Demographer Jennifer Sciubba joins WIRED to answer the internet's questions about population and demographics. What is demography? What perspective can demographics provide about populations and societies? Do fertility rates really matter? Where do most people emigrate from when coming to the United States? And is immigration a net positive or negative? Answers to these questions and plenty more await on Population Support.Population Reference Bureau (PRB) promotes and supports evidence-based policies, practices, and decision-making to improve the health and well-being of people throughout the world. Find out more at prb.org. Follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook.Director: Lisandro Perez-ReyDirector of Photography: Charlie JordanEditor: Philip AndersonExpert: Jennifer SciubbaLine Producer: Joseph BuscemiAssociate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon WhiteProduction Manager: Peter BrunetteCasting Producer: Nicholas SawyerCamera Operator: Christopher EustacheSound Mixer: Michael GugginoProduction Assistant: Kalia SimmsPost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAdditional Editor: Jason Malizia
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm Jennifer Shuba, and I study demographic data.
00:02Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:04This is Population Support.
00:06At Verilion 4, how many people have ever lived on this Earth?
00:15So there have been about 108 billion people, as an estimate, who have ever taken a breath
00:20on planet Earth.
00:22If you went back to, say, year one, there would be about 55 billion people who had ever
00:26taken a breath.
00:27There are 8 billion people who live on planet Earth, 7% of the 108 billion who have ever
00:33taken a breath.
00:34Here's a question from Quora.
00:36Is the majority of the world's population children or adults?
00:39Well, the majority of the world's population is adults.
00:4170% of us are over the age of 18.
00:44Even in Africa, which is the youngest region in the world, 54% of the population is adults.
00:50Countries have seen a steady increase in their life expectancy over time.
00:55World population is growing older.
00:57And that's because the number of children per woman has gone down.
01:01One way to think about it is the average woman about 50 years ago would have had four children
01:07in her lifetime.
01:08But the average woman globally today has only two.
01:11So if we think about lining everyone in the planet up from the youngest person to the
01:15oldest person, where would the center of gravity be?
01:18The center of gravity has shifted over time as the average number of children per woman
01:24has gone down.
01:25At J.D. Crow 13, quiz, what is the fastest growing minority in America?
01:30If you answered hipster, then you win the prize.
01:32Actually, if you answered Asian Americans, you would win the prize.
01:35They are the fastest growing minority in the United States, and they're about 7% of the
01:39U.S. population.
01:40At Ben Poe 234, what are the signature demographics of a red state versus a blue state?
01:47If we think most generally, a red state most often would be more rural, probably have an
01:53older population and is whiter.
01:56Blue state would have more urban areas, ethnically or racially diverse, and probably a younger
02:01population.
02:02But you may notice that it doesn't always map that way.
02:06That's why on election night, it wasn't really just enough for us to see the 50 states projected
02:11on the screen and try to figure out how the election would turn.
02:13You could start to zoom in and see really different dynamics, like Tennessee, for example,
02:18that is relatively a red state across, and then with these little blue dots in the Memphis-Nashville
02:25areas.
02:26A state like Maine is the most rural state in the United States, but it still has lots
02:30of blue areas, and those are its urban areas.
02:32So if you're talking about a House race or a Senate race, you can see how those sub-state
02:39red and blue areas really show up a matter for what a vote looks like.
02:43At Stallman's Beard, is immigration a net positive or negative?
02:47One way we want to think about it is through an economic lens.
02:50In the United States, immigrants are actually most likely to be of working ages.
02:56The U.S. has a total fertility rate below replacement level of 1.6 children per woman
03:01on average, means immigration contributes quite a bit to the growth in the working age
03:06population here.
03:07We can see that foreign-born population, very few children under 5, very few 5 to 17 years
03:13of age, much more concentrated in terms of 18 to 64, or those working ages.
03:19Versus U.S. born population, immigration is kind of what propels that overall population
03:24growth.
03:25If the U.S. were to stop all immigration right now, not do anything else, between now and
03:30the end of the century, the U.S. population would shrink by over 30%.
03:35At Venompilled, wants to know why do fertility rates matter?
03:39They matter a lot because they impact its age structure, for example, and of course
03:44its size.
03:45We can actually see this if we look at snapshots in time of a handful of countries in the world
03:50today.
03:51Females on this side and males on this side, from age 0 all the way up to over 100.
03:55So if we're looking at Ethiopia here, we can see this classic pyramid shape means that
04:00it's a population where women have on average more than 2 children.
04:04So the population is a lot more bottom heavy, which means that there are a lot more younger
04:08people in the country there.
04:10If you had one that's fertility rate of 4 children per woman on average, each generation
04:14is twice the size of the one before it.
04:16Versus if we look at a country like Turkey, you can see that that center of gravity in
04:20terms of ages is in the middle more.
04:23And that's because they've had close to replacement level fertility rates for a while, average
04:27number of children of 1.9 per woman.
04:30So we see that that population is growing older.
04:32The bulk of the people would be here of these working ages.
04:35And then we get to Japan, it's not really a population pyramid anymore.
04:38It's more of a tree.
04:39There are lots of older people in this society.
04:42Some of that is longevity.
04:44And so you can see this narrowing here at the bottom.
04:47And that just shows you that women of reproductive ages, they're having under replacement level
04:51fertility rates.
04:52So why do those fertility rates matter?
04:54If you're in Ethiopia and you're a policymaker, probably one of your bigger concerns is how
04:59to build enough schools year after year for all of these young people aging into kindergarten.
05:05And then how to have enough jobs for those who are aging into the workforce.
05:08If you're in Turkey, you're thinking about the working age population certainly and their
05:12jobs there.
05:13But you also need to be thinking about how in just a few years, these folks will be moving
05:17into retirement ages.
05:18And how do you plan for that?
05:20And if you're in Japan, you're thinking about how schools are closing year after year.
05:24You have a much smaller workforce needing to support a growing population of older people.
05:31So age structures, which are affected by fertility rates, really matter for even setting
05:35the agenda at the national level.
05:37At Tommy Boyo is the real issue that we have too many humans on the planet.
05:42So in a few hundred years when the world population is over 50 billion, what will our problems
05:47be then?
05:48We will never have a population of 50 billion, at least not anywhere close to it with our
05:52trends right now.
05:53Best estimates are somewhere around the year 2080.
05:57And we'll top out at between 9 and 10 billion people.
06:00Now we're reasonably certain about this because our trends in fertility rates and mortality
06:05rates, they're following a fairly predictable pattern.
06:08The uncertainty comes from really just two things.
06:11One is, how fast will fertility rates fall in places where they're currently still high?
06:17And there really aren't that many places in the world where fertility rates are really
06:21high.
06:22They're mostly concentrated in a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
06:25We live in a world where there are only eight countries out of 200-something countries where
06:30women have five or more children.
06:32That includes Nigeria, for example, which is a pretty big country, keeps global population
06:35young.
06:36We have not seen any indication that it's going to come up in places where it's low.
06:40So I feel pretty confident we'll be hitting a peak of somewhere between 9 and 10 billion
06:43people roughly around the year of 2080.
06:45At Hawaiian Pace asks, how can Elon Musk be worried about population decline when Nick
06:52Cannon exists?
06:53Elon and Nick Cannon maybe have something in common, which is they might be single-handedly
06:58trying to change global trends.
07:01Global population growth has been declining since the 1960s.
07:06You can see this peak here in the mid-1960s.
07:09So that rate of growth is really going down over time.
07:13This is what's happening beneath the surface, while on top we see world population continuing
07:18to grow to where we have 8 billion today.
07:20So why is Elon Musk worried about declining population?
07:24It's because what's happening right now is the beneath-the-surface trends are starting
07:28to catch up to what we actually see on the surface, where there's over 60 countries in
07:32the world that have shrinking populations.
07:35We have two parents, so to keep population growth steady, you would want to replace them
07:39with two children.
07:40That would be a steady growth.
07:41But in some countries, Singapore, for example, you only have one child born for those two
07:47parents.
07:48So you can see how those populations of those countries would start to shrink over time.
07:52And that's happening especially in a lot of high-income countries.
07:55So the reason why somebody like Elon Musk would be concerned about this is you end up
07:59with smaller generations over time, meaning fewer producers and fewer consumers.
08:04At Shuffleupagus, I'm on a road trip right now and I'm wondering what's up with these
08:09empty small towns.
08:10Are they ghost towns?
08:11Is depopulation real?
08:13So depopulation is not only real, there are a lot of governments who are really worried
08:17about this because of what it means for economic vitality or national security.
08:22Take China, for example.
08:23Obviously, one of the world's biggest economies, huge player on the international stage, but
08:27also a rapidly shrinking population.
08:30Look at a country like Italy and how many of the villages are depopulating.
08:34If you're in Europe, South Korea, Japan, you're seeing areas of the country empty out.
08:41We've seen pictures all over the newspapers of towns and villages in Japan with ivy growing
08:46through the windows from abandoned homes.
08:48Storefronts start to close.
08:50These fertility rates are lower.
08:52And then that means the population of these small towns and cities is growing older and
08:57older and then eventually dying out without any young people there to replace them.
09:03And you don't necessarily see people moving from bigger cities all the way out to very
09:08small towns and very rural areas because there's no job opportunities there.
09:13Now, you do see some retirees doing that.
09:15Take a state like Maine, for example, most rural state in the United States actually
09:19has seen an influx of retirees moving there, but that's not because they're moving there
09:24for job opportunities.
09:25The United States itself is not shrinking overall, but there are plenty of places within
09:30the United States that are shrinking.
09:32Now, we've had plenty of examples of depopulation in the past.
09:35I mean, think about Detroit and the collapse of that auto industry there.
09:38But we've not ever seen this scale of depopulation, plus, of course, people often leaving these
09:44areas because once an area starts to depopulate, of course, fewer people will be wanting to
09:50stay there.
09:51The jobs leave.
09:52The community and the vitality part of that disappears as well, and so it can kind of
09:55accelerate that depopulation.
09:58Here is a question from Quora.
10:00What countries do most immigrants to America come from?
10:02Well, top countries of origin for U.S. immigrants in 2022, this number here, 23% were from Mexico,
10:106% from India, 6% from China, 4% Philippines, and then El Salvador, Vietnam, and Cuba, all 3%,
10:18and Korea, 2%.
10:19This has actually been changing over time.
10:21Immigration from Mexico has really dropped over time.
10:25Mexico's economy has been growing.
10:27Their total fertility rate is actually the same as the fertility rate in the United States, 1.6.
10:32And so we've seen less Mexican immigration to the U.S. over time as a proportion, whereas
10:37we've seen countries to the south of Mexico really increasing.
10:41Think about gang violence and instability in countries like El Salvador or Guatemala.
10:46That's really been a driver of some of that northward migration.
10:49So those are the top countries of origin, but if we look broader at the regions, we
10:54see that Latin America is 50% of immigrants to the United States in 2022, but Asia was
11:0031% of migrants to the U.S. in that year.
11:03Similar percentages for Europe, 10%, Africa, 6%, Canada, and Oceania.
11:08At Maureen Jo, why are people leaving California for Texas and Arizona?
11:13If we look at the way that the U.S. population has changed between the 2010 census and the
11:182020 census, you still saw lots of growth in the population in places in California,
11:24and this pink here really shows you places where you started to lose population.
11:28So a lot of the U.S. northeast started to see some emptying out.
11:32What we saw during the pandemic that people were moving to take advantage of states without
11:36income taxes, Nashville really started to boom, Tennessee is a state without an income
11:40tax.
11:41Florida, similarly, a state without an income tax.
11:43A lot of people started to move there.
11:45Jobs would move there as well.
11:47After the pandemic, we've really continued to see growth in the U.S. southeast.
11:53Between the middle of 2022 and the middle of 2023, you saw the U.S. southeast grow by
11:58about 1.1 percent, whereas the northeast actually shrank, while there were other regions
12:04in the U.S. that either barely grew or even shrank.
12:06Craig's brother Brian wants to know,
12:08I've been to the most densely populated city in the world.
12:11Have you?
12:12Do you know what city that is?
12:13I do know.
12:14It's Manila in the Philippines with approximately 46,000 people per square kilometer, and I
12:19haven't been there yet.
12:20Doom Bro Max asks,
12:22What made the world population increase so drastically after 1900?
12:26We had great improvements in public health, sanitation, nutrition, antibiotics, and that
12:32allowed those people who were born to live into their reproductive ages.
12:36So this chart really lays it out for us.
12:38If we go way back in time, 200,000 years ago, there's very little global growth.
12:43Even as we go through time, 2000 BCE, for example, or year one, the global population,
12:50the number of people here at any one point in time, is really growing slowly.
12:53And that's because our birth rates and our death rates, those really matched each other.
12:57But we start to see a major shift.
13:00Our first 1 billion people happening here around the year 1800, and then we hit our
13:04second billion a lot faster, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and now up to 8 billion people.
13:10And so a lot of those increases are really happening because we're living longer.
13:15Dystopian Paradise wants to know, in terms of age, what state has the oldest population?
13:20The oldest state is Maine, which has 23% of the population above age 65.
13:25Classic Man wants to know, which state has the youngest population?
13:29That state would be Utah, which has 27% of the population under the age of 18.
13:34You may notice that Utah is a home to a pretty sizable Mormon population, which tends to
13:40have higher births than other populations in the United States.
13:44At Justin L. Ung's, what's the biggest difference between Millennials and Gen Z?
13:48The biggest difference is that globally, Gen Z, or those people who were born from
13:531997 to 2012, are larger than Millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996.
14:02But in the United States, Millennials are larger than Gen Z.
14:06Gen Z, though, is much more racially diverse.
14:09So the percentage of Gen Z who are multiracial is about 4% in the United States, whereas
14:14it's only 2% among Millennials in the U.S.
14:17The share of people who are Hispanic is actually about 4% higher among Gen Z in the U.S. than
14:22it is among Millennials in the U.S.
14:24At JMP Freedom, WTF is the sandwich generation.
14:28Sandwich generation might sound delicious, but it's pretty terrible.
14:31It's those who are sandwiched between caring for younger children and caring for older
14:35parents.
14:36People are having children later in life.
14:38There's a trend towards that in the United States, in Japan, South Korea, Germany.
14:43And so you can end up with a situation where a woman is taking care of her one or two children
14:48at the same time that she's caring for her aging parents, who may live with her or who
14:52need her to come by and help with medical appointments or grocery shopping.
14:56Some people will call this the panini generation, actually, because these women are being squeezed
15:01in the middle.
15:02From Reddit, what would happen if all illegal immigrants were deported?
15:06Well, in the United States, we've got a stock of around 12 million people.
15:10In the U.S., lots of things would probably happen.
15:13There are certain industries in the United States that actually are really heavily dependent
15:17on that kind of labor, so the agricultural industry, for example.
15:20So you could expect having a harder time getting people to fill those jobs, and then prices
15:25for food would rise.
15:26The construction industry is much more heavily dependent on that labor, and so we expect
15:30it to take longer to get houses built, and prices would rise for that as well.
15:34In the United States, there are over 16 million people who live in a household with at least
15:39one undocumented person.
15:41Over 7% of all kids in the United States have at least one undocumented parent.
15:47So we would see families being ripped apart through these deportations.
15:50Eric Kroll wants to know, how do factors like income, race, geographic location, etc. affect
15:56life expectancy?
15:57They affect it a lot.
15:58Let's look at income first.
16:00So we have here a map of the U.S. with the counties drawn out.
16:04We can see here that some of the poorest counties in the United States, like McDowell County,
16:09West Virginia, with a median income of under $29,000 a year, has a life expectancy well
16:16below the U.S. national average.
16:18The same is true for Buffalo County, South Dakota, with a median income of just over
16:22$30,000 a year.
16:24East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, also one of our poorest counties.
16:28And Missaquina County, Mississippi, life expectancy of under 75 years, and median household income
16:34of only over $17,000 a year.
16:37It's not just powerful geography on the U.S. scale, it's also powerful at the global scale.
16:42So here's a couple of different ways to slice it.
16:45Let's stay over here with this yellow color for now.
16:47Global life expectancy in 2024.
16:50High income countries, life expectancy is 81 years.
16:54Middle income, 73 years.
16:56But low income countries, life expectancy is only 65 years.
17:00Most people know this, but of course, sex matters.
17:03Females tend to live longer than males.
17:0676 years on average globally versus 71 years for their male counterparts.
17:12Mostly demographers will nail down that men tend to be in riskier jobs.
17:16When you get to the very oldest ages, they're very heavily female with women outliving men.
17:21So that's something that countries either are or should be talking about.
17:25When it comes to health care, Social Security, these things all go together.
17:29They all affect the life expectancy of an individual, and of course, we aggregate that
17:33and they affect the life expectancy of a country as well.
17:36At chadashamblina wants to know, what country has the lowest life expectancy?
17:41I can't take another 62 years of this pish.
17:43Okay, well, lowest life expectancy at birth for males is in Chad, and that's at 53 years.
17:50Lowest life expectancy at birth for females is in Nigeria, and that is 55 years.
17:54At izazreal, what country has the highest life expectancy?
17:58Well, the answer for males is tiny Monaco, which has only 40,000 people, but where males
18:04born can be expected to live to age 84.
18:06Monaco and other small countries like Liechtenstein, they're really rich.
18:10They're small and rich, and so we know that income level actually is very highly correlated
18:16with life expectancy.
18:17If you're thinking in terms of, you know, countries you'd be more familiar with, those
18:20bigger ones.
18:21In Japan, females live to about 87 years.
18:24Isaac wants to know, people are living longer, but are they living healthier at the same
18:29time?
18:30Healthy life expectancy is one thing, and overall life expectancy is another.
18:34Healthy life expectancy is, you know, how many years can you expect to live in good
18:37health versus how many years you might live overall.
18:40I think ideally for any of us, you want that gap to be as narrow as possible.
18:45So if we look at Haiti, for example, you're only expected to live to age 56 healthy, and
18:50then overall to age 64.
18:52That's a gap of eight years.
18:54This gap here really represents the end of life lived in less than ideal health.
18:59That may mean something as little as difficulty with something like going up the stairs all
19:04the way to being bedridden.
19:06It does affect how long you could work, for example.
19:09How many years would you live healthy after retirement?
19:11Could you have actually retired later?
19:13That's something that's really relevant to all these countries as their populations age.
19:17So Haiti's at one end of the spectrum, Japan's at the other end of the spectrum.
19:20They could expect to live longer in good health to age 74, and then overall to age
19:2684.
19:27Now that's a gap of 10 years.
19:28The United States, though, is an outlier because our gap between healthy years lived and overall
19:34years lived is 12 years.
19:37So that means the average American lives the end of their life many more years less than
19:41ideal health than somebody in, say, even Bangladesh, where it's only 10 years, or in Canada where
19:46it's 11.
19:47So when I think about how well will the U.S. fare as its population ages, I really worry
19:54because it is very expensive to be sick in the United States of America.
19:59There's some real dings to the economy in our future if we have this kind of gap, 12
20:04years between our healthy life expectancy and our overall life expectancy.
20:08New guy, username one.
20:10What's the most populous country on Earth?
20:12Well, the most populous country on Earth is India, and the second most populous is China.
20:17Both of them have about 1.4 billion people.
20:20Far below that comes the United States, followed by Indonesia and Pakistan.
20:25If we count up the most populous countries, those five, plus if we add in Nigeria and
20:30Brazil together, those would make up a little over half of the world's population.
20:35At Arroyo Leota, so how did China's one-child policy work out?
20:40So the one-child policy from 1979 was a law the Chinese government put in place saying
20:46that mostly everyone could only have one child.
20:49Naturally, in a population, there are about 105 boys born for every 100 girls.
20:55That's just the way that it happens.
20:57So that's represented by this orange line here.
20:59And because there are really strong norms of male preference, of son preference in China,
21:05most of these families wanted to have a boy.
21:08That's why when you have restriction to just one child and your first child is a girl,
21:12we see that those that did have a second or third child, maybe those who were part
21:18of ethnic minority populations that were exempt from this one-child policy, those second and
21:22third children had far more skewed sex ratios at birth, and that is because of sex-selective
21:29abortion.
21:30Now, when I was born, which was more that way, there were no ultrasound technology.
21:35My parents would not have known if I was a boy or a girl before I came out.
21:39These folks here, they could see in utero whether or not this child would be a boy or
21:42a girl.
21:43And many of them, as we see, took measures to make sure that they would have a boy.
21:48So when we're looking at a sex ratio at birth for the third baby born, somewhere here around
21:53just a little bit before the year 2000, there were nearly 160 males born for every 100 females
22:00born.
22:01A tremendously skewed sex ratio at birth, a lot different from the natural sex ratio
22:05of 105 males born for every 100 females.
22:09If these were people who were born just before the year 2000, they are now entering their
22:13late 20s, and that means that there are millions more males than there are females of these
22:19different ages.
22:20So China is already a country with well below replacement fertility rates and a rapidly
22:25shrinking population.
22:26It certainly does not help the population grow any faster that there are millions of
22:30missing females of reproductive ages that would have been born without the one-child
22:34policy.
22:35Katie Claude asks, what change in demographics are you concerned about?
22:41One trend that people are concerned about is a youthful population.
22:44So this would be one where a huge proportion of the population is of younger ages.
22:48Think children or teenagers.
22:50A place like Niger or Mali having some of the youngest populations in the world, they
22:55are at a greater risk of having coups, more political instability.
22:59But there are also opportunities associated with these types of youthful populations.
23:03Working age populations are shrinking, so a youthful population actually has lots of
23:07opportunity for economic growth.
23:09Wholesome E. Coli asks, what does demography mean?
23:12At the broadest level, demography is just studying human populations.
23:17We're thinking about those human population changes, and with those there are just three
23:20ingredients to think about.
23:22Fertility changes, mortality changes, and migration changes, or shifts in births, deaths,
23:27and migration.
23:28Those in different combinations give you different outcomes and gives us a lot to study.
23:32Kiwi75 asks, let's look at which countries are growing fastest.
23:35Growing economy is what we need.
23:37The two fastest growing countries are South Sudan and Chad, whose populations are growing
23:41at about 6% a year.
23:42South Sudan and Chad are in Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa is a region of the world with the highest
23:49fertility rates.
23:50And so one out of every four children in the world will actually be African by the year 2050.
23:56That's because fertility rates are lower in other regions and they're higher in Sub-Saharan Africa.
24:00Northern Africa, however, does actually have lower fertility rates.
24:04If we think about what would make a population grow, it's having lots of people of reproductive
24:09ages and a high number of births per person.
24:13Over half of the world's projected population growth between now and 2050 will come from
24:17just eight countries.
24:19Now that includes India, which interestingly enough is a country that has below replacement
24:24fertility rates.
24:25Fewer than two children born per woman on average.
24:28So why is it still growing and why is it contributing so much to world population growth?
24:33That's some momentum of the past.
24:35Those cohorts of women of reproductive ages are larger from when fertility rates were
24:40higher in the past.
24:42So the average number of children born per woman is smaller now, but there are a lot
24:47of those women.
24:48At Misa Alexiv, why do Latin American migrants to the United States have such a high birth
24:53rate?
24:54After all, their birth rate is low in their homeland.
24:56For Latinos to come to the United States with a very high total fertility rate, well
24:59you're right that actually in the homeland, those fertility rates are lower.
25:03If you look at this map, those blue countries represent the two-thirds of Latin American
25:08countries with below replacement fertility.
25:11So below two.
25:12Even these handful in gray that are above, they're not that far above.
25:15Like Bolivia, the total fertility rate of 2.5 children born per woman.
25:19Think about someone who comes to the United States as an immigrant.
25:22They're typically of working ages, which also means that they're typically of reproductive
25:25ages.
25:26It just so happens that they're of those ages where they're more likely to have children.
25:30So it's not really true that they have such a high birth rate.
25:34It's just true that they tend to come of ages where they are more likely to be having children.
25:39We also know that when people stay in a country, when an immigrant stays in a country, very
25:44quickly the norms shift to match that of the reproductive norms around the native-born
25:51population.
25:52So within a generation, you usually see those immigrant fertility rates come right down
25:56to where the native-born population is.
25:58At underscore Jan underscore P, how are illegal immigrants counted?
26:01Well, first we want to think about how anybody is counted.
26:04In the United States and many other countries, there is a census around every 10 years or
26:09so.
26:10But along the way, in between those times, we have regular surveys like the Current Population
26:15Survey or the American Community Survey.
26:17And so you can kind of put these together to get a snapshot of what the population would
26:21look like.
26:22If you want to know how many illegal or irregular immigrants there are in a population, you
26:27would take the number of legal migrants that you know, and then you would take what you
26:31know from these censuses about how many people are in an area.
26:35And this residual or this difference is the estimate of those people who are here outside
26:40the legal system.
26:42And it is an estimate.
26:43Some people don't answer.
26:45Sometimes you can think about somebody who is in the country illegally, lives in a household
26:49with people who are there illegally.
26:51And so the head of household might fill out the census and say how many people are living
26:54there, but it doesn't quite track with how many people are in the area that you know
26:58through legal immigration means.
27:00And so you can kind of look at those leftover numbers to estimate that.
27:02We always take these with a grain of salt, but demographers do use all their context
27:06clues and use all the data to try to estimate that.
27:09At Weekly Humorist, a new study says that in the future, most of the world will live
27:13in megacities and their office will be in any of the window stools at Starbucks that
27:18can reach an outlet.
27:19Well, this is certainly what sci-fi would tell us about megacities, which is amalgamations
27:23of population in areas of 10 million or more.
27:26I don't necessarily think it's the case, but it will depend on where you are in the world.
27:30I mean, there's countries like Bangladesh, for example, they just frankly don't have
27:33any extra space.
27:34So we do see a really densely populated areas.
27:37There are people who are leaving rural areas for urban areas to seek better economic opportunity.
27:42After 1800, for example, only about 3% of the world's population lived in urban areas.
27:48Now we have over 58% of the world's population living in urban areas.
27:52So generally there is a trend towards moving in that direction.
27:55We also see the opposite.
27:56We had seen during the pandemic, some people leaving those urban cores for smaller cities
28:01or suburban areas, TBD on how that shakes out in the future.
28:05At Rod T3, how do mortality rates in the U.S. compare to other countries?
28:10So with that, you're asking about the number of people dying per 1,000.
28:14So if you're Japan, you would have a higher mortality rate because you have a lot of older
28:18people than maybe a country that actually has a less healthy population.
28:22I bet what you really want to know about is life expectancy, especially life expectancy
28:26at birth.
28:27How many years would a person born today be expected to live?
28:30And in the United States, life expectancy at birth is about 78 years old.
28:34Even Canada, our neighbor to the north, has a life expectancy at birth of 82 years.
28:39U.S. life expectancy has not really been keeping pace with increases the way that we would
28:44expect it to.
28:45And that's because health in the U.S. is frankly really bad.
28:48And in terms of access to health care, that can be really uneven from rural to urban areas
28:54or by race as well.
28:55A non-Hispanic black woman in the United States is three and a half times more likely to die
29:00during pregnancy or shortly thereafter than a non-Hispanic white woman.
29:04So all of these things combined, the opioid crisis, another factor in there, these drive
29:10U.S. life expectancy lower.
29:12From Reddit, Ronan Solutions says,
29:14Ukraine's population is nosediving.
29:16Can anything be done?
29:18How can Ukraine build a future in the face of ominous population statistics?
29:22That's a great question.
29:23About 10 million people have left since the war started.
29:26And this is a country that already had a history of emigration or emigration, people leaving
29:32for opportunities in Western Europe, for example, for work.
29:36It's also a country that already had well below replacement fertility rates.
29:40So with fewer births and lots of people leaving, they are having a serious situation with a
29:46population that is shrinking.
29:49And there's not really much that can be done about it.
29:51We know from countries around the world, everywhere from Germany to Canada to Japan, that governments
29:58can play very little role in raising fertility rates through things like tax incentives or
30:05paying for different credits for having children.
30:08So not much can be done on that.
30:10When the war ends and the country begins to rebuild, hopefully that will open up lots
30:14of economic opportunity and the peace there will attract some people to come back.
30:19Some of those 10 million people may come back and start to build lives there.
30:23So those are all the questions for today.
30:24I hope you have seen that demography is a really powerful lens with which to view this
30:29complex world of 8 billion people.
30:31Thanks for watching Population Support.