Changing world population balances, 1800 to 2100

The Russian Demographics Blog was the most recent source to link to Max Galka's remarkable map showing changing populations in the recent past and the projected future.

For thousands of years, Asia has been the population center of the world. But that’s about to change.

Asia contains 7 of the 10 most populous countries in the world, the two largest of which, China and India, each individually have larger populations than Africa, Europe, or the Americas. And as I’ve demonstrated previously, the eye-popping population density in regions such as Tokyo and Bangladesh is an order of magnitude greater than anywhere in the western world.

Two hundred years ago, the figures were even more extreme. In 1800, nearly two thirds of the world lived in Asia. And at that time China had a larger population than Africa, Europe, and the Americas combined.

Asia dominates the world population landscape, and it has for at least the last two and a half thousand years. [. . . T]he relative population sizes of Asia, Africa, and Europe have remained surprisingly constant for thousands of years. Since at least 400 BC, 60% or more of the world has lived in Asia.

According to the U.N. Population Division, the population of Africa is poised to explode during the next 85 years, quadrupling in size by 2100.

The U.N. attributes this change to two factors: Africa’s high fertility rates (African women have on average 4.7 children vs. a global average of 2.5) and its young population, many of whom will be reaching adulthood in the coming years and having children of their own.

A note on public health, or, how you get what you pay for

Late last month, I blogged about PrEP, an acronym for "pre-exposure prophylaxis", as Wikipedia puts it "the use of prescription drugs by people who do not have HIV/AIDS as a strategy for the prevention of HIV/AIDS". When taken with sufficient frequency, the drug in question--in most studies, either tenofovir or the tenofovir/emtricitabine combination TruvadaSouth Africa and Thailand suggest that PrEP can be an effective anti-HIV strategy in middle-income countries as well.

PrEP is not the only transformative event in the treatment of the pandemic The latest anti-retroviral treatments are not only keeping the HIV-positive in good health, they are radically reducing the chances of further infection, via the strategy of TaSP (treatment as prevention). One thing widely reported in the media with varying levels of incredulity after Charlie Sheen's self-outing as HIV-positive, in Vox and Gawker and MacLean's and New York Magazine, is that Sheen has undetectable levels of the virus in his system and cannot infect people. This was not just Sheen talking: This is the actual science. Multiple research projects, including the ongoing PARTNER study, have so far concluded that the chances someone HIV-undetectable could transmit HIV on to someone HIV-negative are trivial. The PARTNER study has not yet found a single instance of such a transmission happening, not with tens of thousands of sex acts in hundreds of couples in two years. TaSP, treatment as prevention, also works. The approach of systematic testing and universal treatment of HIV, pioneered in Canada in British Columbia by Dr. Julio Montaner, can break the back of the epidemic. Saving people's lives also slows down the spread of HIV radically.

These successes raise an important question. Between PrEP and TaSP, not only is it possible for people infected with HIV to lead normal lifespans--indeed, some recent studies suggest that the sustained engagement with medical systems can give HIV-positive people longer life expectancies tan their HIV-negative peers, their HIV becoming a manageable
Journalist Laurie Garrett's 1995 The Coming Plague remains as relevant a book now as it was when it was published two decades ago. In that book, she made the point that the world was woefully unprepared for pandemics, that sustained underinvestment in public health and medical systems made it very difficult for increasingly fragile states to control infectious diseases within their frontiers. Governments, as she observed caustically in country after country, with disease after disease, simply seemed to have other priorities. The result was the risk of catastrophe. PrEP and TaSP may be effective strategies, but what does it matter if governments opt not to make the investments necessary? The United States is the country that developed PrEP and TaSP, and happily these strategies are becoming increasingly widely adopted in different at-risk communities which have access to them. PrEP and TaSP, though, require significant investments, in medication and in ongoing medical surveillance. Those communities which cannot access these investments are suffering horrifically: a recent Al Jazeera item suggests that HIV is spreading among black men who have sex with men in Atlanta at rates rarely seen in the United States since the 1980s. Similar stories can be told elsewhere in the world, only the details varying.

People elect governments, governments make choices, and too often these governments don't bother trying to deal with significant public health problems. The results, when crises erupt, can be catastrophic. I remain thankful that the West African Ebola epidemic has been fought back, though I wonder how many lives, how much wealth, how much potential could have been saved had the concerned governments and organizations behaved prudently. False economies are, by definition, false.

"Edward Hugh, Economist Who Foresaw Eurozone’s Struggles, Dies at 67"

The last Demography Matters post of 2015 noted the sad death of co-blogger Edward Hugh, and the first post of this year shall note Landon Thomas Jr.'s obituary for Edward in The New York Times. A sampling:

“For those of us pessimists who believed that the eurozone structure was leading to an unsustainable bubble in the periphery countries, Edward Hugh was a must-read,” said Albert Edwards, a strategist based in London for the French bank Société Générale. “His prescience in explaining the mechanics of the crisis went almost unnoticed until it actually hit.”

As the eurozone’s economic problems grew, so did Mr. Hugh’s popularity, and by 2011 he had moved the base of his operations to Facebook. There he attracted many thousands of additional followers from all over the world.

If Santa Claus and John Maynard Keynes could combine as one, he might well be Edward Hugh. He was roly-poly and merry, and he always had a twinkle in his eye, not least when he came across a data point or the hint of an economic or social trend that would support one of his many theories.

His intellect was too restless to be pigeonholed, but when pressed he would say that he saw himself as a Keynesian in spirit, but not letter. And in tune with his view that economists in general had become too wedded to static economic models and failed their obligation to predict and explain, he frequently cited this quotation from Keynes:

“Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.”