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Why Half of Humanity Lives in This Circle

Tomas Pueyo
11 min readJul 30, 2023

More than 50% of the world’s population lives in this circle.
Do you think it’s a coincidence?

Let’s zoom into the region to break down the situation.

India and China together account for 2.8 B people, or 35% of the world’s population.
But many other neighboring countries also have a massive population: Indonesia has 274M, Pakistan 230M, Japan 126M, Philippines 114M… And that’s just those with over 100M people. All these countries together amount to a bit over 50% of the world’s population.

I only show countries above 30M people

The Root of East and South Asian Population

Let’s dive into the biggest ones. First, we have India.

1. India

I analyzed India in depth with Pakistan and Bangladesh in an article about the Indian subcontinent. If you have read the article or thread, or already understand why India is so populous, skip this section. If not, you might want to go…

Tomas Pueyo
Tomas Pueyo

Written by Tomas Pueyo

2 MSc in Engineering. Stanford MBA. Ex-Consultant. Creator of applications with >20M users. Currently leading a billion-dollar business @ Course Hero

Responses (105)

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Hi Tomas,
Thanks for this immensely informational article. This is more that I learned in my school's geography. Being born and brought up in India, I always had the curiosity to know so many things, and the knowledge was all unconnected. However…

116

Very well presented! Great article! Their geography worked out great for the last few thousand years - please analyze the same regions in the context of climate change. I understand some of the most life-threatening temperature/humidity conditions…

93

Another clear proof. In order to understand the current functioning of our world, it is not enough to delve into a particular science. Each science must be known to such an extent that we can connect it with the others. The better we see the…

107