A well-researched and thought-provoking book, perfect for anyone who likes an inderdisciplinary approach and is interested in seeing 'the bigger picture'. Informative and easy to read- I'd definitely recommend it for both public and personal libraries.

This is a reference book on demographic profile of world written in a clear and interesting language.
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You may start at any chapter which are divided based on continents.
I used to think high population means poverty and failure but it is not that simple.
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Number of mattered at lots of important junctures of world history and numbers helped countries win and overtake rivals.
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It starts by defining basics of demography for amateur readers and presents lots of interesting facts about human mass on the planet.
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We have reached from 1 to 7 billion in last 200 years.
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Alongwith data which could be little more than palatable, it reflects on how population changes, its effects on us and on social fabric of the community.
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It evaluates how educated women breed less and atrocious enforcements to curb growth of population are generally ineffective and unnecessary.
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It also hints that in democracy highly fertile minorities might be gamechanger by citing recent examples from world politics and diplomacy.
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It also dissects effects of too young or too old population on a country.
Parts detailing Japan, middle east and Israel are very nice.
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There is details about immigration but not about sufferings faced by immigrants. Books explains how immigration maintains diversity, stability and prosperity of a nation.
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Book is enjoyable if you skip focussing on each set of data.
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Definitely a pioneer book to clarify prejudices and fixed thinking about fertility and numbers.
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High population is never evil inherently, number of evil persons in; it can be.
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.Thanks #netgalley and publisher for review copy.

Thank you to NetGalley, Public Affairs and Paul Morland for an ARC ebook copy to review. As always, an honest review from me.

Like:
- a wonderful mix of sociological, economic, political, cultural and science’s effects on population changes throughout history - Fascinating!
- Can tell the author is knowledgable and passionate about the topics
- Has me looking at history in a new way
- Views the population changes in a new and completely interesting way

Love:
- Readers can learn a lot from the book.

Dislike:
-Some sections didn’t interest me or were repetitive (This could definitely be a personal preference, and may not be the case for you.)

Wish that:
- There was more science based information. Based on the book description, I expected a better balance of science and history.

Overall, an interesting and educational book that’s filled with so much information. The author makes the topics accessible.

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Demography is what happens while your country is busy making other plans.

Here is a book that argues pretty convincingly that, while most of us are bickering about the menu in the dining car, the train of history is chugging along towards a fairly predictable demography-driven destination, at least for the (next 100 years or so) short term. Blessed with a remarkable ability to believe, in spite of all evidence and previous experience, that the future will continue on a straight line from the present, people – plus the countries and empires that they populate – continue to predict that the present number-one top-dog country (and its associated values and culture) will dominate the political landscape forever. It will not, nor will the next number-one top-dog country. Prosperity has repeatedly brought predictable social changes, such as women (outrageously unreasonable as they are) wanting control over their own minds and bodies. The social changes in turn yield predictable demographic changes – lower birth rate, higher median age. These changes can be understood and planned for – if we want to.

For tens of thousands of years, the demographic pattern was, well, no pattern: maybe it went up for a while, and then there was a particularly bad plague or period of violence, or maybe there wasn't. The demographic pattern of our age: decreased infant morality and increased life span leading to a population boom, then a leveling off of population as women gain education and the population internalizes the idea that most children will live to adulthood. This pattern first appeared, slowly, in Great Britain. The pattern occurred over a longer period because Britain and its offspring colonies had to invent for themselves the improvements in agriculture and medicine that lengthened lifespan and decreased infant mortality. When the pattern appears in more recent times, the population boom takes place more quickly, because, instead of waiting for advances in medicine and agriculture to take place one-by-one, developing nations can get them, off-the-shelf and road-tested, from already-developed countries.

China and Islam, the twin great scary monsters of today's Western imagination, seem both poised to enter the leveling-off phase of the demographic pattern, according to this book. The implication is that those who think one or both of these teeming foreign hordes will overrun the West by the dint of fevered reproduction should find some other ridiculous bogeyman to base their xenophobia on. However, subsaharan Africa (still stuck in pre-Industrial Revolution levels of infant mortality and life expectancy) is poised now to enter on the first phase, with the problems that it brings, especially a large cohort of potential boy soldiers in the future, disgruntled and willing to perform suicidal violence to satisfy their grievance against the more-prosperous, as well as another large cohort of emigrants willing to stop at nothing to reach lands of more opportunity. These latter we are regularly seeing already on leaky overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean.

[From the book;} To put it another way, demographic development is like a film playing at different times in different cinemas; although the screening has yet to finish at a number of venues, we know how it ends (Kindle location 4063).

The conclusion of this book is of course more detailed and nuanced than the blockquote directly above. I urge you to read this book and understand demography, and your world, more fully.

It is sad to see that this new book, in spite of advance copies being available free to cheapskates like me via Netgalley, lacks (at this writing) even a single review. Furthermore, I seem to be the only one who has marked it “currently reading”, and the number of people who have marked it as “to read” seems woefully small. What is wrong with the world today? This is a book that combines two of the most fascinating subjects in the world: statistics and geography. On the down side, there is a lot of talk about people as well, but at least individual instances of people are kept to a minimum in favor of large groups. I suppose it couldn't be helped.

This quote from Shakespeare does NOT appear anywhere in the book.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. – Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”, Act 4, Scene 3

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and PublicAffairs.

This is a totally fascinating book about population and demography with a gocus in recent trends and how those trends first began in England and spread worldwide. The author presents a compelling case for the importance these trends have played on history and what we can expect in the coming century