The global population pyramid from 1950 to 2100

New piece by Max Roser in Our World in Data, showing how global demography has changed and what we can expect for the 21st century.

In this figure below, curves in blue to green show how the global population pyramid changed from 1950 to today, while shades of yellow show the UN projections for the change expected until 2100.

click on the image to see full size

Mapping the diversity of population ageing across Europe with a ternary colour scheme

Ilya Kashnitsky and Jonas Schöley have recently published this correspondence in The Lancet where they show a very clever way to visualize the spatial heterogeneity of population age structures using choropleth map with ternary colour scheme. The data wrangling was done in R, and the code to replicate get the data and replicate the figure is available on Github.

Needless to say that, if you're interested in demography, R and data, you should be following the work and twitter accounts of Ilya and Jonas.

click on to image to enlarge it

image credit: Ilya Kashnitsky and Jonas Schöley.

Assorted Links

1. paper: carpooling options from companies like Uber and Lyft could reduce the number of vehicles on the road by a factor of three without significantly impacting travel time
   
   
2. Istanbul Urban Database: digitizing the historic urban archives of Istanbul , via @geog.an.mod
   
   
3. "Bussed Out: How America moves its homeless"
   
   
4. The effect of population age structure on innovation. In short, younger societies are more innovative. Via Tyler Cowen
   
   
5. Loud orgies of Mexican fish could deafen dolphins, say scientists.
   
   
6. Place matters: A longitudinal study estimating the influence of neighbourhood walkability on walking behaviour in across different life-stages via Ahmed el Geneidy
   
   
7. The science myths that will not die. The `population bomb` myth is included in the list
   
   
8. Carl Schmertmann‏ pointed out on Twitter to a new open access book "Visualizing Mortality Dynamics in the Lexis Diagram". You might also like this really great interactive interface to explore how mortality patterns change over time and across countries , developed by Jonas Schöley

Visualizing the concept of prospective aging with R

In two great papers published in Science and Nature, W. Sanderson and  S. Scherbov proposed a new way to understand population aging. Instead of focusing on the time people have lived, the authors take a prospective look at the number of years people are still expected to live.

This concept of "prospective aging" is nicely summarized by Ilya Kashnitsky in a blog post:

"The underlying idea is really simple – age is not static: a person aged 65 (the conventional border deliminating elderly population) today is in many aspects not the same as a person ages 65 half a century ago. Health and lifespan improved a lot in the last decades, meaning that today people generally have much more remaining years of life at the moment of being recognized as elderly by the conventional standards. Thus, Sanderson and Scherbov proposed to define elderly population based on the estimation of the expected remaining length of life rather than years lived. Such a refined view of population ageing disqualifies the alarmist claims of the approaching demographic collapse."

If you're interested in the topic, I would highly recommend reading the whole post (and the papers, of course). Ilya brings not only a nice summary of the concept, he also presents some R scripts to create animated population pyramids to visualize prospective aging.

 Ilya Kashnitsky writes a great blog and twitter about demographic research and R more broadly, and I would highly recommend following his work online.

Related Links:

• Demographic papers published on Science and Nature
• Japan's aging population in R
• Demographic Cliff
• World Median Ages, and a few papers and links on population aging

Demographic fact of the day

Nigeria is the fastest growing countries in the world. The population of Nigeria will nearly double in the next 30 years.

Very interesting episode of BBC's Economic Tectonics on how economic power will shift as the world’s population changes, by Ruth Alexander.

This is how 🇳🇬#Nigeria will overtake the US🇺🇸 as the world's 3rd most populous country (Currently 7th) pic.twitter.com/3jqe4K63vJ

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) 5 August 2016

Chart of the Day

For the first time in human history there are more older people (age 65+) than young #children (under age 5)#ageing pic.twitter.com/kTKC4ZoCnW

— Gerhard K. Heilig (@gerhard_heilig) 8 April 2016

Japan's aging population in R

Here is a nice GIF showing the population aging of Japan, and here is the script to make this animated population pyramid in R using ggplot. 

Kudos to Kyle Walker, author of this code and who you should definitely follow on Twitter and GitHub if you're interested in R, spatial analysis, data visualization and demography.

credit: Kyle Walker

Nobel Dialogue on Population Aging

The Nobel Week Dialogue of last year was dedicated to the topic of population aging, with many interesting presentations (ht Population Europe and Bernardo Queiroz). I liked these two sessions in particular, but other presentations are also available here.

• James Vaupel's talk on the demographic causes and consequences of an aging society (13'-27')

• The economics of population aging

Related Links:

• How old is your government?
• Demography may explain secular stagnation
• The Uneven Aging and "Younging" of American Metropolitan areas

World Median Ages, and a few papers and links on population aging

Simran Khosla designed this nice map to compare median age across the globe. You may see it in more details in each continent, here. Simran has also done a similar map comparing Life Expectancy at Birth.

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Simran Khosla via Urban Geographies]

And a few papers and links on population aging.

1. Map of the Day: Where Seniors Are Moving to in the US
2. Is low fertility really a problem? Population aging, dependency, and consumption (ht Bernardo Queiroz)
3. The pace of aging: Intrinsic time scales in demography
4. Handbook of Sociology of Aging 
5. Population Change among the Elderly: International Patterns 
6. The dependence burdens of aging babyboomers: a cross-national view

Assorted Links

1. The Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT found a great way to visualize their faculty members
   
   
2. Suprise in an Abandoned Bangkok Shopping Mall
   
   
3. You will thank me for this: How much underwear to bring on a trip
   
   
4. Prisons Are Facing Aging Populations, Too
   
   
5. Call for Papers: New Directions in Geospatial Simulation
   
   
6. Diver-less Cars With Adjustable Ethics Settings? via Karel Martens
   
   
7. The world population will not stabilize this century, says a new report that Patrick Gerland et al. published yesterday in Science.

UN 2012 population projections by continent [click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Patrick Gerland et al.]

The Age of Peak Academic Performance

An interesting paper on the age of peak academic performance (via Bernardo L Queiroz).

Abstract:

Great scientific output typically peaks in middle age. A classic literature has emphasized comparisons across fields in the age of peak performance. More recent work highlights large underlying variation in age and creativity patterns, where the average age of great scientific contributions has risen substantially since the early 20th Century and some scientists make pioneering contributions much earlier or later in their life-cycle than others. We review these literatures and show how the nexus between age and great scientific insight can inform the nature of creativity, the mechanisms of scientific progress, and the design of institutions that support scientists, while providing further insights about the implications of aging populations, education policies, and economic growth.

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Assorted links

1. A network analysis of the numbers in pi
   
   
2. Bicycle Infrastructure Networks and Ridership in 74 US Cities
   
   
3. The antipode of your current location
   
   
4. Immigration is saving the US from an aging crisis
   
   
5. Tom Vanderbilt: the counterintuitive science of traffic (ht Leo Monasterio)
   
   
6. Average Annual Household Carbon Footprint by ZipCode in the US and average vehicle miles traveled by households by ZipCode in the US
   
   
7. Beautiful picture of Tokyo as seen by Takashi Kitajima

[image credit: Takashi Kitajima]

Assorted links

1. A webpage to help you Convert #Words to #Pages
   
   
2. Urban density and climate change: a STIRPAT analysis using city-level data
   
   
3. Using R to analyze Human Mortality and Fertility databases? (via Emilio Zagheni)
   
   
4. The NSA is Coming to Town
   
   
5. First Detailed Map of Global Deforestation  [paper, interactive map]
   
   
6. The Day Google Became Skynet
   
   
7. Diversity of aging across the tree of life -A 46-Species Comparison (via BL Queiroz)

[Click on the image to enlarge it]

[Image Credit: Jones et al. at Nature, 2013]

What is Aging (from a biological perspective)

A nice and short video by PhD TV and Joao Pedro De Magalhaes showing a biological perspective on aging (ht Marcia Castro).

Assorted Links

1. What if all hte ice melted?
   
   
2. A Gray Future for the BRICsLike OCR for maps: Automating Extracting GIS Data from Scanned Maps (via @QUBDH @digitalurban)
   
   
3. Female Employment and Fertility in China
   
   
4. Chinese food Density by Neighborhood in NYC (via Untapped Cities)
   
   
5. Perfecting bike share schemes via (HumanScaleCity)
   
   
6. Golf Ball 70,000fps 150mph
   
   
7. Autonomous vehicles and self-driving buses closer to reallity (via MR)
   
   
8. Map of scientific collaboration between researchers (old stuff but still interesting)

Assorted Links

1. @NatureMagazine special issue on Research Impact
   
   
2. The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown on 1922 - handy
   
   
3. Zipf’s Law also holds for countries! via Leo Monasterio
   
   
4. Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers as the country’s domestic airline industry
   
   
5. The Funniest Reviews in Amazon (via Analise Real)
   
   
6. Neat page of R spatial examples (via Alistair Leak)
   
   
7. The Impact of Population Ageing on House Prices: A Micro-Simulation Approach
   
   
8. Global Urban Networks - International Summer School 2014
   
   
9. Things I'd rather be doing right now

dsstp://ww

Demographic papers published on Science and Nature

It's not everyday you see demographers publishing on journals like Science and Nature. So here is a short list with some of the papers published since 2000.

ps. Massive presence of @IIASAVienna and @WiCVienna researchers!

• (2013) Pervasive Externalities at the Population, Consumption, and Environment Nexus, by Partha S. Dasgupta, Paul R. Ehrlich
  
  
• (2012) Demography's Role in Sustainable Development, Many authors
  
  
• (2011) China’s Demographic History and Future Challenges, by Xizhe Peng
  
  
• (2011) The Demography of Educational Attainment and Economic Growth, by Wolfgang Lutz, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Warren Sanderson
  
  
• (2011) 7 Billion and Counting, by David E. Bloom
  
  
• (2008) Health and Urban Living, by Christopher Dye
  
  
• (2008) The coming acceleration of global population ageing, by Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2006) The Demography of Growing European Identity, by Wolfgang Lutz, Sylvia Kritzinger, Vegard Skirbekk
  
  
• (2005) Average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age, by Warren C. Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2003) Europe's Population at a Turning Point, Wolfgang Lutz, Brian C. O'Neill, Sergei Scherbov

and my two favorites:

• (2010) Remeasuring Aging, by Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov
  
  
• (2011) Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population, Wolfgang Lutz, Samir KC
• Interactive Age and Education Pyramids by Country

[Image Credit: Lutz and KC, 2011]

China's policies for the aging population

The Oxford Chinese Economy Programme (OXCEP) promoted a series of workshops on June 2013. Here is the presentation by Prof. Zhao Yaohui (China Center for Economic Research at Peking University) on Chinese policies for the aging population.

Related Link:

• Policies against poverty (Prof. Li Shi - Director of the China Institute for the Study of Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University)

Assorted links on Demography, Inequality and Economic Growth

1. How Europe's changing population will impact on income inequality
   
   
2. The distributional impact of population aging
   
   
3. Population Aging and the Growth of Income and Consumption Tax Revenue
   
   
4. Book - Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective
   
   
5. Long-term fiscal sustainability in major economies
   
   
6. Gini estimations for almost any country and a historical analysis of global income inequality (via Leo Monasterio)
   
   
7. World Income Inequality Database
   
   
8. Penn World Table Version 8.0 - a database with information on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity, covering 167 countries between 1950 and 2011. Not bad! (via Drunkeynesian)

Assorted Links

1. How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?  (via @blqueiroz)
   
   
2. Openly available datasets about Amazon
   
   
3. The 25 Least Visited Countries in the World (via Drunkeynesian)
   
   
4. The Flynn effect vs. population aging (via MR)
   
   
5. 3D Mapping in R
   
   
6. An advice for young researchers
   
   
7. Human Development Index of Mexico municipalities
   
   
8. An excellent discussion on the The Challenge of Ageing (and a related essay competition)
   
   
9. Length of the average dissertation (via Flowing Data)
   
   
10. What if we replaced the moon with Jupiter or Saturn?
    
    
11. Population density in select cities around the world