Did the ever dead outnumber the living and when? A birth-and-death approach

•Malthusian population growth.•Constant vs time-dependent birth/death rates.•Time-inhomogeneous birth and death Markov chain.•Age-structured models.

This paper is an attempt to formalize analytically the question raised in “World Population Explained: Do Dead People Outnumber Living, Or Vice Versa?” Huffington Post, Howard (2012). We start developing simple deterministic Malthusian growth models of the problem (with birth and death rates either constant or time-dependent) before running into both linear birth and death Markov chain models and age-structured models.