trivia: 4 largest countries by population

This is a very deceptive question because it sounds so easy. Don't look it up in wikipedia, as it will spoil the answer.

The four largest countries (by population) have been the same since 1975* and are expected to remain the same until until the year 2025. Name the four countries in order by rank.

* The USSR will not be considered a country for the purposes of this quiz. It's status as a country was questionable.

1. China
2. India
3. United States
4. Indonesia

(didn't look it up... scouts honor :-)

China and India, obviously. Russia's population is declining, while the U.S.'s is increasing. So put the U.S. in there. Indonesia is probably in there to. Does Brazil come close? (I know I am hedging my bets here).
Otherwise, I agree with One Angry Dwarf (great name, btw).

I don't understand why this questions is very deceptive. There can be no argument that the four countries with the largest population currently are:

1. China (1.3 billion)
2. India (1.2)
3. USA (0.3)
4. Indonesia (0.2)

(Just as the poster above said. The numbers are coming from memory, but I'm fairly confident they are right.)

Since you said that its been the same top 4 since 1975 and expected to continue through to 2025, then this must be your answer.

I don't get it...its common knowledge! Where is the deception? I think a more interesting question would be which 4 countries have the smallest population...

I'm not sure I get it either....where is the deception here?

I meant that the question seems deceptively easy. I've asked that question dozens of times. Most people get China and India correct (except for the global awareness challenged); the majority get #3 correct, but I often get at least 6 tries to get the fourth one correct.

I think that China has been the largest political unit since the start of human civilization. As a result of OCPC policy, it will finally be passed by India in roughly the year 2025. Roughly 12 years after that the population of China will peak.


In 1950 it was China; India; United States; Russia; Japan; Indonesia

Follow-up question, slightly harder: Name the four most densely populated countries in the world. No cheating. (Do not count minor city-states like Singapore or Monaco).

Quote: teddys

Follow-up question, slightly harder: Name the four most densely populated countries in the world. No cheating. (Do not count minor city-states like Singapore or Monaco).

If you are excluding Singapore, I assume that are also excluding Macau and Hong Kong as well as Vatican City,

I believe that they are all in Asia or the Caribbean
I think they are Taiwan, Barbados, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Bangladesh is by far the most densely populated of the major countries.

I studied world population growth around 2000 and, at the time, India was on track to pass China by now. Consider this, in 2000, world population was estimated at 6 billion. Today, it is estimated at approximately 7 billion. Some of you math guys should calculate where this exponential curve places us, population-wise, at about the time of the 2030 world series of poker.

Quote: Jumboshrimps

I studied world population growth around 2000 and, at the time, India was on track to pass China by now. Consider this, in 2000, world population was estimated at 6 billion. Today, it is estimated at approximately 7 billion. Some of you math guys should calculate where this exponential curve places us, population-wise, at about the time of the 2030 world series of poker.

Let x be the annual growth rate.

(1+x)^10 = 7/6
10*log(1+x)=log(7/6)
log(1+x)=log(7/6)^-10
1+x=(7/6)^-10
x=(7/6)^-10 - 1
x=0.015534493

So 20 years from now the population, assuming the same rate of growth, should be 7B*(1.015534493)^20 = 9.53 billion.

However, before you all start wringing your hands, I'd like to suggest that if it were not for war, destruction of land suitable for farming, and other factors that are humanities own fault, that the planet could sustain a population of 20 billion or so. In other words, the current population and growth rate don't keep me up at night. However, I admit this is far from my area of expertise.

Quote: Wizard

So 20 years from now the population, assuming the same rate of growth, should be 7B*(1.015534493)^20 = 9.53 billion.

The census department predicts 8.20 billion by the year 2030. The difference is that they don't assume the same rate of growth, but are factoring a drop in birth rate, but also an increase in life expectancy.

The world population should pass 7 billion late in the year 2012. The United Nations will declare the official day soon, but their model differs from the Census Bureau by a few weeks. The day of 6 billion was October 12, 1999 and the Day of 5 Billion was 11 July 1987.

The rate of increase in China is now well below that of the USA. After 30 years of radical birth control, and without our immigration they are headed for Zero Population Growth about the year 2037. As I said earlier, India is on track to pass China in population by the year 2025.

World population growth (in millions of people and in percentage) for 100 years. See the effect of 1960 worst famine in history in China as Mao rushed the people to stop being farmers and build mini-steel mills. As Malthus said, one way or the other you have to control population.

You can see the effect of the pill in the 1960's on the developed world, and the drop in the death rate in Africa in the 1970's. Finally starting in the 1990's you see widespread population control in Asia and Latin America. By 2050 the growth in people per year will be the same as 1950.

Perhaps I'm comparing apples and oranges, or maybe there are disagreements between the data sources. In any case, I find it a curiosity that the Wizard's exponential curve calculation suggests an average annual growth rate of 1.5534% over the past decade, while Mr. Martin's graph suggests that the growth rate has not been that high for any of the years in the decade. What am I missing?

Quote: Doc

Perhaps I'm comparing apples and oranges, or maybe there are disagreements between the data sources. In any case, I find it a curiosity that the Wizard's exponential curve calculation suggests an average annual growth rate of 1.5534% over the past decade, while Mr. Martin's graph suggests that the growth rate has not been that high for any of the years in the decade. What am I missing?

The Wizard was doing it as a math problem. He did the calculation taking the numbers given in the post before at face value without researching them to see if they were accurate. The previous post said that the population was 6 billion in 2000 and 7 billion now. In reality it was 6 billion in 1999 and it won't be 7 billion until late in 2012. That's why he got a higher figure for annual growth rate. If the Wizard had used 13 years instead of 10 years the exponential rate would have been 1.1928%.

The census calculations are much more sophisticated than just exponential growth. They are primarily using logistic function and it's inverse, the logit function. But they are fitting to individual birth rates, and death rate data from around the world.

The overall growth rate of the world will not matter nearly as much as the huge disparities between different portions of the world. China will have labor shortages. While the Western world took most of a century to get used to ZPG, it will all happen at once in China. The world has never seen a country with a half a billion retired people. Populations in Japan, Russia, and Europe will plummet inviting the possibility of unplanned illegal immigration on a scale never before seen. The world may grow very militant, but the demand for labor will exist. Japan is building a whole new technology to lift and take care of geriatrics without massive immigrant labor.

Huge numbers of children will still be born in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Indian subcontinent will experience population densities that the world has never seen. Forty years from now Bangladesh will have 234 million people in a country not much bigger than Louisiana that floods every typhoon.

A good movie was Children of Men where women all become infertile, and the first baby is born in 17 years (see the photo).

In my opinion, the most important factor in the population growth equation is the rate of food production. Like all species, the population number of human beings is a function of food supply. When the population number is graphed alongside the rate of food production over say, the last two thousand (or ten thousand) years, a striking resemblence in the shape of the curves is seen. Oddly, convential wisdom has the relationship backward. That is, it is commonly thought that food production is increased in response to population growth. From a biological perspective, that is nonsensical. Rather, the population number increase is in direct response to food supply, as is true of ferral cats, fruit flies, blue whales, and elm trees.

You are correct about food supply over thousands of years, but your time frame is much too long. The sheer numbers of people have been since the 1930's when the world population was in the low 2 billions.

The green revolution has brought industrial methods to agriculture, but some people think we are risking catastrophe. The industrial revolution has limited the numbers of grain plants to a fraction of those used before WWII. They are the ones that are most useful to industrial techniques, but if a plague wipes out one kind of grain the effect on mankind could be a billion people starving.

You may have heard of the Russian scientists in WWII working under Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov who starved to death surrounded by edible seeds because they did not want to destroy the genetic material that would protect the future of mankind.

Quote: pacomartin

... The previous post said that the population was 6 billion in 2000 and 7 billion now. In reality it was 6 billion in 1999 and it won't be 7 billion until late in 2012.

OK. As I suspected, it is a disagreement between the data sources. I have not researched either of them.

The predicted world population growth says that every year the absolute number of people added to the world, and the number of people added to the world by percentage will go down.

It seems as if the world is peacefully headed to ZPG, but the imbalances will rock the world. Africa will have a billion children that will grow up looking at internet pictures of people like Paris Hilton. The world will grow up knowing what the wealthy have in a way that was unprecedented 50 years ago. They will say "Why does Paris Hilton lives like this and I can't even feed my children?"

Quote: pacomartin

Quote: teddys

Follow-up question, slightly harder: Name the four most densely populated countries in the world. No cheating. (Do not count minor city-states like Singapore or Monaco).

If you are excluding Singapore, I assume that are also excluding Macau and Hong Kong as well as Vatican City,

I believe that they are all in Asia or the Caribbean
I think they are Taiwan, Barbados, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Bangladesh is by far the most densely populated of the major countries.

More or less correct. The top four are Bangladesh, Maldives, Taiwan, and Barbados. If you take away the mini-states, South Korea and Lebanon replace them. Netherlands is fifth. Taiwan is even more densely populated then it seems because most of the central and western areas are mountainous and sparsely populated by Melanesian natives. In South Korea most of the population lives in 15-25 story high rises, even in the suburbs. (I did, too). The Netherlands is almost one conterminous urban area.

Well three out of four isn't too bad. I remember that outside of the city states, the most populous states are island-states followed by Bangladesh. I just got one of the islands wrong.

I calculated once that the density of Bangladesh is equivalent to what would result if everyone in Mexico moved to Louisiana. It's fairly incomprehensible. Especially if you realize that they are too poor to afford the high rises that many people in middle economies live in. They are almost all low rises. Plus the whole country is practically a flood plain. On top of that they are not slowing the growth rate as much as Latin America. Every typhoon is accompanied by huge losses to disease and exposure.

I heard that India built a small fence around Bangladesh. It's pretty easy to jump, but they felt the need to mark their territory. I suspect that it will be a big fence before long.

The number of births settled at around 130M/year in the mid 1990's, and is expected to remain almost exactly 130M/year for the next 40 years. The birth rate is going down because the population is still increasing, but the two rates cancel each other out and keep the number of births about the same. ZPG is achieved eventually because the deaths per year will increase from the present 55M/year to 95M/year in 2050 and onto 130M/year at some point in the future. While births remain at 130M/year they are obviously increasing fraction of them in Africa and South Asia (mostly Indian subcontinent). Europe is dropping in population, while the rest of the world (Western Hemisphre, East Asia, Southeast Asia) is moving towards ZPG.



One factor to consider that I think is very important is that China with it's super strict One child per couple policy is still taking over 50 years to achieve ZPG. With the countries that have as many as four children per couple (even as high as 7), I think that the only way to avoid catastrophic loss of life and massive human suffering is to have some kind of mandatory birth control ( or sterilization). Preferably you should sterilize men after they've fathered two children, but that would require a database and the will to enforce it.

I am surprised at how often I get called a racist if I say this sort of thing. The "50 years for China to achieve ZPG argument" doesn't seem to help. I just don't think it is racist to not want to see 100's of millions of people die in famine after famine, or 10 million people die of diarrhea after a flood in Bangladesh. I also don't think that widespread availability of contraceptives will be enough to change the culture.

I think it is fairly obvious that if you can't get the Total Fertility Rate down to about 2.7 or lower you will never develop an economy that can handle all the extra people per year. I pick that number because that is the rate for India. The 22% of the world with a higher fertility rate than India will never get ahead of their growth rate. Relatively wealthy countries like Thailand are only that way because they have been keeping their birth rate down for over 30 years.

Saudi Arabia is the most glaring exception. It has a high birthrate, and is not living in poverty. But most countries don't have a stranglehold on the world economy.