Consider this metaphor: Understanding the dynamics of the world’s population is like hosting a party for the world. Based on United Nations (UN; www.unpopulation.org) data and projections, let’s invite the world to a party to learn more about its population, today and in the decades to come. Throughout this exercise, keep in mind these two questions: What does this mean for my business? What does it mean for me?

Hosting a party for the world

Imagine that you’ve been given a budget to host a party for 100 guests in the five rooms of your house. Your sponsor has imposed one condition: the number of guests from each country must roughly match their share of the world’s population (6.85 billion people as of Nov 2010). What would such a party look like?

• Twenty of your guests — one out of five — will be Chinese and fill one entire room. There are enough of them that they don’t need to bother much about the other guests and can basically turn their room into a private Chinese party.

• Seventeen of your guests would come from India. Together with three neighbors from Pakistan, these guests from the subcontinent fill a second room in your house.

• Before you invite more partygoers, you notice with surprise that the guests from these three Asian countries alone fill two of your five party rooms. Moreover, should you believe in reincarnation, you realize that the odds of being born as either Chinese or Indian in your next life are close to 40%.

• In the third party room, you have a mix of people from seven nations: five from the US, four Indonesians, three Brazilians, and two each from Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia and Japan.

• A sliding glass door divides the fourth room into two halves. The ten guests on the left side of the room include a Mexican couple, a Filipino, a Vietnamese, a German, an Egyptian, an Ethiopian, an Iranian, a Congolese, a Turk, and a Thai. Things get more difficult to distinguish among the ten people in the right-hand side of the room, but you can still distinguish one person each from France and the United Kingdom, a Burmese, a South African, and a Korean (obviously a mix of South and North).

• Finally, in the last room you’ll have twenty people, each of whom has ancestors from several countries, who collectively represent the remaining 189 countries.

It’s worth noting that the world population distribution follows the Pareto Principle (or 80/20-Thinking): 80% of the world’s population lives in just 15% of the 226 countries as considered by the UN.

Fast-forward to 2050

Guess what? Your world party in 2011 was a huge success. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of your party, your sponsor asks you to host another world party in the same venue. This time, though, there are new conditions: in addition to making sure that the mix of nationalities once again matches each country’s share of the world population, you must also account for the overall increase in world population, as well as the portion of the population over 60 years old. Here are some of the challenges you will face:

• Due to the 35% increase in the overall world population to over 9 billion people, your house will now have to accommodate 135 guests for the party, which means that you will have to shoehorn an additional seven guests into each room.

• You give one entire room to the 23 guests from India, which now has a population bigger than China’s. In order to avoid the unpleasantness from the first party, you decide this time to ask the four guests from Bangladesh to join their Indian neighbors.

• The second room contains 21 Chinese and six from the US, who spend the party celebrating the 5th anniversary of the foundation of the United States of Chimerica.

• A mix of guests from economically rising nations occupies the third room: Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Mexico.

• You decide to let the remaining 54 guests sort themselves into the remaining two rooms, as you’re busy trying to comply with your last condition: age distribution.

• In order to match their share of the world population, 30 guests at the party must be older than 60 years. Surprised by this number, you look more closely at the demographics. Nine of the 21 Chinese are over 60. Japan has the highest proportion of elderly citizens in the world, with 42%, followed closely by other wealthy Asian neighbors from Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, and South Korea (all close to 40%). In the larger economies of the ASEAN countries, the sixty-plus age segment is smaller but still ranges from 20% (Philippines) to 28% (Thailand) of the overall population. If you’re reading this article, and all goes well, you will be one of them.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 17 March 2011.