Recently, the ranking of countries by population is an increasingly global issue than it has long been. There is heated debate in academia about the causes and potential threats of overpopulation or "underpopulation." What of this awaits the Earth in the near and distant future? A demographic catastrophe or a new leap in historical development? Polemic scholars have long attracted public attention. The calculation of the number of future solvent citizens is an acute problem for the government. And the rating 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 pure form, it studies the concept of population, which is described by various quantitative indicators and coefficients. She works with different mathematical apparatuses for calculating them and calculates probabilities in order to answer the question: how and in what direction to affect the population. But in fact, the problems that are being addressed are acutely social, implicated in the historical processes, cultural and economic interests of individual countries. Demographic comparisons of the numbers of which against the background of all these issues seem appropriate.
How many of us?
Not so long ago, less than 25 years ago, the entire demographic question was expressed in one true joke: that every sixth person on Earth is Chinese.
In total, there are more than 7.58 billion people on Earth. The list of countries by population is still starting in China. It is still the most populated state in the world, right after it comes India. All other states lag behind them by an order of magnitude, or even two or three. The Vatican closes the list of countries in the world ranking - there are only 795 people in the dwarf enclave state .
Rating of countries by population
There are 233 countries on Earth. The table shows the 10 most populated in the world. Curiously, Russia, the largest country by area, is 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, fit in 364 thousand square meters. km of small islands. The area and population of the United States against this background can be said to be in equilibrium - by 9.8 million square meters. km live 324 million people.
| No. | The country | Population |
| 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 |
Exhibitor or Hyperbole
Initially, the issue of population lay in the field of economics. And it represents the interests of a particular power, so the rating of countries by population was a more significant issue than demography on a global scale.
Malthus, an English economist and founder of demography, suggested that the population grow exponentially and tends to the limit. By the way, like almost all other living things, it depends on the nutrient medium. That is, when resources are depleted, growth slows down. And before this moment comes, it depends on the population - more people live, more are born. These calculations were based on an incorrect premise - the assumption that resources will begin to deplete and will not be renewed or replaced by others.
Despite the incorrect assumptions, Malthus proposed innovative social methods of regulating the population: to limit the marriage of insufficiently wealthy citizens and not to provide assistance to the poor. As well as moral and even spiritual regulatory mechanisms: strict abstinence before marriage.
In fact, the growth of the Earth's population is distributed according to a hyperbolic law. The model was proposed by the physicist S.P. Kapitsa. He showed that the growth of the Earth's population is subject to a certain mathematical law, which does not depend on any, even the most ambitious historical shock. In the graph, curve (1) represents statistical data and (2) a theoretical model. As can be clearly seen, deviations and outbursts due to various universal disasters that significantly reduced the population (for example, the world wars of the last century) did not affect the quantitative growth of mankind.
What does the story have to do with it?
Another interesting fact is that humanity lived in historical epochs, measured in years, and not in population. But over the millions of years of the Paleolithic, over the thousand years of the Middle Ages, and over 125 years of recent history, ten billion people passed through the Earth, regardless of the rating of countries according to the world's population. And time, as it were, continues to shrink. For the effective life time of one generation (45 years), one can say, a whole historical era, if measured by the number of people. The First and Second World Wars shocked 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 already more than 7 billion. The same number was born and died over the thousands of years of the Paleolithic ?!
So from now on, each new generation is called upon to solve the tasks of an entire historical era, to revise past worldviews or to develop a new paradigm!