Auguste Comte Quotes

Demography drives the economy.

The rate of population growth in the United States is slightly below that required to reproduce itself.

Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.

The good news is world population growth rate decreases systematically and is expected to reach zero by 2050, thanks to urbanisation and women's education.

When I was born, there were three billion people on the planet.

Urbanization is the dominant demographic trend of our time.

The statesmen of Germany and of France are to-day confronted by the same social problem: the problem of increasing the population of their respective countries. But while the problem is the same in France as it is in Germany, it presents itself in each of these countries under a different aspect. In France the population remains stationary because of the paucity of births; in Germany it increases indeed, but not in the measure of the country’s necessities, because of the hugeness of emigration. In consequence, the expedients adopted to arrest the evil are different in each country.

The changes taking place in the age structure of the countries around the world are stunning.

This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die.

The population forecast for the United States in 1970 is 170 million. The population forecast for Russia alone in 1970 is 251 million. The implications are clear.

Today, American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young.

I meet so many that think population growth is a major problem in regard to climate change. But the number of children born per year in the world has stopped growing since 1990. The total number of children below 15 years of age in the world are now relatively stable around 2 billion.

The typical white American woman in 1800 gave birth seven times; by 1900, the average was down to 3.5.

The point of our demographics is that we're not having as many children and the population is stagnant, if not declining. So without immigration, we're not going to have the population.

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.

There are reasons for believing that the English increase will far surpass others, and that the diffusion of the United States will ultimately produce the general population of America.

Demography, not democracy, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century. Booming populations are a drag on developing countries, and low fertility rates are sapping growth in developed societies.

… compared to circumstances where the birth rate remains high—a decline in fertility from high to low levels allows a population to save and invest more, both in terms of human capital (ie education and training) and in terms of physical capital (eg roads, factories, machinery.)

This increase in the world's population represents humanity's victory against death.

Mobility will be one of the major beneficiaries of population growth in the world.

In the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. But there is still a vast amount of the world where that's not the case. And that is where the big population growth is taking place.

The immediate cause of the increase of population is the excess of the births above deaths; and the rate of increase, or the period of doubling, depends upon the proportion which the excess of the births above the deaths bears to the population.

The country with a low birth rate and low death rate will be hardest hit - and so the poor may indeed inherit the earth, because they're healthier.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?