Thursday 10 July 2014

"Population of EU member states has soared by a quarter to 507 million..."

From The Daily Mail:

... since 1960"

FFS.

Stick it in Excel

=(507/407)^(1/53)-1

= 0.42% annual growth.

Jeez.

By world standards, that is actually stagnating at best.

Since 1960, the world population has gone up from 3 billion to 7 billion, so in 1960 EU member states were 14% of the world population and now they are only 7%. Which is as Henry George and great minds before and since have predicted/observed; once a country has reached a certain level of prosperity, fecundity drops off quite markedly.

In really rich countries (Germany, Japan), it goes negative, and the true picture is masked by increases in longevity [as Sackerson points out in the comments below] and net immigration. In the UK, for example, more of the one-third increase in population since 1960 is down to people living longer than is due to net immigration; it's probably more extreme in Japan (practically zero immigration) and less extreme in Germany.

10 comments:

Bayard said...

I see the DM got caught pretending to be a militant Muslim and posting inflammatory comments on forums. Didn't take some tech-savvy mods long to track the IP address back to the Mail. I don't think the expression "you couldn't make it up" applies to the DM.

Sackerson said...

Need to strip out the age factor -more survivors into old age = growth despite low birthrate - see China.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, did they? Link?

S, fair point, you can strip out and factor in lots of things, but my point was, 0.4% growth is easily planned for and nobody in his right mind would describe that as "soaring" or "surging".

Bayard said...

I'd forgotten, but a quick google gave me this, amoungst others: http://www.nairaland.com/1802173/uk-newspaper-caught-stirring-up

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, ta, but in the context, I would say that was a reasonable fishing exercise by The Mail.

They were not actually inciting anybody to do anything, they were just asking "Who's up for doing what?"

Lola said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lola said...

MW. You don't really even need to plan for 0.42% annual population growth. In fact if can keep 'planners' out of it we'll sort it out for ourselves.

Pablo said...

In really rich countries (Germany, Japan), it goes negative
Does this mean that if we universally applied LVT, the human race would die out?

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, true.

P, maybe, maybe not. Is that an argument for or against LVT?

Bayard said...

"I would say that was a reasonable fishing exercise by The Mail."

Like making up stories about immigrants on benefits and using models for the pictures, it's not something that they really want to get caught doing.