Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has crunched the latest predictions from the United Nations - and the numbers make fascinating reading. It is easy to forget that in 1900, just 116 years ago, the global population was 1.65bn. By 2000, it had reached 6.08bn, despite two world wars, communism and mass poverty in Africa and Asia. Over the remainder of this century, the world population is expected to hit 11bn. This is an imperfect science, of course. Another global war or the return of the pandemics of yore could easily wipe out billions of people, as could all sorts of “black swan” events. But assuming that nothing terrible of that nature were to happen, it is a good bet to assume that these population forecasts are roughly right, at least to the odd billion.