Population explosion

Time, once again, to visit the ball of confusion that is the mind of Toronto Star business columnist David Olive.  In today's paper he has a column arguing that predictions of the demise of the US as the world's economic superpower are likely to be very wrong.

He's right about that, but as is almost always the case with Olive, there are so many levels of poor writing and worse analysis for the connoisseur of his work to enjoy.  Try, for example to squeeze any meaning out of this sentence:  "An empire can inflict upon itself only so much hubris before the way is made clear for the Visigoths".  Or try to pronounce the word "futilely", an adverb which I'm sure I've never seen in print before today.

These are minor quibbles, however, compared to a great big howler in the middle of the article.  Here are the offending sentences:

"By mid-century, it’s estimated by demographers that the U.S. will have added a stunning 40 million people to its population, while most of the industrialized world shrinks or, at best, stagnates in population growth. Canada will eke out a modest 2 per cent annual gain over that period...."

This is an example of what I used to call "Cuban economic statistics".  For years the Castro regime used to publish elaborate economic data books that contained absolutely no usable information.  You'd be told that sugar production was above the five-year average. or that it had grown 10%, but there would never be any actual numbers, so the comparisons were never helpful.  And by reporting US population projections as a number (40 million) and Canada's as a percentage (2% per year), Olive has made a "stunning" (to use his adjective) mistake.

There are 37 years left until the middle of the century.  If Canada's population grows at a compound* annual rate of 2% for that length of time, which I assume is what Olive means, the by the "rule of 72" we know that it will have slightly more than doubled by 2050. According to Statistics Canada, the country's population in January 2013 was 35,056.064.  Using Olive's projection, it looks as though the Great White North will "eke out" a population growth of about 36,000,000 by 2050.  Using the conventional "rule of 10" that gets used in  Canada/US comparisons, an equivalent population rise for the US would be 360,000,000.  Now that really would be stunning.

* It doesn't make much difference to the argument if you don't compound the rate.  2 per cent per year for 37 years is still 74% growth, or a Canadian population increase of almost 26 million by mid century.