• Question: How many scientists would you estimate there are in the world? :D

    Asked by wilco987 to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I would guess….

      http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

      Because everyone is a scientist really, they just don’t realise yet!

    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Interesting question and quite difficult to estimate because I’m not sure that anyone really knows. It also depends how you define “scientist”!

      If we use the “Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development” who publish numbers for this sort of thing…
      and we use their definition of a “Researcher” working in “Research and Development” (so this probably includes Engineers as well)…
      then we can find that within the European Union in 2010 there were 1,567,669 (about 1.5 million) people!
      Or about 7 people per 1000 people in employment, or 0.7%.

      If we assume there are 7 billion people currently in the world, and around 60% of them are employed (so not counting those who are too young or unemployed) then we get 4.2 billion working people.

      If the same percentage of people were researchers worldwide as they are in the European Union then that would be about 30 million people.

      BUT I think that’s a bit high, I think there are probably a lot less people in research in some 3rd world economies (where there are also a lot more people).

      So I’m going to guess at about 10 million people – am I right?

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