There is minor changes in the rankings of the top ten economies based upon currency fluctuations and some economic overperformance. France and Japan’s economies will be falling with sluggish economic growth and falling populations. Japan could lose 20% of its population by 2050 falling from 125 million to 105 million people. Japan is the 3rd largest economy on a nominal exchange rate basis now but could fall to 5th by 2030 and to 6th by 2035. India, Germany and the UK will move up in ranking.
Canada has 25% more per capita income than people in France. Canada with 53 million people would pass the overall GDP of France. France has flat to decreasing population. Canada with a population of 60 million would pass the GDP of the UK.
The more people that Canada converts from student and work visa into citizens means a larger pool of future family sponsorships. Canada added 1.05 million people in 2022. Canada is increasing immigration by about 100,000 per year from the 437,000 in 2022. Canada could sustain adding an average of 1.2 to 1.3 million people each year. This would enable Canada to reach nearly 50 million people by 2030 and 65 million people by 2040.
In this high population growth scenario for Canada, Canada passes the economy of France around 2032 and passes the UK by about 2038. Canada could pass Japan around 2035.
Canada would remain the 5th place world economy for decades until their population reaches German levels or if the economies of Indonesia, Brazil or one of the other emerging countries do very well.
Canada has over 1.4 million international students and people on temporary work Visas. Canada could convert over half of those people into citizens outside of the immigration process. Canada’s population growth in 2022 was led by temporary immigration, as there was a net increase of around 607,782 non-permanent residents. There were over 645,000 temporary work permits to foreigners in the first ten months of 2022, nearly four times the previous year’s total. In addition, as of December 31st, 2022, there are 807,750 international students holding valid study permits, another all-time high number.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
If you account for negative externalities, particularly if you take into account the mining out of their own gene pools by outbidding young men for the fertile years of the most economically valuable young women — the “top economies” are best regarded not as “developed economies” but rather as “regressive economies”. Importing from abroad to replace their talent is merely feeding a genocidal monster.
Brian you are forgetting to take into account AGI/ASI/Singularity. It’s very probable it will happen well before 2050. Many believe (inlcuding me) that, we will have it – ASI – this decade.
What about bots? Japan/South Korea/Germany/EU countries may for example lose millions of people, but manufacture tens of millions of bots, who will be doing majority of the jobs and doing them even better than humans. Moreover I can’t see the reason why thet wouldn’t manufacture/buy and use more robots than they have people in their countries.
Will working bots with larger outputs than humans and AGI/ASI brains will be counted as population in near future?
I am surprised you didn’t talk about them in your analysis, I saw your Teslabot vids on YT, they’re good. If I remember correctly, you were talking about billions of bots, and in more distant future more bots on Earth tham people, I can see that happening. This alone will disrupt and make irrelevant all population to size of the GDP predictions.
Unpredicatable new science and technologies, post ASI tech. It’s almost certain that all these predicions based on today trends (Canada growing by 1M people per year) will be disrupted in the next 3-15 years.
Imagine North Korea developing their own bot and decide to manufacture 300M of them, what will the world do? Of course we will be afraid that they will use them as army to do bad things to South Korea/USA. Will US in such case decide to have 100x larger army and produce 30 billion of bots? Who knows..
Future will be weird
Yes, if three is big disruption then this kind of linear forecast is disrupted. Widespread antiaging that increases the health of someone 65 to 90+ would double the working age and increase the age where people can be productive. This would help Japan a lot more because they have the oldest population. If there are humanoid bots at national workforce scale then productivity can start to be decoupled from population. Getting to scale is about a 10-20 year thing. However, if all developed countries adopt at the same rate then this does not change the rankings. Canada is a leader in AI with strong programs in Toronto, Waterloo and Montreal.
I kind of suspect narrow AI, possibly with an assist from AGI, will be what finally enables radical life extension (not infinite, just indefinite). I expect we will develop definitions for radical life extension, rejuvenation, weak immortality, strong immortality, multi-threaded minds, networked minds, networked multi-threaded minds, lesser godhood, networked collective minds (hive mind).
The ironic part being that just as various flavors of AI eliminate most resource production and collection, refining, transportation, manufacturing, and service industry related occupations it will allow vastly extended working lifespans for humans, most of which will be permanently unemployable (unless you count things like golf pro, macramé instructor, or social media anything as occupations).
Which then begs the question of what percentage of the world’s population will be able to afford, or otherwise obtain, radical life extension.
No one quite knows where Russia is going to be anymore. The strongest likelihood at this point seems to be that it will have broken up into several separate political entities, none of which would have prospects of continuing forward at anything like the pre-Ukrainian war forecasts.
China is another very questionable economy. All indications being that, after perhaps another decade of inexplicable belligerence towards almost everyone (unless one considers the internal “us against them” mentality Xi uses to try and cement his personal power) by a country that relies almost completely on trade others for everything.
Additionally, Xi is 70 years old, not a subject matter expert on anything except seizing power, has replaced all his subject matter experts with incompetent loyal toads that are allowed to do nothing without his decisions, and competent decisions in this context would require him to be aware of everything going on (even if his flunkies weren’t terrified of telling him anything), and be the subject matter expert on everything. Both of these are patently impossible for a single-threaded human mind, due to time constraints, if nothing else. Speaking of time constraints, we already mentioned he is 70 years old and has left no one remotely ready to replace himself (Putin has the same problem–although it seems unlikely either he or Xi spend much time concerned about it).
I used to be enslaved by my low self esteem. Has Canada got an national identity?
Of course there will be a huge backlash as Canada national identity goes down to zero.
They’ll just be portrayed as hwite supremacists afraid of losing their hwite privilege.