When will we reach peak humanity? When will the largest number of people ever walk on planet Earth. And what does it actually mean for Australia? Firstly, the simple question is where do we get that population projection from? The most famous big picture global population projection figures come from the United Nations population division….
Articles by Simon Kuestenmacher
Simon Kuestenmacher is one of Australia’s leading demographers, co-founder of The Demographics Group, a regular media commentator, a columnist for the Australian and one of the world’s Top 50 Influencers in Data Science.
www.SimonKuestenmacher.com
Because of Covid, we are thinking a lot about the topic of death. Daily we see the death counts reported. The good news is about Covid-related deaths — we see 35 times fewer deaths per 1 million residents in Australia than there are in the US and Europe. Source: The New Daily So, those super…
I’ll like to spend a moment exploring climate change. I’m not talking about the physical details of climate change — scientists are better placed to explore them. But let’s look at what we can do to actually tackle this problem, and why it hasn’t been tackled so far. And I think that the economic success…
In this article I’m going to give a bit of career advice to your kids. Many of you are probably homeschooling, you are trying to ensure that your kids have the best possible future. What kind of subjects should you encourage your kids to focus on? Well, let’s think about what we know about the…
Today the 7.6 million Millennials in Australia are the largest demographic force. As a generation, they outnumber Gen Z and Gen X by about a million people. They outnumber the large Baby-Boomer generation by about two million people now. There’s no other generation that will have such a huge impact on the 2020s as the…
Generation X born, who was born in 1964 to 1981, is a much smaller generation than it could have been. The contraceptive pill was introduced in 1961 — that means the birth rates in Australia fell from 3.1 in 1964 down to 1.9 in 1981, the last year of Gen X. So at the same…
Let’s look at the Baby Boomer generation — a large generation born in the 18 years following the end of World War 2, when the birth rate shot up to 3.5 children per woman. The medium Baby Boomer was born in the mid-50s, which means that they entered university – if they went to university…
Covid taught us how difficult it is to make predictions about the future. But I like a challenge, so I’m going to make 22 predictions for 2022. Here they go: Millennials will continue to move out of apartments and leave their hipster neighbourhoods to purchase family-sized houses as they reach the family formation stage of…
What would you do if you were tasked with spreading the 25.7 million people in Australia across the continent? In how many cities would you place them? How many regional settlements would you build? Where would you build wheat towns, where would you build cotton towns, and where would the dairy towns be? What kind…
We can learn a lot about the Australian people simply by understanding how we spend our money. There used to be a wonderful tool that we could look to — Household Expenditure Survey (HES) asked 10,000 households extremely detailed questions about how they use their money. This survey is only run every 5-7 years and…