Demographics Expert Answers Population Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
I'm Jennifer Shuba and I study demographic data let's answer your questions from the internet this is population [Music] support at vilon 4 how many people have ever lived on this Earth so there have been about 108 billion people as an estimate who have ever taken a breath on planet Earth if you went back to say year one there would be about 55 billion people who had ever taken a breath and there are 8 billion people who live on planet Earth 7% of the 108 billion who have ever taken a breath here's a question from quora is the majority of the world's population children or adults well the majority of the world's population is adults 70% of us are over the age of 18 even in Africa which is the youngest region in the world 54% of the population is adults countries have seen a steady increase in their life expectancy over time world population is growing older and that's because the number of children per woman has gone down one way to think about it is the average woman about 50 years ago would have had four children in her lifetime but the average woman globally today has only two so if we think about lining everyone in the planet up from the youngest person to the oldest person like where would the center of gravity be the center of gravity has shifted over time as the average number of children per woman has gone down at JD Crow 13 quiz what is the fastest growing minority in America if you answered hipster then you win the prize actually if you answered asian-americans you would win the prize they are the fastest growing minority in the United States and they're about 7% of the US population at Beno 234 what are the signature demographics of a red State versus a blue state if we think most generally a red State most often would be more rural probably have an older population and is whiter blue state would have more urban areas ethnically or racially diverse and probably a younger population but you may notice that it doesn't always map that way that's why on Election night it wasn't really just enough for us to see the 50 states projected on the screen and try to figure out how the election would turn you could start to zoom in and see really different Dynamics like Tennessee for example that is relatively a red State across and then with these little blue dots in the Memphis Nashville areas a state like Maine is the most rural state in the United States but it still has lots of blue areas and those are the its urban areas so if you're talking about or like a house race or a senate race you can see how those substate red and blue areas really show up a matter for what a vote looks like at stallman's beard is immigration a net positive or negative one way we want to think about it is through an economic lens in the United States immigrants are actually most likely to be of working ages the US has a total fertility rate below replacement level of 1.6 children per woman on average means immigration contributes quite a bit to the growth in the working age population here we can see that foreign born population very few children under five very few 5 to 17 years of age much more concentrated in terms of 18 to 64 or those working ages versus us-born population immigration is kind of what propels that overall population growth if the US were to stop all immigration right now not do anything else between now and the end of the century the US population would shrink by over 30% at Venom pill wants to know why do fertility rates matter well they matter a lot because they impact its age structure for example and of course its size we can actually see this if we look at snapshots in time of a handful of countries in the world today females on this side and males on this side from age zero all the way up to over a 100 so if we're looking at Ethiopia here we can see this classic pyramid shape means that it's a population where women have on average more than two children so the population is a lot more bottom heavy which means that there are a lot more younger people in the country there if you had one that's fertility rate of four children per woman on average each generation's twice the size of the one before it versus if we look at a country like turkey you can see that that center of gravity in terms of Ages is in the middle more and that's because they've had close to replacement level fertility rates for a while average number of children of 1.9 per woman so we see that that population is growing older the bulk of the people would be here of these working ages and then we get to Japan it's not really a population pyramid anymore it's more of a tree there are lots of older people in the society some of that is longevity and so you can see this narrowing here at the bottom and that just shows you that women of reproductive ages they're having under replacement level fertility rates so why do those fertility rates matter if you're in Ethiopia and you're a policy maker probably one of your bigger concerns is how to build enough schools year after year for all of these young people aging into kindergarten and then how to have enough jobs for those who are aging into the workforce if you're in Turkey you're thinking about the working age population certainly and their jobs there but you also need to be thinking about how and just a few years these folks will be moving into retirement ages and how do you plan for that and if you're in Japan you're thinking about how schools are closing year after year you have a much smaller Workforce needing to support a growing population of older people so age structures which are affected by fertility rates really matter for even setting the agenda at the national level at Tommy boyo is the real issue that we have too many humans on the planet so in a few hundred years when the world population is over 50 billion what will our problems be then we will never have a population of 50 billion at least not anywhere close to it with our Trends right now best estimates are somewhere around the year 2080 and we'll top out at between 9 and 10 billion million people now we're reasonably certain about this because our Trends in fertility rates and mortality rates they're following a fairly predictable pattern the uncertainty comes from really just two things one is how fast will fertility rates fall in places where they're currently still high and there really aren't that many places in the world where fertility rates are really high they're mostly concentrated in a few countries in sub Sahara and Africa we live in a world where there are only eight countries out of 200 something countries where women have five or more children that includes Nigeria for example which is a pretty big country keeps global population young we have not seen any indication that it's going to come up in places where it's low so I feel pretty confident we'll be hitting a peak of somewhere between 9 and 10 billion people roughly around the year of 2080 at Hawaiian Pace asks how can Elon Musk be worried about population decline when Nick Canon exists Elon and Nick Canon maybe have something in common which is they might be single-handedly trying to change Global Trends global population growth has been declining since the 1960s you can see this peak here in the mid 1960s so that rate of growth is really going down over time this is what's happening beneath the surface while on top we see world population continuing to grow so where we have 8 billion today so why is Elon Musk worried about declining population it's because what's happening right now is the beneath the surface Trends are starting to catch up to what we actually see on the surface where there's over 60 countries in the world that have shrinking populations we have two parents so to keep population growth steady you would want to replace them with two children that would be a steady growth but in some countries Singapore for example you only have one child born for those two parents so you can see how those populations of those countries would start to shrink over time and that's happening especially in a lot of high inome countries so the reason why somebody like Elon Musk would be concerned about this is you end up with smaller Generations over time meaning a fewer producers and fewer consumers at shopus I'm on a road trip right now and I'm wondering what's up with these empty small towns are they ghost towns is depopulation real so depopulation is not only real there are a lot of governments who are really worried about this because of what it means for economic Vitality or national security take China for example obviously one of the world's biggest economies huge player on the international stage but also a rapidly shrinking popul look at a country like Italy and how many of the villages are depopulating if you're in Europe South Korea Japan you're seeing areas of the country empty out we've seen pictures all over the newspapers of towns and villages in Japan with Ivy growing Through the Windows from abandoned homes storefronts start to close these fertility rates are lower and then that means the the population of these small towns and cities is growing older and older and then eventually dying out without any young people there to replace them and you don't necessarily see people moving from bigger cities all the way out to very small towns and very rural areas because there's no job opportunities there now you do see some retirees doing that take a state like Maine for example most rural state in the United States actually has seen an influx of retirees moving there but that's not because they're moving there for job opportunities the United States itself is not shrinking overall but there are plenty places within the United States that are shrinking now we've had plenty of examples of depopulation in the past I mean think about Detroit and the collapse of that Auto industry there but we've not ever seen this scale of depopulation plus of course people often leaving these areas because you know once an area starts to depopulate of course fewer people will be wanting to stay there the jobs leave the community and the Vitality part of that disappears as well and so it can kind of accelerate that depopulation here is a question from a what countries do most immigrants to America come from well top countries of origin for us immigrants in 2022 this number here 23% were from Mexico 6% from India 6% from China 4% Philippines and then El Salvador Vietnam and Cuba all 3% and Korea 2% this has actually been changing over time immigration from Mexico has really dropped over time Mexico's economy has been growing their total fertility rate is actually the same as the the fertility rate in the United States 1.6 and so we've seen less Mexican immigration to the us over time as a proportion whereas we've seen countries to the south of Mexico really increasing you know think about gang violence and instability in countries like El Salvador or Guatemala that's really been a driver of some of that northward migration so those are the top countries of origin but if we look broader at the regions we see that Latin America's 50% of immigrants to the United States in 2022 but Asia was 31% of migrants to the US in that year smaller percentages for Europe 10% Africa 6% Canada and Oceania at Marine Joe why are people leaving California for Texas and Arizona if we look at the way that the US population has changed between the 2010 census and the 2020 census mean you still saw lots of growth in the population in places in California and this pink here really shows you places where you started to lose population so a lot of the US Northeast started to see some emptying out but we saw during the pandemic that people were moving to take advantage of states without income taxes Nashville really started to Boom Tennessee is a state without an income tax Florida similarly a state without an income tax a lot of people started to move there jobs would move there as well after the pandemic we've really continued to see growth in the US Southeast between the middle of 2022 and the middle of 2023 you saw the US Southeast grow by about 1.1% whereas the Northeast actually
shrank while there were other regions in the US that either barely grew or even shrank Craigs brother Brian wants to know I've been to the most densely populated city in the world have you do you know what city that is I do know it's Manila and the Philippines with approximately 46,000 people per square kilometer and I haven't been there yet Doom bro Max asks what made the world population increase so drastically after 1900 we had great improvements in public Health sanitation nutrition antibiotics and that allowed those people who were born to live into their reproductive ages so this chart really lays it out for us if we go way back in time 200,000 years ago there's very little Global growth even as we go through time 2000 BCE for example or year one the global population the number of people here at any one point in time is really growing slowly and that's because our birth rates and our death rates those really matched each other but we start to see a major shift our first 1 billion people happening here around the year 1800 and then we hit our second billion a lot faster 3 four 5 6 7 and now up to 8 billion people and so a lot of those increases are really happening because we're living longer dystopian Paradise wants to know in terms of age what state has the oldest population the oldest state is Maine which has 23% of the population above age 65 classic man wants to know which state has the youngest population that that state would be Utah which has 27% of the population under the age of 18 you may notice that Utah is a home to a pretty sizable Mormon population which tends to have higher births than other populations in the United States at Justin L what's the biggest difference between Millennials and gen Z the biggest difference is that globally gen Z or those people who were born from 1997 to 2012 are larger than Millennials who were born between 1981 and 1996 but in the United States Millennials are larger than gen Z gen Z though is much more racially diverse so the percentage of genz who are multi-racial is about 4% in the United States whereas it's only 2% among Millennials in the US the share of people who are Hispanic is actually about 4% higher among gen Z in the US than it is among Millennials in the US at JMP Freedom WTF is the sandwich generation sandwich generation might sound delicious but it's pretty terrible it's those who are sandwiched between caring for younger children and caring for older parents people are having children later in life there's a trend towards that in the United States in Japan South Korea Germany and so you could end up with a situation where a woman is taking care of her one or two children at the same time that she's caring for her aging parents who may live with her or who need her to come by and help with medical appointments or grocery shopping some people will call this The Panini generation actually because these women are being squeezed in the middle from Reddit what would happen if all illegal immigrants were deported well in the United States we've got a stock of around 12 million people in the US lots of things would probably happen there are certain industries in the United States that actually are really heavily dependent on that kind of Labor so the agricultural industry for example so you could expect having a harder time getting people to fill those jobs and then prices for food would rise the construction industry is much more heavily dependent on on that labor and so we expect it take longer to get houses built and prices would rise for that as well in the United States there are over 16 million people who live in a household with at least one undocumented person over 7% of all kids in the United States have at least one undocumented parents so we would see families being ripped apart through these deportations Eric croll wants to know how do factors like income race geographic location Etc affect life expectancy they affected a lot let's look at income first so we have here a map of the US with the counties drawn out we can see here that some of the poorest counties in the United States like McDow County West Virginia with a median income of under $29,000 a year has a life expectancy well below the US national average the same is true for Buffalo County South Dakota with a median income of just over $30,000 a year East Carol Parish Louisiana also one of our poorest counties and is a Queen County Mississippi life expectancy of under 75 years and median household income of only over $177,000 a year it's not just powerful geography on the US scale it's also powerful at the global scale so here's a couple of different ways to slice it let's stay over here with this yellow color for now global life expectancy in 2024 High income countries life expectancy is 81 years middle income 73 years but lowincome countries life expectancy is only 65 years most people know this but of course sex matters females tend to live longer than males 76 years on average globally versus 71 years for their male counterparts mostly demographers will nail down that men tend to be in riskier jobs when you get to the very oldest ages they're very heavily female with women outliving men so that's something that countries either are or should be talking about when it comes to Health Care Social Security these things all go together together they all affect the life expectancy of an individual and of course we aggregate that and they affect the life expectancy of a country as well at childish Hino wants to know what country has the lowest life expectancy I can't take another 62 years of this pish okay well lowest life expectancy at Birth for males is in Chad and that's at 53 years lowest life expectancy at Birth for females is in Nigeria and that is 55 years at isaz real what country has the highest life expectancy well the answer for males is Tiny Monaco which has only 40,000 people but where males born can be expected to live to age 84 mono and other small countries like lonstein they're really rich they're small and Rich and so we know that income level actually is very highly correlated with life expectancy if you're thinking in terms of you know countries you'd be more familiar with those bigger ones in Japan females live to about 87 years Isaac wants to know people are living longer but are they living healthier at the the same time healthy life expectancy is one thing and overall life expectancy is another healthy life expectancy is you know how many years can you expect to live in good health versus how many years you might live overall I think ideally for any of us you want that Gap to be as narrow as possible so if we look at Haiti for example you're only expected to live to age 56 healthy and then overall to age 64 that's a gap of 8 years this Gap here really represents the end of life lived in less than ideal Health that may mean something as little as difficulty with something like going up the stairs all the way to being bedridden it does affect how long you could work for example how many years would you live healthy after retirement could you have actually retired later that's something that's really relevant to all these countries as their populations age so Hades at one end of the spectrum Japan's at the other end of the spectrum they could expect to live longer in good health to age 74 and then overall to age 84 now that's a gap of 10 years the United States though is an outlier because our gap between healthy years lived and overall years lived is 12 years so that means the average American lives the end of their life many more years less than ideal Health than somebody in say even Bangladesh where it's only 10 years or in Canada where it's 11 so when I think about how well will the US Fair as its population ages I really worry because it is very expensive to be sick in the United States of America there's some real dings to the economy in our future if we have this kind of Gap 12 years between our healthy life expectancy and our overall life expectancy new guy username one what's the most populous country on Earth well the most populous country on earth is India and the second most populace is China both of them have about 1.4 billion people far below that comes the United States followed by Indonesia and Pakistan if we count up the most populous countries those five plus if we add in Nigeria and Brazil together those would make up a little over half of the world's population at a royal Leota so how did China's one child policy work out so the one child policy from 1979 was a law the Chinese government put in place saying that mostly everyone could only have one child naturally in a population there are about5 boys born for every 100 girls that's just the way that it happens so that's represented by this orange line line here and because there are really strong Norms of male preference of sun preference in China most of these families wanted to have a boy and that's why when you have restriction to just one child and your first child is a girl we see that those that did have a second or third child you know maybe those who were part of ethnic minority populations that were exempt from this one child policy those second and third children had far more skewed sex ratios at Birth and that is because of sex selective abortion now when I was born which was more that way there were no ultrasound technology like my parents would not have known if I was a boy or a girl before I came out these folks here they could see in utero whether or not this child would be a boy or a girl and many of them as we see took measures to make sure that they would have a boy so when we're looking at a sex ratio at Birth for the third baby born somewhere here around just a little bit before the year 2000 there were nearly 160 male born for every 100 females born a tremendously skewed sex ratio at Birth a lot different from the natural sex ratio of 105 males born for every 100 females if these were people who were born just before the year 2000 they are now entering their late 20s and that means that there are millions more males than there are females of these different ages so China is already a country with well below replacement fertility rates and a rapidly shrinking population it certainly does not help the population grow any faster that there are millions of missing females of reproductive ages that would have been born without the one child policy a Claud asks what change in demographics are you concerned about one Trend that people are concerned about is a youthful population so this would be one where a huge proportion of the population is of younger ages think children or teenagers a place like ner or Mali having some of the youngest populations in the world they are at a greater risk of having coups more political stability but there are also opportunities associated with these types of youthful populations working aged populations are shrinking so a youthful population actually has lots of opportunity for economic growth wholesome eoli asks what does demography mean at the broadest level demography is just studying human populations we're thinking about those human population changes and with those there are just three ingredients to think about fertility changes mortality changes and migration changes or shifts in births deaths and migration those in different combinations give you different outcomes and gives us a lot to study kiwi 75 asks let's look at which countries are growing fastest growing economy is what we need the two fastest growing countries are South Sudan and Chad whose populations are growing at about 6% a year South Sudan and Chad are in Africa and subsaharan Africa is a region of the world with the highest fertility rates and so one out of every four children in the world will actually be African by the year 2050 that's because fertility rates are lower in other regions and they're higher in subsaharan Africa Northern Africa however does actually have uh lower fertility rates if we think about what would make a population grow it's having lots of people of reproductive ages and a high number of births per person over half of the world's projected population growth between now and 2050 will come from just eight countries now that includes India which interestingly enough is a country that has below replacement fertility rate fewer than two children born per woman on average so so why is it still growing and why is it contributing so much to world population growth that's some momentum of the past those cohorts of women of reproductive ages are larger from when fertility rates were higher in the past so the average number of children born per woman is smaller now but there are a lot of those women at Misa alexie why do Latin American migrants to the United States have such a high birth rate after all their birth rate is low in their Homeland or Latinos come to the United States with a very high total fertility rate well you're right that actually in the Homeland those fertility rates are lower if you look at this map those blue countries represent the 2/3 of Latin American countries with below replacement fertility So Below two even these Handful in gray that are above they're not that far above like Bolivia the total fertility rate of 2.5 children born per woman think about someone who comes to the United States as an immigrant they're typically of working Ages which also means that they're typically of reproductive ages it just so happens that they're of those ages ages where they're more likely to have children so it's it's not really true that they have such a high birth rate it's just true that they tend to come of Ages where they are more likely to be having children we also know that when people stay in a country when an immigrant stays in a country very quickly the Norms shift to match that of the reproductive Norms around the the native born population So within a generation you usually see those immigrant fertility rates come right down to where the native born population is at _ janor P how are illegal immigrants counted well first we want to think about how anybody is counted in the United States and many other countries there is a census around every 10 years or so but along the way in between those times we have regular surveys like the current population survey or the American Community survey and so you can kind of put these together to get a snapshot of what the population would look like if you want to know how many illegal or irregular immigrants there are in a population you would take the number of legal migrants that you know and then you would take what you know from these censuses about how many people are in an area and this residual or this difference is the estimate of those people who are here outside the legal system and it is an estimate some people don't answer sometimes you can think about somebody who is in the country illegally lives in a household with people who are there legally and so the head of household might fill out the census and say how many people are living there but it doesn't quite track with how many people are in the the area that you know through legal immigration means and so you can kind of look at those leftover numbers to estimate that we always take these with a grain of salt but demographers do use all their context clues and use all the data to try to estimate that at weekly humorist a new study says that in the future most of the world will live in mega cities and their office will be in any of the window stools at Starbucks that can reach an outlet well this is certainly what sci-fi would tell us about mega cities which is amalgamations of population in areas of 10 million or more I don't necessarily think it's the case but it will depend on where you are in the world I mean there's countries like Bangladesh for example they just frankly don't have any extra space so they we do see a really densely populated areas there are people who are leaving rural areas for urban areas to seek better Economic Opportunity year 1800 for example only about 3% of the world's population lived in urban areas now we have over 58% of the world's population living in urban areas so generally there is a trend towards moving in that direction we also see the opposite we had seen during the pandemic some people leaving those Urban cores for smaller cities or Suburban areas TBD on how that shakes out in the future at Rod T3 how do mortality rates in the US compare to other countries so with that you're asking about the number of people dying per 1,000 so if you're Japan you would have a higher mortality rate because you have a lot of older people than maybe a country that actually has a less healthy population I bet what you really want to know about is life expectancy especially life expectancy at Birth how many years would a person born today be expected to live and in the United States life expectancy at Birth is about 78 years old even Canada our neighbor to the north has a life expectancy at Birth of 82 years us life expectancy has not really been keeping Pace with increases the way that we would expect it to and that's because Health in the US is frankly really bad and in terms of Access to Health Care that can be really uneven from rural to urban areas or by race as well a non-hispanic black woman in the United States is and a half times more likely to die during pregnancy or shortly thereafter than a non-hispanic white woman so all of these things combined the opioid crisis another factor in there these drive us life expectancy lower from Reddit Ronin Solutions says Ukraine's population is nose diving can anything be done how can Ukraine build a future in the face of ominous population statistics that's a great question about 10 million people have left since the war started and this is a country that already had a history of immigration or igration people leaving for opportunities in Western Europe for example for work it's also a country that already had well below replacement fertility rates so with fewer births and lots of people leaving they are having a serious situation with a population that is shrinking and there's not really much that can be done about it we know from countries around the world everywhere from Germany to Canada to Japan that government can play very little role in raising fertility rates through things like tax incentives or or you know paying for different credits for having children so not much can be done on that when the war ends and the country begins to rebuild hopefully that will open up lots of Economic Opportunity and the peace there will attract some people to come back some of those 10 million people may come back and start to build lives there so those are all the questions for today I hope you have seen that demography is a really powerful lens with which to view this complex world of 8 billion people thanks for watching population support
2024-12-14 18:17
