World Population Cartogram (2018) | Hacker News Reader

World Population Cartogram (2018)

ourworldindata.org

73 pointsjonbaer27 comments

About 10 years ago I got the same urge to find or make maps to visually detail humanities conditions. An ostentatious write-up of the idea survives here [1]

I imagined a wiki like effort to crowd source data that scores regions for 5 "Domains of Human Circumstance"

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Labour : opportunities, conditions, demands and rewards of productive endeavour

Food : calories, nutrition, contaminants, variety, taste

Material Environment : air & water quality, land quality (toxicity, civil engineering, architecture, ecology)

Social Environment : access to education, entertainment, arts, media, therapists, medicine

Private Environment (shelter,clothing) : allocation, facilities, privacy, preference, private architecture/furnishings, quantity

Physical Security : statistical hazard from criminal predation, military trauma, political/economic upheaval

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The category scores would be rendered in colored combinations on maps in a manner which importantly would not average out distributions, so that a region with many people living with low scores and others with high would not deceptively appear as equivalent to everyone with middle scores.

I've regretfully never made any progress on it.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131211161318/http://pericosm.c...

The main driver of pop growth has been Asia where pops have tripled since 1950. That’s a lot of growth for one region in such little time. India won’t stabilize till 2060s. That’s scary. Also 100 million along one fertile river valley in Egypt.

Any fluctuation in resources can have dire consequences.

Actually, though, all the models I have seen show Asia stabilizing relatively quickly, and then start falling. This is especially true in China, which is aging very fast.

The real growth explosion is all projected to happen in Africa: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/animation-world-population-...

True but a tripling of a pop in 50 years has a very large impact on the environment. That’s a lot of strain on the system in terms of resource depletion, encroachment of natural habitats, pollution, etc. A tripling of a small pop is one thing, a tripling of a large pop is another.

That said China (and to a lesser extent) India are managing their growth with the future in mind (although at times that management was particularly cruel).

Let it be noted that the US population more than doubled in the same time period (1950-2018, from 150m to 325m, vs 1.4b to 4.5b). So 215% vs 310%.

While true, that was not driven by natural native growth whereas in Asia it was. Not only that but the base pop was already very large, so a trebbling is significant.

For instance Belize tripling its pop now is no big deal, Bangladesh tripling its pop is a huge problem, maybe catrastrophic.

Let it also be noted that the US population was 203 million in 1970, and has had below-replacement fertility rate ever since.

It already has.

Asia has 44 million sqkm. For comparison, Europe has about 10 and North America around 20.

A lot of that is Siberia and other places of extremely continental climate (very cold winters and very hot summers, some places very fragile (the tundra)), so area is deceptive. And even if it were not the case, I don’t see Russia of Mongolia or Kazakstan gearing up for super mass migration. At most they could provide resources for export.

Many countries need a one child policy, the sooner the better. Not only for their own interest, but also specially for the interest of adjacent regions that are being affected and reap no benefits.

The UN's population projections have historically been very accurate. They have also consistently shown that the better educated and developed a country is, the quicker its population stabilises.

I'm not sure what you are referring to, because here (https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/) I see 3 models, a high, medium, and low, and they diverge hugely by 2100.

They have outlier models, but look at the probabilities associated with them (should be >90%, i.e., <10% probability for those lines). A better statement on my behalf would have been that their probabilistic distributions have been historically very accurate.

They are also updated very diligently to account for new phenomena. I don't work for the UN, but they take population growth very seriously.

The UN has underpredicted African population growth for decades and they have been predicting that low fertility populations like East Asians will bounce back to replacement too. Still hasn’t happened. Getting things wrong over and over again does not qualify as an accurate prediction. Getting things wrong, over and over again, the same way each time is embarrassing.

Not sure what you are specifically referring to.

The UN says [1] that "Africa continues to experience high rates of population growth. Between 2017 and 2050, the populations of 26 African countries are projected to expand to at least double their current size."

[1] https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world...

There is enough space for everybody. What the world lacks is good education.

And access to some of those pesky infinite resources

People make resources. People made crude oil and coal into resources. People made uranium ore into a resource. People made ores that would have been regarded as uneconomic dirt into wealth all over the world. (Ethnic) Chinese people turned a rock into a first world country in under 50 years, in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The important resource is people. When oil becomes economically irrelevant the Arabian peninsula will be economically irrelevant despite having had a 100 years of sitting on top of huge oil resources.

Ireland’s natural resources are some land that’s good for raising cattle and sheep and they grew rich off of pharmaceuticals, IT and other US multinationals. Luxembourg grew rich off of banking.

Natural resources are nowhere near as important as people. People turn dirt into valuable things. Without them it’s just dirt.

Good thing environmentalists are dead wrong about everything, otherwise putting even more strain on the planet might have me worried.

There are enough resources on earth and beyond. The main issue we have here on earth is the waste of resources, the main one being the human potential.

China’s one child policy is about to create a huge societal drain as the old population grows relative to the young. It also created over 10 million unregistered and discriminated against people. Plus a huge gender imbalance for young people.

It was very much a short term solution with long term consequences that the country likely isn’t prepared to handle.

China's one child policy has had HORRIBLE side-effects.

No thank you.

More Malthusian propaganda... Meanwhile, people in "developed" countries are dying of over consumption of food.

Really great visualization. I was surprised by how small Russia is relative to expectations. Also how small Canada and large Mexico is.

I love maps like these, they give such a great sense of where the people are. A technique that this map doesn't take advantage of is using color or brightness to represent population growth or age distribution, so you can project into the future.

Along these lines I also like maps adjusted for GDP and economic growth that show where the money is and where they're creating more of it.

This is dataviz done right. Gorgeous and useful.

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