Back in 2010, I predicted that India would have the world’s largest economy (in PPP terms) within 100 years. A few months later, I moved up the predicted date to 2081. Based on this graph, I’d now say some time in the 2060s: 
Today, India and China both have a bit over 1.4 billion people. But look at the disparity in births! India has 23.2 million births, whereas no other country has even 9 million. By the 2060s, those Indian babies will be 40 years old, right in the prime age for working. As long as India can get its productivity up to half of China’s level (which seems doable in the long run) then it should surpass China in GDP (PPP). Of course, long before that the US will have fallen to third place. (We’ll still be number one in per capita terms, which matters for living standards.)I used to find these sort of predictions to be sort of intriguing. More recently, they’ve started to seem kind of pointless. That’s partly because I won’t live to see how all this pans out, and partly because AI is eventually likely to transform the world in such a radical fashion that all predictions about the 22nd century become about as meaningful as those a 13th century peasant might have made about the world of 2024.It isn’t just that India has more births than China, even pre-breakup Pakistan has more births. That’s crazy. (When I was young, Bangladesh was part of Pakistan.)PS. This is one reason I’m not part of the natalism panic. Even with low birth rates, the world’s population will reach about 10 billion in 2100. And after that it’s totally impossible to predict anything. I’m not saying the birth rate worriers are necessarily wrong, just that no one knows what the 2100s will look like.More By This Author:Facing Or Creating?
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