You Can’t Escape Time

As you read this, you’re not getting any younger. And neither is anyone else. It got me thinking about what that means for the global population.
Open Data
DataViz
Author

Andrew Lis

Published

January 5, 2024

Death and Taxes

Unless you live in a country where taxation is a foreign concept, there’s two things you can be reasonably certain about:

  1. You will die one day.
  2. You will have to pay (a lot) of taxes along the way to your inevitable demise.

I don’t write these words to start this off on a dismal note, but rather to simply acknowledge a hard truth about life we all eventually have to swallow.

Who’s Going First?

This got me thinking…

There’s a bunch of countries around the world, and while we’re all humans, we’re not all the same.

Each country didn’t start off with the same initial conditions.

I’m not talking about ‘starting off’ like the Big-Bang.

I’m talking about how different regions around the world have stark inequalities, vastly different levels of access to education, healthcare, clean drinking water, sanitation, vaccines, etc.

So anyway, it just got me thinking: since we all didn’t really start out with the same “initial conditions”, what does that mean for population growth in various regions around the world, as a result of that history?

Who’s going to die first?

Unoriginal

I’m obviously not the first person to have ever thought about this, and when I went digging around the intraweb, there was no shortage of reports/analyses/papers/etc.

I came across some Open Data from Our World in Data, which had a pretty good analysis along with some great animated charts.

Naturally, I wanted to poke around the data a bit myself, so I pulled it and wrangled it a bit to make a simple chart of population growth projections by major global region.

Here’s that chart:

Winners and Losers

When I look at a chart like that, I see a couple things:

  1. I see politics and economic policies that are now materializing in ways that were (probably) not anticipated.
  2. I see population age structures that are likely to result in some hardships for many countries over the next 100 years or so.

After all, we are all going to die one day.

But it’s that second point that I’m most interested in at the moment.

In my line of work, I often get asked how “things can possibly be sustainable(!?)”, usually in reference to “things” such as housing prices, economic growth, societal inequalities, etc.

It’s not a question with a simple answer, but I think that chart is a big part of the answer.

Oh, Canada

I’m lucky enough to live in a high-income country, where I enjoy a tremendous amount of benefits that accrue to me for no other reason than having been lucky enough to be born here.

Yes, I have to pay taxes.

No, I don’t love having to share my income (via taxes) with the rest of Canada.

But, I do recognize that’s actually part of the “benefit” of living here.

Those tax dollars are (typically/hopefully) used to make life better for everyone in the country I live in.

No Shrinkage

But, how can such a fortuitous lifestyle be sustainable?

How are we going to pay for the healthcare costs of an aging population?

How can we continue to have debt-to-GDP ratios that are “unsustainable”?

How can house prices keep rising in major urban areas where all the jobs and amenities are?

Looking at the chart, I think one part of the answer is that Canada keeps growing. And it will likely continue growing well into the future.

And looking at that chart again, it seems like there are some MEGA-populated regions of the planet that are about to undergo a population deflation over the next 100 years.

I honestly don’t know how that’ll pan out for them.

But it’s hard to see how that could be unambiguously “good”, when growth brings with it so many benefits.

I feel pretty lucky to live in a place that’ll (probably) continue growing.

Footnotes

  1. I’m not sure any exist?↩︎

  2. A term economists (and other nerds) use to describe the state of a world when it starts out.↩︎

  3. I see a lot more than two things, but this is supposed to be a short post and I’m going to keep it that way.↩︎

  4. Now, whether that is actually how those dollars get used is a subject for another day.↩︎

  5. We can thank immigration for that, because we sure as hell aren’t making enough babies here to replenish the population.↩︎