Thread: Texas Triangle
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Old Posted Oct 29, 2019, 11:08 PM
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hammersklavier hammersklavier is offline
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In 1900, Detroit had ~800k people. At its peak in 1950, it had ~1.8 million. A statistician in 1950s Detroit, with those numbers, would likely have said that, by 2000, it would reach ~4 million.

That obviously did not happen. Instead, by 2010 Detroit's population had returned to roughly its 1900 population -- ~800k.

Highly optimistic projections like the ones cited in the OP are created from inherently incomplete exponential best-fit growth models. However, growth actually tends to follow a logistic curve, seeing rapid increase over a short period of time but then trending asymptotically towards a ceiling. The problem here, though, is that we need to know the second derivative to generate an accurate logistics curve, and when you're in that period of rapid growth, how can you ascertain when you've passed it? How can you tell when your growth has begun slowing and of itself? All you can say is ... all growth is finite, and anybody who tells you otherwise is lying out of their ass.
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