Where Are People Moving Too?

Within the U.S. and Canada, one view of the answer is in the map at right, which shows as blue those states/provinces with more people moving to them, orange with more people moving from them, and red for states with about the same amount of people moving too or from them.

Mind you, this view is a bit biased: it measures moves by Atlas Van Lines, which means it's looking at a slice of relatively well-off movers (a great many people cannot afford to pay the likes of Atlas for their services).  Another thing to watch: some of the absolute numbers are very small.  For example, 3 people moved out of Newfoundland, and 9 people moved in.  With a sample that small, I don't think we learned very much about Newfoundland!

But even with all the caveats, there are some surprises on here (for me, at least).  Why are people leaving Wyoming?  Why are people moving to Washington?  Why aren't more people leaving California (like they are New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois)?

U.S. Population Map...

Now this is just awesome: an interactive, zoomable map of the U.S. with a dot for every person recorded by the 2010 census.  The map has no other features to clutter the view; it shows population and nothing else.

This is a great tool for me as I look for a place for us to live!

Religion and Population Growth...

Here's an excellent TED talk about the influence of religions on population growth.  It's an excellent counterpoint to the theories of Mark Steyn et al, and also a great example of the intellectual dangers of trying to establish causation by correlation.  By that last comment, I don't mean that I think either this talk or Mark Steyn's theories are either right or wrong – I'm just observing that starting with essentially the same data, both parties have arrived at very different conclusions.  This is true even though both of them are inferring causes by observing correlations in basically the same data set.  This stuff is complicated and hard.  But even if one ignores their stated conclusions, their observations are very interesting indeed...

Farm Productivity...

The graph at right (click to enlarge) is a fascinating look at what invalidated the Malthusian prophecies of the early 20th century.  Back then, the conventional wisdom was that because human populations were growing much faster than our food production, we were all going to starve and die before the year 2000.

Well, not so much.  In fact, there is now more food per capita than at any previous point in history.  Better food, too (in every sense!).  How did this happen?  Why were the projections so very wrong?

They had the same problem that every static projection has: they assumed that the rate of change of both food production and of population growth would remain the same.  If that had actually happened, the Malthusians would have been correct.  But it didn't; in fact, both changed.  Our food production started climbing very rapidly during WWII with the near-simulateous development of cheap fertilizers, effective insecticides, and selective herbicides.  A few decades later, genetic engineering kicked farm productivity even faster.  There's no end in sight yet for farm productivity improvement.  At the same time, worldwide population growth rates are slowing.  The rate of change on those rates is low, but the effects are cumulative and large over the long term.  Most experts today think that our world's human population will level off (or close to that) before the end of this century.  My guess is that today's experts are probably just as wrong as the Malthusians were 100 years ago – but I have no idea in which direction they're wrong, much less the magnitude of their error!

Of All the People Who Have Ever Lived...

...how many are alive today?

Answer: about 1 in 8.

Where Does Everybody Live?

This surprised me.  Click to enlarge, and study it for a little while – I'll bet you'll find some surprises too...

Populations

The map at right (and click on it for a larger view) is sold by ODT; I’m not sure who actually created it. If you look at it closely, you’ll see all the countries look a mite odd. What they’ve done is to keep the boundaries of all the countries in at least roughly the right place, but they’ve changed the area of each country to correspond to its population. So some physically large countries (say, Greenland) are very small on this map because they have very small populations; likewise some physically small countries (like Japan) appear to be much larger because their populatiosn are large.

There were several surprises on this map for me. One was Russia, which really shouldn’t have surprised me, as I know its population really isn’t that large. And then there’s southeast Asia in general — yikes!

Study this thing, and I promise you’ll have some sobering moments…