the.com/demography
the body count of civilization, tallied one birth and grave at a time
means The statistical study of human populations — their size, growth, age, density, and movement, tracked through births, deaths, and migrations.
from From Greek dēmos, 'the people' (the same root behind 'democracy' and 'epidemic'), joined to -graphia, 'writing' or 'description.' So literally a 'writing of the people.' The term itself is a 19th-century coinage, credited to a Belgian statistician who needed a name for the new science of counting populations en masse.
- first counter
- London's 1662 plague bills birthed the science
- replacement rate
- 2.1 kids per woman keeps a nation level
- pyramid shape
- age graphs reveal a country's whole future
- momentum
- populations grow decades after birth rates drop
- dependency ratio
- who works versus who's fed by them
japan population decline — population fell from 128.5m (2010) to 125m (2023) as birth rate dropped below replacement
india surpasses china — india became world's most populous country in 2023 with 1.417 billion people, exceeding china
sub saharan africa growth — population projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, representing 26% of global population