February 21, 2007
Tool of the Futurists' Trade: Population Forecasts
I've recently started to take an interest in the various tools used by futurists and foresight analysts to help them scope out possible futures.
As with all new learning exercises, getting to grips with the vocabulary is the first hurdle, so I'm starting out by disambiguating in my own mind some of the "obvious things, such as forecasting and scenario planning (also see here).
I've also been trying to locating some of the more 'robust' statistical forecasting tools - like population forecasts and visualisations of economic trends.
As far as UK population data goes (both historical and forecast data) there's a nice animation showing male/female population data broken down into age-based bins over the period 1961 to 2074 from the UK National Statistics website.
Static population pyramids from the 2001 UK census are also available from the same site:
As far as visualising economic data goes, my base reference tool will probably be the Gapminder/UN economic data visualisation tool demoed so beautifully by Hans Rosling at TED Talks in 2006.