This is the first of three chapters that present the population projections by age, sex, and level of educational attainment for all countries in the world with a time horizon of 2060, and extensions to 2100. Before discussing the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (WIC) projections, however, it is worth stepping back to consider how social structures change over time. While understanding the evolution of social structures is important under the conventional demographic approach that breaks down populations by age and sex, a more in-depth understanding of the changes in human capital requires that the interplay between different levels of schooling over time (the flow variable), and the changing educational attainment composition of the adult population (the stock variable) be taken into account. Societies can be stratified along several dimensions. In conventional social science the divisions studied refer to social class, race, or ethnicity. Demographers routinely break down populations by age and sex. Another important demographic dimension is that of birth cohorts or generations, that is, persons born and socialized during the same historical period. Particularly during periods of rapid social change, young cohorts tend to differ from older ones in important respects, and the demographic process of generational replacement is a powerful driver of socio-economic change. This process is analytically described by the theory of ‘Demographic Metabolism’, recently introduced as a generalized predictive demographic theory of socio-economic change by the first author (Lutz, 2013), building on earlier work by Mannheim (1952) and Ryder (1965). Ryder, who introduced the notion of Demographic Metabolism in a qualitative way, saw it as the main force of social change. While this theory applies to many stable human characteristics that are acquired at young age and remain invariant over a lifetime, it is particularly appropriate for studying and modelling the dynamics of the change in the distributions of highest educational attainment by age and sex over time. This perspective on human capital formation is the main focus of this book. This first of the three results chapters will highlight the results with respect to future population numbers by level of education in different parts of the world.
Estimating county-level demand for educational attainment