I am not going to cover things that well-informed normies already know: How Israel is a weird outlier in fertility by First World standards, and the collapse of fertility in the Islamic world; how life expectancy has been soaring nearly everywhere; the “Great White Death” in the US and how all races in the US outperform their counterparts elsewhere, except for American Whites, who live less than almost all Europeans. Nor am I going to cover truly banal stuff, such as how tiny Bangladesh has more people than Russia. Nor particularly controversial stuff such as Eurabia, Great Replacement, etc. which I have covered elsewhere.
For all of this you have websites like Our World in Data and books by Steven Pinker.
I am instead going to focus on the truly little known and esoteric that I happen to find most interesting, especially from a historical or futurist perspective.
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Demographic Geopolitics
(1) The world population of Greeks has been steady at ~10 million since the age of Alexander the Great. Their percentage of the world total plummeted from ~5% to slightly more than 0.1% today.
Source: Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2008. “An Update on the Shotgun Method.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 48 (3): 259–86.
(2) In 1900, Europe’s population (~400M) was quintuple that of Sub-Saharan Africa’s (~80M).
By 2100, Sub-Saharan Africa’s population (~4B) will be eight times as great as Europe’s (~650M).
Quite the reversal!
Source: Maddison; UN World Population Prospects.
(3a) Comparing the populations of modern nation-states to their medieval (pre-Black Death) counterparts is a fascinating exercise:
- France grew only 3x from ~20M to today’s ~65M
- England: 10x from ~6M to ~60M
- Italy: 7x from ~9M to ~60M
- Germany: 8x from ~10M to ~82M
- India: 15x from ~100M to ~1.7B (including Pakistan & Bangladesh)
- China: 15x from ~100M to ~1.4B
- Byzantines-Greeks remained at just ~10M (see above)
- Russian lands 30x from ~6M to ~190M
Source: Maddison
(3b) So despite the vast losses of Russia’s demographic potential during the 20th century, it still did rather well in the long-term, increasing its share of Europe’s population from ~5% to ~20% (~25% if inc. UKR/BEL). Swapped places with France in this respect. Glory to the musket and the potato!
(3c) At a larger scale, while both Europe and China were at ~100M in Middle Ages, now China has twice as many people, 1.4B to 700M. The advantages of backwardness – delayed fertility transition left more time for population to soar.
(4) France was the world’s first modern nation to undergo the fertility transition. It had its genesis with the French nobility during 18C. Subsequently, France would fall from having 1/5 Europe’s population in Middle Ages to <10% by late 19C.
Source: Spolaore, Enrico, and Romain Wacziarg. 2019. “Fertility and Modernity.” Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research.
(5) Huge demographic losses on the level of World War II in Eastern Europe were typical in the Malthusian era.
- 30 Years War in Germany, Mongol invasion of Russia and Persia, reduced their populations by a third.
- Wars & anarchy accompanying the end of dynasties usually killed 33%-50% of Chinese.
(6) Were the Turks the big demographic winners of the 20th century?
- 1914: 13.7M Turks vs. 10M Armenians + Greeks (1.3:1) & ~170M in Russian Empire – precarious.
- 2017: 80.8M Turks vs. 13.7M Greeks+Armenians (6:1) & ~150M in RF – secure as never before.
(7) The population ratio between Russia and the Ukraine fell from less than 3:1 to almost 5:1 since 1992. It is ironic that Ukrainian independence has been worse for Ukraine’s population balance vis-a-vis Russia than anything that Lazar Kaganovich and the Nazis did.
Communist Demographics
(8a) Russia just within its current borders, assuming otherwise analogous fertility and migration trends, would have had 261.8 million people by 2017 without the triple demographic disasters of Bolshevism, WW2, and the 1990s – that’s double its actual population of 146 million.
Source: Демографические итоги послереволюционного столетия & Демографические катастрофы ХХ века by Anatoly Vishnevsky
(8b) According to my very rough calculations, based on various sources, the population change for each of the following in their current borders between 1913/14 and 1945/46 was about as follows:
- Russia – 91M/97M
- Ukraine – 35M/34M
- Belarus – 7.5M/7.7M
Assuming a threefold expansion in all of these populations, we could have been looking to a Russian Empire or Republic with a further ~120M fully Russified Belorussians and largely Russified Ukrainians, for a total Slavic population of almost 400M.
That’s twice bigger than the number of White Americans today, the most populous single European ethnicity, and almost as much as all of today’s Western Europe.
(8c) Total population of a hypothetical Russian Empire that also retained Central Asia and the Caucasus, and that hadn’t been bled white by commies, Nazis, and Westernizers during the course of the 20th century, would likely have been not that far off from Dmitry Mendeleev’s 1906 projection of 594 million for 2000.
Source: Understanding Russia by Dmitry Mendeleev (yes, the chemist).
(9) So far as I can tell, the Latvians, Estonians, and Ashkenazi Jews are the only peoples with fewer people today than in 1914. It is ironic that they played the most disproportionate roles (per capita) in cementing Bolshevism in Russia. God must really hate commies.
(10) That said, the Irish have an even more extreme and unique anti-record: There are fewer of them today (~6.6M in all Ireland) than in 1840 (8.5M)! I wonder what they did to anger God so. 🙂
(11) Communism isn’t always an unmitigated demographic disaster. As @Cicerone973 has discovered, for the first time ever, births in Best Korea (25M) probably overtook South Korea (52M) last year.
(Even if, as Myers argued, Songun/Juche has almost zilch to do with Marxism).
(12) The wonders of Maoism: Between 1960 and 1978, the share of China’s urban population FELL from 20% to 18%.
Source: China’s Economy by Arthur K. Kroeber.
(13) We have no solid idea if China’s TFR is ~1.6 children per woman, ~1.1 children per woman, or anywhere in between, e.g. see here, here, and here.
This seems rather important given China’s importance.
Russian Demographics
(14a) Russia’s middle-aged male mortality in the 1990s and early 2000s was worse than under late Tsarism. In particular, alcohol abuse accounted contributed to about a third of all deaths. (This has all since drastically improved).
(14b) Contra Pinker, Russia has seen a “de-civilizing” process in terms of homicide rates (and many other indicators of social wellbeing) in the last third of the 20th century. This was perfectly correlated with its alcoholization epidemic.
In recent years, the Russian homicide rate has retreated back to its pre-1965 “steady state” of ~5/100,000.
Of course, there is still plenty of lost ground, since c.1900 Russia’s rates were similar to those of Italy, Finland, and Japan, whereas all these countries are now at least 5x less violent.
(14c) During the later Soviet era, the Ukraine consistently had a 2 years higher life expectancy than Russia – a difference that dates back well to the 19th century (probably on account of them drinking less, even back then).
But Ukraine has been stagnating since early 2010s; still below its 1960s all time peak, Russia overtook by 2018.
(15) Central Asians went from 10% of Russian population in 1914 to half today, while births have almost equalized since the early 1990s.
Central Asians increasingly looking to work in South Korea, which is ~20 years ahead of China in terms of demographic and socio-economic development. Once China’s urbanization maxes out at ~75-80% by ~2040, I expect labor migration from C. Asia to reorient there.
Demographic Predictions
(16) Might appear easy, but demographers often get things wrong.
c.1930, some forecasts had France’s population falling from 40M to 28M by 1970. Instead, France went from having one of Europe’s lowest TFRs to one of highest, and population went to 50M by that year.
Source: Sauvy, Alfred. 1932. “Calculs Démographiques Sur La Population Française Jusqu’en 1980.” Journal de La Société Statistique de Paris 73: 319–47.
(17) And here are some UN Population Prospects forecasts for the year 2025, as cited by Paul Kennedy in his 1993 book Preparing for the 21st Century. As of the 2017 Update, Iran is predicted to have 87M by 2025, as opposed to 122M.
Breeder Demographics
(18) However, “Breeder” genes are ultra-competitive in a post-Malthusian environment. Consequently, it is entirely possible that Europe – which underwent the demographic transition 50-100 years ago – may have higher fertility rates than Africa by 2100.
Source: Collins, Jason, and Lionel Page. 2018. “The Heritability of Fertility Makes World Population Stabilization Unlikely in the Foreseeable Future.” Evolution and Human Behavior: Official Journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, September.
(19a) Exponential growth can be very powerful. On current trends, Mormons may account for majorities in wide swathes of the rural American West by the early 22nd century.
(19b) There were 31,000 Haremin in Israel and 19,000 Amish in the US in 1952. Today, there are 1,126,000 Haredim in Israel and 343,000 Amish in the US.
(19c) While absolute Amish TFR has fallen over the past century from ~8 children per woman to ~6 children, the differential with the US population as a whole has increased from 2x to 3x.
(19d) Greg Cochran has argued that less committed Amish have been “boiling off” for more than a century, so “Amishness quotient” is increasing with each generation. Which augurs well for their continued demographic expansion.
(20) Do Russians have a “breeder” group, like Jews (Haredim), Americans (Amish, Mormons – to an extent)? Some tantalizing hints that the rural areas of Northern European Russia are going that way – but far from confirmed that this trend is here to stay.
Demographics Trivia
(21) Completed marriages in 1730s Waltham, Massachusetts produced an average of 9.7 children – the largest ever observed in the West by demographic historians (barring a few Christian communes).
Source: Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer.
(22a) Normiecons won’t like this, but generous parental leave & child support appear to be far better than banning abortion & social conservatism so far as promoting higher fertility and disincentivizing dysgenic reproduction patterns goes in First World countries.
(22b) To illustrate the previous point, in the last few years:
- Czech TFR: 1.5-1.7
- Polish TFR: 1.3-1.5
Czechia is Europe’s most atheist country & has highest number of porn stars per capita (but very based on migration). Poland is very holy – but it doesn’t seem to do it much good.
(23) Twitter demographer @Cicerone973 has been tracking an apparent “baby bust” that has affected nearly the entirety of the developed world since 2015.
There are no good explanations for it. My best guess is that since it is happening to almost everyone, it would probably have to be some recent cultural phenomenon that shifts fertility preferences downwards (or delays them). Tinder?
(24) The Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40K has long been in the Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
Think about it.
Every year, billions of Imperial Guards and dozens of planets are lost in wars, to Exterminatus, to democidal robots, bioconstructs, and eldritch abominations. It is also run by superstitious cretins (*blam*). Nonetheless, it doesn’t have any particular demographic problems, new planets always being settled.
(25) Nobody really knows the carrying capacity of our industrial world economy – all we can say for sure is that we are still far below the limits to growth.
My guesstimate is that the planet can support ~100 billion people.
[Ron: Arguably humanity on this planet is on the cusp of a new era in which human labour will cease to be essential to maintain society in material abundance because AI, robots and technology will replace the need for much human physical and mental work.
Once AI and robotics dominate industrial, construction, transport, agricultural, health, legal, accounting and other industries the labour force required for servicing, maintenance and creation of improved robotic and technological designs etc will NOT require more than a fraction of the human manpower currently required to perform the work that will be done by AI and robotics in the future.
Accordingly, what we need to do is start focussing upon what these developments really mean for life as we know it. The first and glaringly obvious question arising from the coming technological dominance of the production and servicing of human needs IS: ‘who will control the output of AI and robotics and who will reap the benefits from that output’? Currently our world is a growing unemployment and underemployment, low wage, high personal income taxation oriented welfare state dystopia because a handfull of incredibly rich individuals control the bulk of transnational corporations AND those individuals pay very little tax while accumulating and KEEPING the bulk of the benefits of that corporate production and associated servicing activities. See eg:
How Billionaires Become Billionaires – Link http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/How-Billionaires-Become-Billionaires.shtml
And:
How Interlinked Corporations Rule The World. – Link http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/How-Interlinked-Corporations-Rule-The-World.shtml
he corporate stranglehold on food and agriculture. – Link http://abundanthope.net/pages/Health_and_Nutrition_37/The-corporate-stranglehold-on-food-and-agriculture.shtml
And:
Rise of the Transnational Corporations – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Rise-of-the-Transnational-Corporations.shtml
And:
The Permanent Unemployment & Underemployment Economy – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/The-Permanent-Unemployment – Underemployment-Economy.shtml
BLIND FREDDY can see that this situation is NOT sustainable. The question is: ‘What, if anything, is the bulk of humanity going to do about it’?
Here’s a hint Pilgrims. IF the global population allows the current rapacious and totally dysfunctional corporatist domination and control of our world (typified by Amazon and Google et al) and fails to develop the mental muscle and guts to refuse to allow Fascists (ie banksters, corporatists and their puppet politicians and so-called Welfare governments) to exploit, impoverish and immiserate the bulk of the global population, human society on this planet will disappear up its own fundamental orifice. The choice is yours. Pretending that ALL that is required is retraining of workers or provision of some form of universal basic income to overcome the problem is ridiculous. See eg:
Universal Basic Income Is Easier Than It Looks – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Universal-Basic-Income-Is-Easier-Than-It-Looks.shtml
And:
Endless Government Free Money – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Endless-Government-Free-Money.shtml
And:
Can We Do Without Money ? – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Can-We-Do-Without-Money.shtml
Our world is currently drowning in debt owed to anonymous banksters who also own or control the corporation that own (and will own future iterations of) the AI and technology we will increasingly depend on. Moreover, those Talmudic owners have indicated that they will only need some 500 million human ‘cattle’ for their amusement etc, the rest being surplus to requirements once they institute their New World Order, One World Government. Sooo, it is unlikely that postulating ANY greater future population for this planet will come to fruition unless the global population CHANGES its attitude to usurious banking, AND corporate personhood; AND limited liability companies; AND ownership and control of the corporations that purport to own the AI and technology needed to sustain everyone. See eg:
Citizens United v. FEC: Corporate Personhood Must be Eliminated if Humanity is to Survive. – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Ron_71/Citizens-United-v-FEC-Corporate-Personhood-Must-GO-if-Humanity-is-to-Survive.shtml
And:
The USA Isn’t a Country, It’s a Corporation! – http://abundanthope.net/pages/True_US_History_108/The-USA-Isn-t-a-Country-It-s-a-Corporation.shtml
And:
The Matrix, the Strawman and WHO You Are – http://abundanthope.net/pages/Ron_71/The_Matrix_the_Strawman_and_WHO_You_Are_3030.shtml
Proper use of AI and robotics etc should enable ALL of humanity to begin transitioning into a new age free of the drudgery of endless physical work that has hitherto been needed to survive. That result will mean that humans will become free to think and develop their innate creativity instead of scrabbling for a living as free range serfs (wage slaves) in the Fascist (Talmudic) capitalist milieu we currently inhabit. However, that prosperous and abundant future for all can only be achieved if we shuck off the mind controlled illusion that a tiny cabal of banksters and corporatists are entitled to OWN and control the corporations and hence the technologies and profits of the machines that create abundance for all. Today it is estimated that some 700 individuals own and/or control the mega trans-national corporations that control global production of goods and services. Those individuals already HAVE most of this worlds’ wealth and if they are allowed to continue to control the production and KEEP the totally inadequately taxed profits of most global mega corporations, human life on this planet is doomed.
The solution is obvious. Nations and communities must take back ownership OR control of the corporations that use AI and robotics etc to produce essential societal needs in the future in order to redistribute the resultant productivity and abundance. IF nations and communities ensure that the profits of ALL corporations are properly taxed so that NO ONE is able to appropriate, hoard and use for private purposes the personally unearned increments accruing from the use of AI, robotics and technologies generally, humanity will enter a golden age. But if not, not.].
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