I can't imagine a factor of an economy, including property prices, that wouldn't be strongly effected by population stability.

What happens to wages? Inflation? Energy? Companies? The share market? ...aged care?

Absolutely fascinating stuff.

What currently happens is that wages start to follow the same sigmoid trend. So does energy use per capital.

Shares are too volatile to even predict in long term.

Aged care, not enough data for a conclusion.

Wow, I just took the quiz and it was rather enlightening. I ended up scoring reasonably well (9/13), but only because getting the first few wrong taught me to stop taking such a dismal view of the world. If I hadn't been shown the correct answers until the end, I probably would have done even worse. I might have to look into that book!

Oh, I didn't realize it shows answers right away. Previous version didn't do that. 9/13 would have been a great score.

edit: I've changed the link to a test that doesn't mark correct answers right away, previous link: http://factfulnessquiz.com/

The two versions of the quiz claim different correct answers for the population of the continents question.

Huh, indeed, factfulnessquiz.com seems to be selecting wrong answer as correct even though they list correct answer correctly on http://factfulnessquiz.com/answers

Pretty serious given that there are only 13 questions and that's what the whole website is about. They didn't even leave any contact. I'll send an email to gapminder.

Nice catch, and a really bad job from whoever made the quiz website. Triple checking those answers should be a priority.

Comparing to the answer I just looked up in the print version of the book (and double checking on google) the http://factfulnessquiz.com/ is incorrect on this point.

I scored 54% and all of the cases that I err'd were due to the reality being slightly better than I thought. That makes me think that to pass this test you do what I am not going to tell you now...

I scored 38% and I turned out to be pessimistic on all counts. Perhaps it is time to give Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now a read.

Investment: I personally think about that. The area I live in is popular due to a good nearby university so I think population will grow at least for the next decade.

But in a time frame of 30-60 years... I'm not counting on getting the money back for my house.

I got 11/13. It helped that I recently did a study of education vs gender vs country development using Worldbank data for a data analytics course.

(Interesting result : in many regions women have high rates of post secondary education than men.)

There are massive issues with the calculation of poverty designed to give the illusion of progress under globalized production chains. In reality, the metric is completely disconnected from what people identify as poverty. The entire premise is flawed. See: Steve Pinker for an example of this technique in use.

Have you read Factfulness? He is very explicit about what he means with his different levels of income and changes in poverty - using examples of physical situation, not mere money. (Like at what point in the cycle do you own shoes? Can afford a bicycle? Have running water? What do these things mean for your income potential in the future, or that of your children?) Dr Rosling worked for much of his life as a health care provider in the poorest places on Earth, and was intimately familiar with what real poverty looks like, in all its details.

Yes, and I think it’s a boneheaded and disingenuous argument. Much, if not most, of the world is blatantly in poverty and cannot afford a quality standard of living. Comparing it to a world with equitable wealth distribution would be much better. This is how the western world justifies open exploitation.

That's the bias of privilege talking.

Going from $2/day to $8/day may not seem like much to you, but to someone at that level, their income has quadrupled. They might have access to a bicycle to get to a paying job now. Shoes. Clean water. School for their children, so the next generation has more opportunity. Go from $8 to $32 (using Rosling's quadruplings here), and you now have a car, potable hot and cold water from a tap, even the possibility of college for your kids. It's still "poverty" to us, but not all poverty is the same. Understanding this is a shift in perspective, and requires putting down our wealthy, western privilege for a moment.

Keep in mind, too, that a world of no health care, no clean water, no literacy, etc - the extreme poverty of the poorest nations - was the situation in much of Europe during the 19th century. It took Europe a long time to get to where it is today, and much of the progress happened in the post WWII, post colonial era. "Open exploitation" is not what you think it is, not anymore.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, much of the world has seen income increases from 20x-100x per capita in the past 50 years. That's the poor, "exploited" countries.

Economic change takes time. Generations. The fact that we wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty isn't "boneheaded", it's incredible. But it will take several more generations to get the rest of the world up to the standards of our privilege.

As I said, marginal improvements are used to justify ruthless exploitation.

I have a hard time thinking of the 20x improvement in Egypt or the 100x improvement in China (or similar gains elsewhere) as "marginal improvements". We're talking orders of magnitude improvements in standard of living over the course of a couple of generations.

I don't know what you're expecting. Someone snaps their fingers and everything is magically "fair"?

> quality standard of living

How do you define this standard?

> equitable wealth distribution would be much better.

Let me present you with two scenarios, all else being equal, and you tell me in which one people are better off:

1: Every one makes the equivalent of $5,000 a year.

2: 90% of the population makes $20,000 a year and the remaining 10% make $100,000.

> This is how the western world justifies open exploitation.

Can you quantify this exploitation?