogen fertilizer. Phosphorous from non-renewable mineral deposits is rapidly reaching limits. We mine it, then we shît it into the ocean.
And we haven't even talked about diesel. There are no electric tractors even on the drawing boards that are capable of 450 horsepower continuously for the sixteen-hour days of planting and harvest season. This is no Tesla, cruising on twenty horsepower or less!
Each calorie we eat came from the good graces of ten calories of fossil sunlight. Can we turn that around? Maybe, but the odds don't look good!
When will Ehrlich be right? there is no sign of population decline reversing, and fertility decline has been accelerating in the decades after he published his screed. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize, Pau Ehrlich impressed Johnny Carson.
That prestigious Smithsonian article is two paragraphs written by an editor of Air and Space magazine in 2012. The Club of Rome ignores technology adaptations and global population is nowhere near increasing exponentially now.
Known fossil fuel reserves have increased steadily, oil from 600 billion barrels in 1970 to 1,700 billion barrels now and coal has increased by at least 5x to over 1,000 billion tons. Natural gas from 70 trillion cubic meters to over 200 trillion cubic meters now. Fracking is only used on a small portion of available deposits. Uranium is renewable using fast breeder reactors. Metals are renewable by recycling. Fusion will be the next unlimited energy resource. Food production in terms of calories per person have been steadily increasing, and that includes wasting lots of food production to make unneeded ethanol and biodiesel.
Since global fertility shows no signs of increasing, even if there is a limit to growth we are not on path to ever hitting it.
I'm afraid we must agree to disagree.
Nostradamus also wasn't wrong he just didn't get the timing right :)
Well, I doubt humans will last as long as cockroaches have.
One question. I think pne of the biggest changes will be extending the fertility years if people (in this case mai ly women). We can see it already, and how each year birthd after 40 are increasing. Can the model take that into account? If south korea manages to keep women "fertile" until 50, is it the same as having a 2.1 fertility again?
No, our simple model does not take that into account. See https://docs.owid.io/projects/etl/analyses/population_tool/ for details. For the population calculation, the difference is not too big though - whether older women are able to get more children or you attribute these numbers to younger women instead but keep the total fertility rate the same matters mostly for the timing of when these children are born - the population dynamics in terms of total population wouldn't be very different over this time horizon.
If you use all three you can get it to be level by 2100 with somewhat more reasonable levels. First - continue the life expectancy as a straight line reaches around 107 by 2100. Keep immigration steady at its current 1.7%. And increase fertility from 0.7 to 1.5. That last may be the most implausible however as nothing they've done has increased fertility.
If you keep fertility at 0.7 you need to increase immigration to 6%. In a more mobile world that may be possible - the population is still growing rapidly in Africa.
Not saying that this needs to be South Korea's goal. They can also adapt to an ageing population and promote healthy ageing and technology to increase productive life span.
Thanks! Would you consider adding expected working vs non-working population?
The three variables act independently in the model.
Will changing net immigration rate not affect fertility? I had assumed that migrants typically have higher fertility rates than incumbents in more developed countries.
yes, they can, but you can tweak both yourself independently. Otherwise someone would need to programme some relationship between the two that works the same for all countries which is just not gonna be reliable. Immigrant profile for those coming to Switzerland is going to be different to the ones coming to South Africa for example.
https://substack.com/@aaronruby/note/p-198323227?r=7jhui4