“The 1950-2000 period is like no other in human or financial history in terms of population growth, economic growth, inflation or asset prices.”

This quote isn’t from ‘Boom, Gloom and the New Normal: How Western BabyBoomers are Changing Demand Patterns, Again‘, the very popular ebook that John Richardson and I published in 2011.  Nor is the chart from one of the hundreds of presentations that we have since been privileged to give at industry and company events around the world.

It’s from the highly-respected Jim Reid and his team at Deutsche Bank in their latest in-depth Long-Term Asset Return Study, ‘The History (and future) of inflation’.  As MoneyWeek editor, John Stepek, reports in an excellent summary:

“The only economic environment that almost all of us alive today have ever known, is a whopping great historical outlier….inflation has positively exploded during all of our lifetimes. And not just general price inflation – asset prices have surged too.  What is this down to? Reid and his team conclude that at its root, this is down to rampant population growth.” (my emphasis)

As Stepek reports, the world’s population growth since 1950’s has been far more than phenomenal:

“From 5000BC, it took the global population 2,000 years to double; it took another 2,000 years for it to double again. There weren’t that many of us, and lots of us died very young, so it took a long time for the population to expand.  Fast forward another few centuries, though, and it’s a different story.

“As a result of the Industrial Revolution, lifespans and survival rates improved – the population doubled again in the period between 1760-1900, for example. That’s just 140 years.  Yet that pales compared to the growth we’ve seen in the 20th century. Between 1950-2000,  a mere 50 years, the population more than doubled from 2.5bn to 6.1bn.”