How Fast the World Population is Growing

Though both the birth and death rate are declining, the population of the world is still growing. Why is this? It is because the birth rate is still higher than the death rate. For the more math types, this means that if we take the derivative of the function of population with respect to time, the result will be positive. Though the number may have changed slightly, right now, every time your heartbeats 2.5 babies are being born. At this rate, there are 219,000 more people every day being born. Of course, since the growth rate is an exponential function, the number changes (and grows larger) every day. The good news is that since the 1960s, the world population growth per year has fallen from 2.2% to around 1.25%. This marks a drop of almost 50%. Though this is remarkable, in the same time frame, the world population doubled.

Think about it for a second. In a mere 40 years, the Earth has to sustain twice as many people. Feel the urgency of the issue? The Exponential Growth Model is simply frightening. Even Einstein said, "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." In fact, though the rate of 1.25% seems small, it resulted in the increase of 80 million people in 2004. That number is likely higher now. To put it in perspective, 80 million people a year is equivalent to 12 New York City populations or 1 Germany population.

Also, there is a large disparity between the growth rate of developed and developing countries. While many of the developed countries have growth rates that hover around .1%, developing countries grow at the rate of 1.5% a year. The nations that are expected to grow the most are India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. What about the nations with the highest current population? China comes in first and India is in second. Together, India and China make up about 37-40% of the entire world population. Imagine that 2 out of every 5 people can be expected to be Chinese or Indian. The United States comes in third even though it only has about 5% of the world population.