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I recently stumbled upon this article about a forecast/list of predicted population development until 2025: Deagel, a real intelligence organization for the U.S. government, predicts massive global depopulation (50-80%) by 2025

Here is the forecast they are talking about: http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx

The list has been put together by the alleged "security firm" Deagel; The article says the following about Deagel:

According to their own website, deagel.com, Deagel provides news and intelligence on international military aviation and advanced technologies. There website has articles dating back to 2003, but little is known about the real owners. Many online researchers have erroneously confused this site with "deagle.com" which is owned by Edwin Deagle.

This report predicts a rather hefty population decrease until 2025. According to their own statement (which can be found at the bottom of the page), their "sources" include CIA, FBI, UN, USG etc:

The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of the forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN, USG, etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country's page. There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources such as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others.

My question is: Is the information presented in the forecast reliable?

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    The article is posted on a website that allows users to upload any type of content. Furthermore, if you google "Deagel 2025 forecast", you only get fringe theory websites and absolutely 0 coverage by reputable media. I am not sure this fits with our policies regarding notable claims.
    – Jordy
    Aug 24, 2017 at 9:36
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    Read the second quote carefully - it doesn't say that their sources include CIA, FBI, etc. It says that the data they used is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, FBI, etc. In other words, it's public information that the CIA can access just like anyone else. I suspect the sole reason for mentioning the government agencies is to mislead in this way.
    – Mark
    Aug 24, 2017 at 10:23
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    @Adrenaxus, it is posted on steemit.com, they describe themself as a platform where you can get paid for uploading content that attracts a lot of "likes". Secondly, we have strict policies regarding which claims are notable, for further reading click here.
    – Jordy
    Aug 24, 2017 at 10:30
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    Additionally, the awkward grammar is a pretty clear sign, as is the fact that if they were an actual "intelligence organization", they wouldn't be posting their findings on some random website (or using sources like "internet gurus"). note that the claim, at its most conservative, is that half the people in the world are going to die in the next 8 years. That's at "predict a horrifying, world-spanning catastrophe" levels, not "follow the economic and demographic data" levels.
    – Ben Barden
    Aug 24, 2017 at 13:46
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    @jamesqf - Deagel explain it: "Historically a change in the economic paradigm has resulted in a death toll that is rarely highlighted by mainstream historians. When the transition from rural areas to large cities happened in Europe many people unable to accept the new paradigm killed themselves. They killed themselves by a psychological factor. This is not mainstream but it is true". But regrettably Big History remains trapped in an evidence-based-paradigm, focussing on things like industrialisation and the growth of cities... Aug 25, 2017 at 6:48

1 Answer 1

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+100

Steemit.com vastly overstates the reliance of Intelligence sources on deagel.com, to the point of outright lying. Deagel.com is not a reliable source of information and has a history of making doom-and-gloom predictions regarding population numbers and GDP levels, dating back at least as far as April 2009. In addition, their "model" assumes an economic crisis exponentially worse than any ever seen in the world today, and not a nuclear war or pandemic (which would reasonably be the only methods to achieve the sorts of depopulation numbers predicted.) The website shows clear bias against government organizations as well.


The steemit.com article tries to oversell the importance of deagel.com for their narrative.

WikiLeaks documents have revealed it was legitimately used as reference material in a Stratfor report on the technological capabilities of The People's Republic of North Korea

In reality, a single email leaked from Stratfor Enterprises, LLC references Deagel.com. Note that this was a single email in a leak from the company of over 5 million emails, and is also the only email obtained by WikiLeaks that references the phrase "deagel" in its entire database. The context of the 'deagel.com' reference is telling as well. The reference is in an attached document, describing the capabilites of the North Korean Taepo Dong-X IRBM

Taepo Dong-X

Variant with solid-propellant missile engine. A Deagel.com report, dated Sept. 17, 2010, provides an estimated range of 1,553 mi to 2,485 mi (2,500 to 4,000 km) for the Taepo Dong-X, sufficient to target Japan and Guam. However, an Oct. 1, 2003, U.S. Congressional Research Service report puts the range as up to 9,400 mi (15,040 km). As of 2009, it was reportedly still in development.

(Note: The Taepodong-X is apparently one of the more uncommon names for the Hwasong-10, or Musudan missile.)

A single reference to the range of a North Korean IRBM, with data that is freely available online, does not speak well of the quality of Deagel.com's research and reporting. This is backed up by the Deagel.com entry on the Taepodong-X, which contains no information that could be easily found by reading the Wikipedia article.

Deagel provides news and intelligence on international military aviation and advanced technologies

Deagel.com's "news" stories are copy-and-pasted press releases from other sources, with a single attribution at the bottom of the news articles, if the owners of Deagel.com even care to do the copy-and-pasting at all.


Deagel.com has been predicting a drastic reduction of the population of the United States for the better part of a decade. While their previous predictions are not available on their website, The Internet Wayback Machine has been cataloging the page since 2007.

(Note that the predictions for US GDP values follows a similar pattern, but are not included here)

Prediction Date         Prediction Year       Population        Actual
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 2008           2017                  323 million(1)    325.7 million
------------------ END 2017 PREDICTIONS --------------------------------------
April 2009              2020                  271 million       331.0 million
April 2010              2020                  264 million       331.0 million
August 2011             2020                  248 million       331.0 million
------------------ END 2020 PREDICTIONS --------------------------------------
June 2012               2025                  187 million
May 2013                2025                  182 million
July 2014               2025                  88 million(2)
October 2014            2025                  69 million(3)
August 2015             2025                  65 million
October 2016            2025                  61 million
August 2017             2025                  54 million
May 2018                2025                  100 million(4)
August 2020             2025                  100 million(5)(6)

Dates and Predictions of Note
-----------------------------
(1: This is the only prediction where the population increases from the current count)

(2: First recorded instance where the prediction is sub-100 million.)

(3: Note explaining their predictions first appears on the bottom of the page)

(4: First recorded instance where the prediction has gone up from a previous prediction)

(5: Deagel.com goes through a UI overhaul, and the note mentioned in the question and referenced in note 3 of this chart disappears for unknown reasons)

(6: Current prediction as of 24 August 2020)

Previously, under the page for their 2025 Forecast was a long note explaining their reasoning for the numbers of the United States (and Western European nations to a lesser extent). As of 24 August 2020 this note is no longer available on their site, as their forecast page has been modified.

An immediate red flag is raised in the first paragraph, where they state in no uncertain terms

We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree.

They start with the assumption that any numbers released by the United States Government is a lie, and work from there. This conveniently allows them to ignore any data provided by official sources that conflicts with their results, a hideous combination of No True Scotsman and Cherry Picking.

The explanation then veers suddenly off into a paragraph regarding the Ebola Virus, and asking readers to imagine a hypothetical scenario where the virus grew to Pandemic levels, infecting hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans. This entire paragraph ignores basic facts about the virus, including its transmissibility, its total mortality, and the fact that even the worst recent Ebola outbreak only killed 11 thousand people in Africa, a continent with much lower standards of hygiene. Of course, all that doesn't even matter because

no pandemic or nuclear war is included in the forecast.


The reasoning they give behind the vast depopulation of the United States is, instead, migration. The next paragraph predicts that

The collapse of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of its population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the pension funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles and ponzi schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse accelerating itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States....We see a significant part of the American population migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe - suffering a similar illness - won't be relevant.

They then cite the collapse of the Soviet Union as proof that the population will collapse to the levels they predict, but contain the important caveat that

The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet Union's one.

However, even at the worst point of the collapse of the Soviet Union's population (which was actually after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a whole) the population dropped from approx. 290 million to 285 million. This is a far cry from their projected 80-90% depopulation projection, and their entire thesis is based on several extremely radical presumptions.

  1. The American Stock Market and banking system will collapse almost entirely
  2. A number of economic bubbles will collapse in rapid succession
  3. Extremely large numbers of skilled American workers will migrate from the country
  4. American based companies will bail out of the United States in droves to Asia and Latin America

Their claim for economic power shifting to Asia is an imaginary axis that shifted from the Mediterranean into Northern Europe, then in the middle of the Atlantic, before finally settling in the United States, and that it will continue to shift westward, with no sources or reasoning given.


While the numbers presented on the site are horrifying, there is zero evidence presented that backs the numbers up. The model that they claim to use starts with assuming massive economic crashes, dwarfing the collapses of 2008 and 1929, which would cause significant portions of the US population to migrate to other countries for work, and other portions of the population to just die.

We do not have an exact breakdown for what they expect the split to be between these two groups, but the numbers do not seem reasonable regardless. A split that skews towards large migration numbers would be, by a wide margin, the largest refugee crisis ever seen on Earth, dwarfing even the largest refugee crises known to man. If the number skews more towards deaths, the numbers would rival or exceed The Black Death in sheer number of deaths. Remember again that no pandemic or war is projected in their model, so this would involve people dying at Black Death rates for no reason.

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    – user11643
    Sep 15, 2020 at 19:16

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