Recently, the ranking of countries by population is an increasingly global issue than it has been for a long time. There is a heated debate in scientific circles about the causes and potential threats of overpopulation or "underpopulation". What of this awaits the Earth in the near and distant future? Demographic catastrophe or a new breakthrough in historical development? The scholarly controversy has long attracted public attention. Calculating the number of future solvent citizens is an acute problem for the government. And the ranking of countries by population is not so much a mathematical question, but a political and social one.
Demography
So demography is a scientific field that is useful to understand. In its purest form, it studies the concept of population, which is described by various quantitative indicators and coefficients. She works with different mathematical tools for calculating them and calculates probabilities to answer the question: how and in what direction to influence the population. But in fact, the problems that are touched upon are acutely social, implicated inhistorical processes, cultural and economic interests of individual countries. Demographic comparisons of the number of which, against the background of all these questions, seem appropriate.
How many of us?
Not so long ago, less than 25 years ago, the whole demographic question was expressed in one true joke: that one in six people on Earth is Chinese.
In total, there are now more than 7.58 billion people on Earth. The list of countries by population still starts with China. It is still the most populated country in the world, followed immediately by India. All other states lag behind them by an order of magnitude, or even by two or three. The list of countries in the world ranking closes the Vatican - there are only 795 people in the dwarf enclave state.
Ranking of countries by population
There are 233 countries on Earth. The table shows the 10 most populated in the world. It is curious, but Russia, the largest country in terms of area - more than 17 million square meters. km, - far from the most populated, barely in the top ten of the table. And Japan, slightly inferior in number, fits into 364 thousand square meters. km of small islands. Against this background, the area and population of the United States, one might say, are in balance - by 9.8 million square meters. km live 324 million people.
| Country | Population, people | |
| 1 | China | 1, 409, 517, 397 |
| 2 | India | 1, 339, 180, 127 |
| 3 | USA | 324, 459, 463 |
| 4 | Indonesia | 263, 991, 379 |
| 5 | Brazil | 209, 288, 278 |
| 6 | Pakistan | 197, 015, 955 |
| 7 | Nigeria | 190, 886, 311 |
| 8 | Bangladesh | 164, 669, 751 |
| 9 | Russia | 143, 989, 754 |
| 10 | Mexico | 129, 163, 276 |
Exponent or hyperbole
Initially, the issue of population lay in the field of economics. And it represents the interests of a particular power, so the ranking of countries by population was a more significant issue than demographics on a global scale.
M althus, the English economist and founder of demography, assumed that the population grows exponentially and tends to the limit. By the way, like almost all other living beings - depending on the nutrient medium. That is, when resources are depleted, growth slows down. And until this moment it depends on the population - more people live, more people are born. These calculations were based on the wrong premise - the assumption that resources would start to deplete and not be renewed or replaced by others.
Despite the wrong assumptions, M althus proposed innovative social methods of population control: to limit the marriage of underprivileged citizens and not to provide assistance to the poor. As well as moral and even spiritual mechanisms of regulation: strict abstinence before marriage.
Really growthThe population of the Earth is distributed according to the hyperbolic law. The model was proposed by the physicist S. P. Kapitsa. He showed that the growth of the Earth's population obeys a certain mathematical law, which does not depend on any, even the largest historical shock. In the graph, curve (1) represents the statistical data and (2) the theoretical model. As you can clearly see, deviations and surges due to various universal catastrophes that significantly reduced the population (for example, the world wars of the last century) did not affect the quantitative growth of mankind.
What's the story about?
Another interesting fact is that mankind lived in historical epochs, measured in years, not in population. But for millions of years of the Paleolithic, for a thousand years of the Middle Ages, and for 125 years of recent history, ten billion people passed through the Earth, regardless of the ranking of countries in terms of the population of the planet. And time continues to shrink. In the effective lifetime of one generation (45 years), one might say, an entire historical epoch passes, if measured by the number of people. The First and Second World Wars shook the world in the first half of the last century, not so long ago on the scale of history. And now, much less than a century later, the population is over 7 billion. How many were born and died in the thousands of years of the Paleolithic?!
So from now on, each new generation is called upon to solve the problems of an entire historical era, to revise past worldviews or develop a new paradigm!
