Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2008, 01:30:28 PM
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Woof All:
Mark Steyn's "America Alone" (which has its own lively thread here on this forum) powerfully brings demographic analysis to the table. This thread seeks to keep the ball rolling on the matter of demographics.
This piece is from today's LA Slimes. Note the rather contemptible thought process behind the reasons the experts give for the increase.
TAC,
Marc
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U.S. experiences baby boomlet in 2006
Almost 4.3 million births are reported, the most in 45 years. Hispanics accounted for nearly 25% of the increase.
From the Associated Press
January 16, 2008
ATLANTA -- Bucking the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a baby boomlet, reporting the largest number of children born in 45 years.
The nearly 4.3 million births in 2006 were mostly due to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Latinos. That group accounted for nearly one-quarter of all U.S. births. But non-Latino white women and other racial and ethnic groups were having more babies too.
An Associated Press review of births dating to 1909 found the total in the U.S. was the highest since 1961, near the end of the baby boom. An examination of global data also shows that the United States has a higher fertility rate than every country in continental Europe, as well as Australia, Canada and Japan. Fertility levels in those countries have been lower than the U.S. rate for several years, although some are on the rise, most notably in France.
Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty. (A decline in contraceptives might be because people WANT to have babies! A drop in access to abortion?!? What kind of values see birth rates that maintain population as a failure to sufficiently abort?!?!? What kind of values see having children as a sign of poor education?!?!?!?)
There are cultural reasons as well. Latinos as a group have fertility rates -- the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime -- that are about 40% higher than the U.S. overall. And experts say Americans, especially those in middle America, view children more favorably than people in many other Westernized countries.
"Americans like children. We are the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, 'Let's have another kid,' " said Nan Marie Astone, associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University.
Demographers say it is too soon to know if the sudden increase in births is the start of a trend.
"We have to wait and see. For now, I would call it a noticeable blip," said Brady E. Hamilton, a statistician with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Demographers often use the word boomlet for a small and brief baby boom.
To many economists and policymakers, the increase in births is good news. The U.S. fertility rate reached 2.1. That's the "magic number" required for a population to replace itself. Countries with much lower rates -- such as Japan and Italy, both with a rate of 1.3 -- face future labor shortages and eroding tax bases as they fail to reproduce enough to take care of their aging elders. (And this is exactly why Europe has accepted so many Turks and Arabs-- see the "America Alone" thread.)
But the higher fertility rate isn't all good. Last month, the CDC reported that America's teen birthrate rose for the first time in 15 years.
The same report also showed births becoming more common in nearly every age and racial or ethnic group. Birthrates increased for women in their 20s, 30s and early 40s, not just teens. They rose for whites, blacks, Latinos, American Indians and Alaska Natives.
The rate for Asian women stayed about the same.
Total births jumped 3% in 2006, the largest single-year increase since 1989, according to preliminary data compiled by the CDC. Clearly, U.S. birthrates are not what they were in the 1950s and early 1960s, when they were nearly twice as high and large families were much more common. The recent birth numbers are more a result of many women having a couple of kids each, rather than a smaller number of mothers, each bearing several children, Astone said.
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Dying Russia
By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT and HANS GROTH
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
April 25, 2008
Russia is a European country, and its population patterns are unmistakably European in a number of respects, e.g. low birth rates, rising illegitimacy ratios and immigration tensions, and an aging population. But its demographic profile and future prospects differs in two important respects that bode ill for Russia's long-term economic outlook – to say nothing of the Kremlin's ambitious goal of becoming the world's fifth-largest economy by the year 2020.
First, Russia's health and mortality situation is vastly worse than Western Europe's. Life expectancy for Russian men is astonishingly low, well below current levels in either Pakistan or Bangladesh. And trends have been moving in the wrong direction for decades. In 2005, male and female life expectancy at birth in Russia were both lower than they had been 40 years earlier.
Russia's brutally high levels of mortality, along with anemic fertility levels, fashion a second "exceptional" demographic trend for the country: depopulation. In the 16-plus years since the end of the U.S.S.R., Russia has recorded over 12 million more deaths than births. Net immigration has only partially compensated for this deficit. Consequently, Russia's population dropped from 148.7 million in 1992 to just over 142 million at the start of this year. Whereas Western Europe faces the prospect of population decline a generation hence, Russia is in the midst of it.
President-elect Dmitry Medvedev envisions a Russia in which births come to exceed deaths by 2014, with positive population growth over the following decade. He has endorsed a new "official demographic concept" with population policies like birth bonuses and other social measures, including in public health, to reverse the decline. Unfortunately, there is not a single example from modern history where pro-natal policies have been able to achieve a sustainable demographic reversal. Outside of Russia, few demographers anticipate depopulation will actually halt over the coming generation. Even the United Nation's "high" projection envisions a drop of over 10 million between 2005 and 2030.
Russia's working-age population is set for an even steeper decline. Between 2005 and 2030, Western Europe's working-age population – aged 15-64 – is projected to shrink by about 7%. In Russia, that figure is 19%. Although Russia's population is just over a third of Western Europe's, absolute declines in working-age population promise to be roughly similar in magnitude over the coming decades. On current mortality schedules, seven of eight Swiss men 20 years of age can expect to celebrate their 65th birthday; only three out of seven Russian men can have the same hope.
In and of itself, the sharp falloff in working-age population – together with the rising ratio of older citizens to Russians of working age – frames a serious demographic challenge for the effort to propel economic growth and raise living standards. But the problem is even more acute than these raw numbers might suggest. For Russia's mortality problem is concentrated in its working-age population.
For over 40 years, Russia has been witness to a truly terrifying upsurge of illness and death precisely among those who ordinarily form the backbone of a modern economy. In 2005, for men between the ages of 27-57, death rates were typically 100% higher than they had been in 1965. As for Russia's women, their situation might only be described as "good" in comparison to that terrible record for Russian men. Death rates for women aged 26-59 in 2005 were at least 40% higher than in 1965 – and for some ages, death rates were up by 50%, 60%, or even 70%.
The causes of death are clear enough: Skyrocketing mortality from cardiovascular disease and injuries (accidents, poisoning, suicides and homicides). The underlying causes here are harder to pinpoint, but we can mention a number of plausible factors: Poor diet, lack of exercise, heavy smoking, and social stress. Russia's deadly love affair with the vodka bottle remains legendary, and looks to be another significant factor, with per capita consumption extraordinarily high.
Russia's "excess mortality" threatens to straitjacket Russian productivity and development. It is true that Russia has enjoyed robust economic growth rates over the past several years, but this has primarily been generated by oil and gas exports. In the modern world economy, a country's health profile is an essential element of its sustainable economic potential – quite arguably, the key element. How can Russia hope to be a vibrant modern economy with a dwindling and debilitated workforce and a life expectancy which is a full 12 years shorter than in Western Europe? No modern society can expect to enjoy an Irish standard of living on an Indian survival schedule.
If Russia is to arrive in the front ranks of 21st-century economies, the yawning health gap that separates Russians from the rest of Europe and all other industrialized democracies has to be closed. Nothing less than a protracted national struggle may be necessary to achieve this goal.
Mr. Eberstadt, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., and Dr. Groth, a Pfizer global health fellow and managing director of Pfizer-Switzerland, are authors of "Europe's Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health" (AEI Press).
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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A brave new dangerous world
Dual demographic trends in the developed and developing worlds point to increased future conflict and instability, Peter A Buxbaum writes for ISN Security Watch.
By Peter Buxbaum in Washington, DC for ISN Security Watch
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?ots591=4888CAA0-B3DB-1461-98B9-E20E7B9C13D4&lng=en&id=96082
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“The world is entering a demographic transformation of historic and unprecedented dimensions.”
That was the essential message of a recently released monograph from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan Washington think tank. The coming demographic dislocations are beginning to attract the attention of geopolitical and military thinkers and planners.
Geopolitics, much like the local variety, is an intensely human endeavor. So is the expression of geopolitical aspirations in the form of war and armed conflict.
That explains why, when the United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) examined trends that will impact the future posture of US military forces, first and foremost on its list was demographics. Around the same time that JFCOM released its Joint Operating Environment report last month, the CSIS, which often contributes thought leadership to the US government, released The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century.
“In the future, conflicts will remain human,” Rear Admiral John Richardson, JFCOM’s director of strategy and policy, told ISN Security Watch. “That’s why demographics are important.”
“There is a growing interest in demographics among governments and policymakers,” added Richard Jackson, a senior fellow at CSIS and co-author of its report, in an interview. “The developed world is rapidly approaching a demographic tipping point where the trends are about to turn negative. The window of opportunity to prepare for this challenge is now closing.”
In a nutshell, there are two broad demographic trends facing the world through 2030: a population boom in the developing world and population decline in the developed world.
The world will add 60 million people each year and reach a total of 8 billion by the 2030s, noted the JFCOM report. Ninety-five percent of that increase will occur in developing countries, many of which will experience “youth bulges.” A “youth bulge” is defined as the ratio of youth aged 15 to 24 to the total population aged 15 and over. Political demographers say youth bulges are predictors of civil unrest, revolution and war.
“The developed world confronts the opposite problem,” said the JFCOM report. “During the next 25 years population growth in the developed world will likely slow or in some cases decline.”
Russia’s population is already declining by one-half of one percent annually, with the prospect that the decline will continue. Japan’s population will fall from 128 million to approximately 117 million in the 2030s due to a collapse in the country's birth rate. China’s population will continue to grow over the next quarter century, but its population will age significantly because of the strict enforcement of the government’s family planning policy. The trend in the US differs from much of the rest of the developed world thanks to higher fertility and immigration rates.
Migration
In addition to the population explosion in the developing world, there will also be increased migration to cities. Since conflict will occur where people are, from a military standpoint, “it is almost inevitable that forces will find themselves involved in combat or relief operations in cities,” said the JFCOM report.
“These urban settings are not going to be Manhattan,” said Richardson. “They are going to be sprawling structures where instability can easily brew. Growing populations put pressures on such basic resources as water and food. Where you see youth bulges is also where you see resource challenges.” Richardson sees future US forces increasingly being called upon by partner governments for urban crisis management.
Although US forces now have experience in urban warfare, thanks to operations in Iraq, cities are not the favored battlegrounds. “Operations in urban terrain will confront joint force commanders with a number of conundrums,” said the JFCOM report. “The very density of building and population will inhibit the use of kinetic means, given the potential for collateral damage as well as large numbers of civilian casualties.” Such inhibitions could also increase US casualties, the report noted.
Demographic transformation response
Population trends in Russia are an emblematic although exaggerated example of what is occurring in much of the developed world. “Russia will be experiencing a population decline not seen since the plague of the Middle Ages,” said Jackson. “This is a cause for concern because an extreme misalignment of geopolitical aspirations and demographic fundamentals can lead countries to behave unpredictably.”
Will Russia meekly accept the fate of its demographic decline, or will this trend feed extremism and provoke aggression?
“Russia has window of opportunity that is closing soon,” said Joe Purser, director of the JFCOM Futures Group. “It may face a situation in 20 or 30 years when it will be unable to see to its own security.” Purser speculated that one possible Russian reaction will be to “establish a frontier of instability around the old Soviet states in order to maintain influence” in those areas.
Rapid demographic transition in Russia, and also in China, Iran and Pakistan, “could push them toward civil collapse, or toward ‘neo-authoritarianism,’” said the CSIS report.
Youth and violence
These demographic trends will also make it less likely that nations in the developed world will sacrifice their youth in military adventures, according to the CSIS report, while “regions such as the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, where the youth bulge will reach over 50 percent of the population, will possess fewer inhibitions about engaging in conflict.”
The CSIS report also identified a “correlation between extreme youth and violence.” The likelihood of violence “grows explosive” when the youth bulge exceeds 35 percent, according to JFCOM. The youth bulges in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, as well in Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan, already exceed that level, the JFCOM report noted.
Contrary to popular opinion, the violence engendered by a youth bulge does not necessary correlate with the failure of the local society to keep up an adequate rate of economic development.
“Some of the East Asian tigers are cases in point,” noted Jackson. “A rapidly transitioning developing world is likely to be a riskier world,” the CSIS report concluded, without regard to rates of economic growth.
“There is a paradox of development,” Jackson explained, “in which rising per capital income can be destabilizing in the short and medium run” even as it promotes stability in the long run. Among the reasons for this phenomenon: massive internal migrations which loosen extended family ties and exacerbate ethnic tensions.
Demographics and development
The United States faces a different scenario than much of the rest of the developed world, by both the JFCOM and CSIS accounts, with its population increasing by 50 million to a total of 355 million by 2030.
“This growth will result not only from births in current American families,” said the JFCOM report, “but also from continued immigration, especially from Mexico and the Caribbean, which will lead to major increases in America’s Hispanic population.”
The US has a current fertility rate of 2.6, 2.0 being the replacement rate, the highest in the developed world, and 1.9 when the Hispanic population is subtracted out, still high for a developed country. “This means that the US will have a growing workforce whereas elsewhere in the developed world it will be stagnating or declining,” said Jackson.
The major implications of these dual population trends is that “the population and GDP of the developed world will steadily shrink as a share of the world’s total,” said the CSIS report. “In tandem, the global influence of the developed world will likely decline.”
On the other hand, “The population and GDP of the United States will steadily expand as a share of the developed world’s total. The influence of the United States in the developed world will likely rise.”
This means the US must be prepare for an even larger role than it now has in maintaining global security, said CSIS, and that “leaders in the United States, Europe, and Japan need to acknowledge and prepare for this reality, while seeking ways to strengthen multilateralism.”
The CSIS monograph recommends enhanced investments from the developed world in development assistance and soft power in order to prevent the stresses in the developing world from rapid demographic, economic and social change from erupting into security threats. The developed world must also be perceived as the champions of the young and the aspiring. “If they are unwilling to commit substantial resources to helping young nations, the global appeal of their values and ideals will diminish,” said the CSIS report.
One major obstacle to allocating the kinds of resources contemplated by CSIS is the increasing burden of aging populations on the resources of developed countries. But what hangs in the balance is not only the security and economic well being of developing world populations, but what JFCOM’s Joint Operating Environment terms the “battle of the narrative.”
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Peter Buxbaum, a Washington-based independent journalist, has been writing about defense, security, business and technology for 15 years. His work has appeared in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, Chief Executive, Information Week, Defense Technology International, Homeland Security and Computerworld. His website is www.buxbaum1.com.
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Are these numbers accurate? No sources are given. If they are, what are the implications?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU
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Though the article seems glib to me on the issues of US immigration, illegal and legal, this article reminds us of some sound points.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704216804575423233023294698.html?mod=djem_jie_360#printMode
The Demographics Driving Nations' Wealth
By DAVID WESSEL
Demography is not destiny. In 1300, China was bigger than Europe and had the world's most sophisticated technology. But China blew it. By 1850, its population was 65% larger than Europe's, but—thanks to the Industrial Revolution—Europeans were far richer.
Yet demography does matter. "We never pay enough attention to demography because it's so long term," says Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund. So turn for a moment from angst about the disappointing pace of the economic recovery and daunting government budget deficits, and look over the horizon.
China's working-age population will keep growing for 15 years or so, then turn down, the result of its one-child policy and the tendency of birth rates to fall as incomes rise. In 2050, the U.N. projects, China will have 100 million fewer workers than it does today. India's population, in contrast, will grow by 300 million working-age persons over the next 40 years.
The U.S. is in between, benefiting from a higher birth rate and younger populations than Europe and Japan and more immigration. It is projected to add 35 million working-age persons by 2050.
So what?
History, as interpreted by modern economists pondering the mysteries of growth, teaches that more people lead to more ideas. And unlike land or oil, ideas can be used by more than one person simultaneously. Before countries began sharing ideas, the biggest had the most rapid technological progress. Now, trade, travel and the Internet speed new ideas around the globe ever-more rapidly. So the benefits are dispersed. Belgium is rich not because it is big or has invented a lot, but because it has the wherewithal to employ technology invented by others, notes Michael Kremer of Harvard University. Zaire is bigger, but lacks the wherewithal.
"In the coming decades, because of the Internet, because of many other changes that have shrunk the world, it's almost impossible for an individual country to keep proprietary technology for itself," says Mr. Strauss-Kahn. For a time, relatively small countries like Britain and France were global heavyweights because of their technological prowess. That day is over, he predicts. "Power equals numbers," he reasons, and that leads him to anticipate the rising influence of China and India.
.Rising populations—and growing numbers of meat-eating, oil-burning consumers—create tension between environmental costs and idea-generating benefits. Some worry about the costs; others see the benefits.
"China's population is roughly equal to that of the U.S., Europe and Japan combined," optimistic Stanford University economists Chad Jones and Paul Romer observed recently in an academic journal. "Over the next several decades, the continued economic development of China might plausibly double the number of researchers throughout the world pushing forward the technological frontier. What effect will this have on incomes in countries that share ideas with China in the long run?" Somewhere between a lot and really a lot, they say. In fact, they say that even if the U.S. had to bear all the costs of mitigating the added carbon emitted by a rapidly developing China, ideas generated by the Chinese would boost U.S. per capita income enough to more than compensate.
Despite the Internet, multinational companies and global financial markets, we are not—yet—one big world economy. Divergences in demographics have national consequences.
Today, one in five Japanese and Europeans is over age 65. In 2050, it will be one in three. Rapid productivity growth—the amount of stuff produced per hour of work—could make it easier for working-age populations to support the old folks, but productivity trends aren't promising. The Japanese and Europeans almost surely will have to work longer, take fewer vacations and probably pay more taxes. Aging also threatens the Japanese government's ability to keep borrowing so heavily. IMF economist Kiichi Tokuoka estimates that at least half of Japanese government borrowing is now financed, directly or indirectly, by Japanese households; unlike the U.S., Japan doesn't borrow heavily from abroad. Japanese savers will be selling bonds in retirement—and there aren't enough younger workers to save enough to pick up the slack.
For China, the challenge is to build social structures and retirement schemes to sustain a growing cadre of old folks that, unlike previous generations, won't be able to rely so much on its children for support. Today, 1.4% of Chinese are over age 80; in 2050, 7.2% will be, the U.N. projects.
India has more time to adjust since its working population is likely to keep growing. Its challenge is to harness the growing number of workers in their 30s and 40s and to nurture industry and services. If India dismantles archaic labor laws, brings more women into the work force and invests in training and education, demographics could add four percentage points a year to economic growth, Goldman Sachs economists estimate. But that's a big "if."
And the U.S.? For all today's gloom, it may be in the sweet spot. A growing population, an openness to ambitious immigrants and trade (if not disrupted by xenophobic politics) and strong productivity growth (if sustained) could lift living standards and bring faster growth, which would reduce big government budget deficits far easier for the U.S. than for slower growing Europe and Japan.
About David Wessel.David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal's economics editor, writes Capital, a weekly look at the economy and the forces shaping living standards around the world. David has been with The Wall Street Journal since 1984, first in the Boston bureau and then the Washington bureau, where he was chief economics correspondent and later deputy bureau chief. During 1999 and 2000, he was the newspaper's Berlin bureau chief. He also has worked for the Boston Globe and at the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. He has shared two Pulitzer prizes, one for a Boston Globe series on race in the workplace in Boston and the other for Wall Street Journal stories on the corporate scandals of 2002. David is a graduate of Haverford College and was a Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University. His book on the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis, "In Fed We Trust," www.infedwetrust.com, will be published by Crown on Aug. 4. Follow David Wessel on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/davidmwessel
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America’s One-Child Policy
What China imposed on its population, we’re adopting voluntarily.
BY Jonathan V. Last
September 27, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 02
For the last several months, Chinese officials have been floating the idea of relaxing the country’s famed “One-Child” policy. One-Child has long been admired in the West by environmentalists, anti-population doomsayers, and some of our sillier professional wise men. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008), for instance, Tom Friedman lauded the policy for saving China from “a population calamity.” What Friedman and others fail to understand is that China is built upon a crumbling demographic base. One-Child may or may not have “saved” China from overpopulation, but it has certainly created a demographic catastrophe.
Between 1950 and 1970, the average Chinese woman had roughly six children during her lifetime. Beginning in 1970, the Chinese government began urging a course of “late, long, few,” and in a decade the fertility rate dropped from 5.9 to 2.1. But that wasn’t enough for the government. In 1979, they instituted the One-Child policy—which is more complicated than it sounds.
Under One-Child, couples wanting a baby were required to obtain permission from local officials. (In 2002, the government relaxed this provision; you can now have one child without government clearance.) After having one child, urban residents and government employees were forbidden from having another. In rural areas, however, couples are often allowed to have a second baby five years after the first. Any more than two, however, and the government institutes penalties. Sanctions range from heavy fines to confiscation of belongings to dismissal from work—in addition to the occasional forced abortion or sterilization. The overall result is a Chinese fertility rate that now sits somewhere between 1.9 and 1.3, depending on who is doing the tabulating. Nicholas Eberstadt noted that “In some major population centers—Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin among them—it appears that the average number of births per woman is amazingly low: below one baby per lifetime.”
One-Child marked a radical change in the trajectory of China’s population, from staggering growth to probable contraction. In 1950, China had 550 million people; today it is home to 1.33 billion. According to projections from the United Nations’ Population Division, -China’s population will peak at 1.458 billion in 2030. But then it will begin shrinking. By 2050, China will be down to 1.408 billion and losing 20 million people every five years.
At the same time, the average age in China will rise dramatically. In 2005, China’s median age was 32. By 2050, it will be 45, and a quarter of the Chinese population will be over the age of 65. The government’s pension system is almost nonexistent, and One-Child has eliminated the traditional support system of the extended family—most people no longer have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. It is unclear what sort of havoc this atomization will wreak on their society. China will have 330 million senior citizens with no one to care for them and no way to pay for their upkeep. It is, Eberstadt observed, “a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy already underway.”
By 2050, the age structure in China will be such that there are only 1.6 workers—today the country has 5.4—to support each retiree. The government will be forced to either: (1) substantially cut spending (in areas such as defense and public works) in order to shift resources to care for the elderly or (2) impose radically higher tax burdens on younger workers. The first option risks China’s international and military ambitions; the second risks revolution.
When we talk about the “fertility rate,” we mean the “total fertility rate” (TFR): the number of children born to the average woman over the course of her lifetime. In order for a country to maintain a steady population, it needs a fertility rate of 2.1. If the rate is higher, the country’s population grows; lower and it shrinks.
During the last 50 years, fertility rates have fallen all over the world. From Africa to Asia, South America to Eastern Europe, from Third World jungles to the wealthy desert petro-kingdoms, every country in every region is experiencing declines in fertility. In 1979, the world’s fertility rate was 6.0; today it’s 2.6. Industrialized nations have been the hardest hit. America’s 2.06 is one of the highest fertility rates in the First World. Only Israel (2.75) and New Zealand (2.10) are more fertile.
China and America have yet to witness the effects of falling fertility because of demographic momentum. Populations increase even as fertility rates collapse, until the last above-replacement generation dies, after which the population begins contracting. The rate of contraction speeds up as each generation passes. No society has ever experienced prosperity in the wake of contracting population.
Like China today, 30 years ago Japan was supposedly on the verge of eclipsing America economically. But like China, Japan was also in dire demographic straits. In 1950, the average Japanese woman had 2.75 children during her lifetime. That number dropped to 2.08 by 1960. By 1995, it had fallen to 1.49. In 2010, the Japanese fertility rate is 1.2.
Japan’s demographic momentum kept its population slowly increasing during the late 1990s and early 2000s; in 2004, it peaked at 127.84 million. And then the contraction began. In 2008, Japan lost 145,000 people and by 2025, it will have lost 6 million. By 2050, it will have shed an additional 17 million people, leaving its total population around 100 million and falling. And a declining population is necessarily an aging population, meaning that you’re faced with both a decline in demand for goods and services (because the population is getting smaller) and at the same time a labor shortage (because so many of the remaining people are too old to work). In 2050, the largest five-year cohort in Japan is expected to be people aged 75-79. While health care will likely be a growth sector, this is not a recipe for a robust economy.
Culturally speaking, Japan’s fertility problem is a marriage problem: As Japanese women began attending college at greater rates in the 1970s, they began to delay marriage. By 2000, the average age of first marriage for college graduates was over 30. At first, these women simply postponed childbearing; then they abandoned it. Today, college-educated Japanese women have, on average, barely one child during their lifetimes.
These changes created some new cultural stereotypes in Japan. For instance, it is not uncommon to see dogs paraded around in strollers by childless, adult women. But the most prevalent new demographic archetype is the parasaito shinguru or “parasite single.” These creatures are college-educated, working women who live with their parents well into their 30s—not because they are too poor to pay rent, but because they spend their salaries on designer clothes, international travel, and fancy restaurants. The parasite singles are Japan’s biggest consumer group because, unlike real adults, their entire paychecks are available for discretionary spending. Sociologist Masahiro Yamada, who coined the term, explains, “They are like the ancient aristocrats of feudal times, but their parents play the role of servants. Their lives are spoiled. The only thing that’s important to them is seeking pleasure.”
The Japanese government has been trying to stoke fertility since the early 1970s. In 1972, when Japan’s fertility rate was still above replacement, the government introduced a monthly per-child subsidy for parents. Over the years, the government tinkered with the subsidy, altering the amount and raising the age allowance. None of which made much difference: The fertility rate fell at a steady pace. In 1990, the government formed a committee charged with “Creating a sound environment for bearing and rearing children,” the fruit of which was a Childcare Leave Act aimed at helping working mothers.
In 2003, Japan passed the “Law for Basic Measures to Cope with a Declining Fertility Society,” followed two years later by the “Law for Measures to Support the Development of the Next Generation.” To get a sense of how daft the Japanese bureaucrats and politicians are, one of the new provisions required businesses to create—but not implement—abstract “plans” for raising the fertility level of their workers.
In the face of 35 years of failed incentives, Japan’s fertility rate stands at 1.2. This is below what is considered “lowest low,” a mathematical tipping point at which a country’s population will decline by as much as 50 percent within 45 years. This is a death spiral from which, demographers believe, it is impossible to escape. Then again, that’s just theory: History has never seen fertility rates so low.
Next to Japan’s, the U.S. fertility rate looks pretty good at 2.06. The massive, continual influx of immigrants we receive is enough to keep the U.S. population slowly growing. But America’s fertility rate has been falling since the founding.
Colgate economist Michael Haines combined the 1790 census with other data sets to determine that in 1800 the fertility rate for white American females was 7.04 and for black was 7.90. (All early American demographic data were kept separately for the two races.) Fertility rates for both groups have fallen steadily. The only significant uptick came at the end of World War II with the Baby Boom. For 20 years, fertility rates spiked, reaching as high as 3.53 for white women and 4.52 for black women in 1960.
The Baby Boom was notable not just for its magnitude but for its longevity—it lasted an entire generation, creating a population bulge that still bloats our demographic profile. Yet despite its impact, the Baby Boom was temporary. In the cultural moment that followed during the 1960s and 1970s, the fertility rate in America—and indeed around the world—went bust. In Canada, the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, in every single Western industrialized nation, the fertility rate plummeted.
From a combined TFR of 3.7 in 1960, U.S. fertility halved to 1.8 in 1980. It has rebounded slightly during the last few decades, but that upward movement has more to do with Hispanic immigration than with increased native fertility. In 2006, the fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites was 1.77; the fertility rate of blacks was 2.0. Of America’s major demographic groups, only Hispanics are above replacement, with a TFR of 2.3. Yet even the Hispanic population has seen its fertility rate fall some 8 percent in the last decade. Indeed, the problem with immigration as it relates to fertility isn’t the old complaint that the newcomers are out-breeding the natives. Rather, the problem is that the newcomers start behaving like natives too soon, with their TFR regressing quickly to the mean. If we are to maintain even our modest 2.06, we need an ever-greater supply of immigrants.
Today there are 26.6 million legal immigrants living in America and roughly 11.3 million illegals. We need these workers to prop up the entitlement programs we’re no longer having enough babies to fund. In order to keep Social Security and Medicare running, we need a stable ratio of workers to retirees. If we were to keep the ratio at the present level of three workers for every retiree—already lower than it has ever been—America would need to add 44.9 million new immigrants between 2025 and 2035. If we wanted to keep the ratio at 5.2 workers for every retiree—about what it was in 1960, before the collapse of our fertility rate—we’d need to import 10.8 million immigrants every year until 2050. At which point the United States would have 1.1 billion people, 73 percent of whom would be the descendants of recent immigrants.
Putting aside questions of cultural coherence—remember the joke: “Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism: You may pick two”?—it would be logistically impossible to add 10.8 million immigrants a year. As demographer Phillip Longman notes, “such a flow would require the equivalent of building another New York City every ten months or so.”
There is a supply-side problem, too. Immigrants began streaming over America’s southern border in the 1980s for several reasons. America was safer and freer. There were more and better jobs. But there was also an enormous surplus of labor in Latin America as a result of high fertility rates. In Mexico, for instance, the fertility rate was 6.82 in 1970. It dropped to 5.3 in 1980, 3.61 in 1990, and 2.75 in 2000. It now sits at 2.1. You see this trend across the entire Latin world. Some countries, such as Chile and Costa Rica, are already well below replacement. And when a country’s fertility drops below replacement, people tend to stop emigrating. Consider Puerto Rico. In 1955, Puerto Rico’s fertility rate was 4.97. (The major Puerto Rican migration to America began in the 1950s.) Over time, Puerto Rican fertility diminished. By 2000, it had dipped to 1.99. For 2010, it is estimated to be 1.65.
During this same period, emigrating from Puerto Rico to the United States became easier, and while the economic situation in Puerto Rico brightened somewhat, it did not improve dramatically. Yet the number of Puerto Ricans moving to America during that span plummeted—from 80,000 in 1955 to just 3,800 in 2008. And this took place as the population of Puerto Rico itself was nearly doubling, from 2.25 million to 3.97 million.
There is no reason to believe that the example of Puerto Rico will not translate to the rest of Latin America. To our south, fertility rates are generally still higher than our own. But the rate of decline is much steeper. The average fertility rate for Latin America in the 1960s was 6.0 children per woman; by 2005 that average had dropped to 2.5. Within a decade or two, every single country in Latin America will have a fertility rate below that of the United States. And at that point, immigration from the region may significantly diminish.
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There is a constellation of factors tamping down fertility in America. And even with steady immigration, they represent our own, bottom-up adoption of a One-Child regimen.
At the most basic level, the decline of infant mortality played a large part. In 1850, 2-in-10 white babies and 3.4-in-10 black babies died during infancy. Steady improvements in medicine, sanitation, and nutrition reduced infant mortality to asymptotic levels—today just 6.22 deaths for every 1,000 live births.
Americans also began migrating from rural areas to cities and transitioning from farm work to factories. These changes made children both less useful and more expensive.
Social changes have affected the fertility rate, too. Some of these changes are small and simple—like the evolution of car-seat laws, which make it difficult to transport more than two children. Some—like the rise of the educated woman—are massively complex.
One of the best predictors of fertility is education: The more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have. The total fertility rate for American women without a high school diploma is 2.45. With each subsequent level of educational attainment, fertility falls—it drops to 1.6 for women with a graduate degree. One of the drivers of our fertility decline was the making of college de rigueur for middle-class women.
From 1879 to 1930, American men and women graduated from college at roughly the same low rate. This was as much a function of the university being the preserve of the privileged as it was of gender equality. It wasn’t until 1930 that college graduation rates between the sexes began diverging, with men becoming markedly better educated. By 1947, 2.3 men graduated from college for every woman. That divergence was not, as the feminist-industrial complex would have you believe, the result of sexism. Before the two world wars, college was open only to a small pool of wealthy elites and was partaken of by these men and women in equal measure. The G.I. Bill broadened access to college for former soldiers, who were, naturally, men. As these middle- and lower-middle-class men flooded the classrooms, a gender gap was created.
With the class restrictions lifted, however, it was only a matter of time before middle- and lower-middle-class women caught up with their male counterparts. By 1980, the balance was again even. And, by 2003, women significantly outnumbered men in college, with 1.35 women graduating for every man.
But let’s wind the clock back to the period stretching from the 1950s to the early 1970s. What’s interesting about this interregnum isn’t that men outnumbered women, but rather what it was women graduating from college did with their degrees. Nearly half of those female graduates were involved in a single field—education. And as it turns out, being a teacher is highly compatible with having babies. As more women began attending college, however, they entered a broader array of fields, many of which were less friendly to family life. For the class of 1980, for instance, only 36 percent of female graduates became teachers and that number has continued to drop.
As women entered other careers, they postponed having babies. A teacher can reasonably graduate from college at 22, begin working immediately, and if she so chooses, marry and have children in short order without losing ground in her career. By comparison, consider the life of a young woman who becomes a doctor: Graduate with a bachelor’s degree at 22; graduate from medical school at 26; finish residency at 29. If our doctor does not pursue any specialization, she can begin her career as she turns 30. Only then is childbearing even theoretically possible, and it will come at some expense to her nascent career.
The first effect of the broadening of women’s career paths was to push up the average age of marriage. In 1950, the average age of first marriage for an American woman was 20.3 years. Between 1950 and 1970—when a large percentage of women were still entering the teaching profession—that number ticked upward only slightly, to 20.8 years. By 1980 it had risen to 22.0 years; by 1990 it was 23.9, and off to the races. By 2007, the average American woman did not wed until she was 26.
The drop in fertility among women with college and advanced degrees, then, is in large part due to delayed family formation. The longer a middle-class woman waits to get married, the longer she will wait to have children. For example, in 1970, the average age of a woman in the United States giving birth to her first child was 21.4 years. In 2000, it was 24.9 years.
The American drive for education has had other subtle effects on fertility. For instance, it’s not just the length of education that diminishes fertility, but the debt-load incurred. In 1987, 9 percent of college graduates said they were delaying marriage because of their student loans and 12 percent said they were delaying children. As student debts ballooned, so did those numbers. By 2002, 14 percent said they were pushing back marriage and 21 percent said they were postponing having children because of their loans.
If the G.I. Bill could wreak so much havoc on fertility rates, imagine the effects of the last century’s two great changes in sexual life: the contraceptive pill and the legalization of on-demand abortion. Calculating the number of babies not born because of the birth control pill is impossible. But without confusing correlation and causation, it is worth noting that the pill became available in America and much of the West in 1960, the precise moment when fertility rates began heading into deep decline.
On the other hand, it is quite easy to make an accounting of abortion’s effects. Before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the tide of public opinion in America was against abortion. Accordingly, there were relatively few abortions, even though most states allowed for early-term abortions. In 1970, for example, there were 193,491 reported legal abortions. Certainly, this number undercounts the real total because it does not include illegal abortions. But let’s take 200,000 as a baseline. In 1973, as Roe created a universal abortion right, the number of reported abortions rose to 744,600. The next year, that number rose by 20 percent, to 898,600 abortions. By this time all abortions were legal, and so we can be confident that this number is fairly accurate. Over the course of the next 15 years the number of abortions rose by almost 100 percent.
In 1973—the year of the Roe decision—there were 3.1 million babies born. Over the next 10 years that number rose only slightly, despite the fact that America’s total population was increasing quickly. Why weren’t there more babies born in the decade following Roe? Because during that time, 13.6 million were aborted—meaning that 28.5 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion. Since Roe more than 49.5 million babies have been aborted in the United States, and the fertility rate has varied inversely to the abortion rate, generally declining when abortion is on the rise and rising when abortion is on the decline.
Fertility isn’t all about sex, of course. It also involves that other great American passion: real estate. Fertility rates vary widely across the 50 states. The states with the highest are found mostly in the West, while the states with the lowest fertility are found mostly in the industrialized Northeast. The more fertile states tend to be more rural; the less fertile more urban. And the more fertile states tend to have lower land costs and, hence, costs of living. The cultural demographer Steve Sailer refers to this phenomenon as the “dirt gap.”
Beyond even the cost of real estate, housing stock influences fertility. When dramatically falling fertility first appeared in Europe after World War I, demographers went into a panic. In Sweden, researchers noticed that the small, modernist apartment buildings which had sprung up across the country were pushing couples to have fewer children. Subsequent research has demonstrated the effects of housing stock on fertility across the globe. Studies show the same results over and over—all things being equal, women living in apartments or condominiums have fewer babies than women living in single-family homes. This phenomenon has been demonstrated everywhere from New Jersey to Colombia to Great Britain to Iran.
How much does housing type matter? A 1988 Canadian study showed that even when you control for education, income, and other factors, married couples who lived in apartment-type buildings had 0.42 fewer children over their lifetimes than married couples in single-family homes. From the 1940s until the 1960s, there was a boom in the construction of detached, single-family homes in America. Levittowns sprang up across the country and, by 1960, single-family homes represented their biggest share of American housing stock in modern times. This coincides perfectly with the Baby Boom. On the other hand, large-scale apartment and condominium complexes became more popular during the 1960s. Their percentage of the total U.S. housing stock increased by 40 percent from 1960 to 1970 and by another 23 percent from 1970 to 1980: the precise years during which America’s fertility numbers went into steep decline.
And then there’s consumerism. It’s a cliché to complain about $800 baby strollers and designer children’s clothing. But even the clichés no longer capture the lunacy of it all. One popular baby stroller, the Bugaboo Cameleon, retails for $880. That’s a bargain compared with Avila’s innovative “round” crib. Crafted from cherry wood, it goes for $1,285. But even if you sift out the consumerist outrages, the cost of raising a child today is staggering.
In 1960, the USDA estimated that the total cost of raising a child, from birth until age 18, was $25,229 ($185,817 in 2010 dollars)—they measured food at home and away, clothing, housing, medical care, education, transportation, and “personal care, recreation, reading and other miscellaneous expenditures.” Over the next 25 years, that cost remained reasonably constant, rising and falling by minor degrees. By 1985, it was (in real dollars) actually slightly cheaper to raise a child than it had been in 1960. But after 1985 children became steadily more expensive. By 2007, the cost of raising a child had risen 15.4 percent over the 1960 level.
The USDA, in its calculations, leaves out many of the little costs of parenthood—maternity clothes, baby furniture, toys, vitamins. Yet even these items are just nickels and dimes. The real money is in three big-ticket items that the USDA ignores: child care, college tuition, and forgone salary.
Let’s start with child care. The 2007 USDA survey reports that the average family spent $4,000 on child care during the first two years of a child’s life. In the real world, that $4,000 is little more than a mathematical construct. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies reports that in 2008, the average cost of full-time care for an infant from a babysitter or nanny was $9,630 per year. The average cost of full-time care for an infant in a day-care center was $14,591 per year.
The USDA also ignores college. Recall our mammoth college gender gap in 1947. Even though many more men than women were going to college, very few people were enrolled at all—only 10 percent of college-aged men and 3.4 percent of college-aged women attended a university. Today, the majority of children—and the vast majority of middle-class children—attend college. In 2006, 66 percent of high school graduates enrolled in either a two- or four-year degree program within a year of completing high school.
These costs beggar belief. For the 2009 school year, the average tuition at a state college was $7,020. Private colleges averaged $26,273. Neither of those figures includes room, board, and other expenses—another $12,755 for full-time students not living at home (though only $12,368 for state-school students). So a child starting college today will cost her parents somewhere from $77,552 (for an average state-school degree) to $156,112 (for an average private degree). Remember, please, that we’re talking averages here. If your bundle of joy is lucky enough to gain entrance to an elite university, the four-year tab will easily top $200,000. Over the last 35 years, the period during which college became a necessary expense for middle-class life, the price of college increased—in real dollars—by 1,000 percent.
Finally, there’s the matter of forgone income. Recall that the USDA assumes virtually no expenditures for child care. This implies that one parent stays home at least until the child reaches school age. In The Empty Cradle (2004), Phillip Longman explored the cost of lost income by mothers and calculates that a woman making $45,000 a year who stays home until her child is school-aged and then returns to work part-time forgoes $823,736 by the time her child turns 18.
Add that number to the others and you’re talking $1.1 million to raise a single child. That’s a lot of money for a middle-class couple. In 2007, the median income for Americans in their prime child-bearing years (ages 25 to 34) was just $30,846 (or $40,739 for those with a college degree). People like to say that buying a house is the biggest purchase you’ll ever make. Well, the median price of a home in 2008 was $180,100. Having a baby is like buying six houses, all at once. Except that you can’t (legally) sell them—and after 13 years they’ll tell you they hate you.
There was a time when such indignities were worth suffering because children served a practical purpose: They cared for their parents in old age. Oftentimes physically; always financially. Beginning with the New Deal, the logistics of this social compact began to change. In 1935, the Social Security Act established government payouts for retirees. These benefits were paid for by a new payroll tax on those working. Over time, Social Security payments expanded, the taxes increased, and new benefits—such as Medicare—were added.
It’s difficult to overstate the effects of these initiatives. For starters, they created an enormous new burden for workers. In 1955, the median American family paid 17.3 percent in income taxes. By 1998, the median one-earner family paid 37.6 percent in income taxes; two-earner families paid 40.9 percent. Social Security and Medicare placed an increasing burden on families at the same time that the cost of children was also increasing.
There were other consequences. Where people’s offspring had for centuries seen to the financial needs of their parents, retired people with no offspring now had access to a set of comparable benefits. And in a world where childbearing has no practical benefit, people have babies because they want to, either for self-fulfillment or as a moral imperative. “Moral imperative,” of course, is a euphemism for “religious compulsion.” There are stark differences in fertility between secular and religious people.
The best indicator of actual fertility is “aspirational fertility”—the number of children men and women say they would like to have. Gallup has been asking Americans about their “ideal family size” since 1936. When they first asked the question, 64 percent of Americans said that three or more children were ideal; 34 percent said that zero, one, or two children were ideal. Today only 34 percent of Americans think that a family with three-or-more children is ideal.
But on this question there are two Americas today: a secular population that wants small families (or no family at all) and a religious population that wants larger families. Religious affiliation is part of the story, but the real difference comes with church attendance. Among people who seldom or never go to church, 66 percent say that zero, one, or two children is the ideal family size, and only 25 percent view three-or-more children as ideal. Among those who go to church monthly, the three-or-more number edges up to 29 percent. But among those who attend church every week, 41 percent say three or more children is ideal, while only 47 percent think that a smaller family is preferable. When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they’re making a cultural and theological statement.
And the truth is, America needs more of such statements. The United Nations Population Division’s projection of our demographic future makes for stark reading. Native fertility rates are so low that without a continual influx of immigrants to stave off population decline, our population will shrink from 308 million to 290 million by 2050.
Our challenge is to balance three needs: (1) a stable population, (2) a plausible ratio of workers-to-retirees, and (3) a manageable number of immigrants. Yet, for instance, to keep the worker-support ratio at high levels would require, as we saw earlier, gargantuan levels of immigration. Keeping immigration at a reasonable level (the U.N. uses 760,000 immigrants a year as a baseline) would mean that our population would increase to 349 million in 2050, but that our worker-support ratio would be cut in half. If we cut off immigration altogether the worker-support ratio would be even lower, and in addition, we’d face rapid population decline.
The simplest answer is for Americans to have more babies.
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Throughout history, governments have tried to get people to procreate. Augustus levied a “bachelor tax” on unmarried, aristocratic men. In 1927, Mussolini imposed a tax on all unmarried men between the ages of 25 and 65. The Soviet Union spent the last 50 years of its existence attempting to cajole it citizenry into having more children. In 1944, for instance, Stalin created the Motherhood Medal, given to any woman who bore at least six children. None of these attempts was successful. But they raise the question of what smart pro-natalist policies would look like in America today.
The Social Security regime is the most obvious and easily addressable problem. Longman proposes a “Parental Dividend” system by which a couple’s FICA taxes would be reduced by one-third with the birth of their first child, by two-thirds with the birth of a second, and then eliminated completely with the third (until the youngest child turns 18). Other, more complicated schemes abound. Regardless of the means, though, the goal is the same: Reduce the disconnect between the costs of creating new taxpayers and the benefits of receiving government pensions.
The costs of raising children could also be undercut by reforming the college system. The modern college degree functions less as an educational tool than as a credentialing badge—a marker which gives employers a vague estimate of a person’s intelligence, social milieu, and work ability. The reason employers need this badge is that, thanks to an obscure Supreme Court case, they aren’t allowed to ask for test scores the way colleges are.
In the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power, the Court held that employers could not rely on IQ-type tests if minorities performed relatively poorly on them. Blacks and Hispanics display a persistent underperformance on such tests, making it impossible for employers to ask for test scores. (As the recent Ricci case proved, even a test that has been sufficiently vetted beforehand for a lack of bias can cause trouble if minorities perform poorly on it.) So employers launder their request for test scores through the college system since colleges are allowed to use such considerations. The universities get rich, students and their parents go into hock, and everyone pretends that Acme Widgets is hiring young Suzy because they value her B.A. in English from Haverford, and not because her admission to Haverford proved that she is bright—a fact that a free, three-hour written test would have demonstrated just as well. If Griggs were rolled back, it would upend the college system at a stroke.
Finally, we could address the dirt gap—the underlying cost of land, which drives the cost of living and gives rise to the dramatic differences in fertility we see across the country. People often make decisions on where to live based on employment. High concentrations of jobs are found in intensely urban areas—Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago—which have correspondingly high land costs. This is why we have the accurate stereotype of the working couple who move from the city to the exurbs once they decide to have kids.
Geography is unpleasantly resistant to social planning. There are only so many acres of land in Manhattan, and there’s nothing anyone can to do to make it less expensive (though correcting the absurdity of New York City’s rent-control/rent-stabilization system would help). But we could make the suburbs more accessible to cities by improving our highway system. Since 1970, the “vehicle lane miles” (that’s the metric traffic engineers use) consumed by Americans have risen by 150 percent. During that period we added 5 percent to our highway capacity. Now you know why we have so much traffic.
The answer is not building more public transportation. Parents trying to balance work and children need the flexibility automobiles provide. The solution is building more roads. As Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam noted wryly in Grand New Party (2008), Dallas has twice as much pavement-per-person as Los Angeles and half the traffic. And, not coincidentally, a higher fertility rate. An improved highway system would make it easier for couples to have access to both the concentration of jobs cities provide and the affordable housing that the suburbs offer.
Yet even if we adopt such measures, they may do little to change American fertility. It turns out that a government cannot convince people to have children; all it can do is help people to have the children they already want.
In 1965, Singapore gained full independence from the British, and the government embarked on a program of rapid industrialization. Among its initiatives were increased urbanization and an attempt to jumpstart women’s rates of college graduation and participation in the workforce. Singapore’s fertility rate was already in decline, having fallen from 5.45 in 1960 to 4.7 in 1965. As part of modernization, however, the government wanted to drive the fertility rate down even faster. In 1966, the government created the “Family Planning and Population Board” and launched a propaganda campaign, using messages such as “Stop at Two” and “Small Families, Brighter Future.” The most popular slogan, recounted in numerous posters and public service ads, was “Girl or Boy, Two Is Enough.”
Accompanying this bright, cheery campaign was an array of less gentle policies. Abortion was sanctioned—and even encouraged—at every stage. Parents who had more than two children were punished with no paid maternity leave and higher hospital charges for the delivery of the extra babies. Couples were encouraged to volunteer for sterilization. Parents who did so after having just one or two children were reimbursed for the medical costs of delivering those babies and their children were given preference in registering for the best schools.
The tactics were frighteningly effective. In 1976—just ten years after the campaign began—Singapore reached its target of 2.1. They had pushed their fertility rate down 53 percent in a decade. But the rate kept diving, down to 1.74 by 1980. The biggest fertility decline came from the elites: Singapore, like every other industrialized country, found that the more education a woman had and the better her job, the less likely she was to have children.
In 1983, Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, spoke about the country’s demographic problem with a candor that is the luxury of autocrats:
[W]e shouldn’t get our women into jobs where they cannot, at the same time, be mothers. . . . You just can’t be doing a full-time, heavy job like that of a doctor or engineer and run a home and bring up children. . . . Our most valuable asset is in the ability of our people, yet we are frittering away this asset through the unintended consequences of changes in our education policy and equal career opportunities for women. This has affected their traditional role as mothers.
In an attempt to boost fertility rates among the elites, the government began offering big tax breaks to highly educated women who had three or more children. A matchmaking service was created by the government for university graduates to encourage young professional men and women to get married. None of it worked. Educated women still shunned motherhood. Even worse, Singapore realized that lower-class women had stopped having babies, too. By 1984, Singapore’s fertility rate was 1.62 and falling.
The government dissolved the Family Planning and Population Board. “Two Is Enough” was replaced by “Have Three Or More Children If You Can,” a slogan broadcast on TV and radio and pushed in print ads and on billboards. Posters abounded proclaiming the joy and fulfillment of family life. Tax-incentives were given to families with more than three children, as were school admissions preferences. Unpaid maternity leave for government workers was increased from one year to four years. For a brief period these pro-natalist measures seemed to be working, but they merely delayed the downward march. By 1999, the fertility rate stood at 1.49.
In 2000, the government announced a series of new initiatives. The first was the “Baby Bonus” program, which paid families for having children: $9,000 for the second child and $18,000 for the third. The tax code was modified to give a hefty break to mothers under the age of 31 who had a second child. The government created “Child Development Accounts,” which function like a 401(k) for kids, with the government matching parents’ savings dollar-for-dollar. Mothers were granted 12 weeks of paid maternity leave with each birth.
The government offered better, larger housing for families with children and made it easier for young married couples to buy a home. They even embarked on a program to find grandparents housing close to their grandchildren, to help ease the burden of childcare. At the same time, the government did its best to undo the disincentives it had created a few years earlier. The $10,000 bonus for sterilization was scrapped. Officials were reluctant to ban abortion outright, but launched a public campaign against it. Women with fewer than three children who sought either sterilization or an abortion were required to attend counseling before any procedure would be performed.
Singapore had become a pro-natalist utopia, where aggressive government intervention was married to a willingness to talk frankly about demographic failure and uphold traditionalist mores. (In 1994, for instance, the prime minister spoke out against illegitimacy, calling single motherhood “wrong” and claiming that the “respectable part of society” should never accept it because “by removing the stigma, we may encourage more women to have children without getting married.”) And yet the effort has met with total and unremitting failure. In 2001, Singapore’s fertility rate was 1.41. By 2004 it was 1.24.
Today it is 1.1. Despite all the incentives, all of the public campaigns, all of the pleading, the average woman in Singapore can barely be bothered to have a single child.
Jonathan V. Last, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, was a 2009 Phillips Foundation fellow.
Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/america%E2%80%99s-one-child-policy
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Think Again: Global Aging
A gray tsunami is sweeping the planet -- and not just in the places you expect. How did the world get so old, so fast?
BY PHILLIP LONGMAN | NOVEMBER 2010
View a photo essay of The Grayest Generation.
"The World Faces a Population Bomb."
Yes, but of old people. Not so long ago, we were warned that rising global population would inevitably bring world famine. As Paul Ehrlich wrote apocalyptically in his 1968 worldwide bestseller, The Population Bomb, "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." Obviously, Ehrlich's predicted holocaust, which assumed that the 1960s global baby boom would continue until the world faced mass famine, didn't happen. Instead, the global growth rate dropped from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to roughly half that today, with many countries no longer producing enough babies to avoid falling populations. Having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers' chief worry; now, having too few is.
It's true that the world's population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 billion, according to the U.N. Population Division. But this will be a very different kind of population growth than ever before -- driven not by birth rates, which have plummeted around the world, but primarily by an increase in the number of elderly people. Indeed, the global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of midcentury, while the number of people over 60 will grow by 1.2 billion. How did the world grow so gray, so quickly?
One reason is that more people are living to advanced old age. But just as significant is the enormous bulge of people born in the first few decades after World War II. Both the United States and Western Europe saw particularly dramatic increases in birth rates during the late 1940s and 1950s, as returning veterans made up for lost time. In the 1960s and 1970s, much of the developing world also experienced a baby boom, but for a different reason: striking declines in infant and child mortality. As these global baby boomers age, they will create a population explosion of seniors. Today in the West, we are seeing a sharp uptick in people turning 60; in another 20 years, we'll see an explosion in the numbers turning 80. Most of the rest of the world will follow the same course in the next few decades.
The Grayest Generation
Photos of a world going gray.
Eventually, the last echoes of the global baby boomers will fade away. Then, because of the continuing fall in birth rates, humans will face the very real prospect that our numbers will fall as fast -- if not faster -- than the rate at which they once grew. Russia's population is already 7 million below what it was in 1991. As for Japan, one expert has calculated that the very last Japanese baby will be born in the year 2959, assuming the country's low fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman continues unchanged. Young Austrian women now tell pollsters their ideal family size is less than two children, enough to replace themselves but not their partners. Worldwide, there is a 50 percent chance that the population will be falling by 2070, according to a recent study published in Nature. By 2150, according to one U.N. projection, the global population could be half what it is today.
That might sound like an appealing prospect: less traffic, more room at the beach, easier college admissions. But be careful what you wish for.
"Aging Is a Rich-Country Problem."
NO. Once, demographers believed, following a long line of ancient thinkers from Tacitus and Cicero in late Rome to Ibn Khaldun in the medieval Arab world, that population aging and decline were particular traits of "civilized" countries that had obtained a high degree of luxury. Reflecting on the fate of Rome, Charles Darwin's grandson bemoaned a pattern he saw throughout history: "Must civilization always lead to the limitation of families and consequent decay and then replacement from barbaric sources, which in turn will go through the same experience?"
Today, however, we see that birth rates are dipping below replacement levels even in countries hardly known for luxury. Emerging first in Scandinavia in the 1970s, what the experts call "subreplacement fertility" quickly spread to the rest of Europe, Russia, most of Asia, much of South America, the Caribbean, Southern India, and even Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon, Morocco, and Iran. Of the 59 countries now producing fewer children than needed to sustain their populations, 18 are characterized by the United Nations as "developing," i.e., not rich.
Indeed, most developing countries are experiencing population aging at unprecedented rates. Consider Iran. As recently as the late 1970s, the average Iranian woman had nearly seven children. Today, for reasons not well understood, she has just 1.74, far below the average 2.1 children needed to sustain a population over time. Accordingly, between 2010 and 2050, the share of Iran's population 60 and older is expected to increase from 7.1 to 28.1 percent. This is well above the share of 60-plus people found in Western Europe today and about the same percentage that is expected for most Northern European countries in 2050. But unlike Western Europe, Iran and many other developing regions experiencing the same hyper-aging -- from Cuba to Croatia, Lebanon to the Wallis and Futuna Islands -- will not necessarily have a chance to get rich before they get old.
One contributing factor is urbanization; more than half the world's population now lives in cities, where children are an expensive economic liability, not another pair of hands to till fields or care for livestock. Two other oft-cited reasons are expanded work opportunities for women and the increasing prevalence of pensions and other old-age financial support that doesn't depend on having large numbers of children to finance retirement.
Surprisingly, this graying of the world is not by any means the exclusive result of programs deliberately aimed at population control. For though there are countries such as India, which embraced population control even to the point of forced sterilization programs during the 1970s and saw dramatic reduction in birth rates, there are also counterexamples such as Brazil, where the government never promoted family planning and yet its birth rate went down even more. Why? In both countries and elsewhere, changing cultural norms appear to be the primary force driving down birth rates -- think TV, not government decrees. In Brazil, television was introduced sequentially province by province, and in each new region the boob tube reached, birth rates plummeted soon after. (Discuss among yourselves whether this was because of what's on Brazilian television -- mostly soap operas depicting rich people living the high life -- or simply because a television was now on at night in many more bedrooms.)
Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
"The West Is Doomed by Demographics."
MAYBE. But the outlook is even worse for Asia. Those who predict a coming Asian Century have not come to terms with the region's approaching era of hyper-aging. Japan, whose "lost decade" began just as its labor force started to shrink in the late 1980s, now appears to be not an exception, but a vanguard of Asian demographics. South Korea and Taiwan, with some of the lowest birth rates of any major country, will be losing population within 15 years. Singapore's government is so worried about its birth dearth that it not only offers new mothers a "baby bonus" of up to about $3,000 each for the first or second child and about $4,500 for a third or fourth child, paid maternity leave, and other enticements to have children, it has even started sponsoring speed-dating events.
China, for now, continues to enjoy the economic benefits associated with the early phase of birth-rate decline, when a society has fewer children to support and more available female labor for the workforce. But with its stringent one-child policy and exceptionally low birth rate, China is rapidly evolving into what demographers call a "4-2-1" society, in which one child becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.
Asia will also be plagued by a chronic shortage of women in the coming decades, which could leave the most populous region on Earth with the same skewed sex ratios as the early American West. Due to selective abortion, China has about 16 percent more boys than girls, which many predict will lead to instability as tens of millions of "unmarriageable" men find other outlets for their excess libido. India has nearly the same sex-ratio imbalance and also a substantial difference in birth rates between its southern (mostly Hindu) states and its northern (more heavily Muslim) states, which could contribute to ethnic tension.
No society has ever experienced the speed of population aging -- or the gender imbalance -- now seen throughout Asia. So we can't simply look to history to predict Asia's future. But we can say with confidence that no region on Earth is more demographically challenged.
"The U.S. Baby Boom Has Saved It
From an Old-Age Crisis."
For now. On its current course, the U.S. population of 310 million will continue to grow relative to that of the rest of the developed world, primarily because its birth rate, while barely at replacement level, is still higher than that of almost any other industrialized country. In purely geopolitical terms, this suggests American influence over Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other allies could grow. Yet the United States has no reason to be smug about its comparatively favorable demographics. As its allies age and even shrink in population, the United States could be forced to assume even more of the burden of policing the world's trouble spots. Like a person in middle age, the United States now has to worry not only about its own aging, but also about how to provide for other family members who are becoming too old to fend for themselves.
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And age America will. The main reason for its comparative youthfulness so far has been immigration, both legal and illegal. But according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of illegal immigrants thought to be entering the United States has plunged to just 300,000 people annually -- down from 850,000 in the early 2000s. More than a million immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America have returned home in the last two years. These falling numbers are largely driven by the soaring U.S. unemployment rate, which has at least temporarily reduced the economic rewards of moving to El Norte, but they could herald a permanent shift.
Demographics explain why. Birth rates are falling dramatically across Latin America, especially in Mexico, suggesting a tidal shift in migration patterns. Consider what happened with Puerto Rico, where birth rates have also plunged: Immigration to the mainland United States has all but stopped despite an open border and the lure of a considerably higher standard of living on the continent. In the not-so-distant future, the United States may well find itself competing for immigrants rather than building walls to keep them out.
"Old People Will Just Work Longer."
But only if older workers are healthy. And that's a big if. You might have noticed a lot more middle-age Americans using canes, walkers, and wheelchairs these days. So many of Walmart's customers are now physically impaired that the giant retailer has replaced many of its shopping carts with electric scooters that allow shoppers to remain seated as they cruise the aisles. Such sights are reflected in statistics showing that, for the first time since such record-keeping began, disability rates are no longer improving among middle-age Americans, but getting worse.
According to a recent Rand Corp. study published in Health Affairs, more than 40 percent of Americans ages 50 to 64 already have difficulties performing ordinary activities of daily life, such as walking a quarter mile or climbing 10 steps without resting -- a substantial rise from just 10 years ago. Because of this declining physical fitness among the middle-aged, we can expect the next generation of senior citizens to be much more impaired than the current one.
It isn't just Americans. Obesity and sedentary lifestyles are spreading globally. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of obese adults increased worldwide from 200 million to 300 million -- with 115 million of these living in developing countries. From Chile to China, McDonald's and KFC are opening franchises every day, even as people everywhere spend more and more of their time in automobiles and in front of flat-screen TVs and computer monitors. More than a billion people worldwide are now estimated to be overweight, creating a global pandemic of chronic conditions from heart disease to diabetes.
Sure, countries can and will do much more to help people age gracefully and to encourage older citizens to remain in the workforce. A recent report from the European Commission has pointed out, for example, that providing for more part-time jobs would not only encourage delayed retirement, but could also help boost birth rates by smoothing the tensions between work and family life for parents. Encouraging healthier diets would enormously lengthen productive life spans, as would building or preserving more walkable communities. But there are clear limits to how many seniors will be fit enough, mentally or physically, to compete in the global economy of the next 20 years.
These trends undermine the argument, now common around the world, that standard retirement ages must go up. Not only are improvements in life expectancy at older ages very modest and now trending toward zero, but disability rates are exploding to the point that it would be difficult for many older workers to perform in the workplace even if they had the job skills that a modern economy demands. This explains such paradoxes as the fact that U.S. employers report it is nearly impossible to find the engineering talent they need, while the unemployment rate among U.S. engineers remains extraordinarily high. The faster-evolving and more technologically sophisticated a society becomes, the more rapidly job skills -- and elderly workers, sadly -- become obsolete.
"An Elderly World Will Be More Peaceful."
Not necessarily. Some strategists, such as scholar Mark L. Haas, speak of a coming "geriatric peace." Here's the argument: In a world of single-child families, popular resistance to military conscription should grow, as tolerance of military casualties falls. The rising cost of pensions and health care should also make sustaining military buildups increasingly difficult. Societies dominated by middle-age and older citizens may also become more risk-averse, more preoccupied with practical, domestic concerns like crime and retirement security, and less driven by adherence to violent ideologies. Japan is often held up as an example of a country that has grown more stable and peaceful as it has aged. Western Europe was wracked by domestic unrest when its vaunted "Generation of '68" was still young, but as these postwar baby boomers aged and produced few children, the political and social agendas of Europe became far less radical.
But there are some problems with this rosy scenario. To start, even countries that are rapidly aging can, paradoxically, produce youth bulges with all the attendant social consequences, from more violence to economic dislocation. Consider Iran. By 2020, the number of 15- to 24-year-old Iranians will have shrunk by 34 percent since 2005, according to the U.N. Population Division. This largely reflects the sharp downturn in the Iranian economy that occurred after its 1979 revolution, as well as the clerical regime's embrace of contraception. But from 2020 to 2035, the number will again swell by 34 percent, even if birth rates continue to decline. Why? A very high proportion of Iranian women are now of childbearing age, which means that even though young Iranian women are having far fewer children than their mothers did -- indeed, not enough to sustain the population over time -- their numbers are still sufficient to create a temporary "echo boom."
Many other Muslim countries, from Libya to Pakistan, will experience similarly huge oscillations in their youth populations. Most of the Central Asian republics, too, will face large echo booms in the 2020s. Long a battlefield for larger powers from the Mongols and Persians to the Russians and British, these newly independent states are once again the object of geopolitical competition due to their natural gas and oil reserves. The same is true of two of Latin America's most volatile countries, Peru and Venezuela.
This isn't just a numbers game. As the darkest recent chapters of European history suggest, the point of transition from growth to demographic decline can be an unsettling and dangerous one. Fascist ideology in Europe was deeply informed by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, and the writings of other eugenicists obsessed with the demographic decline of "Aryans."
Now, just as the horrors of fascism are passing from living memory, a new generation of Europeans is again feeling demographically besieged, this time by the arrival of Muslim immigrants. Fear of demographic decline also fuels the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India, and it contributes to the backlash in the United States against immigrants and the controversy around the building of the "Ground Zero mosque" near the site of the 9/11 tragedy.
Over the next few decades, not only will echo booms be producing youth bulges in many of the world's trouble spots, but much of the developed world's population will be passing into advanced old age. It's a recipe for maximum demographic danger, Neil Howe and Richard Jackson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies warn. If you think the teenies are looking ugly, watch out for the 2020s.
"A Gray World Will Be a Poorer World."
Only if we do nothing. The connection between a society's wealth and its demographics is cyclical. At first, with fertility declining and the workforce aging, there are proportionately fewer children to raise and educate. This is good: It frees up female labor to join the formal economy and allows for greater investment in the education of each remaining child. All else being equal, both factors stimulate economic development. Japan went through this phase in the 1960s and 1970s, with the other Asian countries following close behind. China is benefiting from it now.
Then, however, the outlook turns bleak. Over time, low birth rates lead not only to fewer children, but also to fewer working-age people just as the percentage of dependent elders explodes. This means that as population aging runs its course, it might well go from stimulating the economy to depressing it. Fewer young adults means fewer people needing to purchase new homes, new furniture, and the like, as well as fewer people likely to take entrepreneurial risks. Aging workers become more interested in protecting existing jobs than in creating new businesses. Last-ditch efforts to prop up consumption and home values may result in more and more capital flowing into expanded consumer credit, creating financial bubbles that inevitably burst (sound familiar?).
In other words, a planet that grays indefinitely is clearly asking for trouble. But birth rates don't have to plummet forever. One path forward might be characterized as the Swedish road: It involves massive state intervention designed to smooth the tensions between work and family life to enable women to have more children without steep financial setbacks. But so far, countries that have followed this approach have achieved only very modest success. At the other extreme is what might be called the Taliban road: This would mean a return to "traditional values," in which women have few economic and social options beyond the role of motherhood. This mindset may well maintain high birth rates, but with consequences that today are unacceptable to all but the most rigid fundamentalists.
So is there a third way? Yes, though we aren't quite sure how to get there. The trick will be restoring what, in the days of family-owned farms and small businesses, was once true: that babies are an asset rather than a burden. Imagine a society in which parents get to keep more of the human capital they form by investing in their children. Imagine a society in which the family is no longer just a consumer unit, but a productive enterprise. The society that figures out how to restore the economic foundation of the family will own the future. The alternative is poor and gray indeed.
Tim Graham/Getty Images
Phillip Longman, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Washington Monthly, is author The Empty Cradle.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/think_again_global_aging?page=full
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Israel as Middle Eastern hegemon
By Spengler
Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, long-term projections help us order our perceptions of what we see in front of us today. Here's one to think about, fresh from the just-released update of the United Nations' population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain.
Population aged 15 to 24 years, Israel vs selected countries
Source: United Nations Population Division
With a total fertility rate of three children per woman, Israel's total
population will rise to 24 million by the end of the present century. Iran's fertility is around 1.7 and falling, while the fertility for ethnic Turks is only 1.5 (the Kurdish minority has a fertility rate of around 4.5).
Not that the size of land armies matters much in an era of high-tech warfare, but if present trends continue, Israel will be able to field the largest land army in the Middle East. That startling data point, though, should alert analysts to a more relevant problem: among the military powers in the Middle East, Israel will be the only one with a viable population structure by the middle of this century.
That is why it is in America's interest to keep Israel as an ally. Israel is not only the strongest power in the region; in a generation or two it will be the only power in the region, the last man standing among ruined neighbors. The demographic time bomb in the region is not the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, as the Israeli peace party wrongly believed, but rather Israel itself.
The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous. Most of Israel's population increase comes from so-called "secular" Israelis, who have 2.6 children on average, more than any other people in the industrial world. The ultra-Orthodox have seven or eight, bringing total fertility to three children.
Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic. It's not so much the projection of the demographic future cranked out by the United Nations computers that counts, but rather the implicit vision of the future in the minds of today's prospective parents.
People who can't be bothered to have children presumably have a very dim view of days to come. Reams have been written, to be sure, about Europe's demographic tailspin. Less has been said about Persian pessimism and Anatolian anomie.
Paradoxically, this makes Israel's present position dangerous, for its enemies understand that they have a very brief window in which to encircle the Jewish superpower. The collapse of Egypt and possibly that of Syria shortens this window. Nothing short of American support for a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state on the 1949 armistice lines followed by economic sanctions against Israel, though, is likely to make a difference, and this seems unlikely.
Israel already is a high-tech superpower. Israeli leads the Group of 7 industrial nations in patent applications. As Professor Reuven Brenner of McGill University wrote in the January 2010 issue of First Things:
Today Israel's venture capital industry still raises more funds than any other venue except the United States. In 2006 alone, 402 Israeli hi-tech companies raised over $1.62 billion - the highest amount in the past five years. That same year, Israel had 80 active venture capital funds and over $10 billion under management, invested in over 1,000 Israeli start-ups.
Maintaining the stunning progress of the past decade will be a challenge, because Israel's high-tech sector received a one-time boost from Russian emigration. As Brenner observes:
Of the million Russians who moved to Israel during the 1980s and 1990s, more than 55 percent had post-secondary education, and more than half held academic and managerial positions in their former country ... This made Israel the world leader in the scientist and engineer workforce, followed by the United States with 80 and Germany with 55 scientists and engineers per 10,000 members of its labor force.
Israel's prowess in the arts matches its accomplishments in technology and business. Israel has become something of a superpower in that most characteristically Western art form, classical music. In a July 21, 2010, survey of Israeli music for the webzine Tablet, I wrote, "Israelis take to classical music - the art form that most clearly creates a sense of the future - like no other people on earth, to the point that music has become part of Israel's character, an embodiment of the national genius for balancing hope and fear."
Israel has one the largest local audience for chamber music recitals of any country in the world, and its leading musicians occupy top slots around the world - for example Guy Braunstein, concertmaster (principal violin) of the Berlin Philharmonic.
This, I believe, explains the implacable hostility of Israel's neighbors, as well as the Europeans. It is the unquenchable envy of the dying towards the living. Having failed at Christianity, and afterward failed at neo-pagan nationalism, Europe has reconciled itself to a quiet passage into oblivion.
Israel's success is a horrible reminder of European failure; its bumptious nationalism grates against Europe's determination to forget its own ugly embrace of nationalism; and its implicitly religious raison d'etre provokes post-Christian rage. Above all, it offends Europe that Israel brims with life. Some of Europe's great nations may not survive the present century. At constant fertility, Israel will have more citizens than any of the Eastern European countries where large numbers of Jews resided prior to the Holocaust.
Total population, Israel vs selected Eastern European countries (constant fertility scenario)
Source: United Nations Population Division
In the constant fertility scenario, Israel will end the century at a median age of 32, while Poland will have a median age of 57. That is an inherently impossible outcome, because in that case most of Poland's population would be elderly dependents. To support them, the remaining young people would have to emigrate and work overseas (perhaps in Israel).
The Muslim world, meanwhile, is turning grey at an unprecedented rate. Turkey's and Iran's median age will surpass the 40-year mark by mid-century, assuming constant fertility, while Israel's will stabilize in the mid-30s. Europe will become an impoverished geriatric ward.
Median age in years (constant fertility assumption)
Source: United Nations Population Division
The implications of these trends have not escaped the leaders of the affected countries. "If we continue the existing trend, 2038 will mark disaster for us," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned in May 2010 (see The heart of TurknessAsia Times Online, March 23, 2011).
I do not know whether Erdogan chose the year 2038 by statistical projection, or whether he consulted the Muslim counterpart of Harold Camping, but it will do as well as any. Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, has warned repeatedly of "national extinction" if the country's low birth rate persists.
What happens to Egypt and Syria in this scenario is of small importance. Neither country will come out of the present crisis in any condition to fight, if they come out of it at all. Egypt's social structure - with two-fifths of the country immured in extreme rural poverty, and another quarter starving on thin subsidies in Cairo and Alexandria - simply is not viable.
It needed only one swift kick to shatter, and that came from the doubling of food prices. The rebellion that deposed Hosni Mubarak made things much worse; the collapse of tourism and other sources of foreign exchange, the jump in import prices, and flight capital have left Egypt without the funds to cover half its annual import bill. The country will be broke by year-end, despite US President Barack Obama's aid package (The hunger to come in Egypt Asia Times Online, May 10, 2011).
Development economists have known for years that a disaster was in the works. A 2009 World Bank report on Arab food security warned, "Arab countries are very vulnerable to fluctuations in international commodity markets because they are heavily dependent on imported food. Arab countries are the largest importers of cereal in the world. Most import at least 50 percent of the food calories they consume." The trouble is that the Arab regimes made things worse rather than better.
Egypt's rulers of the past 60 years intentionally transformed what once was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean into a starvation trap. They did so through tragedy, not oversight. Keeping a large part of one's people illiterate on subsistence farms is the surest method of social control.
Crop yields in Egypt are a fifth of the best American levels, and by design, for no Egyptian government wished to add more displaced peasants to the 17 million people now crowded into Cairo. Syrian President Basher al-Assad made a few tentative steps in this direction, and got a 100,000 landless farmers living in tent cities around Damascus (Food and Syria's failure Asia Times Online March 29, 2011).
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak did not invent the system. Post-revolutionary Russia imprisoned its peasants on collective farms; as the Mexican historian Enrique Krauze showed (in his 1992 book TextosHereticos), post-revolutionary Mexico emulated the Stalinist model of social control and imposed its own system of collective farms during the 1930s.
Mexico eventually dumped a fifth of its population on its northern neighbor, mainly rural people from the impoverished south. The remaining Mexican poor provided an inexhaustible source of foot-soldiers for the drug cartels with which the Mexican government is fighting a low-intensity civil war.
Egypt, the most populous Arab country, postponed these problems for three generations. It is governable only by military rule, de facto or de jure, because the military is the only institution that can take peasants straight from the farm and assimilate them into a disciplined social structure.
There is no civil society underneath the military. The collapse of Mubarak's military dictatorship came about when food price inflation revealed its incapacity to meet the population's basic needs. But the collapse of military rule and the flight of the army-linked oligarchy that milked the Egyptian economy for 60 years is a near-term disaster.
In place of the orderly corruption over which Mubarak presided, there is a scramble on the part of half-organized political groups to get control of the country's shrinking supply of basic goods. Civic violence likely will claim more lives than hunger.
Refugees from Libya and Tunisia have swamped the refugee camps on the closest Italian island, and hundreds have drowned in small boats attempting to cross the Mediterranean. By the end of this year, tourists on the Greek islands may see thousands of small boats carrying hungry Egyptians seeking help. Europe's sympathy for the Arab side may vanish under an inundation of refugees.
Events are most likely to overtake diplomacy. The sort of economic and demographic imbalances implied by the projections shown above reflect back into the present. Chaos in Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries probably will pre-empt the present focus on Israel and the Palestinians. It would not be surprising if the Palestinians were to mount another Intifada, or Egypt and Syria were to initiate one last war against Israel. It might be their last opportunity.
But I rate the probably of another war at well under 50%. The internal problems of Egypt and Syria are more likely to make war too difficult to wage.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. Comment on this article in Spengler's Expat Bar forum.
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I'm reminded of a quote from an Israeli general when asked if the IDF was the greatest army in the world. He replied"I don't know, we've only fought arabs".
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By JAMES FREEMAN
It's been a dreary week for economic news: slow job creation, falling home prices, lagging auto and consumer sales, and a sell-off in stocks. So it seems like a good moment to check in with one of Wall Street's leading perma-optimists, BlackRock Chief Equity Strategist Bob Doll, to see if he's still bullish on America.
To my considerable relief, he doesn't disappoint. "Credit markets are sound. Money growth is good," says Mr. Doll, whose optimism has been the right market call since March 9, 2009, when stocks hit their post-crisis lows. The Dow has since risen more than 85%, and Mr. Doll expects the slow economic expansion to continue.
As intriguing in this moment of U.S. pessimism is the 56-year-old uber-investor's long-term bullishness on American companies and U.S. competitiveness. "You could say we're the best house in a bad neighborhood," says the man who has spent 28 years managing money. "We have fewer problems and more solutions than Europe or Japan."
Mr. Doll is sitting in a conference room at one of BlackRock's two giant offices in midtown Manhattan. While his company remains obscure to most Americans, and has only existed since 1988, it is now the world's largest money manager.
Born as a subsidiary of the private equity firm Blackstone, the company went public in 1999 and after a series of mergers and acquisitions, BlackRock now keeps watch on more than $3.6 trillion of client money. Mr. Doll's job is to allocate almost $30 billion among shares of large U.S. corporations and to advise clients on the most compelling opportunities for equity investment.
Notably, his focus remains the United States, and he believes that the most important reason why America's house remains the nicest in the neighborhood of developed countries is that our family keeps getting bigger.
"Over the next 20 years, the U.S. work force is going to grow by 11%, Europe's going to fall by five, and Japan's going to fall by 17. This alone tells me the U.S. has a huge advantage over Europe and a bigger one over Japan for growth," he says. "And the reason for this is pretty simple. We have higher immigration than both of these, and we make more babies. We have a higher fertility rate. And they are the long-term determinants of population growth and therefore work force growth." Mr. Doll and his wife seem to be doing their part with three children.
But many Americans, whether they favor pundits on the right or the left, may have a hard time accepting that population growth and immigration are the keys to our prosperity. Mr. Doll explains the economics: "The long-term growth rate of any economy is the product of the change in the size of the work force multiplied by the productivity of the work force." Productivity is very hard to predict, he reports, but demographics is easy. "You count noses." And that tally shows a very healthy America.
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Christopher Serra
.But doesn't Mr. Doll smell trouble on productivity? It rose just 1.3% in the first quarter compared to the same quarter last year. He says that U.S. productivity is "OK and better than lots of other places." This is a recurring theme of our discussion— that America is the least worst among the major developed economies.
Mr. Doll's optimism comes despite his skepticism about the last several years of heavy government intervention in the economy. His team at BlackRock calculated that, at most, half of the 2009 stimulus program was "true stimulus" for the economy. What about the rest? "Call your congressman and find out where the money went." More than a few readers may be tempted to call BlackRock and ask how they concluded that even half of it was spent effectively.
What about the impact of ObamaCare, the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and the president's continuing advocacy of tax increases? "All three of them are retardants to growth," says Mr. Doll.
He also concedes that "we face formidable long-term structural problems that make the U.S. less attractive than it otherwise might be," and yet he has written in these pages about America remaining a "city upon a hill" in the vision of Puritan John Winthrop. Mr. Doll could be making the least inspiring case for American exceptionalism in the history of the republic. "You might say we win by default, which is not a fun way to win," he says.
But can we really win merely by staying ahead of Europe and Japan? So far the answer seems to be yes. People are invariably shocked when Mr. Doll tells them that in 1995 the U.S. produced roughly 25% of the world's goods and services and in 2010, after 15 years that included a tech bust, a terrorist attack and a housing bust that triggered a financial crisis, the U.S. was still producing that same 25% of global GDP.
How is this possible given the rapid rise of China and India? Mr. Doll says the increase in emerging markets' share of the world economy has come "at the expense of mostly Japan and a bit Europe. The U.S. has held its own, which I think is a statement of our ability to be productive in a tough world."
But an investor would still have more upside in developing countries than in the U.S., right? Mr. Doll says that if he were forced to lock up his money in one place for the next 10 or 20 years he would indeed select the developing world and specifically India over China.
China's population will grow only slightly faster than that of the U.S. between now and 2030, he says, whereas he expects India's population to increase 32%, suggesting robust GDP growth. "The one-child birth policy in China will eventually arrest the growth rate of China to a much smaller number."
But in the short run, Mr. Doll likes the U.S. equity market best of all and reports that this is where most of his personal investments are, largely in the funds he oversees. "The U.S. stock market and the U.S. economy are increasingly different animals. It used to be when U.S. economic growth went a certain direction, so did the stock market," because so much of the business done by these companies was domestic. But now 40% happens elsewhere. Mr. Doll estimates that, over the next five years, 70% of the incremental earnings growth of S&P 500 companies will come from outside the U.S.
Among the formidable U.S. companies that he thinks are attractively priced now are Applied Materials, which makes the machines that make computer chips, pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers, and Chevron. He also believes that Alcoa "fits the slowly expanding global economy," and he is "increasingly intrigued" by Microsoft, a "blue chip" tech company with a stagnant stock price.
Mr. Doll is less bullish on the future for U.S. jobs. "I hope the number is not as high as seven or eight [percent unemployment] but I think it's higher than five," he says. "Said differently, when I went to school, we studied that full employment was 3% unemployment and then I went into the work world and I never saw three. And I think with almost every passing cycle—for a lot of reasons, technology being cheaper and more reliable than most human beings, as an example—the structural unemployment rate slowly but surely has moved higher. And I think that continues. So I hope it's not seven or eight. I think it's a little lower than that, hopefully six or seven. . . . Sad but true. And that has political and social consequences that I don't think we even know what to do with yet."
Inflation will also be higher, though Mr. Doll doesn't expect the Fed to let it get out of hand. Regulation is still too much of a burden, especially on young companies trying to go public, he adds, and "We need a major overhaul of our tax system if we're going to create more incentives and more productivity."
But even with all our problems, he says, "I think the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the U.S." He argues that we are still the source of technological innovation and home to the greatest universities and the most creative businesses. He sees promising advances in health care and alternative energy technologies. By alternative he doesn't necessarily mean "green" energy, but simply new power sources given that he expects oil prices to keep rising.
Also, it should be noted that his outlook is premised on meaningful spending reductions in Washington. "I think we are moving in an austerity direction," he says. "Six months ago, no one had a plan that said, 'I'm going to be able to cut the deficit by X trillion over Y years." Now, with House passage of a bill by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and the looming vote on the nation's debt limit, he hopefully notes that all sides are at least talking about "trillions over years."
Mr. Doll's optimism—or, more accurately, his lack of pessimism—has at times gotten the best of him, as in 2008. "We turned slightly to the negative side of neutral, but I never said, 'Get out,'" he recalls. "The severity and rapidity of the problems was beyond belief."
Now in 2011, his views may not strike anyone as wildly optimistic. But on Wall Street, Mr. Doll's sobering catalog of U.S. weaknesses is what passes for bullishness. With unemployment hitting 9.1%, Main Street can hardly be any more cheerful.
All of which suggests a political opportunity for someone who can present a credible plan to return to low unemployment and robust economic growth. Optimism about the future is implicit in America's high birth rate. Pundits may continue to try to convince voters to accept a new normal, but Americans are probably aiming higher than the best house in a bad neighborhood.
Mr. Freeman is assistant editor of The Journal's editorial page.
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Bringing CCP's Michael Barone post from yesterday over here per Crafty's request, with my comments.
First I detest group politics,but here we go... I think my statement that Hispanics vote Dem only 60-40 was a rough, best case approximation, from a conservative point of view. This CCP/Dick Morris post (http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1736.msg42770#msg42770) says that in 2010 (a best case year) Hispanics voted Democrat by 58-37 From this post:(http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=943.msg39256#msg39256) Obama won Hispanics by 67% to 31% in 2008, a best case year for him. Obama's approval rating from Hispanics is (only) 13 points higher than the public at large.
CCP makes a valid point that illegals granted citizenship and voting rights with one party favoring and the other opposing will leaning much further than that (until they start either paying taxes or looking for work). Also these partial measures like a ban on deportations will affects families, friends and neighborhoods of existing voters.
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CCP: "Doug writes Hispanics vote 40/60 Rep/Dem. I find it hard to believe that most illegals, if had the chance to vote (some I bet do already) would vote Rep at a rate as high as 40% yet this from Barone-Rasmussen:"
****GOP Shouldn't Panic If Whites Become a Minority
A Commentary By Michael Barone
Monday, April 04, 2011 Email to a Friend ShareThisAdvertisement
Are whites on the verge of becoming a minority of the American population? That's what some analysts of the 2010 Census results claim. Many go on, sometimes with relish, to say that this spells electoral doom for the Republican Party.
I think the picture is more complicated than that. And that the demise of the Republican Party is no more foreordained than it was a century ago when Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants were pouring into the United States in proportions much greater than the Hispanic and Asian immigration of the past two decades.
The numbers do appear stark. The Census tells us that 16 percent of U.S. residents are Hispanic, up from 13 percent in 2000 and 9 percent in 1990, and that 5 percent are Asian, up from 4 percent in 2000. The percentage of blacks held steady at 13. Among children, the voters of tomorrow, those percentages are higher.
But it's a mistake to see blacks, Hispanics and Asians as a single "people of color" voting bloc. The 2010 exit poll shows that the Republican percentages in the vote for the U.S. House were 60 percent among whites, 9 percent among blacks, 38 percent among Hispanics and 40 percent among Asians.
Simple arithmetic tells you that Hispanics and Asians vote more like whites than like blacks. The picture is similar in the 2008 exit poll.
Moreover, while blacks vote similarly in just about every state, there is wide variation among Hispanics. In 2010 governor elections, Hispanics voted 31 percent Republican in California, 38 percent Republican in Texas and 50 percent Republican in Florida (where Cubans are no longer a majority of Hispanics).
As RealClearPolitics senior political analyst Sean Trende has written, Hispanics tend to vote 10 percent to 15 percent less Republican than whites of similar income and education levels. An increasingly Hispanic electorate puts Republicans at a disadvantage, but not an overwhelming one.
The same is true of Asians. In 2010, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid got 79 percent from Asians in Nevada, where many are Filipinos. But the Asians in Middlesex County, N.J., most of whom are from India, seem to have voted for Republican Gov. Chris Christie in 2009.
The 2010 Census tells something else that may prove important: There's been a slowdown of immigration since the recession began in 2007 and even some reverse migration. If you look at the Census results for Hispanic immigrant entry points -- East Los Angeles and Santa Ana, Calif., the east side of Houston, the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago -- you find that the Hispanic population has dropped sharply since 2000.
One reason is the business cycle. The 2000 Census was taken on April 1, 2000, less than a month after the peak of the tech boom. Unemployment was low, immigration was high, and entry-point houses and apartments were crammed with large families.
The 2010 Census was taken after two years of recession, when immigration had slackened off. We simply don't know whether this was just a temporary response to the business cycle or the beginning of a permanent decline in migration.
Past mass migrations, which most experts expected to continue indefinitely, in fact ended abruptly. Net Puerto Rican migration to New York City stopped in 1961, and the huge movement of Southern blacks to Northern cities ended in 1965. Those who extrapolate current trends far into the future end up being wrong sooner or later.
Finally there is an assumption -- which is particularly strong among those who expect a majority "people of color" electorate to put Democrats in power permanently -- that racial consciousness never changes. But sometimes it does.
American blacks do have common roots in slavery and segregation. But African immigrants don't share that heritage, and Hispanics come from many different countries and cultures (there are big regional differences just within Mexico). The Asian category includes anyone from Japan to Lebanon and in between.
Under the definitions in use in the America of a century ago, when Southern and Eastern European immigrants were not regarded as white, the United States became a majority non-white nation sometime in the 1950s. By today's definitions, we'll become majority non-white a few decades hence.
But that may not make for the vast cultural and political change some predict. Not if we assimilate newcomers, and if our two political parties adapt, as we and they have done in the past.
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By JONATHAN WEISMAN
WOODBRIDGE, Va.—The surging Hispanic population in several states that figure to be crucial to the outcome of next year's election is prompting an early scramble by both parties to influence Hispanic voters.
The trend is particularly important to President Barack Obama, who has seen his support among white voters sag, putting his hold on several swing states in danger. He is ramping up an urgent effort to win support from Latinos, while Republicans are trying to build on doubts among them about his stewardship of the economy.
In Florida, the nation's largest presidential swing state, the voting-age Hispanic population grew by nearly 250,000 people between 2008 and 2010, census data show. By contrast, the voting-age white population grew by 30,400.
Nevada added more than 44,000 voting-age Hispanics over the same period, more than double the increase of 18,000 voting-age whites. And in New Mexico, the voting-age Hispanic total rose by more than 36,000, outpacing the growth among whites of just over 19,000.
Mr. Obama won all three states in 2008—and two-thirds of Hispanic voters nationwide—but he's now facing headwinds. Hispanic unemployment stands at 11.3%, higher than the 9.1% rate for the nation as a whole. And the president has failed to deliver a promised overhaul of immigration laws that would include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
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Close.Some swing states added more white adults than Hispanic adults. But a meaningful rise in voting-age Hispanics also gives Mr. Obama an opportunity. He won North Carolina, for example, by more than 14,000 votes. About 54,400 additional voting-age Hispanics have come to the state between 2008 and 2010, census data show.
Mr. Obama's re-election campaign is starting a broad canvassing effort, reaching from traditional Hispanic communities to suburban areas where a Hispanic surge is relatively new. Hispanic-to-Hispanic phone banks are being set up in New Mexico and Nevada. Latino student outreach is also beginning.
From the White House, the president on Wednesday conducted an online roundtable on Hispanic issues. A day earlier, he spoke at a predominantly Hispanic high school in Denver.
Republicans aren't leaving the field open to the president. The first television ad of the presidential campaign from American Crossroads, a GOP-allied independent group, ran in Spanish and English in July, about the same time as Spanish-language radio ads from the Republican National Committee.
"I supported President Obama because he spoke so beautifully, but since then things have gone from bad to much worse," said a female character in the English version of the American Crossroads ad.
Mr. Obama implored Latinos at the Wednesday event to register and vote in order to claim their full voice in the political process. "We still have not seen the kinds of participation levels that are necessary to match up the numbers with actual political power," he said, in comments translated into Spanish.
America in 2010
See details on the concentration of Hispanics and other racial groups by county, nationwide.
.More photos and interactive graphics
.Polling explains why the push is coming so early in the president's re-election effort: Mr. Obama's support among whites has sunk. Only 35% of white adults approved of his job performance in August. Six months into his presidency, 49% had approved of his job performance, Wall Street Journal/NBC News surveys show. Hispanics view him more favorably: 57% approved of Mr. Obama in August, down from 71% in June 2009.
Here in Virginia, which Mr. Obama carried in 2008, two-thirds of white voters disapproved of his job performance in a recent poll. That is one reason that, in suburbs like this one, his re-election campaign is recruiting Latino neighborhood captains, canvassing coordinators, phone-bank hosts and data-management coordinators.
In Jill Borak's Woodbridge living room, Keisy Chavez, a Obama campaign Latino outreach coordinator, was training new recruit Chepita Jovel last week as the two worked their way down call sheets of Spanish-sounding surnames. Flipping between English and Spanish, they worked the phones and cajoled former volunteers to work once again for the president.
Related Article
For First Time, Largest Group of Poor Children Are Latino
.But generating enthusiasm could be a challenge, due to higher unemployment today and no overhaul of immigration laws for the president to campaign on. A less-ambitious effort to provide illegal immigrant children a route to citizenship through service and study also has foundered. "People are discouraged," said Ms. Chavez, a life-insurance saleswoman by day. "But you know, it's just like in sales. You say, 'I understand why you feel like that,' and you bring them along."
One potentially encouraging sign for Mr. Obama: The Census Bureau reported Wednesday that Latinos made up 7% of voters in 2010, the highest percentage for a nonpresidential election since the bureau began collecting such data.
At the same time, the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security has deported more than one million illegal immigrants in three years, putting him on pace to deport more in one term than George W. Bush did in two. That has done nothing to win over conservatives, but it has done much to sour many Latino voters.
"I think there is a Latino problem right now for the president," said Walter Tejada, a Democrat and member of the Arlington County board of supervisors and one of the most prominent Hispanic politicians in the area. "There's a disenchantment, and there's definitely an enthusiasm gap. It's very real."
Republicans are focusing on that in ads in key states. "The No. 1 issue facing Hispanics today is the number one issue facing everyone else—jobs and the economy," said Whit Ayres, who has been polling Hispanic voters for a Latino outreach effort by Resurgent Republic, another GOP group.
Mr. Obama may have one thing going for him: By huge majorities, Hispanic voters favor immigration bills that have languished since the Bush administration, and they largely blame the GOP for their failure, according to a new poll of Hispanic voters by Resurgent Republic.
Some Republicans see that as a serious problem. They argue that the GOP has a wide opening to win Hispanic votes in a year when economic issues are trumping all others, and they believe Latinos, who tend to be Catholic and include many small-business owners, should be as open to the party's low-tax, culturally conservative message as are other voters.
But many Latinos read the GOP's call for tough illegal immigration laws as an affront.
Some Republican campaign consultants have quietly hoped immigration issues would drop from the current presidential debate, allowing the economic argument to dominate.
But in recent days, the opposite has happened as Republican front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have sparred at debates over a law the Texas governor signed granting in-state university tuition to illegal immigrants.
Mr. Romney has called the law a magnet for illegal immigration. When Mr. Perry suggested at a recent debate that the law's critics had no heart, the backlash among conservative voters was harsh.
"The message from the Resurgent Republic poll for Republicans is to be extremely careful of their tone when talking about immigration," Mr. Ayres said. "It is critically important for Republicans discussing immigration reform not to come across as anti-Hispanic."
The Republican economic message doesn't appear to be resonating among Hispanics, either. Resurgent Republic asked Hispanics in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico whether they agreed that the best way to improve the economy was to increase government investment in job training, education and infrastructure, or by reining in government spending, lowering taxes and reducing excessive regulations.
In Colorado, a swing state, 56% sided with more government spending, as Mr. Obama has proposed, while 37% sided with less government, as Republicans propose. In Florida, the spread was 52% to 40%. In New Mexico, it was 59%-30%.
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http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/16/fewer-babies-for-better-or-worse/strong-marriages-strong-economies
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David P. Goldman, who blogs at the Asia Times as “Spengler,” has written an insightful book challenging the truisms of the commentariat on both the rise of Islam and the decline of the West: How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too)
History buffs will recognize that the pen name Spengler honours Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of Decline of the West. Goldman’s initial observations about the decline are most helpful but not unprecedented. From a much less religion-friendly perspective, American demographer Phillip Longman has been saying the same thing, and so has Canadian demographer David Foot.
It is what Goldman says about Islam that will surprise many readers: Islam is dying too because the Muslim birth rate - according to reliable statistics - has crashed. How badly?
Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts.
Whatever they believe about Islam, they have one or two children, but rarely three or four. Not enough to deliver their societies from demographic collapse, given the size of the families they came from. For example,
The average young Tunisian woman - like her Iranian or Turkish counterpart - grew up in a family of seven children, but will bear only one or two herself.
Education for women doesn’t in itself cause birth dearth, but abandonment of the land does. Muslims are not immune from the urbanization that turns children who were once a source of wealth into a major cost centre. Increasing numbers of people, there as here, hope that others will undertake the trouble.
But surely some Muslims have large families? Those who do live in areas that are considered backward, and they cannot indefinitely prop up an unsustainably low urban birth rate. But because demographic decline happened so quickly in Muslim societies, the Western problem of too few young people supporting too many seniors will be much more severe, especially in countries with few natural resources, like Turkey.
One might ask, why can’t Islamism reverse the decline by demanding that urban women do their duty? A look at Iran, Goldman says, reveals a related crisis of effective faith. For example, according to a suppressed report, more than 90 percent of Tehran prostitutes are said to have passed the university entrance exam, and 30 percent of them are studying. Their career choice is, they say, voluntary. Drug abuse among students is rampant, fuelled by cheap opium from neighbouring Afghanistan. The Islamist could exemplarily punish a few prostitutes or drug addicts - but thousands?
More generally, when modernization comes quickly, without warning, and from elsewhere, a declining birth rate can be accompanied by worse, not better, conditions for modern women. In Turkey, for example, only 22 percent of women sought employment outside the home in 2009, down from 34 percent in 1988 - despite their intervening fertility crash. About this, Goldman observes, “If we are surprised by Muslim demographics, it is because we have not listened carefully enough to what Muslims themselves have been trying to tell us.” Islamism is more of a last stand for many than a resurgent force, hence the glamour of suicide. If all this is correct, demographic collapse will increase rather than decrease the risk of terrorism, because “there is no such thing as rational self-interest for people who believe they have nothing to lose.”
Those inclined to dismiss Goldman’s contrarian analysis might point out that if there are few young people for the Islamist to recruit, there will be few suicide terrorists. Not necessarily; a culture’s suicidal resistance often increases at precisely the point where a huge conflict is irretrievably lost. This was true of the South in the closing days of the Civil War, and of Germany and Japan in World War II, for example. Many won’t be trying to win, only to inflict damage on the victor.
Compounding the problem is that Islam is - at present - much less well-adapted to political systems that produce stability in a modern environment. The rule of life among Islamists is authoritarianism in every facet of life. Authoritarianism results in either accepted oppression or revolt, but not the consensual stability that a modern society needs. And imams provide little guidance as to how to get there, because many see the very behaviours that hamper progress as ordained by Allah. For these reasons, Goldman thinks, the threat to the West from Islamism is generally overrated; internal demographic collapse is a much more serious threat. No civilization has ever survived a situation in which a small number of young adults must support a large number of retirees as well as raise children to support them.
Interestingly, he think that the United States has a much better chance of surviving the collapse than Europe or the Muslim world, for reasons we will explore in Part II next week.
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.
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The Earth at Population 7 Billion
The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the world’s 7 billionth person was born Oct. 31. Understanding demography is a core part of STRATFOR’s work, as it colors a great many factors, from whether a state can balance its budget to whether a state will be capable of defending itself.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the increase in population is putting pressure on the global ecosystem and threatening the balance of power in the world. As the story goes, the poorer states are breeding so rapidly that within a few generations they will overwhelm the West and Japan — assuming the environment survives the rising tide of people.
“So while the absolute population of the developed world will crest within the next generation, that of the world as a whole will level out and begin to decline sometime in the next two to three generations.”
That thinking obscures a far more complex reality. Four factors help properly analyze the impact of population growth. First, populations are indeed cresting in the developed world — and appear already to have done so in Germany and Japan. Because of large gains in life expectancy, these cresting populations are first aging. Third, while a senior citizen and an infant both count as a single person from a census point of view, only one of them can one day have children — in other words, aging is the last step before a population begins declining. The developed world is moving into an era of shrinking populations. And before anyone thinks that the masses of the developing world are about to take over, the demographic profiles of the major developing states are only three decades behind the developed world.
So while the absolute population of the developed world will crest within the next generation, that of the world as a whole will level out and begin to decline sometime in the next two to three generations.
This trend of aging, followed by shrinking populations, is already rewriting the geopolitical environment. A normal population structure is tilted toward the young: there are many babies, fewer children, still fewer young adults, and so on. Young adults support children, but they are at the low ebb of their earning potential. Young adults’ large numbers plus low earning power combine with their high living costs to make them debtors. Older adults have finished raising children, and their earning power is at its zenith: They are a society’s creditors. A typical population structure features fewer mature adults than young adults, which leads to weak capital supply but strong capital demand. Loans are expensive, borrowing is difficult and cost efficiency is of crucial importance. This was the normal state of affairs globally in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
The modern era’s trend of aging-but-not-yet-declining populations has changed all of these calculations. There are many more mature adults in all developing countries than there are young adults. Capital supply is robust as those mature workers save for their retirement and pay more taxes than when they were younger (or both). But there are fewer young families to absorb the available capital. In such a capital-rich environment, borrowing costs plummet, leaving substantial room to lower taxes. Economic growth greatly increases when money management becomes a booming industry as every saver looks for ways to earn returns on investments. Sectors become overinvested and bubbles form; volatility and financial crashes become more common.
Demography drove economies to this condition in the 1990s, when credit (and thus growth) increased. In the 2000s, mature workers produced a good deal of excess capital. The 2010s find the global economy correcting itself after 20 years of excess-capital-driven growth — at the same time as mature workers are retiring and leaving their capital-supplying role.
A darker period is likely to dawn by the 2020s. Most of those high-wage earners will have retired — they will no longer supply capital and instead will depend on the state to issue their pensions. The cost of capital will invert strongly. The generation born between 1964 and 1979 — characterized by its low numbers — will be responsible for supplying capital. Not only will they have to fund the younger generations, they also will have to support the pensions and geriatric-support programs created by their predecessors. Since the developing world’s aging process lags about 30 years behind that of the developed world, this same generation will act as the primary capital suppliers to the entire world.
“Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of population patterns is that the developed world will have a massive interest in attracting immigrants.”
The developing world started to age too late. Its countries will lack enough mature workers to generate the capital needed to replace that which can no longer be imported from the developed world. The developing world will experience the financial challenges of the developed world, without having built up the infrastructure and industrial base the developed world has had for three generations. Such capital scarcity threatens to halt growth across the poorer parts of the planet. It will also make for strange bedfellows: The only hope the developed world’s ’64-’79 generation will have to meet their bills is to import more taxpayers. Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of population patterns is that the developed world will have a massive interest in attracting immigrants.
The aforementioned analysis is what the picture will look like on a global scale — but with demography, every country and region in many ways constitutes a unique reality. The trends that shape demography are affected by geography and culture. The overarching trend is of a shrinking global population, but there are dozens of standalone stories where that trend is either bucked, magnified or otherwise interpreted through the lens of the locality. Here are five examples:
Russia’s population started shrinking some 20 years ago due to the influence of alcoholism, drug abuse and communicable diseases rather than due to having achieved affluence. That difference in causality whittled away the morale of Russia’s potential young parents so deeply that Russia now has more citizens in their 20s, 30s, even their 60s, than it has teenagers. Russian power may well be in sharp ascendance currently, but it is entirely likely that in about 10 years time, the Russians will lack the people they need to man a sizable army, or perhaps even to maintain a modern society.
India is the only major developing state that is still experiencing a normal population profile (in which there are more babies than children and more children than young adults, etc.). This could make India the world’s workforce, but the country probably will soon be the target of huge citizen-recruitment programs from the rest of the world. Unless India can make a significant leap in the quality of its mass education, the coming brain drain will deplete the country’s skilled labor.
China’s population stands at more than a billion, but after thirty years of the one-child policy and of population movements from rural to urban areas, the Chinese birthrate has fallen dramatically. Only Japan is aging faster than China. Even if STRATFOR is wrong and the Chinese economy does not collapse over the next few years, it will struggle mightily to survive the 2020s, when China faces sharp qualitative labor shortages. China’s economy depends on attractive labor costs — the looming bottoming out of the cheap, low-skilled labor pool could be a deathblow.
Brazil may not turn out as capital-starved as much of the developing world. The country’s demographic has not inverted, but merely slowed: its number of 20- and 30-year-olds is similar to its number of teenagers and children. In two decades, Brazil may have a population structure that makes it relatively capital rich (by the standards of the world in 2040). It could well become the only major developing state that can generate its own capital and not depend on the developed world’s shrinking capital supplies. And thanks to the local opportunities that local capital can create, it might avoid losing too much of its skilled labor to foreign recruitment.
The United States is the only developed state that still can claim a positive demographic profile, and this is before factoring in immigration. In the developed world, only New Zealand is younger than the United States, and the United States is the only developed state that has a young generation strong in numbers — those born between 1980 and 1999 are second in number only to the baby boomers, who are currently in the process of retiring. As such, the United States not only faces the least severe shift from capital excess to capital scarcity, it is also the only developed state that can hope to grow out of the current demographic period in anything less than sixty years. In the 2020s, the United States will have a good number of citizens in their 30s, who are capable of having children. Across Europe, the dominant generation at that time will consist of people in their 50s and 60s. America’s adjustment will still be difficult, but it alone among the major powers will still have excess capital and a younger generation capable of supporting its economic systems.
STRATFOR would like to extend its thanks to the fine people at the U.S. Census Bureau who collect, organize and share their statistics on global population. You can access their data here
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By E.S. BROWNING
Many older Americans fear they will be working well into their 60s because they didn't save enough to retire. Millions more wish they were that lucky: Without full-time jobs, they are short of money and afraid of what lies ahead.
Deborah Kallick was a professor of biomedical chemistry at the University of Minnesota until she ventured into the private sector in 2000 with a job in genome research. She is now one of more than four million Americans aged 55 to 64 who can't find full-time work. That number has nearly doubled in five years, according to U.S. Department of Labor figures in October.
Ms. Kallick, 60 years old, has been unemployed since 2007 and lives in the Northern California home of an ex-boyfriend. She has run out of unemployment insurance, used up most of her retirement savings and is indebted to relatives and credit-card companies.
A good job could settle her accounts, she said. Until then, Ms. Kallick relies on generosity, occasional consulting work and the sale of sweaters, purses and other possessions on eBay.
"It is very hard to work through this and learn to be calm and happy day to day," said Ms. Kallick, who never married. "It has taken a lot of strength and courage to learn to do that."
Older Baby Boomers are trying to postpone retirement, as many find their spending habits far outpaced their thrift. With U.S. unemployment at 8.6%, and much higher among people in their teens and 20s, younger members of the labor pool accuse Boomers of refusing to gracefully exit the workplace.
But their long-held grip is slipping, as employers look past older Americans to younger, cheaper workers.
The Labor Department counts people as unemployed only if they have looked for a job in the previous month. By that definition, 6.5% of workers aged 55 to 64 were unemployed in October, below the national average but more than twice the jobless rate for the group five years earlier.
Taking into account the number of older people who want full-time work but are unemployed, working part-time or need a job but have quit looking, the percentage jumps to 17.4%, or 4.3 million Americans ages 55 to 64, according to the government data. The number has grown from 2.4 million in October 2006.
This group without full-time work now accounts for more than one in six older Americans seeking positions.
In some ways, older people are doing better than everyone else: Among all U.S. workers, 20% are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs. But older people have far less time to rebuild savings.
"This is new. It is different. It is worse than we have experienced before and it is very widespread," said Carl Van Horn, head of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. "It is going to get worse. You are going to have a higher level of poverty among older Americans."
Older people have more trouble finding new jobs. Among unemployed workers older than 55, more than half have been looking for more than two years, compared with 31% of younger workers, according to the Heldrich Center. Among older workers who found a new job, 72% took a pay cut, often a big one, the Rutgers data show.
The problem has been building for decades: Inflation-adjusted, middle-class incomes have stagnated in parallel with a free-spending culture of indebtedness that has left many Americans with too little saved. Over the same time, many U.S. companies cut pensions and shifted to less-generous retirement-savings plans such as 401(k) accounts that have stagnated or diminished in the market tumult of past years.
Older families aren't just failing to save, they are increasingly draining accounts that were supposed to help finance retirement.
The median household headed by someone aged 55 to 64 has $87,200 in retirement accounts and other financial assets, according to Strategic Business Insights' MacroMonitor database. If each of the 4.3 million unemployed or underemployed people in this age group runs through half the family savings, that will, in theory, total $188 billion in lost retirement money.
The typical retirement-age household has too little saved to maintain its standard of living in retirement, according to actuarial and Federal Reserve data.
Financial planners often advise that retirement resources be large enough to provide 85% of a person's working income. Median households headed by a person aged 60 to 62 with a 401(k) account have saved less than one-quarter of what is needed in that account to live as well in retirement, according to Fed data analyzed for The Wall Street Journal by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
The trouble spreads across generations. Older people hang on to jobs or, out of desperation, take lower-level jobs for which they are over-qualified. Either way, they displace younger workers.
In the past, older people who lost jobs often gave up and retired. No longer. In October, two-thirds of people aged 55 to 64 had jobs or wanted them, up from 59% in 1994, according to Labor Department data.
At an age when they should be generating peak incomes and savings, many unemployed and underemployed Americans are applying for early Social Security benefits and spending what's left in their retirement accounts.
Kathi Paladie, 64 years old, lost her job as an executive assistant at a mortgage company in Tacoma, Wash., six years ago. She hasn't found full-time work since but works occasionally as a phone interviewer for a political survey firm.
Her retirement savings is spent, and she said her monthly $800 Social Security checks, $100-a-week unemployment benefits and occasional paychecks barely cover expenses.
"If I don't buy a lot of groceries, then I am OK," said Ms. Paladie, who is divorced. "I do a lot of puzzles sitting here and watching TV. And I play with my bird. And that's about it."
She rarely goes out, she said, "but I've got a clean house." To save money, she sometimes eats Frosted Flakes for dinner. She shares them with her African Grey parrot, Muffin, who also likes the sweetened cereal.
Ms. Paladie hasn't been to the doctor for five years, she said. She frets about paying rent after her unemployment benefits run out next year. Her daughter lives nearby but doesn't have the room for her, Ms. Paladie said.
"It is kind of a standing joke," she said, "that if this fails, that I can always move in with them and sleep in the garage."
The problem of older, out-of-work Americans extends beyond individuals to the U.S. economy. Among jobless people aged 55 to 64 who want to work, lost annual wages exceed an estimated $100 billion, based on the median income of this age group.
Retirement savings losses exceed $10 billion a year, assuming contribution rates of 8% for employees and 2% for employers. Even if only half the people were working, the economy would gain $50 billion a year in income and another $5 billion in retirement savings.
That doesn't count the lost wages of people who have taken salary cuts to get new jobs.
Richard Foster, 59 years old, a former computer programmer and software analyst in Arvada, Colo., near Denver, has been unemployed several times over the past decade. The older he gets, the more trouble he has finding jobs in computer mainframes, his specialty, amid changing technologies. And the longer his absence from programming, the harder it is to attract recruiters, who prefer people with experience in the past six months, Mr. Foster said.
These days, he works on the telephone nearly full-time as a customer-service representative. His employer grades him on how fast he finishes each call and how customers rate his service. Mr. Foster recently contracted Bell's palsy, a temporary facial paralysis thought to be stress-related.
The work pays a lot better than a previous job, delivery driver for a dry cleaner. Still, Mr. Foster said, it pays 40% less than what he earned as a programmer at the University of Colorado Hospital, a job he lost in a restructuring that kept more tenured employees.
Mr. Foster's wife, Tina, has complications from a detached retina, which keeps her from working. Her treatment is only partially paid for by his medical plan, which classified Ms. Foster's eye problem as a pre-existing condition.
He has a retirement-savings plan at his new employer, he said, but it's hard to save, given the couple's struggle "to make ends meet day to day." He is putting off dental work, for example, to save money.
While out of work, Mr. Foster said, he sometimes depended on food banks. He filed for personal bankruptcy in 2003. He and his wife got a break recently: his wife's sister and her husband helped them purchase a home. Mortgage payments to his in-laws are less than his rent. Retirement? He said he has no idea when.
Mr. Foster's worries aren't unusual. More than two-thirds of unemployed people older than 50 report extreme stress, trouble sleeping or family strains, according to surveys by the Heldrich Center at Rutgers. More than 60% of respondents said they didn't expect to hold another full-time job in their field and a similar percentage said they were pessimistic about finding any job soon. One-third of those over 55 reported selling possessions to stay afloat.
In another unfortunate consequence, the younger people are when they apply for Social Security retirement benefits, the lower their monthly checks for the rest of their lives. Two-thirds of Americans older than 50 expect to file for the benefits earlier than they would prefer, or already have done so, according to the Rutgers survey.
"People are taking in boarders, they are moving in with their kids, selling their homes for the cash that they can live on," said Abby Snay, executive director in San Francisco for JVS, a community agency that teaches work skills.
Although her agency has long focused on young people, the fastest-growing client group is closer to retirement age. Before the recession, only 11% of her clients were older than 55; now, it is 17%.
"We are seeing people in a panic, in survival mode," she said. "They are about to finish their financial assets and all they have after that is their retirement funds. They are trying to figure out some kind of bridge so they won't have to pay an early withdrawal fee for their retirement incomes."
Ms. Snay has even seen former donors return as clients. "There is a level of shame and humiliation," she said, "and, 'What have I done wrong?' "
She recently offered older clients a workshop on the website LinkedIn. She recalled some people said, "'If I put up a picture, no one will hire me.'"
Her response: "We advise people to put up a photo, put their best foot forward."
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204883304577219182393755006.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Columnist Doug Saunders in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb. 11:
The world is on the threshold of what might be called "peak people." The world's supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking, causing a shift from surplus to scarcity. As with "peak oil" theories—which hold that declining petroleum supplies will trigger global economic instability—the claims of the doomsayers are too hyperbolic and hysterical. These are not existential threats but rather policy challenges. That said, they're very big policy challenges. . . .
About 11% of the world's people are over 60 at the moment. In the next 25 years that will double, to almost a fifth, and one in six of those people will be over 80, according to a forthcoming book, "Global Aging in the 21st Century," by sociologists Susan McDaniel of the University of Lethbridge and Zachary Zimmer of the University of California.
While this is affecting every country and region—even sub-Saharan Africa is now seeing a very fast rise in its proportion of seniors—some countries are being hit very hard. While 12 per cent of Chinese are now over 60, in two decades, there will be more than 28 per cent. Brazil faces a similar blow. It will be very difficult for countries that are only just emerging from poverty to suddenly face huge elder-care costs.
Peak people will be an age when jobs compete for workers rather than vice versa. The cheapest labour will vanish. We're already seeing this: Because China is aging very fast, its dwindling working-age population is turning down the lowest-paid jobs and pushing up the minimum wage sharply, as well as the once-minimal costs of social services: Stuff from China will stop being cheap, because the Chinese aren't young.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204795304577223632111866416.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLETopStories
By KAREN DAMATO
If you're a baby boomer, you've got a big problem when it comes to the investment returns you can expect in retirement: It's the sheer number of other boomers who are also getting ready to leave the workplace and rely on their portfolios to help pay the bills.
That's the depressing conclusion Robert D. Arnott, a portfolio manager, asset-management executive and inveterate researcher, has come to in more than 20 years of studying demographic trends and financial-market results.
The problem in a nutshell: The ratio of retirees to active workers in the U.S. will balloon. As retirees sell stocks and then bonds to support themselves, there will be fewer younger investors to buy those securities, keeping a lid on prices. Meanwhile, strong demand from boomers and a limited supply of workers will boost the prices of goods and services the boomers need.
CONTINUED
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Written with the values for which POTH is famous
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120517
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http://businessjournal.gallup.com/content/155510/Live-2032.aspx?utm_source=email&utm_medium=072012&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=newsletter
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http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/11/the-real-class-warfare-baby-boomers-vs-y
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http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/07/housing-headwinds-us-birthrate-lowest.html
Housing Headwinds: US Birthrate Lowest in 25 Years as Twenty-Somethings Postpone Having Babies
Boomer demographics and postponement of marriage on account of student debt and poor finances are two of the key reasons that I long-ago stated the housing recovery would be slow for a decade.
Declining birthrates now show that is indeed what is happening.
First, please consider a short snip from my July 25 post "Actual" New Home Sales First 6 Months of 2012 vs. Prior Years; Reflections on the Housing Recovery
Reflections on the Housing Recovery
Even with today's reported decline, new home sales have likely bottomed on an annual, cumulative-total basis.
However, don't expect much in terms of recovery.
Debt overhang is immense, and student debt is particularly problematic. Lack of jobs coupled with high student debt is capping family formation. Kids out of college are deep in debt and holding off getting married, starting families, and therefore buying houses.
Moreover, home sizes will trend lower and price recovery will be anemic because of boomer demographics. Retired boomers looking to downsize have few buyers able or willing to buy.
Bank-owned real estate (REOs) and shadow inventory are hugely underestimated. That too will pressure prices and sales.
The good news is home sales will add to GDP.
The more realistic news is structural headwinds are immense, demographics are poor, and job prospects for college graduates are poor. The bottom in new home sales may be in, just don't expect anything close to a normal housing-led recovery, because it's not going to happen.
Twenty-Somethings Postpone Having Babies
USA Today picked up on that theme in their article Americans put off having babies amid poor economy
Twenty-somethings who postponed having babies because of the poor economy are still hesitant to jump in to parenthood — an unexpected consequence that has dropped the USA's birthrate to its lowest point in 25 years.
As the economy tanked, the average number of births per woman fell 12% from a peak of 2.12 in 2007. Demographic Intelligence projects the rate to hit 1.87 this year and 1.86 next year — the lowest since 1987.
The less-educated and Hispanics have experienced the biggest birthrate decline while the share of U.S. births to college-educated, non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans has grown.
The effect of this economic slump on birthrates has been more rapid and long-lasting than any downturn since the Great Depression.
Many young adults are unemployed, carrying big student loan debt and often forced to move back in with their parents — factors that may make them think twice about starting a family.
"The more you delay it, the more you delay the possibility of a second or third child," says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. "This is probably a long-term trend that is exacerbated by the recession but also by the general hollowing out of middle-class jobs. There's a growing sense that college is prohibitively expensive, and yet your kids can't make it without a college degree," so many women may decide to have just one child.
Unexpected by Whom?
I am amused by the phrase "unexpected consequence" in the opening paragraph of the above article. I have to ask "unexpected by whom?"
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/07/housing-headwinds-us-birthrate-lowest.html#KqgFKZSPGagByIEE.99
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/life-expectancy-for-less-educated-whites-in-us-is-shrinking.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120921
Since 1990 the average life span for uneducated whites has contracted five years :-o
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I'm used to seeing the birth rate reported as a number something like 2.1 (the number for stable population), not the numbers being reported here. Can someone explain, translate the numbers here?
U.S. Fertility Rate Hits Lowest Level on Record.
By Conor Dougherty
Last year the U.S. fertility rate fell to the lowest level since the government began keeping track of the data, the latest evidence that the recession and slow recovery has markedly altered plans for new children, according to this report released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Getty ImagesThe overall fertility rate for women in the U.S. — defined as the number of newborns per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — was 63.2 last year, down from 64.1 in 2010 and the lowest rate since the government started collecting these statistics in 1920.
Ken Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, notes that similar fertility drops occurred during the Great Depression — and never recovered. “The young women never made up for the births that they didn’t have,” he said.
Much of the delay in child-bearing has occurred among younger women, probably because they have more leeway in delaying their families than women who are closing in on the end of their fertility window. The most startling example: Hispanic women between 20 and 24 saw their fertility rate drop to 115 last year from 165 in 2007. White women between 20 and 24 saw their rate fall to 72 from 85 over the same period.
Meantime, women of all races between 35 and 39 have seen their fertility rate barely budge: To 47.2 in 2011 from 47.6 in 2007
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Summary
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Two elderly women in Berlin on Sept. 18
Germany and Europe face a shrinking, aging population. To mitigate the population decline over the coming decades, Germany will try to attract foreign labor, and to address the population aging, it will attempt to reform its social security system. Both efforts will lead to tensions within German society. As it struggles to maintain a productive labor force, Germany also will likely become a less relevant source of capital in the coming decades, which could weaken its position in Europe. Based on their population growth, countries like France, the United Kingdom and Turkey will likely see their positions strengthen within Europe.
Analysis
Compared to 1960, around half as many children are born in Germany every year, while life expectancy has increased by a decade. The Federal Statistical Office of Germany reports that Germany's population will decrease from the current 82 million to around 65 million by 2060, assuming life expectancy increases by eight years, the birth rate stays at 1.4 children per woman and Germany experiences net immigration of 100,000 per year.
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On top of the population decline, Germany's aging population will change the structure of the labor force. In 2010, the number of people between 20 and 65 years old was around 50 million. The Federal Statistical Office expects the population of this age group to decline to between 33 million and 36 million by 2060, when over half of Germany's population will be older than 51. If Germany wants to keep its labor force at a constant size, the retirement age will have to be increased from 65 to 71. Currently Germany plans to gradually increase it to 67 by 2030.
Apart from saving for their own retirement, which already is a prominent trend among Germans, the younger generations will also have to carry the social security system that supports the aging population. Future German governments will face the challenges of maintaining labor productivity in an aging population, getting the public to approve changes to social security systems and ensuring cohesion between generations that can maintain the pension system.
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Encouraging immigration is a promising way for Germany to counter population decline. However, even if Germany had net immigration of between 150,000 and 200,000 per year, the population would still decline to 70 million by 2060. Since reunification, Germany has seen large fluctuations in immigration. Changes in immigration laws, EU expansion and economic stability in Germany all contributed to these fluctuations. However, immigration will probably not be able to offset the consequences of low birth rates, especially considering the general population decline in Europe, which would be the origin of most of Germany's future immigrants since cultural and political barriers will limit immigration from outside Europe. Recruiting labor from outside of Europe will be especially difficult since the country does not have any cultural ties with former colonies that can attract people from outside the continent who speak the local language, the way that France or the United Kingdom do.
Though immigration may not be able to compensate for the declining birth rate, Germany will remain a prominent destination for immigrants due to its level of development, and it will likely try to increase its attractiveness by easing entry requirements as it has done in the past. While recovering from World War II, Germany signed bilateral agreements with countries like Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey to attract foreign labor. Turkey's population is expected to grow over the next few decades and to even outgrow France and the United Kingdom, so Turkey will probably remain an important source of labor for Germany.
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Also, workers from Russia could play a more prominent role in Germany, even though Russia faces its own demographic challenges. This would require a strategic partnership between the two countries since Moscow will likely try to strengthen its domestic industries and keep its people employed in Russia. Similarly, other European countries facing a declining labor force will likely resist the outflow of workers, potentially leading to tensions among the countries that currently allow free labor mobility within Europe.
The demographic changes will not have an immediate effect on Germany's economic position. Typically, people between 30 and 60 have the highest savings rate, and a large proportion of Germany's population is between the ages of 40 and 60. Also, Germany is currently the third-largest exporter in the world and is criticized for running persistent trade surpluses, which aggravates the trade imbalances within Europe. A combination of trade surpluses and a high savings rate has helped Germany establish its role as the most important European creditor. In 2011, only six EU countries, including Germany, had positive net international investment positions, meaning their foreign asset holdings were larger than the liabilities held by foreigners. In Europe's current debt crisis, Germany is considered the most important creditor, providing around one-third of the financial aid that the eurozone gives to struggling countries. This gives Germany important leverage in influencing the struggling countries' reform efforts.
In the long term, Germany's demographic outlook will challenge its trade surplus and position as creditor. A study by the Center for European Economic Research showed that Germany would not have a trade surplus by around 2030 due to decreased exports (resulting from lower productivity) and growing imports by retirees. Further, the study expects the saving rates to drop. Since the German population will decline, less investment will be required, but the study claims that the drop in savings will be greater than the drop in investment required, so Germany would become a capital importer by around 2030.
Japan has an aging population but is also the largest international creditor, taking the net international investment position as the benchmark. This shows that a country does not necessarily have to become a capital importer because of demographic change as long as domestic savings rates are high.
Germany currently has one of the highest household savings rates in Europe and therefore could follow in Japan's footsteps. However, it is unlikely that this savings rate will stay as high, since empirical studies show that Germans, like most people, decrease their savings rate as they age. With an overall declining and aging population it is likely that savings will decrease -- especially since there will be less young people generating the capital to support the social security system.
This will have wider implications for Europe since Germany is currently its largest economy and an important source of capital and therefore able to exert power on the continent. As Germany's position weakens over the coming decades other countries with more favorable demographic trends like France, the United Kingdom and Turkey will likely see their position strengthen and eventually challenge Germany's power in Europe.
Read more: Germany's Demographic Challenges | Stratfor
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Juan Williams: Obama's Daunting Demographic Message for the GOP
Nationwide during the past four years, four million Latino voters have been added to the polls..
By JUAN WILLIAMS
The critical political message from President Obama's re-election victory Tuesday is that he cemented a new coalition of Democrats, led by the Latino vote, which threatens to reduce Republicans to an afterthought in future national elections.
Yes, Mr. Obama won with the same group of voters—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, young people and educated women—that brought him to power in 2008. But when that group came together four years ago it was largely viewed as a phenomenon created by the historic, rock-star aura surrounding the first African-American presidential candidate. Yet that same coalition—in greater numbers and making up a larger percentage of the electorate—went to the polls from Florida to California again on Tuesday, and it delivered the president a second term.
Some Republicans had mocked pre-election polls that gave Democrats an advantage in voter turnout models because they doubted that a president stuck with approval ratings below 50% and unemployment just below 8% could recreate the enthusiasm among younger, female and minority voters.
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But those voters did go to the polls this week and they were joined by more people who fit their profile. Since 2008 more than 10 million new voters have registered, and young people, many of them Latinos, made up the bulk of those voters. In battleground states of Florida, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada there is no question, based on exit-poll surveys, that Latinos made the difference for the president.
Latinos increased their percentage of the electorate to 10% in this race from 9% in 2008. In Florida, for example, the number of registered Hispanic voters in the state grew by nearly 200,000 in the past four years. Nationwide during that period, four million registered Latino voters were added to the polls. In the 2008 election, Latinos nationwide gave Mr. Obama 67% of their vote; that rose to 71% on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, black voters turned out at the same 13% level of the overall vote as in 2008, while women voters showed a slight increase to 54% from 53%. Low-income voters, defined as people earning less than $50,000, also increased their turnout in this election, rising to 41% of the vote from 38% in '08. The president won 55% of all female voters, regardless of race or income level, in this election, and 60% of all low-income voters. And young voters increased their presence at the polls to 19% on Tuesday from 18% four years ago.
The percentage of white voters this year dropped to 72% from 74% in 2008. In 1992, white voters made up 87% of the electorate. In every presidential election since then, their share of the vote has dropped by between two and four percentage points. This year, 43% of white voters were over 45, 14% of them over age 65. Mitt Romney won the white vote 59% to 39%, the biggest share for a Republican since 1988—and it was still not enough to put him in the White House. He won the white-male vote by a whopping 27 points. But white men made up only 34% of all voters. In 1976, by contrast, they were 46%. White women went for Mr. Romney by a smaller but still considerable margin, 56% to 42%.
These numbers and the persistence of this new Democratic coalition present a threat to the future of the GOP, which is becoming the party of a declining number of older, white voters geographically centered in the South and in small towns and rural communities.
These factors have now combined to give Democrats the popular-vote victory in five of the last six presidential elections.
American history has shown that as the demographic composition of the country changes—socially, economically, ethnically—political parties must adapt if their principles are to survive.
The first American political party, the Federalists, became overly dependent on a small, wealthy class of political elites based in the Northeast. As the nation expanded, they were eventually overtaken by the more populist Democratic-Republicans with a strong base in the growing American South.
Similarly, before the Civil War, the Whigs were a major political party based in the North who opposed Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party. Abraham Lincoln began his career as a Whig. They joined the new Republican Party and strengthened the cause of abolition.
After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Southern Democrats, known as the Dixiecrats, left their party for the Republican Party. They helped to transform the South from a reliably Democratic to a GOP stronghold, giving us Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush.
Now the cycles of history have turned against the GOP. The 2008 and 2012 Obama coalitions are no longer the exception to electoral politics. They are the new rule.
Demography is political destiny and today Democrats have the numbers to prove it.
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¡Estimados Republicanos!
The GOP's immigration and Hispanic debacles..
Article Video Comments (10) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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In 2004, George W. Bush—an immigration-friendly Republican who spoke semi-passable Spanish—won re-election with about 40% of the Hispanic vote. This year, immigration hardliner Mitt Romney got about 27% of the Hispanic vote, according to the main exit poll—four points fewer than John McCain in 2008.
Had Mr. Romney matched Mr. Bush's Hispanic percentage, he could have netted an additional million votes or more, or nearly half of Barack Obama's popular margin on Tuesday. Those votes might have made a difference in states with large Hispanic populations such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and even Virginia, all of which Mr. Bush won and Mr. Romney lost.
That's something broken-hearted GOP voters should ponder as they try to make sense of their defeat. There are plenty of reasons Mr. Romney came up short, and yes, Hispanics are not single-issue voters. But the antagonistic attitude that the GOP too often exhibits toward America's fastest-growing demographic group on immigration policy goes far to explain Tuesday's result.
Related Video
Hoover Institution research fellow Bill Whalen on whether Mitt Romney lost because Republicans have turned off minorities. Photos: Associated Press
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.It's also so unnecessary. Immigrants should be a natural GOP constituency. Newcomers to the U.S.—legal or illegal—tend to be aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency, and they are cultural conservatives. They are not the 47%. Republicans are also supposed to be the folks who have figured out the law of unintended consequences, such as that imposing ever-tighter border controls discourages the millions of illegal immigrants living in this country from returning home.
We have done our best over the years to explain such points, to which we would add that the free movement of labor is a central component of economic growth. Yet it has become near-orthodoxy among many conservatives to denounce every attempt at immigration reform as a form of "amnesty"—now as much a devil word on the right as "vouchers" are on the left.
We understand the law-and-order issues at stake, particularly along the border, as well as questions of fairness in allowing illegals to jump the immigration queue. But the right response isn't mass deportation—as politically infeasible as it is morally repulsive. It's a rational, humane, bipartisan reform that broadens the avenues to legal immigration, both for those abroad and those already here.
Mr. Obama created a potentially fruitful opening to the GOP when he failed to do anything of the sort legislatively in his first term—a failure for which he was repeatedly scored in his September interview with Univision. A nimble GOP adversary might have seized the opportunity to present himself as the real immigration reformer.
But not Mr. Romney, who often pandered to his party's nativist wing (especially after Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the primaries), even endorsing what he called "self-deportation." That may have endeared him to one or two radio talk show hosts, but it proved a disaster on Tuesday.
And not only with Hispanics: Exit polls show that Asian-Americans went for the President over Mr. Romney by a whopping 73%-26%, an 11-point improvement over Mr. Obama's margin in 2008. How many other non-white groups can the GOP lose and still consider itself a national party?
No doubt this editorial will provoke letters denouncing us for being soft on the issue. Now is an opportune time to ask those disapproving readers how many more Tuesdays like this one they'd care to repeat?
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Note back to Juan Williams, it isn't about the GOP, it's about the direction of the country. Hispanics, African Americans, gays, Jews, Asian Americans and women will need to change the economic agenda inside the Democratic party or live forever poor and in debt if they are too racist, sexist or xenophobic to sit with Republicans IMHO. The GOP already reached out.
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A steep decline in births among immigrant women hard hit by the recent recession is the driving force behind the record low U.S. birthrate, according to the Pew Research Center.
The annual number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 dropped 8% in the U.S. from 2007 to 2010 to 64 births per 1,000, according to a report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew center. The U.S. birthrate peaked during the baby boom, at 122.7 in 1957.
Immigrant women, both legal and illegal, still have a higher birthrate than the U.S. population as a whole. Yet the rate for foreign-born women dropped 14% between 2007 and 2010, to 87.8 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, compared with a 6% decline for U.S.-born women, to 58.9 births. The birthrate plunged 19% for immigrants of Hispanic origin during that period; among Mexicans, the largest group among Hispanics, the rate plunged 23%.
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Close."Latinos have been hit particularly hard by the recession, and the downturn in births is especially sharp for immigrants," said D'Vera Cohn, co-author of the Pew study, which is based on analysis of data from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.
In addition to economic conditions, the U.S. birthrate has been affected by a slowdown in new arrivals. Immigration from Mexico, the biggest source country, reached a net zero in 2010, with as many Mexicans returning to Mexico as entering the U.S., according to Pew.
Preliminary data from the National Center for Health Statistics show the overall birthrate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000. However, there is no breakdown yet available on immigrants and U.S.-born mothers. Pew researchers say the pattern observed through 2010 is unlikely to have changed.
The U.S. birthrate has declined during major economic crises in the past, including the Great Depression in the 1930s and the oil shock of the 1970s. Birthrates, which have reliable records dating back to 1920, have historically bounced back after economic conditions improved.
Over the long term, nations tend to see their birthrates decline as they become more prosperous, a trend that can threaten that prosperity. When low fertility is coupled with low mortality, the result is an aging society with a high proportion of elderly people and relatively fewer workers to support them, a situation that Japan and many European countries face. Overall U.S. fertility has remained around the replacement level, owing to the large number of immigrants it attracts.
The total fertility rate in 2012 is estimated at 1.39 children per woman in Japan and 1.40 in Italy, compared with 2.06 in the U.S., according to the Central Intelligence Agency, which compiles world data.
Immigration has propelled demographic changes in the U.S. for several decades, so any sustained decline in birthrates among immigrants could affect the pace of growth of the minority population. The U.S. population is poised to reach "majority-minority" status, when less than half of the population is white, around 2040, demographers say.
The year 2007 marked a record number of births in the U.S.—4,316,233. But there have been fewer births since the onset of the recession, even as the overall population continues to grow because of immigration. From 2007 to 2010, the number of births fell by more than 300,000, with immigrant women accounting for more than 40% of that decline, according to the Pew report.
Only 13% of all U.S. residents are immigrants. But they make up a disproportionate share of all births because immigrant women are more likely than others to be in their prime childbearing years. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants of childbearing age jumped 85%, while the number of native-born women of childbearing age shrank 1%.
The decline in birthrates among immigrants has narrowed the gap between them and native-born Americans in the past two decades. In 1990, the birthrate for immigrants was 70% higher than for U.S.-born women. In 2010, it was only 49% higher.
"Immigrants have shaped [population] patterns recently by driving down births, and in the long term by offsetting declines in births to women born in the U.S.," said Ms. Cohn of Pew.
Carmen Ozorio, a 41-year-old Guatemalan immigrant, has had only one child since immigrating to the U.S. more than a decade ago. The Los Angeles housekeeper thought she would have another child, but then her partner's work hours at a factory were cut as the economy soured. "The situation is too difficult to have more children," said Ms. Ozorio, whose son is 9.
More factors than immediate economic conditions influence childbearing decisions in the long run, including women's employment, access to contraception and age of marriage. In Mexico, home to the majority of U.S. immigrants, the fertility rate has been steadily declining.
Even with the recent decline, immigrants in the U.S. will continue to propel population growth. According to Pew projections, immigrants and their descendants will account for most of the U.S. population growth by midcentury.
Write to Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com
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In the last few yrs. I noticed less of a revolving door of very short latinos going to and from the OB floor at the hospital in here in town where there is a huge community of illegals. I am not making it up that every time I got on the elevator we would stop on the obstetrics floor.
I know I am just racist. :roll: One is not allowed to state the obvious.
Legal no problem. Illegal a problem.
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Reported in POTH fashion, the decline of birth rates in the US:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/health/us-birthrate-dips-especially-for-hispanics.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130101&_r=0
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"Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?"
http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life
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"Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?"
http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life
USA no. 16, right behind Europe and Asia - with the power IMO to move back up to no. 1 if only we wanted to.
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"Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?"
http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life
USA no. 16, right behind Europe and Asia - with the power IMO to move back up to no. 1 if only we wanted to.
Not without defaulting first. We are past the point where we can grow the economy to dig us out.
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Declining migration and falling birthrates have led to a drop in the number of children in California just as baby boomers reach retirement, creating an economic and demographic challenge for the nation's most populous state.
"After decades of burgeoning population and economic growth…the state now faces a very different prospect," said a report released Tuesday by the University of Southern California and the Lucile Packard Foundation. The report, "California's Diminishing Resource: Children," analyzed data from the 2010 census and the American Community Survey to conclude that the trend marks a "historic transition" for the state.
In 1970, six years after the end of the baby boom, children made up more than one-third of California's population. By 2030, they will account for just one-fifth, according to projections by lead author Dowell Myers, a USC demographer. "We have a massive replacement problem statewide," Mr. Myers said in an interview.
California's demographic shift mirrors that of many Northeast and Midwest states, including New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan, where the percentage of children fell even more sharply from 2000 to 2010. But unlike those states, California has always relied on migrants from other states and abroad to fuel its economy, and the change represents a new reality for the Golden State.
Ever since the Gold Rush, the majority of Californians has been born elsewhere. That pattern began to change in the 1990s, when migrants were attracted by the lower cost of living and rapid growth in other Western and Southern states. Then, the housing bust and 2008 financial crisis hit California harder than most states. By 2010, more than half of all adults 25 to 34 years old were born in California.
At the same time, the state's birthrate fell to 1.94 children per woman in 2010, below the replacement level of 2.1 children, according to the study. California's rate is lower than the overall U.S. rate of 2.06 children in 2012, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The shrinking pool of youngsters coincides with a bulging population of older people. Nationally, "we are approaching a period of very large retirement, something like two million people a year for the next 20 years," said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, an independent research group.
In 1970, California averaged 21 seniors for every 100 working-age adults. By 2030, that ratio is expected to rise to 36 seniors per 100 working-age adults, according to the report. That retirement wave will place "massive pressure on institutions and programs for an aging population," the report said.
Today's children will be the workers who pay for those programs and who take jobs vacated by boomers in the state's high-technology hub in Silicon Valley, its entertainment industry in Los Angeles and its farm belt in the Central Valley.
"Unless the birthrate picks up, we are going to need more immigrants. If neither happens, we are going to have less growth," said Mr. Levy. The report wasn't optimistic, saying that "with migration greatly reduced…outsiders are much less likely to come to the rescue."
Investments in the state's education system will be vital to meet labor-force needs and prevent the economy from contracting, said Mr. Levy. With less migration to the state, the skills and human capital necessary to keep California's economy afloat will need to be homegrown, both Mr. Levy and Mr. Myers said.
With more than 90% of the state's children under age 10 born in the state, "the majority of the next generation of workers will have been shaped by California's health and education systems," Mr. Myers said. "It's essential that we nurture our human capital."
Many of those future workers, however, will have grown up in poverty. More than 20% of children in California now live below the federal poverty level.
The report found that the birthrate had tumbled for every population group. In 2010, it was below replacement level for whites, Asians and African-Americans.
The birthrate for Hispanics, who account for 51% of children under 18 in the state, was slightly above replacement level. But Hispanic birthrates are seeing the steepest drop of any group and are expected to fall to the replacement level in 2020, the report said.
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Young graduates are in debt, out of work and on their parents’ couches. People in their 30s and 40s can’t afford to buy homes or have children. Retirees are earning near-zero interest on their savings.
Arynita Armstrong, 60, at her home in Willis, Tex. She last worked five years ago. “When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” she says.
In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.
These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.
Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”
New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.
“If I break my wrist, I lose my house,” said Susan Zimmerman, 62, a freelance writer in Cleveland, of the distress that a medical emergency would wreak upon her finances and her quality of life. None of the three part-time jobs she has cobbled together pay benefits, and she says she is counting the days until she becomes eligible for Medicare.
In the meantime, Ms. Zimmerman has fashioned her own regimen of home remedies — including eating blue cheese instead of taking penicillin and consuming plenty of orange juice, red wine, coffee and whatever else the latest longevity studies recommend — to maintain her health, which she must do if she wants to continue paying the bills.
“I will probably be working until I’m 100,” she said.
As common as that sentiment is, the job market has been especially unkind to older workers.
Unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are far lower than those for young people, who are recently out of school, with fewer skills and a shorter work history. But once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding another one. Over the last year, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released on Friday.
The lengthy process is partly because older workers are more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, like manufacturing. Compared with the rest of the population, older people are also more likely to own their own homes and be less mobile than renters, who can move to new job markets.
Older workers are more likely to have a disability of some sort, perhaps limiting the range of jobs that offer realistic choices. They may also be less inclined, at least initially, to take jobs that pay far less than their old positions.
Displaced boomers also believe they are victims of age discrimination, because employers can easily find a young, energetic worker who will accept lower pay and who can potentially stick around for decades rather than a few years.
“When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” said Arynita Armstrong, 60, of Willis, Tex. She has been looking for work for five years since losing her job at a mortgage company. “They’re afraid to hire you, because they think you’re a health risk. You know, you might make their premiums go up. They think it’ll cost more money to invest in training you than it’s worth it because you might retire in five years.
“Not that they say any of this to your face,” she added.
When older workers do find re-employment, the compensation is usually not up to the level of their previous jobs, according to data from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
In a survey by the center of older workers who were laid off during the recession, just one in six had found another job, and half of that group had accepted pay cuts. Fourteen percent of the re-employed said the pay in their new job was less than half what they earned in their previous job.
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“I just say to myself: ‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ ” said John Agati, 56, of Norwalk, Conn., whose last full-time job, as a merchandise buyer and product developer, ended four years ago when his employer went out of business.
That position paid $90,000, and his résumé lists stints at companies like American Express, Disney and USA Networks. Since being laid off, though, he has worked a series of part-time, low-wage, temporary positions, including selling shoes at Lord & Taylor and making sales calls for a limo company.
The last few years have taken a toll not only on his family’s finances, but also on his feelings of self-worth.
“You just get sad,” Mr. Agati said. “I see people getting up in the morning, going out to their careers and going home. I just wish I was doing that. Some people don’t like their jobs, or they have problems with their jobs, but at least they’re working. I just wish I was in their shoes.”
He said he cannot afford to go back to school, as many younger people without jobs have done. Even if he could afford it, economists say it is unclear whether older workers like him benefit much from more education.
“It just doesn’t make sense to offer retraining for people 55 and older,” said Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “Discrimination by age, long-term unemployment, the fact that they’re now at the end of the hiring queue, the lack of time horizon just does not make it sensible to invest in them.”
Many displaced older workers are taking this message to heart and leaving the labor force entirely.
The share of older people applying for Social Security early spiked during the recession as people sought whatever income they could find. The penalty they will pay is permanent, as retirees who take benefits at age 62 — as Ms. Zimmerman did, to help make her mortgage payments — will receive 30 percent less in each month’s check for the rest of their lives than they would if they had waited until full retirement age (66 for those born after 1942).
Those not yet eligible for Social Security are increasingly applying for another, comparable kind of income support that often goes to people who expect never to work again: disability benefits. More than one in eight people in their late 50s is now on some form of federal disability insurance program, according to Mark Duggan, chairman of the department of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The very oldest Americans, of course, were battered by some of the same ill winds that tormented those now nearing retirement, but at least the most senior were cushioned by a more readily available social safety net. More important, in a statistical twist, they may have actually benefited from the financial crisis in the most fundamental way: prolonged lives.
Death rates for people over 65 have historically fallen during recessions, according to a November 2011 study by economists at the University of California, Davis. Why? The researchers argue that weak job markets push more workers into accepting relatively undesirable work at nursing homes, leading to better care for residents.
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second post
http://live.wsj.com/video/the-demographic-cliff/FF10307B-DD95-492F-B747-BEDAE579765C.html?mod=lifestyle_video_newsreel#!FF10307B-DD95-492F-B747-BEDAE579765C
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324324404579043321640414270.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird
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The Floundering of America
The U.S. future based on current trends is meaner, riskier and less dynamic.
By William A. Galston
Nov. 19, 2013 7:37 p.m. ET
As Washington lurches from crisis to crisis, the United States is floundering. "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending," Abraham Lincoln declared in 1858, "we could better judge what to do, and how to do it." In Lincoln's time, we were tending toward a conflict over slavery. Today, we are hurtling toward a less dynamic economy, a meaner society and a riskier world.
To begin, we are in the early stage of a historic shift in the U.S. workforce. In the four decades from 1970 through 2010, the labor force expanded at an average rate of 1.6% a year. Between 2023 and 2038, the Congressional Budget Office projects, the labor force growth will average only 0.4% a year, a pace that is likely to persist even beyond the 25-year window. More workers are leaving the workforce to retire, and women's labor-force participation—a potent source of growth for two generations—has plateaued. Unless immigration increases dramatically, the U.S. workforce will expand only one-quarter as fast as it did in recent decades.
The trend has broad economic implications. Assuming a continuation of current policies over the next quarter-century, real growth in gross domestic product will average only 2% annually, and real GDP per person will grow at only 1.3% annually, compared with 2.1% between 1967 and 2007. Without new policies that jolt the country out of its current path, slower growth will become the new normal.
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An added concern: There is good reason to believe that America is aging even faster than we thought. Over the past 60 years, mortality rates have declined by an average of 1.17% a year. The trustees of the Social Security system believe that the annual rate of decline will slow in coming decades to only 0.80%, an assumption that underlies the trustees' current economic projections for the program.
But the Social Security Administration's advisory panel on assumptions and methods disagrees, arguing that because of the long-term consequences of decreased smoking, the decline in mortality rates will speed up. The Congressional Budget Office counters that because of offsetting factors such as obesity and improving medical technology, it is most defensible to assume that the trends of the past six decades will continue.
This dispute may sound abstruse, but the real-world consequences are enormous. Life expectancy today averages 78.5 years. The Social Security trustees project that this figure will rise to 83.6 years over the next two generations. But if their own advisory panel is correct, average life expectancy will be more than two years higher—85.8 years. Simply extrapolating current trends, as the CBO suggests, generates an average of 84.9 years—1.3 years more than the Social Security trustees foresee.
If the CBO is right, the population of Americans 65 or older would rise by 37% over the next decade and 85% by 2038. The number of Social Security beneficiaries would rise correspondingly—from 57 million today to 76 million in 2023 and a staggering 101 million just 15 years later. The system's actuarial shortfall would amount to 3.4% of taxable payroll, significantly more than the 2.72% the trustees expect. And the surge in Social Security outlays is only one of many challenging consequences of a rapidly aging society.
A third key trend: In recent decades, the CBO finds a sustained reduction in the excess-cost growth for health care—the amount by which health-care costs per capita rise faster than GDP per capita. But even assuming a continuation of this favorable trend, the CBO projects, national health-care spending would increase by about 5%—to 22% of GDP—by 2038.
In sum, current trends and policies will yield lower rates of economic growth, painfully slow gains in real incomes, huge increases in outlays for expenses related to an aging population, and a health sector that devours more and more of the national product. Only an unprecedented decline in discretionary spending to 5.3% of GDP in 2023 (the lowest level since at least 1962) would keep the burden of debt roughly stable during the next decade.
But that projected decline—the consequence of sequestration—is pure folly. With only 2.6% of GDP for national defense and an equal share for domestic purposes, there is no way that the U.S. can continue to provide global stability and finance the public investments that a strong economy requires while also meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals who have no place else to turn.
The country needs a new national strategy for a viable future—a coherent set of ambitious goals that will serve, as John F. Kennedy said in announcing the race to the moon, to "organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
That strategy begins with the recognition across party lines that we cannot go on this way.
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"The country needs a new national strategy for a viable future—a coherent set of ambitious goals that will serve, as John F. Kennedy said in announcing the race to the moon, to "organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
Well we have had a turn towards fascist style socialism. What do our Wall Street friends from the WSJ now have in mind for us?
Now that many of them have been bailed out?
Tell us Mr. Galston. What is the strategy?
"Unless immigration increases dramatically, the U.S. workforce will expand only one-quarter as fast as it did in recent decades."
More immigrants? to fuel the work force? and cheap labor for you guys? and more competition to drive/keep wages down even more for the majority that are not employers?
Sounds like my politics of health care post noting Ezeikel Emanuel getting on his soap box calling for a gloried setting of goals for our health care future.
We kind of had that too. Free health care, or cheaper, better quality and everyone is covered. Sounds great huh?
Levin was discussing Paul Gigot interviewing Paul Ryan and basically asking him about another government shutdown. Gigot did it in a very MSNBC way. Something like, how are you going to prevent another shutdown...... As Levin pointed out, the WSJ is all about Wall Street. The rest of us can go grovel.
I think he is right.
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Both Mark Steyn and the WSJ are correct IMHO in seeing people as resources. Europe if fuct because of its demographic contraction and is economic fascism. At least America is demographically stable. Key here is WHO we let in. I think if we dig a bit we will find the WSJ is thinking more of Indian computer engineers than Mexican gardeners.
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Both Mark Steyn and the WSJ are correct IMHO in seeing people as resources. Europe if fuct because of its demographic contraction and is economic fascism. At least America is demographically stable. Key here is WHO we let in. I think if we dig a bit we will find the WSJ is thinking more of Indian computer engineers than Mexican gardeners.
Too bad that what is beneficial for the country and what is beneficial for winning the next election might be two different things.
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ccp, For one thing, I think the WSJ is publishing Galston columns as an opposing or different viewpoint, not as their own. He is a former Clinton adviser* and comes from the Brookings Institute, as opposed to say, Cato, Heritage or AEI. His recent columns defended food stamps as a program that works and attacked the tea party as causing a crackup. Here, he seems to be pushing the Krugman idea that no growth is the new normal. But no growth is only the new normal when we choose anti-growth policies.
The WSJ opinion page otherwise is a pro-growth, pro-free enterprise beacon. They are occasionally wrong on issues from my point of view. Most recently they were (IMHO) too accepting of a bad immigration deal and they opposed the de-funding of Obamacare that preceded the 16 day, 17% non-essential, paid vacation known as 'the shutdown', without putting forward a better way of stopping Obamacare. The 'shutdown' polled badly for conservatives. From that point of view, it is logical to ask how we move forward on economic freedom without setbacks like that.
[WSJ Editorial page editor] Paul Gigot is a Packer fan from Green Bay, WI - not exactly a Wall Streeter. The WSJ really does have a firewall between news content and opinion, unlike most papers I read where I cannot tell where news ends and opinion begins. I read the WSJ editorials regularly and don't find them to be pro-big business or pro-Wall Street at the expense of the rest of us. They are explicitly pro-economic freedom and pro-growth.
As Crafty suggests, on immigration I assume they would prefer a better balance of incoming workers to address America's needs, not to have all come from one place with the same (limited) skills set. That isn't what would come out of the recent immigration push, and therefore I part ways with them on that.
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From the WSJ Editorial Page - About Us http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html?cb=logged0.7089306168604355
"We speak for free markets and free people, the principles, if you will, marked in the watershed year of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." So over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities."
* "Bill Galston, former deputy domestic policy adviser to Clinton"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/quinn110298.htm
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Columnist Terence Jeffrey: "Last week, the federal Centers for Disease Control published its report on births in the United States in 2012. It pointed to two telling trends: Unwed motherhood remained near an historic high while the overall fertility rate hit an historic low. ... Of the 3,952,841 babies born in the United States during the year, 1,609,619 -- or 40.7 percent -- were born to unmarried women. As recently as 1980, only 18.4 percent of the babies born in the United States were illegitimate. ... In the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the Census Bureau, 108,592,000 Americans -- 35 percent of the population -- received benefits from one or more mean-tested federal welfare program. That number will surely rise if Americans continue having 40 percent of their babies out of wedlock. And, in their 'war on poverty,' left-wing politicians will no doubt increasingly target for redistribution the wealth of married, two-parent, hard-working, diploma-earning families who cause this nation's income inequality by living exactly the sorts of lives we must live if we wish to remain free."
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http://newobserveronline.com/the-extermination-of-whites-in-europe-we-are-the-last-3-german-children-in-our-school/
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"Here 99 percent of the 313 pupils have an immigrant (Muslim) background. For 285 of those, the parents receive financial support from the state."
Velcome to Germany. The immigrants of today are not the immigrants of my grandparents. Even in Germany it appears.
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Slumping Fertility Rates in Developing Countries Spark Labor Worries
Birthrates Fall in Thailand, Raising Concerns about Aging Population
By James Hookway
March 19, 2014 10:31 p.m. ET
BAAN TAM TA KEM, Thailand—Slumping fertility rates aren't just a problem for wealthy countries anymore.
Birthrates have fallen in Thailand in recent years, making it one of the poorest countries facing the prospect of shrinking labor pools and an aging population. Such problems, while familiar in Europe and Japan, used to be unheard of in the up-and-coming economies of Southeast Asia.
Thailand's fertility rate has fallen to an average of just 1.6 children per woman, from seven in the 1970s, disrupting centuries of tradition in which children care for their parents. That is forcing political leaders to look for new sources of economic growth and community leaders to search for ways to make the elderly more self-sufficient.
Out here among the green rice fields and plantations of rural Thailand, much of the working-age population has migrated to seek higher-paying work in and around Bangkok. "People just used to hang around gossiping or playing the lottery while waiting for their relatives to send home money from Bangkok or elsewhere," says Chumleang Panrin, 54 years old, who lives in the village of Baan Tam Ta Kem in eastern Thailand. "Now we're working together to provide ourselves with some security for the future."
Other pockets of the developing world also have seen sharp declines in fertility rates, including Brazil, Mexico and parts of India and Southeast Asia. Rising prosperity appears to be one catalyst. If the trend continues, the United Nations projects—in its "low-growth" forecast—that the global population will hit 8.3 billion in 2050 before declining to less than the current level of 7.2 billion by 2100. (Its "mid-growth" forecast projects 10.85 billion by century's end.)
"Aging is occurring nearly everywhere, and it's happening faster than many people think," says Babatunde Ostimehin, executive director of the United Nations' population program. "If governments don't respond, they could end up facing a crisis."
Demographers such as Michael Teitelbaum at Harvard Law School and Jay Winter, a history professor at Yale University, note that already more than half the world's population lives in aging countries where the fertility rate is less than 2.1 children per woman—the rate required to replace both parents, once infant mortality is taken into account.
This is both an opportunity and a threat. On one hand, it could help preserve natural resources in nations that have been taxed by rapid population growth. But some economists blame a slowdown in population growth for contributing to such disparate events as the Great Depression and Japan's sluggish growth rates in recent decades.
A slowing birth rate in Thailand means fewer young people to take care of the country's elderly. WSJ's James Hookway reports on efforts to help Thai seniors become more self-sufficient.
Some developing nations that built their economies on an expanding supply of young people entering the workforce are rethinking their growth plans. China saw its working-age population decline by 3.45 million in 2012 and 2.45 million last year—a cumulative decline of 0.63% since 2011 and a sign that expansion has ended. It is now relaxing its one-child policy and making it easier for people to move to its cities to try to boost productivity.
South Korea, whose economy is more developed than many others in Asia, is trying to reduce the expenses associated with raising children, including looking for ways to expand child care and to curb the cost of education.
Chile's government last year announced plans for a "baby bonus" for parents who have a third child, following the lead of countries such as France and Australia, which already have incentives for parents to have more children.
Fertility rates rise and fall. The improving economy in the U.S. helped stabilize fertility rates in 2012 at 1.9 after four years of declines, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. When immigration is taken into account, the U.S. population still is growing.
In the developing world, fertility rates are likely to continue falling. More people are moving to crowded megacities where housing and education are increasingly expensive, and the cultural changes sparked by these migrations are difficult to reverse.
"Singapore's repeated failed attempts to pump up birthrates show that total fertility rates can be very difficult to revive once the social context has changed," says Sanjeev Sanyal, a global-market strategist at Deutsche Bank. DBK.XE +0.06%
In Thailand, where the workforce no longer is expanding rapidly, much of the textiles industry has migrated to countries with cheaper wages, such as Cambodia and Bangladesh, where birthrates are higher and average ages younger. Countries with more skilled workforces and higher productivity, such as Vietnam, are soaking up a growing share of manufacturing investments.
Retirees make up a significant and visible proportion of the demonstrators who regularly take to the streets in Bangkok, in occasionally violent political displays against the government of the day.
"There are a lot more of us now, and we have a voice," said Suchakree Somkong, 74 years old, waving a yellow royal banner with his friends at one recent protest. "This is old-people's power."
Younger Thais, meanwhile, are struggling to makes ends meet even as unemployment rates remain consistently low. For many, having more children—or any at all—isn't going to happen soon.
Angsana Niwat, 38, moved to Bangkok 20 years ago from the rural northeast. She says she has no plans to have more children. Raising her 6-year-old son, she says, is a financial strain.
"If you want to work, you need to find somebody and pay them to look after the kids," says Ms. Angsana, who no longer works. "Then you have to think about paying for extra tuition to make sure they get into a good university. It's a struggle to make ends meet." She is dipping into her savings from her old job in public relations, she says, because her husband's business installing mirrors barely pulls in enough money to cover mortgage payments.
Some academics such as Therdsak Chomtohsuwan, an economics professor at Bangkok's Rangsit University, have suggested levying punitive taxes on single people and childless couples, much as former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu used to do. As income-tax revenue threatens to trail off along with the working-age population, government finance officials are considering increasing consumption taxes such as sales taxes.
In rural villages, community leaders are trying to devise ways to cope with the changes.
In Baan Nong Thong Lim, a 35-year-old monk at the local Buddhist temple began teaching elderly villagers last July how to adjust to life with fewer young people around to care for them. The monk, Phra Weera Sripron, gave lessons on how to coax lime trees to yield fruit all year round by constraining their roots in upturned cement pipes, and how to grow mushrooms, a cash crop, in homemade, darkened gazebos.
"At the same time we teach them about self-sufficiency and other Buddhist principles," says Phra Weera, who sports close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair with his saffron robe. "There are many more people coming in to the temple now."
Local villagers agree. "When we came to the temple before, we would just contribute merit for the next life," says Sanit Thipnangrong, a 58-year-old grandmother. "But by doing this, we can improve our prospects in this life and not wait around for anybody else to help us."
Some Thais contend that rather than trying to persuade people to have more children, the nation needs to figure out how to make do with fewer.
Mechai Viravaidya, a veteran health campaigner, picked up the nickname "Mr. Condom" in the 1980s when he launched a program to encourage Thai women to have fewer children and to protect against AIDS. He traveled the country teaching the proper use of contraception to nudge down birthrates and improve living standards.
"People aren't going to start having more children," he says. "That horse has already left the stable. What we are doing here is teaching elderly people in rural communities to learn more, earn more and increase their own productivity."
To that end, Mr. Mechai founded the Mechai Bamboo Development School four years ago a short drive from the temple at Baan Nong Thong Lim. In addition to their academic curriculum, students learn about agriculture techniques to boost yields and produce marketable items such as limes all year round.
The goal is to teach Thai youngsters—and their parents, grandparents and guardians, who drop in frequently—how to produce more. Lecturers from nearby colleges stop in regularly to tell students how to find markets for their products and earn cash. Mushrooms and bean sprouts are potentially big earners, Mr. Mechai says. "The yield on bean sprouts is 700%," he says. "That's better than marijuana."
The school also aims to redress some of the shortcomings of the country's education sector. In last year's Program for International Student Assessment tests, run by the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Thailand, with a per capita income of just over $5,000 a year, lagged far behind competitors such as China, South Korea and Singapore, ranking 48th of the 65 countries participating.
In the nearby village of Baan Tam Ta Kem, Ms. Chumleang has organized the residents to adopt many of the smart-farming techniques pioneered at Mr. Mechai's school.
A decade ago, the area was mostly thick jungle. But now land has been cleared to raise a variety of crops, including limes and orchids. The villagers also produce local delicacies such as crickets fried with rock salt and fiery chili peppers, and homeopathic remedies such as pillows stuffed with herbs that they sell as far away as Bangkok.
Prisoners at a nearby jail were taught new agricultural techniques while in detention, and police chief Col. Narongchit Maneechote put his latest batch of recruits from the police academy to work digging out weeds and planting saplings on the police station's grounds.
"When people used to see police officers with some extra money, they thought we were getting it from protection rackets for illegal lotteries," Col. Narongchit said. "Now they know it comes from farming."
Such self-help programs are small steps. "But it's getting closer to the answer," says Mr. Therdsak of Rangsit University. "There is still a lot to do. But people need to learn to upgrade their skills if they are going to support themselves into old age."
In Hua Ngom, a village of about 6,000 in Chiang Rai province in Thailand's far north, community leader Winai Kurengchai began a special learning program for older residents called "Be Proud to Be Old" after noticing a series of suicides among older residents.
"At first we thought it was something to do with the crisis," says Mr. Winai, referring to the Asian financial problems in the late 1990s that threw Thailand's economy into recession. Eventually, he says, he realized the victims were mostly elderly people left alone when their children moved away to cities and began having smaller families.
One 73-year-old woman, he recalls, flung herself down a water well. "She wasn't poor," he says. "She was wearing several gold necklaces. But deep down she was overcome by the pressure of living on her own."
There have been no suicides in recent months, he says, as older residents learn about home farming and study languages such as English. But birthrates remain stubbornly low. Last year, only three children were born in Hua Ngom.
—Wilawan Watcharasakwet contributed to this article.
Write to James Hookway at james.hookway@wsj.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/opinion/blow-the-split-of-the-ages.html?emc=edit_th_20140329&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/opinion/blow-the-split-of-the-ages.html?emc=edit_th_20140329&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
Voting against their own interests will not last.
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"Voting against their own interests will not last"
Wait till they have to pay the nation's bills. The government should do more and more. Until they realize they are the ones who will have to help foot the bill.
Yep. The world is one big happy family. Keep giving it all away. Open the borders wide. See how well that goes.
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Did you see the street survey of American University students who were asked how many Senators from each state are there? Or name one Senator?
One girl even stated, " I am not into the America 'thing'".
We can thank liberal education for this.
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Hi there,
Another challenge to be faced by bioethics in the decades ahead is the downstream consequences of falling birth rates.
Once fertility begins to fall, it keeps falling to levels which once seemed (sorry) inconceivable. The replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. But in South Korea, parts of Spain, and Russia it has fallen below 1.3. At that rate, population begins to decline fairly rapidly. A small population could have big political consequences.
This worries the leaders of Iran. The birth rate in Iran has fallen more swiftly than anywhere else in the world – from 6.4 in 1986 to a current low of 1.8. When they look into their crystal ball, they see a weak and depopulated nation.
This is why the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently released a 14-point plan to reverse decades of propaganda for small families and double his country’s population to 150 million. His proposals include: increasing the birth rate to more than 2.3; lowering the age of marriage; an Islamic-Iranian lifestyle and opposing undesirable aspects of the Western lifestyle; and providing treatment for both male and female infertility.
A bill is already being drafted to ban abortions and sterilisations. Government support for family planning and contraceptives has already been discontinued. A program offering free vasectomies has been terminated.
For Westerners like me, the social policy and politics of a theocratic country like Iran are quite mysterious. But if its rulers are as impatient and stubborn as the media makes them out to be, they may try to impose pro-natal policies, lest they drift into geopolitical irrelevance. Today most bioethics deals with issues relating to having fewer children. What happens when women are pressured into having more children? What dilemmas will bioethicists face then?
Cheers,
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http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/14545
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debated
http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/14896
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The Emerging Latino Divide
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on December 15, 2014
Tear up the textbooks, a new pattern may be emerging among Latino voters. The conventional wisdom -- that Hispanics habitually vote Democrat over the immigration issue -- may be obsolete.
Gallup found that support for President Obama's amnesty order was primarily among the foreign born population -- whether Latino or not. Hispanics born in the United States only backed the amnesty plan by 51-42. Latinos born outside the U.S. backed it by 75-17. (Non-Hispanics born outside the U.S. backed Obama's plan by 60-32).
Since only one-quarter of Hispanic voters are foreign born, this finding is electrifying! It means that the knee jerk approval Democrats are expecting from the Latino community may not be forthcoming, particularly not in sufficient numbers to offset the backlash among non-Hispanic voters.
But the longer term political and social implications of this fissure in the Latino community, based on place of birth, are even more important. Political science experts have long wondered if the rapidly growing Latino population would auger in a permanent Democratic majority. When black and Latino voters reach one-third of the electorate combined (they are now one-quarter), will that cause Republican extinction?
Certainly if Hispanic voters follow African-American voting patterns it would spell bad -- and possibly fatal -- news for the GOP. But the Gallup data suggest that Latinos are assimilating politically into the larger population and, unlike blacks, abandoning race consciousness in their voting patterns. Like German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Irish-Americans, they are mirroring national public opinion in their thinking rather than sticking with their ethnic orientation.
This birthplace gap in the Latino vote may help explain the 13 point gain by Republicans among Latino voters in the 2014 elections. While Democrats still won Hispanics 2:1, they did not win by the 3:1 margin that Obama tallied in 2012.
For decades, politicians spoke of the gender gap in voting patterns before they realized that pro-Democratic voting patterns were largely concentrated among unmarried women. It was more of a marriage gap than a gender gap.
So, with outspoken Latino advocacy groups urging immigration amnesty at the top of their lungs, the compliant and complacent media have assumed that they speak for all Latinos. But they don't. While foreign-born Hispanics account for half of the U.S. Latino population, they are only one -quarter of the citizens and, perhaps, an even smaller share of the electorate.
So Republicans should not fear increases in the Latino population as much as they do. In the second generation, the children of our new neighbors, show the classical signs of healthy assimilation.
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Population Decline and the Great Economic Reversal
Geopolitical Weekly
February 17, 2015 | 09:52 GMT
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By George Friedman
In recent weeks, we have been focusing on Greece, Germany, Ukraine and Russia. All are still burning issues. But in every case, readers have called my attention to what they see as an underlying and even defining dimension of all these issues — if not right now, then soon. That dimension is declining population and the impact it will have on all of these countries. The argument was made that declining populations will generate crises in these and other countries, undermining their economies and national power. Sometimes we need to pause and move away from immediate crises to broader issues. Let me start with some thoughts from my book The Next 100 Years.
Reasons for the Population Decline
There is no question but that the populations of most European countries will decline in the next generation, and in the cases of Germany and Russia, the decline will be dramatic. In fact, the entire global population explosion is ending. In virtually all societies, from the poorest to the wealthiest, the birthrate among women has been declining. In order to maintain population stability, the birthrate must remain at 2.1 births per woman. Above that, and the population rises; below that, it falls. In the advanced industrial world, the birthrate is already substantially below 2.1. In middle-tier countries such as Mexico or Turkey, the birthrate is falling but will not reach 2.1 until between 2040 and 2050. In the poorest countries, such as Bangladesh or Bolivia, the birthrate is also falling, but it will take most of this century to reach 2.1.
The process is essentially irreversible. It is primarily a matter of urbanization. In agricultural and low-level industrial societies, children are a productive asset. Children can be put to work at the age of 6 doing agricultural work or simple workshop labor. Children become a source of income, and the more you have the better. Just as important, since there is no retirement plan other than family in such societies, a large family can more easily support parents in old age.
In a mature urban society, the economic value of children declines. In fact, children turn from instruments of production into objects of massive consumption. In urban industrial society, not only are the opportunities for employment at an early age diminished, but the educational requirements also expand dramatically. Children need to be supported much longer, sometimes into their mid-20s. Children cost a tremendous amount of money with limited return, if any, for parents. Thus, people have fewer children. Birth control merely provided the means for what was an economic necessity. For most people, a family of eight children would be a financial catastrophe. Therefore, women have two children or fewer, on average. As a result, the population contracts. Of course, there are other reasons for this decline, but urban industrialism is at the heart of it.
There are those who foresee economic disaster in this process. As someone who was raised in a world that saw the population explosion as leading to economic disaster, I would think that the end of the population boom would be greeted with celebration. But the argument is that the contraction of the population, particularly during the transitional period before the older generations die off, will leave a relatively small number of workers supporting a very large group of retirees, particularly as life expectancy in advanced industrial countries increases. In addition, the debts incurred by the older generation would be left to the smaller, younger generation to pay off. Given this, the expectation is major economic dislocation. (MARC: This makes sense to me) In addition, there is the view that a country's political power will contract with the population, based on the assumption that the military force that could be deployed — and paid for — with a smaller population would contract.
The most obvious solution to this problem is immigration. The problem is that Japan and most European countries have severe cultural problems integrating immigrants. The Japanese don't try, for the most part, and the Europeans who have tried — particularly with migrants from the Islamic world — have found it difficult. The United States also has a birthrate for white women at about 1.9, meaning that the Caucasian population is contracting, but the African-American and Hispanic populations compensate for that. In addition, the United States is an efficient manager of immigration, despite current controversies.
Two points must be made on immigration. First, the American solution of relying on immigration will mean a substantial change in what has been the historical sore point in American culture: race. The United States can maintain its population only if the white population becomes a minority in the long run. The second point is that some of the historical sources of immigration to the United States, particularly Mexico, are exporting fewer immigrants. As Mexico moves up the economic scale, emigration to the United States will decline. Therefore, the third tier of countries where there is still surplus population will have to be the source for immigrants. Europe and Japan have no viable model for integrating migrants.
The Effects of Population on GDP
But the real question is whether a declining population matters. Assume that there is a smooth downward curve of population, with it decreasing by 20 percent. If the downward curve in gross domestic product matched the downward curve in population, per capita GDP would be unchanged. By this simplest measure, the only way there would be a problem is if GDP fell more than population, or fell completely out of sync with the population, creating negative and positive bubbles. That would be destabilizing.
But there is no reason to think that GDP would fall along with population. The capital base of society, its productive plant as broadly understood, will not dissolve as population declines. Moreover, assume that population fell but GDP fell less — or even grew. Per capita GDP would rise and, by that measure, the population would be more prosperous than before.
One of the key variables mitigating the problem of decreasing population would be continuing advances in technology to increase productivity. We can call this automation or robotics, but growths in individual working productivity have been occurring in all productive environments from the beginning of industrialization, and the rate of growth has been intensifying. Given the smooth and predictable decline in population, there is no reason to believe, at the very least, that GDP would not fall less than population. In other words, with a declining population in advanced industrial societies, even leaving immigration out as a factor, per capita GDP would be expected to grow.
Changes in the Relationship Between Labor and Capital
A declining population would have another and more radical impact. World population was steady until the middle of the 16th century. The rate of growth increased in about 1750 and moved up steadily until the beginning of the 20th century, when it surged. Put another way, beginning with European imperialism and culminating in the 20th century, the population has always been growing. For the past 500 years or so, the population has grown at an increasing rate. That means that throughout the history of modern industrialism and capitalism, there has always been a surplus of labor. There has also been a shortage of capital in the sense that capital was more expensive than labor by equivalent quanta, and given the constant production of more humans, supply tended to depress the price of labor.
For the first time in 500 years, this situation is reversing itself. First, fewer humans are being born, which means the labor force will contract and the price of all sorts of labor will increase. This has never happened before in the history of industrial man. In the past, the scarce essential element has been capital. But now capital, understood in its precise meaning as the means of production, will be in surplus, while labor will be at a premium. The economic plant in place now and created over the next generation will not evaporate. At most, it is underutilized, and that means a decline in the return on capital. Put in terms of the analog, money, it means that we will be entering a period where money will be cheap and labor increasingly expensive.
The only circumstance in which this would not be the case would be a growth in productivity so vast that it would leave labor in surplus. Of course if that happened, then we would be entering a revolutionary situation in which the relationship between labor and income would have to shift. Assuming a more incremental, if intensifying, improvement in productivity, it would still leave surplus on the capital side and a shortage in labor, sufficient to force the price of money down and the price of labor up.
That would mean that in addition to rising per capita GDP, the actual distribution of wealth would shift. We are currently in a period where the accumulation of wealth has shifted dramatically into fewer hands, and the gap between the upper-middle class and the middle class has also widened. If the cost of money declined and the price of labor increased, the wide disparities would shift, and the historical logic of industrial capitalism would be, if not turned on its head, certainly reformulated.
We should also remember that the three inputs into production are land, labor and capital. The value of land, understood in the broader sense of real estate, has been moving in some relationship to population. With a decline in population, the demand for land would contract, lowering the cost of housing and further increasing the value of per capita GDP.
The path to rough equilibrium will be rocky and fraught with financial crisis. For example, the decline in the value of housing will put the net worth of the middle and upper classes at risk, while adjusting to a world where interest rates are perpetually lower than they were in the first era of capitalism would run counter to expectations and therefore lead financial markets down dark alleys. The mitigating element to this is that the decline in population is transparent and highly predictable. There is time for homeowners, investors and everyone else to adjust their expectations.
This will not be the case in all countries. The middle- and third-tier countries will be experiencing their declines after the advanced countries will have adjusted — a further cause of disequilibrium in the system. And countries such as Russia, where population is declining outside the context of a robust capital infrastructure, will see per capita GDP decline depending on the price of commodities like oil. Populations are falling even where advanced industrialism is not in place, and in areas where only urbanization and a decline of preindustrial agriculture are in place the consequences are severe. There are places with no safety net, and Russia is one of those places.
The argument I am making here is that population decline will significantly transform the functioning of economies, but in the advanced industrial world it will not represent a catastrophe — quite the contrary. Perhaps the most important change will be that where for the past 500 years bankers and financiers have held the upper hand, in a labor-scarce society having pools of labor to broker will be the key. I have no idea what that business model will look like, but I have no doubt that others will figure that out.
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http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/no-one-is-winning-from-the-worlds-lack-of-children/16060
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Pasting GM's post here as well:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11625406/The-world-is-drowning-in-debt-warns-Goldman-Sachs.html
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http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/abandoned-villages-for-sale/16658
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-demographics-rule-the-global-economy-1448203724
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As predicted by Mark Steyn:
http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/spains-population-reaches-tipping-point/17307
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http://seekingalpha.com/article/3983717-asias-aging-population-pressure-global-economy?auth_param=evk9c:1bmlnom:da670f87bf88a83504e4a85d66761d5a&uprof=46
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Not sure how these numbers were derived but if accurate , , ,
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jun/13/nigeria-larger-population-us-2050
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http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/30008
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If true one can come up with several theories as to why.
Granted this is from Columbia so must be taken with a grain of salt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/business/rich-vote-republican-not-this-election-maybe.html?_r=0
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2015/11/03/why-demographic-trends-spell-trouble-for-china-and-russia-and-prosperity-for-us/?sr_source=lift_facebook&nowelcome&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=oracle#70d58d04cfcc
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By Bret Stephens
March 20, 2017 7:02 p.m. ET
583 COMMENTS
Tokyo
Japan is an excellent place to test the proposition that countries do better with low levels of immigration. In a land of 127 million people, there are just over two million foreign residents, and only a third of them are here for the long term. The number of illegal immigrants, which peaked at a modest 300,000 in the early 1990s, is down by 80%.
As for refugees, in 2016, Tokyo entertained 10,000 requests for asylum. It accepted a grand total of 28. Steve Bannon would smile.
The result, say immigration restrictionists, is plain to see. Japan’s crime and drug-use rates are famously low. Life expectancy is famously high. Japanese students put their American peers to shame on international tests. The unemployment rate clocks in at 3.1%. All this is supposed to be a function of a homogenous society with a high degree of cultural cohesion—the antithesis of cacophonous, multiethnic America.
Just one problem: The Japanese have lost their appetite for reproduction. To steal a line from Steve King, the GOP congressman from Iowa, the only way they can save their civilization is with “somebody else’s babies.”
Japan’s population shrank by nearly a million between 2010 and 2015, the first absolute decline since census-taking began in the 1920s. On current trend the population will fall to 97 million by the middle of the century. Barely 10% of Japanese will be children. The rest of the population will divide almost evenly between working-age adults and the elderly.
Imagine yourself as a 35-year-old Japanese salary man. You can expect that an ever-larger share of your paycheck will go to the government to fund the pensions and health care of your parents—who, at 70, can reasonably expect to live another 10 or 15 years, and who aren’t likely to vote for politicians promising to strip their entitlements.
Being Japanese, you were raised to make financial sacrifices for your elders, even if it means not having children of your own. Besides, it’s hard to want children with the economy in such bad shape. As Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma has noted, lousy demographics mean a lousy economy: The average rate of GDP growth in countries with shrinking working-age populations is only 1.5%. In 2016, Japan’s growth rate was 1%—and that was a relatively good year by recent standards.
What if the government paid you to have babies? Alas, along with millions of your countrymen, you suffer from what the Japanese call “celibacy syndrome” and aren’t interested in sex, never mind procreation. You’re also unhappy: In 2016, Japan ranked 53rd on the U.N.’s World Happiness Report, a notch above Kazakhstan but below El Salvador and Uzbekistan.
So Japan is in trouble, and the government knows it. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has tinkered with formulas to bring in lower-skilled temporary workers for housecleaning and farm jobs, and he has promoted various tax breaks and subsidies to ease the burden of raising children and caring for aging parents.
But whatever their other benefits, “pro-family” policies won’t reverse the demographic trend. Only large-scale immigration can do that, and the Japanese won’t countenance it. The flip side of cohesion is exclusion. The consequence of exclusion is decline.
Which brings us back to Mr. King and the U.S. immigration debates. A decade ago, America’s fertility rate, at 2.12 children for every woman, was just above the replacement rate. That meant there could be modest population growth without immigration. But the fertility rate has since fallen: It’s now below replacement and at an all-time low.
Without immigration, our demographic destiny would become Japanese. But our culture wouldn’t, leaving us with the worst of both worlds: economic stagnation without social stability. Multiethnic America would tear itself to pieces fighting over redistribution rights to the shrinking national pie.
This doesn’t have to be our fate. Though it may be news to Mr. King, immigrants aren’t a threat to American civilization. They are our civilization—bearers of a forward-looking notion of identity based on what people wish to become, not who they once were. Among those immigrants are 30% of all American Nobel Prize winners and the founders of 90 of our Fortune 500 companies—a figure that more than doubles when you include companies founded by the children of immigrants. If immigration means change, it forces dynamism. America is literally unimaginable without it.
Every virtue has its defect and vice versa. The Japanese are in the process of discovering that the social values that once helped launch their development—loyalty, self-sacrifice, harmony—now inhibit it. Americans may need reminding that the culture of openness about which conservatives so often complain is our abiding strength. Openness to different ideas, foreign goods and new people. And their babies—who, whatever else Mr. King might think, are also made in God’s image.
Write bstephens@wsj.com.
Appeared in the Mar. 21, 2017, print edition.
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There is a difference between bringing in lawful immigrants to be Americans and open borders where illegal invaders create colonies in your country.
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Pithily stated!
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/business/fewer-children-in-greece-may-add-to-its-financial-crisis.html?emc=edit_th_20170417&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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http://www.breitbart.com/economics/2017/04/19/young-white-america-dying-despair/
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"Any discussion of Japan must include the subject of demographics."
Also true in Russia, Europe and the US where population and workforce declines are masked by legal immigrants or illegals who often take lower paying jobs and/or live off of public assistance. Coverage of a new MN study below. Like Sweden, we are replacing our declining population with people coming for reasons other than the business climate.
With an income tax rate comparable to NY and Calif and double what they charge in Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, not to mention zero state income tax like neighboring South Dakota and Texas and Florida, Minnesota has a net out-flow of people going to or coming from other states. Rich people leave and poor people come, generally speaking.
We have a major inflow of Muslims from east Africa (Somalia) "placed" in Minnesota by the (Obama) state department, as well as 'secondary' immigration where people immigrate and then move to Minnesota for good benefits more so than the weather.
The people leaving tend to be people who want to escape the nation's worst death taxes, and punitive retirement taxes. The people coming in are more likely to be on government programs according to the (Minneapolis) Startribune: http://www.startribune.com/affordable-housing-crisis-hits-eden-prairie-families/420163473/
Whether new residents come from the south side of Chicago or the civil war in Somali, new residents seem more prone to crime and terror.
http://www.startribune.com/routine-arrest-leads-minneapolis-police-to-arsenal/422377353/
Also jeopardize public health:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2017/05/08/minnesota-measles-outbreak-officials-say-somali-families-targeted-with-misinformation.html
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From the Center for the American Experiment:
https://www.americanexperiment.org/2017/05/minnesotas-decline-minnesota-may-lose-congressional-seat-2020/
Minnesota’s decline: Why Minnesota may lose a congressional seat in 2020
Written by Kim Crockett in Minnesota Budget, Minnesota Economy on May 17, 2017 Print
As we await the end of the legislative session, Minnesota’s population numbers and growth are in the news, driven by a preliminary report from the Metropolitan Council that estimates current population for the Metro. The report, required by state statute, will set LGA funding for the Metro.
As reported in the Pioneer Press: “Growth in the urban cores of Minneapolis and St. Paul continue to spur the region’s population gains, according to a new report by the Metropolitan Council…The preliminary report, released Tuesday, says the seven-county metro area grew by 191,628 residents between 2010 and 2016. Both St. Paul and Minneapolis saw significant gains: St. Paul’s population grew to 304,442 in 2016… Minneapolis’ population hit 419,952 in 2016.”
I checked in with the state demographer’s office (because I do not trust the Met Council’s methodology or integrity) and confirmed that there has been a notable uptick in the number of residents in the two core cities. Where are people coming from?
Out of the 5.49 million people in the state, about half a million (457,200 as of 2015) were born outside of the United States. The news reports I read did not mention that the only net positive growth as a state is from foreign-born residents.
Or that people from Minnesota are leaving, and people from the U.S. are not moving here, in sufficient numbers to help Minnesota grow.
We recommend reporters visit the State Demographer’s website where one can find detailed reports on just how Minnesota is growing—and how Minnesota is declining, demographically speaking.
A short report called “Ada to Zumbrota” underlines the state’s demographic trends that may cost the state a Congressional district following the 2020 Census. One conclusion from the report: “As deaths are predicted to outnumber births in 2040, migration in Minnesota is going to become increasingly important if Minnesota is to continue growing.”
Here are some highlights and a new graph for you to consider:
While both the U.S.-born population and foreign-born population have grown since 1970, the foreign-born population has swelled more quickly…Minnesota had about 113,000 foreign-born residents in 1990, but that number had more than quadrupled to about 457,200 residents by 2015.
Some of that growth is from refugees settled her by the State Department: the Minnesota Department of Health reports that between 2010 and 2016, Minnesota welcomed about 16,571 refugees. (The Department of Human Services puts the number at 15,808). Since 1979, the State Department has placed approximately 105,000 refugees in Minnesota. (Minnesota is also a favored destination for “secondary” refugees, people who are settled by the State Department in another state but move to Minnesota. Secondary migrants are not in the official count of refugees; we are working on getting those numbers.)
Back to the report:
In terms of percentage change, natural increase (births minus deaths) has historically been slower in Minnesota than the U.S. average. However, Minnesota’s foreign-born percentage change began far outpacing national trends between 1985 and 1995 and continues to do so (in part because our number of immigrants are a small fraction of all those in the nation).
The net change for Minnesota’s foreign-born population between 1990 and 2000 alone was 13% annually. By comparison, population growth due to natural increase in Minnesota was less than 1% annually during those same years. (see Figure 2).
tate trends do not tell us what demographic is driving the growth in the Metro area but it seems reasonable to assume that many foreign-born residents, especially refugees, are making their home in the Metro area at least initially (before perhaps finding housing and hopefully work elsewhere in the state).
What do these trends tell us about our state?
It is no surprise that Minnesota is attractive to immigrants and refugees. Who would not want to live here (no jokes about the weather, please).
But why is Minnesota so unattractive to its own population—or to people from around the U.S.?
The answer is simple: state and local policies are hostile to good jobs and economic growth.
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http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/indian-population-overtakes-china-chinese-demographer/1/960581.html
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2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQELHJx8Vf0
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https://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/family-is-high-on-russias-agenda/20022
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/26/muslim-majority-in-france-projected-in-40-years/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJSbFptSmxPRFE0WW1JMCIsInQiOiJSNHV1VWtVY3U2V1E0UlNcL1lLUU5hV01QR3VocVlcLzFSa3ZHR05cL1ZLNmJaSVI1eWRqcmI4ckxkVzh1Z2d1R2d2am80cDFaM0tGYzdZTk9FSFJWVGluaFhtU3lFY25hTTBlY3FCMXc3NE1XY3NJaE5hc0M2RTl2TkpMZlBYd0g4MSJ9
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By Caitlin Cheadle for Visual Capitalist
Total fertility rates, which can be defined as the average number of children born to a woman who survives her reproductive years (aged 15-49), have decreased globally by about half since 1960.
This has drastically shaped today's global economy, but a continued decline could have much more severe long-term consequences. If the world has too many elderly dependents and not enough workers, the burden on economic growth will be difficult to overcome.
Global Fertility Rates
FERTILITY RATES START TO DECLINE
First, it's important to address some of the reasons for these falling fertility rates.
In developed nations the introduction of commercially available birth control has played a large role, but this also coincided with several major societal shifts. Changing religious values, the emancipation of women and their increasing participation in the workforce, and higher costs of childcare and education have all factored into declining fertility rates.
BIRTHRATES WANE, ECONOMY GAINS
Initially, reduced child dependency rates were actually beneficial to economic growth.
By delaying childbirth, men and women could gain an education before starting a family. This was important in a shifting labor market where smaller, family-run businesses were in decline and a more skilled and specialized labor force was in demand.
Men and women could also choose to start their careers before having families, while paying more in income taxes and enjoying the benefits of a higher disposable income. Increased spending power creates demand, which stimulates job growth – and the economy benefits in the short-term.
A GLOBAL PHENOMENON
Global Fertility Rates
Worldwide fertility rates began to fall substantially in the mid-1960s. While each country has its own underlying causes for this, it is interesting that in developed and developing nations, the downward trend is similar.
Part of this is due to developing countries' own efforts to rein in their rapidly expanding populations. In China, the One Child Policy was introduced in 1979, however fertility rates had already dropped significantly prior to this. India's government was also active on this front, sterilizing an estimated 8.3 million people (mostly men) between 1975 and 1977 as a method of population control.
THE AGE IMBALANCE
So here we are now, with a global fertility rate of just 2.5 – roughly half of what it was 50 years ago.
Today, 46% of the world's population lives in countries that are below the average global replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.
Because these countries (59 to be exact, including BRIC nations Brazil, Russia, and China) are not repopulating quickly enough to sustain their current populations, we are beginning to see a substantial imbalance in the ratio of elderly dependents to working-age people, which will only intensify over the coming decades.
Global Elderly Dependence Ratio
By 2100, the U.N. predicts that nearly 30% of the population will be made of people 60 years and older. Life expectancy also continues to increase steadily, which means those dependents will be living even longer. Between 2000 and 2015 the average global life expectancy at birth increased by around 5 years, reaching an average of 73.8 years for females and 69.1 years for males.
ECONOMIC REVERSAL
What does this mean for the economy?
As this large aging population exits the workforce, most of the positive trends that were spurred by declining fertility rates will be reversed, and economic growth will face a significant burden.
Working Age Population
The global increase of elderly dependent populations will have serious economic consequences. Health care costs for the elderly will strain resources, while the smaller working population will struggle to produce enough income tax revenue to support these rising costs. It's likely this will cause spending power to decrease, consumerism to decline, job production to slow — and the economy to stagnate.
SOLUTIONS
Immigration has been a source of short-term population sustenance for many nations, including the U.S. and Britain. However, aside from obvious societal tensions associated with this strategy, immigrants are often adults themselves when they relocate, meaning they too will be elderly dependents soon.
Several nations are already experiencing the effects of a large proportion of elderly dependents. Japan, with one-quarter of its total population currently over the age of 65, has been a pioneer in developing technologies, such as robotics, as a solution to ease strained health care resources. Many countries are restructuring health care programs with long-term solutions in mind, while others are attempting to lower the cost of childcare and education.
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/
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Along the same lines as previous post,
"This is the “C” question: are you a citizen or not."
Will The “C” Question (Citizenship status) Destroy The Democratic Party?
http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2018/01/will-c-question-destroy-democratic-party/
"If millions of non-citizens refuse to participate in the US Census, the Democrats will take massive political beating."
Why are we giving representation to non-citizens?
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http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
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Along the same lines as previous post,
"This is the “C” question: are you a citizen or not."
Will The “C” Question (Citizenship status) Destroy The Democratic Party?
http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2018/01/will-c-question-destroy-democratic-party/
"If millions of non-citizens refuse to participate in the US Census, the Democrats will take massive political beating."
Why are we giving representation to non-citizens?
It's part of the plan to replace us with more obedient populations.
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"Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.
“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.
India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.
In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20."
Read more in link:
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https://www.prageru.com/videos/suicide-europe
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https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/u-s-fertility-rate-falls-to-a-new-low/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=May2018
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second post of the day
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-21/china-said-to-consider-ending-birth-limits-as-soon-as-this-year?utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid=socialflow-facebook-business&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
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"The contest between production and reproduction remains as hard fought and poignant as ever, though in a way it is being settled faute de mieux: more women having few children. This may be a good thing in ecological terms, but it is not self-evidently the result of glad free choice. One certainty is that birth rates in the industrial communities are at historic lows, and it remains our suspicion now as it was our assertion twenty years ago that this is all about the interaction of a complicated urgent biology and a self-assured heartless industrial system. Zookeepers esteem zoos in major measure by how successfully their resident reproduce. Where does the Human Zoo stand in the ratings?"
From the Introduction to the second edition (1989) of Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox for their book "The Imperial Animal"
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China: Growing Old Before It Grows Rich
May 29, 2018
By Phillip Orchard
The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.
The Damage Done
When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.
But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, growing by about 20 percent annually in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.
Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.
This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.
Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.
The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.
Drags on China’s Growth
A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.
For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).
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Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.
To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.
Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.
Why It’s Worse For China
China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.
First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.
Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.
Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.
Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.
In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.
The post China: Growing Old Before It Grows Rich appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.
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Can America Grow Like It Used To?
There are reasons to think not, chief among them the aging population.
Can America Grow Like It Used To?
Photo: mike blake/Reuters
By William A. Galston
May 29, 2018 7:22 p.m. ET
36 COMMENTS
While controversies over Iran and North Korea have dominated the recent news, most Americans remain focused on the economy, where declining unemployment and faster growth have improved President Trump’s standing. But can the U.S. economy return to the 3% annual increases in gross domestic product witnessed during the postwar years? This question was the subject of last week’s Wall Street Journal debate among four opinion contributors— Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Arthur Laffer, Jason Furman and me.
We agreed on the normative proposition that the U.S. would benefit from faster economic growth. More upward mobility expands the American dream and reduces competition over scarce opportunities. Growth increases government revenue, taking the edge off tough choices between guns and butter, and between the present and the future.
We also agreed on the basic framework for analyzing growth. If economic production is determined by the number of hours worked times output per hour, then we can increase long-run growth through a larger labor force, higher productivity, or both.
Opinion: The Economic Growth Debate--William Galston
William Galston says immigration plays a big role in promoting economic growth.
Can the Economy return to 3% Growth?
Watch the whole event here
And finally, we agreed that there was room to raise the aggregate level of work in our society. Consider the basic facts. This April, the official employment rate was 3.9%—the same level as in April 2000. But this apparent similarity masks a consequential change. Over those 18 years, labor-force participation among Americans of prime working age (25 to 64 years) dropped by 2.5 percentage points. In the same period, labor-force participation for U.S. women 25 to 64 fell from eighth to 26th among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For men, the ranking dropped from eighth to 29th. American men experienced the largest decline of any OECD country, and American women were the only female cohort in the entire OECD whose workforce participation fell.
These international comparisons strongly suggest that better policies could make a difference. We need to make it easier for formerly incarcerated men to rejoin the workforce, for women to balance the demands of work in the home and in the market, and for older Americans to continue working well past what previous generations considered retirement age. We need to attack substance abuse—especially opioids—which thwarts too many men and women on the threshold of the workforce. And where there is solid evidence that poorly designed social supports discourage work, we should restructure them.
Although these changes would make a difference, they can do nothing to alter the reality that America is aging rapidly. Two thousand was the last year in which the entire baby-boom generation was of prime working age, and 2019 will be the first year in which none of it is. During the last two decades of the 20th century, the U.S. workforce expanded at an annual rate of about 1.5%. During the next two decades, it will expand at an estimated 0.5% annually. By itself, this slowing growth of the workforce will be enough to knock a full percentage point off annual economic growth. Productivity improvements that once yielded 3% growth will now yield only 2%.
There is no sign of a new baby boom on the horizon. On the contrary, the birthrate reached an all-time low in 2017, continuing six decades of decline. So there is only one way to boost the growth rate of the workforce: expand dramatically the number of working-age immigrants admitted each year. If the U.S. prioritized working-age entrants the way most other advanced countries do, it would increase annual labor-force growth by up to 0.3% without increasing the aggregate level of immigration.
I’ve said little about the other key component of economic growth—productivity—because most economists regard it as unpredictable. Between 1950 and 1973, it grew at 2.4% annually before collapsing to just 0.7% from 1974-81. It accelerated to 1.7% between 1982 and 1990, and to 2% from 1991-2001. But then, just when analysts began to hail a new golden age of information technology, productivity growth fell to 1.4% in 2002-07, and to 0.9% during the past decade.
We understand the basics of productivity—investment in the workforce, plant and equipment, research and development, and infrastructure, plus an environment that encourages innovation. But the pace at which new technologies and processes are integrated into the workplace remains mysterious. If a new generation of robotics and artificial intelligence yields a productivity boom, we could return to the growth of the postwar years. But we don’t know enough to bet on it.
Appeared in t
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Galston, as I understand it, is the opposing view columnist on the Journal's editorial page, not to take away from his valid points. From that debate, I would point you to the Laffer view: https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-the-economic-growth-debate-arthur-laffer/E8F37B96-F324-4E49-A4DE-BAC016D42F88.html Demographic aging in many economies around the world most certainly is a limiting force on growth. My view is that in spite of an aging population we are nowhere near our limit of growth. Trump already increased the growth rate roughly 50% over that under Obama and a doubling of Obama's growth rate is more than possible, IMHO. Government-based policies are the main limit on our growth.
We (mostly) don't work in coal mines anymore. In government alone, look at the number of people in leadership that are over the mandatory retirement age if we had one.
Our businesses and industries may have to innovate to hang onto valuable employees as they age and wish to keep going at perhaps a slightly slower pace. Companies have tended to be quite rigid with the full time or nothing choice while public employees are taking 'retirement' in the prime of life like my brother and law who retired from the federal government at 48.
Within a workforce NON-participation rate of 37% and 100 million adults not working peak under Obama, not counting those 65 and over, we have plenty of potential labor not already working, (IMHO).
Among the motivated to rise financially, there are people working two jobs and others who might want to do that for a while if the disincentive system is alleviated.
Imagine the labor pool increase if the workforce participation rate nationally moved toward that of the most productive states, millions more workers and still nowhere near the potential.
https://mn.gov/deed/data/data-tools/compare-mn/labor/labor-force.jsp
The development of labor savings devices is among the opportunities for export and economic growth. It's hard or perhaps stupid to think we have peaked in productivity growth.
Regarding retirement and social security, Medicare, etc., ages should be judged IMHO relative to the current population, not according to how things used to be.
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China’s Looming Labor Shortage
Experts now say its population will start to decline in 2030.
28 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 10, 2019 5:09 p.m. ET
Children learn to make lanterns in a kindergarten in Xiaji Township of Baoying County, east China's Jiangsu Province, Dec. 29, 2018.
Children learn to make lanterns in a kindergarten in Xiaji Township of Baoying County, east China's Jiangsu Province, Dec. 29, 2018. Photo: Xinhua/Zuma Press
Somewhere Julian Simon is smiling. In the 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank, the Club of Rome, author Paul Ehrlich, and the United Nations predicted catastrophe if China’s government couldn’t stop its people from having babies. Simon argued from his post at the University of Illinois that this was wrong. He said the problem wasn’t too many Chinese but the political and economic system oppressing them. Simon even predicted in 1985 that if China opened its economy to market forces, the growth might leave China facing a labor shortage.
Well, here we are. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently confirmed that Simon, who died in 1998, was right. In its Green Book of Population and Labor, the academy now says China’s population will start to decline in 2030, that the decline is “unstoppable,” and that it is “bound to cause very unfavorable social and economic consequences,” especially in a society that is rapidly aging.
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This means China can no longer count on the large, young workforce that has long driven its economic growth. In 2016 a Renmin University professor published a paper for the EU-China Social Protection Reform Project reckoning that by 2050 China’s economic growth rate would drop to 2% due to the population decline. This in turn means fewer working-age people to support rising health-care and pension obligations.
Simon’s prediction for China was based on what he had seen in Singapore. Like China, Singapore’s government initially pushed population control—only to reverse itself with policies that now encourage Singaporeans to have more children.
There’s a lesson here for the Western experts and institutions that pushed population control on developing nations. Their prescriptions led to human-rights outrages such as sterilizations and forced abortions, and they have left the societies that took their advice scrambling to reverse the sorry consequences. This includes China, where three years ago the government officially allowed families to have two children instead of one.
But the efforts to reverse declining birth rates with incentives to have babies haven’t succeeded. This is consistent with results of natalist subsidies in Western Europe and most other places where they have been tried.
Western nations at least grew prosperous before they grew old. China may be the first nation to grow old before it reaches developed status. They should have listened to Julian Simon instead of the World Bank.
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European Muslims: A Demographic Opportunity
Sep 20, 2018
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Summary
The Muslim population in Europe has been growing since World War II, topped off by the migration crisis in 2015. Today, about 33 million Muslims live in Europe, equal to 6 percent of the population. Not since the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna in 1683 has Islam played such a prominent role in European affairs.
Yet the numbers are slightly deceiving. Islam has become such a serious political issue in Europe not because of the growth in Muslims itself but because the Muslim population is younger and growing faster than other demographic groups. This is in part because of the migration wave and in part because European fertility rates have fallen below replacement level. The trend sows fear among the native population that its influence and way of life is ending, and it is compounded by the desire of the immigrants to retain at least elements of their previous national, ethnic and religious identities. These demographic shifts have led to internal disagreements that threaten to tear the European Union apart. They also profoundly shape internal political dynamics in many of Europe’s most powerful countries. Forty-five percent of Europe’s Muslims live in one of three countries: France (5.7 million), Germany (5 million) or the United Kingdom (4.1 million).
The future of the EU, and of countries like France and Germany, will be shaped by whether these countries can assimilate Muslims. Since France, Germany and the U.K. have the largest Muslim populations, this Deep Dive will focus mainly on the challenges that each faces. We’ll attempt to estimate the scale of the challenge of integration, but we’ll also cover its benefits for the host countries, where immigration will help solve labor shortages to come. We then draw on the history of European Jewry in the 18th century for insights into how European Muslim integration might proceed. We conclude that the significant minority of European Muslims who thus far have refused to assimilate will continue to pose a problem for their host countries, and the prospects for the majority to eventually “belong” in their new homes are mixed.
The Nature of the Problem
First, a caveat: Demographic data on European Muslim populations are difficult to parse and fraught with inconsistencies. France, for instance, does not account for religion in its national statistics, as doing so would violate its strict adherence to “laicite,” a distinctly French approach to secularism to which we will return. Whereas Pew estimates that Muslims make up 9 percent of France’s population, a French think tank called the Institut Montaigne puts the figure at closer to 6 percent. German data on religious affiliation depends on public affiliation with a public law religious society – in Germany’s last census in 2011, 33 percent of Germans did not identify with any religious society. Furthermore, there is no specific category for “Muslims” in the German census – they are instead subsumed by a general category of “others.” The data that follows thus constitute a useful but imprecise snapshot of the issue.
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Europe’s Muslim population first began to increase during the dramatic period of economic growth and reconstruction after World War II. There was a critical need for low-skilled labor throughout Western Europe, and though the bulk of that need was satisfied by internal European migration from east to west, substantial numbers of Muslim migrants also came to Europe for work. In 1936, there just 70,000 Muslims living in France, or 0.17 percent of France’s population. By 1960, there were 1 million, or 2 percent of the population. From 1960 to 1970, the Muslim population of the United Kingdom increased from 105,000 to 668,000. The German figures are perhaps the most staggering, growing from 20,000 Muslims in 1951 to 1.2 million in 1971.
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The ethnicities and nationalities of the immigrants depended somewhat on their destination. Many of the Muslim migrants to France came from Algeria, which France ruled as a colony from 1830 to 1962. Today, 38 percent of French Muslims are of Algerian descent. Muslim migration to the U.K. came predominantly from Britain’s former colonies in South Asia: More than 50 percent of British Muslims today are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin. Germany had fewer former colonial holdings from which it could import foreign labor, which is a major reason Germany has had a tougher time integrating its Muslim population than the U.K. and France. Germany instead recruited cheap labor from its former World War I ally: Turkey. More than half of all Muslims in Germany in 1973 were Turkish, and the German Federal Office of Statistics estimates that the current population of Turkish descent in Germany is roughly 3 million – a number that is widely considered conservative.
The demographic makeup of Muslim migration to Europe in this period was equally important. Many Muslims who came to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s were young, single men. They were taking advantage of labor shortages in European countries, and the jobs that they got were often menial. This was not a problem at first. In fact, Muslim migration was one of a number of migrations that helped supercharge the Western European economies after the war. But by the end of the 1970s, the period of economic growth had run its course. The first workers to get laid off were the foreign workers and migrants who had left their families and homes behind in search of higher wages and better opportunities. In West Germany, the government did not even count Turkish workers in its official unemployment statistics; instead, it encouraged Turks to return home. But many Muslim migrants throughout Europe decided to stay – and used the money they had earned to bring their families to join them in Europe too.
The result was a self-perpetuating disconnection between Muslim migrants and the countries they now called home. Even though European countries had encouraged Muslim migration to fill low-skill jobs, the concern was never to integrate them into German or French or British society but to profit from their labor. The social mobility that a citizen of these countries enjoyed was not enjoyed equally by Muslim migrants. Furthermore, the migrants were far from home, living in a political culture and a religious environment radically different from the ones in which they had grown up. Sour prospects and the innate human desire for familiarity led to a de facto segregation that was as much by choice as it was by imposition. Muslim migrants felt unwelcome, so they created their own, often separate communities, which only raised suspicion and hostility among the natives toward Muslims, for whom there were fewer jobs and prospects.
This dynamic has only worsened over time as more Muslims have migrated to Europe, not in response to labor shortages but to escape violence or poverty. A 2016 U.K. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government report identified 42 wards where a minority faith or ethnic group was a local majority. Nine of the top 10 were Pakistani Muslim wards. The same report also found that almost 16 percent of all British Muslims speak little or no English – double the next highest group (Hindus at 8 percent). In France, the Institut Montaigne estimates that the unemployment rate for those of North African descent is roughly 30 percent, whereas countrywide unemployment is 9.1 percent as of July 2018. Similar conditions are present among Turkish workers in Germany. They face an unemployment rate of roughly 16 percent, more than three times the national average of 5.2 percent in August.
The issue has been aggravated by high fertility rates among European Muslims relative to other religious and ethnic groups. In France and the U.K., for example, Pew projected the average total fertility rate for Muslims would be around 2.9 children per woman – compared to 1.9 and 1.8 children per woman for non-Muslims, respectively. In Germany, the total fertility rate of 1.9 for Muslims is actually below replacement rate, but that is still significantly higher than the non-Muslim rate of 1.4. The average European total fertility rate for non-Muslims is around 1.6, compared to 2.6 for Muslims. Combine this with continued migration to European countries from the Muslim world – Germany alone received almost 1 million Muslim migrants from mid-2010 to mid-2016, before Chancellor Angela Merkel came under intense political pressure to stop migration – and it is not hard to imagine the more aggressive projections on Muslim population growth in Europe coming to fruition.
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These statistics led one well-known French financial analyst, Charles Gave, to estimate in 2017 that within 40 years, Muslims would become a majority of the French population. That seems far-fetched, and Gave wouldn’t be the first to be guilty of overestimation. After all, in 2003, Pew estimated that Muslims would make up 10 percent of Europe’s population by 2020 – well over the actual rate, according to Pew in 2018, of 6 percent – and worried that it was projecting too low a figure. Even so, the broader issue remains: Muslims have more babies and are younger and poorer than non-Muslims. In the U.K., the median age for Muslims is 25; the national median age is 39. In France, the average age of Muslims is 35.8 years, compared to 53 for Christians. That Europe will become more Muslim in the coming years is a given – what’s unclear is how much more.
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The Challenge of Integration
The deeper and often unasked question is why the growth of Europe’s Muslim population is so controversial. Muslims are not the only minority group in Europe. Both the U.K. and France, for instance, have significant black minorities (at roughly 3 percent and 1.5 percent of the total population, respectively). The U.K., France and Germany have all seen significant migration from India, Vietnam, China and other Asian countries in recent years as well – to say nothing of intra-European migration, including the high number of Poles who have migrated west in search of better jobs. The number of Muslims in these countries is also still quite low. Pew estimates that if European countries get tough on migration, by 2050 the Muslim population in most European countries won’t exceed 10 percent, with France being an exception at 12.7 percent. Western European countries are not as monochromatic as Eastern European countries, but compared to a country like the United States, where a recent U.S. census report projected that whites will be a majority-minority by 2045, they aren’t especially diverse.
The primary reason the Muslim population is problematic for European governments is because of its reluctance to assimilate into European society. “Islam,” after all, does not denote where one is from; it denotes adherence to a faith, one that informs how a believer should think about politics, cultural norms and justice. Non-Muslim migrants, or Muslim migrants who are not particularly religious, have typical immigrant struggles – overcoming language barriers or nostalgia for their home or their family or a particular kind of food. But these obstacles do not lead groups to want to be treated differently from British, French or German citizens. If anything, it leads to a greater desire to “belong.” There are, however, groups of religious Muslims in Europe who have no desire to belong at all. They want to practice their religion free of government influence and are even confused as to why this is problematic – from their perspective, European states are supposed to be “freer” than the states they came from. They also view European society as potentially corrupting – and try to isolate themselves from those influences as much as possible.
To be clear, these Muslim communities are a minority of the Muslims in European countries, and a fairly small minority at that. In the U.K., for instance, almost half of all Muslims were U.K.-born. Even more striking, a recent U.K. government report found that 86 percent of British Muslims feel a “strong sense of belonging to Britain” – higher even than the national average of 83 percent. Seventy-eight percent answered in the affirmative in a follow-up question about whether they desire full integration into British life. This is an overwhelming majority – but it’s the other roughly 20 percent who are the problem for London. The same U.K. study showed that 23 percent of British Muslims supported the introduction of sharia (Islamic law) in parts of Great Britain. Thirty-one percent said polygamy should be legal (compared to 9 percent for the national average), and 32 percent would not condemn violence against someone for mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Four percent even said they sympathized with terrorists and suicide bombers.
In other words, in the U.K., there are some 800,000 Muslims who do not value some of those basic fundamentals of British political life like the rule of law and freedom of speech. That 4 percent of British Muslims sympathize with Islamist terrorists may seem like a small figure, but it adds up to more than 150,000 people. The national average for Britain was 1 percent, so this is not a strictly Muslim issue – if no one except these Muslims supported terrorism, they would make up 0.3 percent of the total British population. The larger issue is that although all societies have radical fringes, the fringe of European Muslims is a relatively larger part of the whole and is resistant to assimilation or change. This, in effect, poisons the well. Even though the vast majority of British Muslims identify with their country and want to integrate, their reputation in Britain is damaged by those who resist assimilation. And the fear and suspicion that these Muslims create only reinforces prejudices and discrimination, which in turn further radicalizes British Muslims who feel isolated from British life.
A similar picture can be seen in both France and Germany. Institut Montaigne found that while 71 percent of French Muslims generally supported the French secular state, 29 percent “consider religious laws to be more important than the laws of the French state.” The study also pointed out that the vast majority of people with these views are young, low-skilled laborers living in segregated communities inside France. As in the U.K., a significant minority of French Muslims reject some basic tenets of French political life and French culture. Even more distressing in France is that those with more radical views are also the youngest – 50 percent of young people held these views as opposed to 20 percent of the French Muslim population over 40. Whether growing old will moderate the views of these young French Muslims is an open question – that 20 percent is still a distressingly large figure is not.
For Germany, the picture is less clear, partly because Germany experienced such a massive influx of Syrian refugees in the past three years. These migrants have had as little time to assimilate into German society as German sources have had to collect data on how well they are assimilating. Yet in a 2015 study, before the influx of Muslim refugees to Germany had really begun, independent German think tank Bertelsmann Stiftung noted that almost a quarter of the 4.7 million Muslims in Germany at the time had arrived since 2011. That Germany opened its doors to Muslim migrants has historical precedence: Germany recruited Turkish laborers to come to Germany in the 1960s to help cope with labor shortages. But Germany, more so than France and the U.K., never expected or wanted Muslims to integrate. Muslims and other migrants were not considered part of German society, and Germany only began trying to integrate Muslims (and migrants in general) in the 1990s.
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Indeed, until legal reforms were instituted in 2000, it was hard for Muslim migrants and their families, the majority of whom were Turkish, to become German citizens. (German nationality laws were based on a Wilhelmian law from 1913 that stressed German descent over all else.) But though the German government has sought to make Germany more welcoming to immigrants and has instituted policies specifically to better integrate them into society in recent years, their success so far has been mixed. The Bertelsmann Stiftung study found that 96 percent of German Muslims feel “connected with Germany,” though it also noted that almost one quarter of Muslims born in Germany did not learn German as a first language. A U.S.-based think tank, the Migration Policy Institute, pointed to high membership among Muslims in German associations (50 percent) and high numbers receiving school qualifications (85 percent) as signs that integration is succeeding.
What is most striking about this evidence is how similar the situation is in the U.K., France and Germany, despite radically different politically structures, ethnic makeups of the Muslim populations and approaches toward integration into society. In all three countries, a large majority of Muslims assimilate into society and become as British, French or German as any citizen, despite discrimination and in general poorer economic prospects compared to the national average. And yet in all three, a significant minority of the population not only resists assimilation but hives itself off from the rest of the country’s citizenry, espousing different views on everything from who should possess legitimate authority to what women should be allowed to wear in public. All three countries have also in recent years experienced Islamist terrorist attacks, which have reinforced mistrust of Muslims, which creates a vicious cycle that gives way to the very isolation that breeds radicalization among Muslim youths.
A Historical Comparison
The only real historical basis for comparison to the challenges European Muslims currently face is the fate of European Jews in the 20th century. Like European Muslims, European Jews were spread throughout the Continent, and at times, Jews would migrate to new countries to escape persecution or violence. This is not to say it’s a perfect comparison. The Jews living in Europe had been there for centuries, and especially in Western European countries, they were often well-off. And unlike European Muslims, the majority of European Jews lived in Eastern Europe (in 1933, in Poland, they made up 9 percent of the population, as compared to just under 1 percent of Germany’s population). Despite the differences, the experience of European Jews – a religious minority in Europe – informs thinking about Islam’s future in Europe.
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European Jews lived through one of the most transformative periods in European history – the slow, centuries-long transformation of Europe from a patchwork of multiethnic monarchies into individual nation-states. The European Jewish experience varied greatly depending on the given state. In Great Britain, membership in a religious community was not mandated by law. As a result, British Jews felt less dissonance between their religious lives and their national lives. British Jewish institutions even mimicked the Anglican Church in their development, so strongly did Jews want to integrate into British society.
The situation was much different in France. After the French Revolution, the National Assembly debated granting citizenship to French Jews and concluded famously that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.” To become French, Jews had to check their religion at the door. In that sense, not much has changed in the intervening centuries.
Germany was a more complicated case. Before 1871, there was no Germany to speak of, and local Jewish communities interacted with the various Germanic states in a variety of ways. In Prussia, Jews were offered equal rights – but only if they recognized the absolute authority of the Prussian government and did not hold views antithetical to those of Prussian society. That “but” helped create a de facto Jewish reformation. For a long time, European countries were often made of different confessional groups, with authority delegated to the spiritual leaders of those groups. But the advent of the nation-state and the attempted integration of Jews into the new national European societies created crises in various religious communities, and Judaism was no exception. The very concept of today’s three main Jewish denominations came from this tumultuous time and from internal arguments about how much tradition to conserve versus how many reforms should be undertaken so that Jews could live prosperously in the new Europe.
Germany became the center of gravity for Jewish religious reform, but in truth, throughout Europe, Jews reconceptualized their relationship between organized religion and the state. (Eastern Europe, which we won’t address at any length here, became the epicenter of Jewish nationalism, one strain of which became Zionism.) Many Jews assimilated seamlessly into European society. Others held on to tradition with fundamentalist zeal, closing themselves off from what they saw as the corrosive influence of European modernity. In the end, it didn’t much matter. European Jews was never truly integrated into European society. The word “anti-Semitism” was coined by a German association in 1879 – eight years after a recently unified Germany had granted Jews full equal rights. Jews eventually became an easy scapegoat for Hitler during his rise to power, and European Jews, as well as gypsies and political dissidents, were marked for slaughter as a result. (Anti-Semitism also was not a strictly German phenomenon – Germany had only some 600,000 Jews. With the notable exception of Denmark, no European nation-state conquered by the Nazis defended Jewish citizens as if Jews were national brethren.)
European Muslims come from countries that, like 18th-century Europe’s multiethnic empires, are not organized on the basis of liberalism or nationalism. One of the reasons some Muslim migrants have such difficulty integrating into European societies is that in Islam, there is little distinction between governance and piety, and in most Muslim states, there has been no social or political revolution that necessitated the reinterpretation of Islam to allow for a separation of mosque and state. A religious Muslim’s primary identity is wrapped up in the “ummah” – the greater Islamic community – not his or her state of residence. Tribes, families and sects – not nations with constitutions and individual rights – are the political environments from which most of these Muslim migrants come. As with European Jews in the 18th century, this clash between Islam and Western political values may well lead to institutional religious reform to attempt to integrate.
This is not a process that will happen overnight, nor will it be seamless. But it is already possible to see the different ways in which European Muslims are struggling to maintain their religious beliefs while integrating into their new national communities. For example, in a recent 134-page report published by the Muslim Council of Britain, a Muslim sheikh made a religious case that Islam actually requires Muslims integrate into the societies in which they live. Quoting heavily from the Quran, the sheikh concludes that “Islam places a lot more emphasis on integration and human relationships than the worship of God itself.” The problem, for both European Muslims and for the nation-states where they live, is that while compromises and reforms may help integrate Muslims into European society better, no country or group has yet found a successful way of bringing the fringe elements in from the cold. And for as long as a fifth of European Muslims resist assimilation, domestic hostility toward Muslims will continue, as will Islamists attacks.
A Silver Lining?
There is one silver lining to this story. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the horrors wrought by World War II were in part a result of economic crisis. The dismembering of Germany after World War I, followed by the Great Depression, essentially catapulted the world into a temporary Dark Age. Discrimination is often a byproduct of economic duress, and Jews in Europe were an obvious target for the masses: a religious minority that had always seemed to be a nation living within nations, with whom Christendom had a violent past, and which had in general profited seemingly at the expense of ordinary people, or so the line of thinking went. It is easy to dismiss it now, but it is impossible to dismiss how attractive such ideas were in the decade leading up to World War II.
European Muslims are by and large not wealthy. They are also generally younger than their neighbors. And that may make all the difference. Muslim migration first came to Europe when European countries were experiencing shortages of labor due to economic growth. Now, European countries are getting older and their populations are shrinking, a situation that is in turn creating new demand for labor. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has suffered grievous political harm because of her open migration policies, but the flipside is that migrants in Germany have essentially functioned as an economic stimulus. Oxford Economics recently published a report suggesting that the influx of Muslim migrants into Germany would raise gross domestic product by almost 1 percent by 2020, and that the influx of people might also curb inflationary pressures. The deeper problem for Germany is that it is simply an aging population: Next year, there will be fewer Germans under 30 years old than Germans over 60. Making its Muslim migrants truly German would go a long way toward combating Germany’s aging process.
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The U.K. and France, while also aging, do not face as stark a challenge as Germany does in this regard, but neither are they immune from demographic factors. France is in the least danger, though its non-Muslim total fertility rate has dropped for three consecutive years, falling to 1.9 children in 2017. Indeed, both the U.K. and France have total fertility rates that exceed the European average. The rub, however, is that Muslims in the U.K. and France are having babies at a significantly higher rate than non-Muslims. And though it is impossible to know whether the Muslims who are reproducing at these higher rates belong to the portion of the Muslim populations that have not assimilated into European societies, it is a good bet that they do, as a combination of traditional values, marriage at an early age and lack of access to education all lead to higher birth rates – and are all ways one could describe those Muslim communities that don’t integrate into British and French society.
The aging of Europe provides an opportunity. Nothing is better for integration than the prospect of economic opportunity and social mobility. And there will be plenty of jobs for young people in Europe in the coming decades, so much so that Poland is literally paying women to have babies, and Germany was willing to break taboos on immigration just to attract younger people to a country that has historically been hostile to immigration. The existence of opportunity is hardly a guarantee of Muslim assimilation, but it also means that Muslims will not be seen as stealing jobs from qualified German, French or British citizens. For the first time since the 1970s, European societies are actively encouraging migration and attempting to integrate Muslims into European societies, which may help balance against the hostility toward Muslims in these countries. At the very least, economic issues will not exacerbate the problem of integration that is already there.
The situation can be summed easily, even if it defies an easy solution. The size of the European Muslim population is increasing. While many European Muslims have assimilated into European society, a substantial minority, perhaps as many as one-fifth of all European Muslims, have not only failed to assimilate but reject the basic political and cultural tenets of the countries in which they live. These pockets of resistance to assimilation, often egged on by lack of economic prospects and discrimination, lead to hostility and suspicion on the part of the domestic population, while only exacerbates the problem of integration. The countries with the three biggest Muslim populations in Europe – France, Germany and the U.K. – have struggled to integrate Muslims into their societies, and despite the various differences in their approaches, all have failed to prevent the emergence of a strain of Islamic identity that the nation-state has yet to metabolize successfully. Europe is aging, and the economic opportunity that this will offer to young and relatively less wealthy European Muslims may help lead to assimilation. Even so, Europe’s historical approach to religious minorities leaves much to be desired and suggests integration will never truly be successful.
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The Predictive Power of Demography
Oct 11, 2018
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Summary
Fertility rates below replacement level are widely considered to be detrimental to national power. If such rates are accompanied by an overall population structure in which older people outnumber younger people, what was detrimental becomes an impending catastrophe. These prevalent beliefs would benefit from more critical scrutiny.
That demographics are relevant to a state’s power is not up for debate. Whether an aging population is indicative of future weakness, however, is a question worth considering. In the 20th century, population structure was actually a relatively weak predictor of national power. Germany in 1933 worked itself into a violent hysteria over fears that population decline spelled national decline. Then it nearly conquered Europe. Moreover, predicting the future age and fertility of a population proved almost impossible for most demographic experts of the 20th century. In the 1960s, American demographers feared overpopulation; by the late 1970s they were writing of a baby bust that would last the rest of the century. They were wrong on both counts.
This Deep Dive is a modest first attempt to check assumptions and rethink the issue. We begin by considering the examples of 1933 Germany and 1980 America. Many of the false assumptions about those countries in those years are now being made about China in 2018. We conclude that although demographics provide an important snapshot of a nation’s status, they are not a good predictor of future strength.
Germany, 1933: A Case Study
Since the 1870s, birthrates have declined in all Western nations. Among the many reasons for the slump, three stand out.
First, the Industrial Revolution, which enabled a population explosion in the first half of the 19th century, altered the return on investment of having children. Whereas children had been a resource, the industrialization of society made them an economic drain. Second, freed from the rigors of their traditional childbearing role, women entered the workforce in greater numbers. And third, advances in contraceptive technologies significantly increased women’s ability to control their reproductive cycles, and as a result, lowered birthrates. There was a cyclical component to the decline in birthrates as well. The Industrial Revolution had been a time of tremendous economic growth. Such boom periods are usually followed by periods of contraction, and toward the end of the 19th century, the boom was nearing its end. This is hardly an exhaustive picture of the situation, but it was the context in which a newly unified German state emerged in 1871.
Germany was a latecomer to the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution, but by the end of the 19th century it had made up for its slow start. From 1871 to 1914, its population increased by roughly 27 million, or by about 66 percent. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, the military manpower between Germany and France was more or less equal. But by the eve of World War I, Germany’s population of roughly 68 million was over a third larger than France’s. Crucially, when Germany was recruiting soldiers to fight in the Great War, it was drawing from a pool of 7 million men aged 20-24 compared with France’s 4 million. Germany’s population explosion in no small part contributed to its ability to wage war simultaneously against the British, French and Russian empires – and to come close to victory. In the end, it was defeated – at a cost of 2.5 million soldiers and civilians, or some 4 percent of its total population – because of U.S. intervention.
Besides the losses, Germany by the end of the 19th century had already begun to experience declining birthrates, just as the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution had before. Its total fertility rate began to decline in 1883, but at 5.23 children born per woman, and with a relatively higher fertility rate compared with its main European rivals like the United Kingdom (4.62) and France (3.4), Germany still had a population growth advantage. The end of the Great War did not result in an attendant rise in Germany’s birthrate; in fact, it dropped precipitously, from 25.9 births per thousand in 1920 to 14.7 by 1933. Meanwhile, industrialization was sweeping through Eastern Europe and the young Soviet Union, and with it came the same increases in population and productivity that had enabled Germany’s rise.
In 1926, the national statistics office, the Statistisches Reichsamt, published its first study on the German fertility problem. One scenario in the study predicted that, as a result of the casualties during World War I and the long-term decline in fertility, the German population would begin to shrink as early as 1945. Three years later the office revised its projections, estimating a sharper drop in fertility, and therefore in the population. Population decline had thoroughly entered the German zeitgeist. A slew of popular works emerged in the 1930s decrying Germany’s impending demographic doom. The most famous writer on the subject was Friedrich Burgdorfer, whose “Volk ohne Jugend” (“A People Without Youth”) was widely read. Debates over whether to legalize abortion hinged on whether Germany could afford to allow women to abdicate their national duty. France had once feared the Germanization of Europe; now Germany feared “Slavonization.”
The fear of Germany’s demographic decline was part of the dangerous ideological cocktail that Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party would take advantage of during its rise to power. Beyond the insecurity over Germany’s inability to reproduce and the paranoia over the threat posed by the Slavic east, a large population was considered crucial to ensuring the national defense. The population’s robustness and virility were seen as key indicators of whether Germany would survive in a world where social Darwinism was widely accepted. In Germany, the increased emphasis on the study of demographics coincided with a focus on race science and eugenics. The Reichstag was set ablaze in February 1933; four months later, the first German census in eight years was published, with special sections on Jews inside the Reich. The quest to correct Germany’s fertility problem became an official Nazi policy and obsession.
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It’s not hard to see why Germany was so self-conscious of its population structure. The Great War cut a deep gash into an entire generation, and, except for a few years immediately after the war ended, the base of the German population pyramid was disintegrating. The Nazis wasted little time attacking the issue. Five months after assuming power, Hitler’s government implemented a marriage loan policy, whereby it redistributed income tax revenue to married couples in the form of 1,000-reichsmark loans (in the vicinity of $6,500 in 2018), repayment of which was canceled by one-fourth for every child born. Only couples deemed racially pure enough were entitled to apply for the program – and from 1933 to 1938, 1.1 million marriages were granted. In addition, women were encouraged not to participate in the labor market, and abortion laws were enforced with new thoroughness. The Nazi fertility policies attracted global attention. The American Journal of Sociology wrote in 1940 that Nazi Germany represented “the only case in which deliberate national policies … have increased the fertility of an entire nation.”
But the long-term “damage” to Germany’s population structure could not be erased overnight, or even over five years. Germany’s net reproduction rate was 0.76 in 1933; Nazi policies managed to increase it to 0.95 by 1938 – still below the replacement level of 1.0 and therefore insufficient to stop the imminent shrinkage of the German population. In five years, Germany had managed only to return to the same rates the Statistisches Reichsamt had observed in 1926.
In the end, though, Germany’s declining fertility rate and misshapen population pyramid did not prevent the Nazi regime from building the most formidable war machine Europe had ever seen. It did not stop Germany’s blitzkrieg into Poland or its march into Paris. Certainly it did not hinder Germany from conquering most of continental Europe by 1942. It required the full exertion of the combined populations of the U.S., the Soviet Union and the U.K. to defeat the supposedly demographically challenged Aryan race.
In 1926, Germany was worried that its 55-year-old experiment as a unified nation-state would fail because of its declining fertility rates, its graying population and the influx of Slavs from the east. Not only did this demographic profile not cripple German strength, but it obscured the myriad other factors (especially military might and industrial base) that made Germany the most powerful country in Europe. Furthermore, the widely accepted orthodoxy on the disastrous effects of imminent population decline was not a benign ignorance. The Nazis expertly, malignantly manipulated it to come to power and to solidify domestic support for mass extermination and continental conquest (in addition to the marriage loans). In this sense, the German case study is an example of how an aging population leads not to weakness, but rather to aggression. Instead of a death knell, an accurate prediction of the implications of Germany’s demographic profile in 1926 would have rung alarm bells about the country’s imminent play for global domination.
The United States, 1980: A Case Study
The 1970s were a difficult decade in American history. The Vietnam War came to an ignominious end. The Watergate scandal led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation – and, along with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin controversy in the previous decade, permanently scarred the institutional legitimacy of the U.S. executive. U.S. national debt almost tripled, from $371 billion at the beginning of the ’70s to $908 billion by the end. War in the Middle East led to high oil prices. Inflation rates hit 14 percent by 1980, while gross domestic product growth rates stagnated. Dissidents and clerics joined forces in Iran to overthrow the U.S.-backed government and kept 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for over a year. By the end of the decade, a former actor and governor of California who promised to make America great again had won the presidency in a landslide.
Amid the stagflation and insecurity about America’s future, a serious demographic problem reared its head. The year Ronald Reagan was elected, the total fertility rate in the U.S. fell to 1.76. It was a stunning reversal. The fertility rate had reversed its decline in the beginning of the 20th century, rising to 3.58 from 1933 to 1958. These were the baby boomers, and on the back of war reconstruction and consumer demand, the U.S. economy soared and its demographic pyramid looked the Platonic ideal of a healthy population. In the 1960s, the concern was not with the potential for an aging or shrinking population, but with overpopulation. In the late ’60s, numerous books were written about the negative future effects of overpopulation, the most famous of which was Stanford biology professor Paul R. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” in which the author predicted that 65 million Americans would die in the 1970s from lack of food.
By the end of the 1970s, it was a potential future decline in population, not overpopulation, that most concerned American demographers. In 1979, Population and Development Review published an article titled “Will US Fertility Remain Low?” which concluded that the “baby bust” could last until the end of the 20th century. (Although, to be fair, the authors were unsure enough of their predictive powers that they left open the possibility that the situation might reverse within a year.) The following year, The Sociological Quarterly printed a slightly more pessimistic article: “Will US Fertility Decline Toward Zero?” As in 1930s Germany, there were debates about abortion (Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, came down in 1973) and access to contraceptives. There was also concern over an increase in the divorce rate, which reached its peak in the early 1980s. Doubts surfaced about the future viability of social security for an aging U.S. population.
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And, as in Germany in the 1930s, the insecurity of American virility led to fears that the U.S. would be eclipsed on the world stage. Germany had feared the Slavs; the U.S. began to fear the world’s most populous country, China. Unlike Germany, the U.S. did not develop a pseudo-mystical race narrative, nor was it concerned about acquiring land to expand, but its decision to enter a de facto alliance with China against the Soviet Union reflected this worldview. In Nixon’s own words from a speech in July 1971, China was a country with “the capacity” and “the kind of people” to pose a serious challenge to the United States. It was a statement about quantity as much as quality. Nixon believed that a “multipolar” world was emerging and that, despite its failures in Vietnam, the U.S. had to focus its future foreign policy more on Asia, where the world’s most populous states were modernizing and fast catching up with the West. The general feeling was that difficult times lay ahead for the United States – and that sentiment was reflected in U.S. birthrates.
It was a pessimism that, it turns out, was profoundly misplaced. Within 11 years, the Cold War was over. The Soviet Union collapsed on itself, and the United States was the country left standing. U.S. fertility rates improved slightly from their nadir in the 1970s, climbing to 2.08 by 1990. Furthermore, U.S. fertility rates and birthrates since the 1970s have stayed relatively constant, and slightly higher, when compared with those of most developed countries. This is true despite the recent media hysteria over data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May. That report concluded that births in the U.S. in 2017 had declined by 2 percent to the lowest number in 30 years and that the general fertility rate was down 3 percent to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women. It seems that any insecure moment in U.S. history is punctuated by both a decline in fertility rates and an accompanying fear that U.S. power has entered a secular decline.
Historical evidence doesn’t bear this out. Demographers, politicians and popular culture all emphasized the aging of the U.S. population as a sign that the U.S. was in decline four decades ago – and a decade before the U.S. emerged as the sole global superpower. If population structure were a primary aspect of a country’s ability to project national power, then the United States should not have gotten where it did in 1990. One could make a case that relative to that of the Soviet Union, the U.S. population structure was far stronger, and that this played a role in the Soviets’ defeat in the Cold War – but that was not the widely accepted argument of the time. Instead, an unhealthy population pyramid, a declining birthrate and an aging population were all seen as reasons not only that the U.S. might lose the Cold War but that there would soon be global parity in terms of economic and military power between the United States and China, Japan and the Soviet Union. The demographic orthodoxy in this case served only to obscure the fact that the U.S. was far from decline. It was in fact on the cusp of unrivaled strength.
China, 2018: An Open Question
Enough about the past; the more important question concerns the future – and there is no more important demographic question about the future than the fate of China. During the 1970s, when most of the world was fretting over population decline, China was concerned primarily with population control. Among the numerous reforms Deng Xiaoping instituted when he succeeded Chairman Mao was the one-child policy. In Mao’s China, a large population was a strength. Indeed, it was something the People’s Republic of China touted to the world. During the opening session of the U.N. World Population Conference in 1974, the leader of the Chinese delegation proudly stated that China’s population had increased 60 percent in 20 years and would soon surpass 800 million. Of course, Mao’s China was not a modern country. Primarily rural and intentionally distant from the global economy, China in 1979 was more like a pre-industrial European country than an emerging behemoth.
Deng had a different vision for China. Where Mao had emphasized self-reliance, Deng emphasized self-enrichment. But he did not have generations to wait. Mao had unified the Chinese people, but if China’s newfound independence was to be preserved, the country had to join the 20th century, and it had to do so as quickly as possible. China’s population was a tremendous asset in this endeavor: Its hundreds of millions of peasants could work for far lower wages than people in competing countries, making China ideally suited for success when it entered the global trading system. But in the long term, if China’s population continued to grow at previous levels, it could threaten the survival of the Communist Party’s rule. After all, industrialization in Western economies was not a linear or universally enjoyed success. The dislocations of industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries transformed family life, created new wealth inequalities and included periods of busts as well as booms that China could not afford.
China was, in effect, trying to accomplish in a few decades what had taken most Western countries over a century to achieve – and it was trying to do so in a way that ensured extremely low unemployment. Social and political stability was not just a policy goal for the Chinese government – it was an existential challenge. Birthrates and fertility rates declined organically in the West beginning in the latter half of the 19th century as a response to changes in the structure of national economies over the previous 50 years. China did not have time to wait, and so the government began to impose lower birthrates on its population so that it would have fewer mouths to feed and fewer people to employ. The fewer children in China, the more wealth would be available for Chinese adults. The country’s one-child policy, from this perspective, has been overwhelmingly successful. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, it had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Meanwhile, fertility rates have been below replacement level since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.
The result of this policy, however, has turned China’s population pyramid into a demographer’s worst nightmare. China industrialized faster than any economy in history, but now it is also aging faster than any economy in history. The number of working-age Chinese has been declining since 2013, and the PRC’s own projections suggest the overall population will begin to shrink as early as 2020. This is regularly described in the mainstream press and in academic circles – indeed, even at GPF – as an impending crisis. There is no denying that China, though it has achieved substantial enrichment since 1979, remains a country with hundreds of millions of poor people, many of whom have not enjoyed the success of Chinese coastal elites and for whom future prosperity seems a more dismal prospect today than at any time in the past 39 years. It is not a coincidence that Chairman Xi Jinping is now speaking of “self-reliance” in China once more.
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But there is something too simplistic in the argument that China’s aging population consigns it to doom. Such prognostications were not true about Germany in the 1930s or the United States in the 1970s. Nor can it be true that China’s overpopulation in the 1980s was an inevitable crisis and its aging population in 2018 is also an inevitable crisis. Indeed, while China’s population pyramid has become inverted in the past 30 years, its GDP has increased by a factor of 63, from $177 billion to $11.2 trillion. Chinese society has enjoyed these monumental gains more evenly than it would have without the one-child policy, considering that according to at least one expert, the policy prevented the birth of some 400 million Chinese. The Communist Party of China might not still be the ruling power in Beijing if 400 million young Chinese citizens were added to the current combustible economic environment in which the country finds itself. The World Bank’s international poverty line is $1.90 a day, and as of 2015, only 700,000 Chinese citizens fell below the line. Imagine if 400 million more were added to the equation.
This is not to say China’s aging population poses no challenges. The burden of taking care of the increasing number of elderly Chinese will fall on the younger generations. And yet, those generations will likely never want for a job. Worker shortages will be a problem for the Communist Party, not worker surpluses, and they are a problem the party is far better equipped to handle. Technology, immigration, imports and foreign conquests are all potential solutions to help bridge the gap. The more important point is that China is about to embark on a period of its history in which there will be more than enough jobs to go around. The issue will no longer be employing the poor at unprofitable jobs but making sure that Chinese workers are sufficiently trained and prepared for the jobs that will be needed. Considering the accomplishments that China’s centralized, autocratic governing structure has managed, this is not an impossibility. Dictatorship has many flaws, and in the long run is often brittle, but one of its primary advantages is that policy changes like the ones China needs to make can be decided and implemented rapidly, as the one-child policy demonstrated.
In reality, if China’s future is precarious, it’s not because of its aging population. It is because of the high concentration of wealth on the Chinese coast and the transfer of that wealth from the coast to the interior that must happen if a replay of Chinese history – namely, a revolution by the relatively less well-off – is to be avoided. Considering past Chinese history and the center of gravity of China’s problem, a smaller population may be a net benefit. That Chinese families have not entered a baby boom since the repeal of the one-child policy in 2015, rather than an indictment of China’s virility, may be evidence that the country succeeded in modernizing its economy in 36 years and now has the demographic profile of any modern industrialized economy. At the very least, it is not an accurate predictor of China’s national power over the next 20 years.
Demographics are a crucial part of geopolitics, and yet for all their importance it is notoriously difficult to predict their consequences. Despite this difficulty, it has long been asserted that a country with an aging population and a declining fertility rate is destined for national catastrophe. The claim does not hold up to scrutiny. The age and fertility of a population can still offer significant insights into how a state will behave and evolve, but an aging population does not presage in and of itself an imminent decline in national power. The conventional wisdom was wrong about Germany in 1933, and it was wrong about the U.S. in 1980. This should be considered when thinking about China’s future.
The post The Predictive Power of Demography appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.
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Russia Takes on Its Demographic Decline
A picture taken on March 30, 2017 shows a woman entering a building of Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) in Moscow.
Highlights
Russia's demographic decline will be a key concern for Moscow in the coming years as a result of emigration and low birth rates.
Contradictory data sets and the Kremlin's plans to attract migrants make it difficult to predict the exact extent and speed of Russia's demographic decline, but it will nevertheless impact the Russian economy and Moscow's ability to project power abroad.
Even if Russia succeeds in attracting significant numbers of migrants to mitigate its population decline, Moscow will face greater difficulties associated with managing domestic ethnic tensions and political instability.
From great power competition with the United States to internal unrest, Moscow has plenty of issues to deal with, but another problem looms ominously on the horizon: demographic change. Because of emigration and low birth rates, Russia's population is projected to decline precipitously in the next few decades. This could have significant geopolitical implications, impacting everything from the country's economy to its military power to its ability to project influence around the world — especially in its near abroad. But due to the disparities between population projections, and to Moscow's efforts to mitigate its decline, the true scale of the demographic threat facing Russia is unknown. While a perusal of various data sets suggests that fears of Russia's imminent demographic demise might be exaggerated, the country's planners still have much work to do to arrest the decline.
The Big Picture
Russia's demographic outlook will play a major role in shaping the country both internally and internationally in the coming decades. The looming population decline will challenge Moscow's ability to sustain its economic and military power, just as the changing ethnic balance in Russia will complicate Kremlin efforts to manage social and political instability.
See 2019 Second-Quarter Forecast
See Eurasia section of the 2019 Second-Quarter Forecast
See Russia's Internal Struggle
Disparate Data Sets
The primary sources for Russia's demographic data are the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), a Russian government agency, and international bodies such as the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In tracking Russia's historical and current population data, there is little discrepancy between the Rosstat and U.N. figures, but there is a far larger gap between Rosstat and the OECD regarding Russian emigration to specific countries like the United States and Germany.
That's because Rosstat only counts Russians who officially cancel their registration in their homeland — something that most emigrants do not do. As a result, the number of Russians emigrating from the country is much higher than the numbers Russia has officially reported, according to a study that the independent media outlet Proekt released in January, citing OECD data. Indeed, certain destination countries, including the United States, have reported Russian immigration figures as many as six times as high as those reported by Rosstat.
Crucially, however, the Proekt report cited OECD migration data published by the destination countries, which doesn't necessarily indicate that incoming Russians actually arrived from Russia. Instead, these "persons holding a Russian nationality arriving from anywhere" could, for example, be Russian citizens who emigrated from France to Germany. This could explain why the OECD figures diverge so much from Rosstat's numbers, as the latter only tallies people leaving Russia. But while the gap between the Russian and international numbers is simply too large to suggest that the difference consists of Russians migrating from third countries to the likes of the United States or Germany, it is likely an exaggeration to claim that the true rate of emigration is six times as high as the Rosstat figures; instead, the reality is somewhere in between.
What Awaits Russia
When it comes to projections for Russia's overall population, the country is currently projected to lose about 8 percent of its population by 2050 according to the United Nations. (Rosstat does not publish such projections.) Naturally, larger emigration numbers would accelerate the population decline. But given the incongruous data sets, it's difficult to project a precise timeline for Russia's downward demographic trend.
Another factor to consider is the Kremlin's efforts to offset its population decline and emigration trends. According to the Russian business daily Kommersant, the Russian government plans to attract 5 million to 10 million migrants from neighboring countries with large Russian-speaking populations, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Moldova, to offset Russia's population decline over the next six years. The government's efforts to attract migrants, as well as it bid to encourage more births, managed to hold the population trend steady in recent years, but 2018 was the first year since 2008 in which Russia's population dropped in absolute terms, falling by 93,500 to 148.8 million people. The country's current plan to attract at least 5 million migrants in just over five years, however, is far more ambitious.
The extent to which the Russian population will decline will have significant implications for Moscow. The continued fall in population will undermine Russia's economic position, particularly as the people most likely to leave are young, educated professionals in sectors like technology and the military. Rosstat, too, has noted the increased brain drain: In 2017, 22 percent of emigrants from Russia possessed advanced degrees, up 5 percent from 2012. The fall will make maintaining tax revenues and sustaining the pension system challenging for Russia, something that prompted the government to raise the retirement age effective this year.
The change will also alter Russia's demographic composition, as migrants from faster-growing countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia are likely to migrate to Russia in greater numbers to make up for the population loss. This, in turn, could foment more ethnic tensions in the country and increase political instability, as evidenced by recent protests against migration in Moscow and Russian Far Eastern cities like Yakutsk. The potential for ethnic tensions notwithstanding, the Russian government has few options but to attract more immigrants to offset its impending population decline.
From a geopolitical perspective, a weakened economy and smaller population will also compromise Russia's ability to project military power and political influence, as the country will lag behind countries that are growing in population and competing for influence in the region, including great power competitors China and the United States and even smaller powers like Turkey and Iran. So while the exact extent of Russia's demographic decline and changing ethnic makeup is difficult to predict, there is little doubt it will give Moscow great cause for concern in the long term.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-birth-rate-continues-to-fall_2924565.html?ref=brief_BreakingNews&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=0a862943ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_16_02_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-0a862943ff-239065853
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while cans sat on their asses collecting from Kochs:
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/20/texas-hispanic-population-pace-surpass-white-residents/
could not find how many of these new arrivals are illegals or children of illegals.
son texas will go way of california
and the ball game is over for the Republican Party
yeah we may be winning some Latinos over but only a minority ............
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/immigration-cannot-fix-challenges-aging-society/
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Is capitalism ready for negative growth?
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-08-12/population-bust
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14942/italy-mass-immigration-suicide
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQELHJx8Vf0
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https://airmail.news/issues/2019-11-2/marking-their-territory
A headline from Drudge.
Everyone says that future demographics favor Democrats, but Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders style Democrats aren't reproducing anymore.
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Coincidentally I was ruminating this morning on how we could educate the new immigrants, illegal and legal, into understanding the genius of the American experiment . . . Contrast the subversion of our youth by the Left beginning in the early 70s.
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Coincidentally I was ruminating this morning on how we could educate the new immigrants, illegal and legal, into understanding the genius of the American experiment . . . Contrast the subversion of our youth by the Left beginning in the early 70s.
"Where does your free sh*t come from?"
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Actually that is a fg brilliant bullet point response to free shit proposals.
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(https://s17-us2.startpage.com/cgi-bin/serveimage?url=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F_IKmlNWItWss%2FSmTEHzE3LxI%2FAAAAAAAABDA%2F6iqijs0pUqo%2Fs320%2FSomalian%2Bgangs%2BMinneapolis.jpg&sp=a6740b6c0098cd878601af1c6af3a745&anticache=621993)
"Excuse me, have you gentlemen read the Federalist Papers"?
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Actually that is a fg brilliant bullet point response to free shit proposals.
They are not ashamed to say aloud they want someone else to pay for your sh*t.
This argument that has been going on for a long time:
“Tax Everyone But Me” included an instance starting with “Congress! Congress! Don’t tax me”
- March 1932 “Collier’s Weekly
Human nature being what it is, it is [also] true that pretty much everybody is inclined to join in the chorus: “Congress, congress, don’t tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree.”
1932 April 5, Morning World-Herald, Omaha, NE
'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.'
- Russell B. Long, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, D-LA, July, 1973
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/04/tax-tree/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-fertility-rate-falls-for-fourth-consecutive-year-in-2018-reaching-record-low/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=18733222
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A point I have been making here for several years now
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-workforce-demographic-on-the-decline-as-population-set-to-shrink_3209694.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=f86885fd10-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_21_12_55&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-f86885fd10-239065853
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-birth-rate-lowest-in-70-years-marriage-rate-also-declining_3210314.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=dbeeb15b0a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_21_09_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-dbeeb15b0a-239065853
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Stratfor Worldview
An Aging Workforce Dims Russia’s Economic Forecast
Sim Tack
Global Analyst , Stratfor
Jan 23, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
HIGHLIGHTS
By 2036, the number of young adults living in Russia is expected to rapidly decline just as the largest segment of its population approaches retirement.
Moscow's move to extend retirement ages will sustain the size of Russia's labor market in the short term, though it ultimately will make its workforce older, less efficient and less productive.
In the long term, Russia's aging labor force will severely restrict its potential for economic growth, which could compel Russia to seek out new economic relations, as well as exercise more constraint toward the West.
Russia's population has long been projected to shrink in the coming decades due to high emigration and low birth rates. But recent projections forecast an even faster reduction than previously anticipated, raising new concerns over the severity of the country's demographic decline and the potential impact on the Russian economy. For now, extended retirement ages and an upcoming boom of young workers will help Moscow temporarily manage the effects of its demographic decline — though that won't keep Russia from hemorrhaging the high-quality workers needed to keep its economy chugging in the meantime.
Indeed, substantially improving the country's population prospects will first require improving its economic prospects to the point where it either keeps Russians at home or attracts foreign workers. Otherwise, Russia will continue to edge ever closer to economic and political turmoil, as its deepening demographic crisis starts to significantly erode its labor force for potentially decades to come.
The Big Picture
A shrinking and aging population is just one of the many challenges Russia will face in the coming decades. But given the expected toll on its industrial capacity and labor force, it's one that could significantly impact Russia's long-term economic trajectory, as well as its foreign policy behavior.
Calm Before the Storm?
At the end of last year, Russia's national statistics office Rosstat released its latest population forecast. Overall, the report showed trendlines similar to the long-accepted realities of demographic decline in Russia. But the country's population also dropped for the first time in a decade last year. Deaths outpaced births at a record rate as well, marking Russia's highest natural population decline in 11 years. These downward trends were coupled with lower-than-anticipated migration inflows and higher-than-anticipated immigration outflows in 2019. The most negative of the three scenarios in the Rosstat forecast shows a potential population drop of 12 million by 2036, as opposed to the 8 million drop forecasted just two years ago.
This line chart shows Russia's population forecast to 2036.
Despite Russia's long-term projections of population decline, its labor force is actually expected to grow slightly, or at least remain at its current level, for the next 15 years. This counterintuitive growth will stem largely from Moscow's 2018 decision to gradually extend retirement ages over the next decade. The current retirement ages for Russian men and women are 61 and 56, respectively. By 2028, Moscow will increase these ages to 65 and 60, respectively. Extending the duration of its citizens' economic activity will help temporarily freeze Russia's dependency ratio, or the gap between those participating in the labor force (adults) and those who aren't (mostly children and seniors). It will also help reduce the strain on public spending by increasing the segment of the population from which it can derive income taxes while limiting the growth of those dependent on pensions.
These line charts show Russia's projected workforce to 2036 and the number of men of military recruitment age.
A growing number of young people is expected to enter the workforce starting in 2024, which will also help maintain the size of Russia's labor market in the coming years. In addition to the obvious economic benefits, this boost of youthful workers starting in around 2025 will limit the other effects of Russia's demographic decline as well, such as difficulties in military recruitment. Russians between the draft-eligible ages of 18 and 27 currently make up one of the smaller segments of the country's population, which has forced Moscow to downscale its ambitions for numbers for both conscripted and contracted military personnel in recent years. But by 2025, this age group is poised to start rising again as the next, larger generation of Russians reaches maturity.
The Cycle Continues
Yet while this influx of younger people may help support both military recruitment and sustenance of the labor force in the short term, it won't provide a permanent fix for Russia's aging workforce. The productivity of workers is generally assumed to peak at around 40 years old before their output and inclination toward innovation progressively decline with age. Currently, the bulk of the Russian population and workforce is either right at or on the cusp of that peak, falling between the ages of 30 and 40. But as this generation grows older and works longer under the extended retirement age, and as a larger wave of younger people enters the workforce, there will be growing concentrations of workers under the age of 30 and over the age of 45 between now and 2036. The number of the most experienced and motivated workers in the middle, meanwhile, will begin to decrease as part of Russia's returning 30-year cycle of expanding and contracting fertility rates following World War II.
Russia's projected population, by age bracket.
Russia's population contracted massively during and directly after the war due to a combination of low birth rates and the sheer loss of lives in battle. This contraction between 1938 and 1945 then contributed to another contraction in the 1970s once this war-time generation began having children, which is still visible in the smaller segment of the population between the ages of 45 and 54. The birth rates of this already small generation were then further suppressed by a 1998 financial and political crisis, which hit right as they were coming of age and starting families. As a result, their children — who are now between the ages of 15 and 24 — make up a particularly small segment of the Russian population. And once this generation reaches prime working age in 2035, it will thus shrink the most productive segment of the workforce.
Long-Term Repercussions
Given this reality, the Russian government could continue to push retirement ages back, though doing so would be wildly unpopular. Indeed, the latest hike sparked waves of protests after it was proposed in 2018, which led the Kremlin to limit the female retirement age to 60 instead of 63 as initially planned. But in addition to threatening political stability, such a move would also only further deteriorate the efficiency and quality of the Russian workforce by forcing older and less motivated Russians to remain employed for longer.
This graphic shows Russia's working population, by age.
Mitigating the actual severity of Russia's demographic decline will instead largely depend on the country's economic performance in the coming years. Significant growth could not only entice more nearby foreigners to seek out new job opportunities in Russia, but also encourage more Russians to have children. On the flip side, however, continued economic stagnation or a recession risks exacerbating the plummeting migration numbers and low birth rates chipping away at Russia's population. But given that neither demographic patterns nor other factors signal such an economic comeback in the coming decades, the latter scenario remains far more likely.
In the longer term, these demographic pressures will continue to build and impose extreme stress on the foundation of the Russian economy by severely restricting its potential for growth, as well as its resilience against other greater global threats and external shocks. Too weak to risk inviting more sanctions pressure or embargoes, Russia will find itself less able to sustain its adversarial posture toward the West. In the face of diminishing industrial capacity, the need to both insulate the Russian economy and build up financial reserves will also make collaborative economic relations — such as the one Moscow is currently developing with China — all the more crucial.
As Russia's economy worsens, it will propel even more of its younger, more capable workers as well as would-be immigrants to establish their lives elsewhere.
But perhaps most importantly is the fact that these greater economic repercussions risk exacerbating the very drivers contributing to its labor woes by making the notion of working or starting a family in Russia all the more undesirable. As Russia's economy worsens, it will propel even more of its younger, more capable workers — as well as would-be immigrants — to establish their lives elsewhere. Thus, barring an economic comeback that drastically changes its demographic fortunes, the spiraling population decline that has haunted Russia for decades will likely continue to haunt Russia for decades to come.
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https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/08/exclusive-hungarys-pro-family-policy-working-births-up-9-4-per-cent/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=b_inspired&utm_campaign=20200411
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https://mercatornet.com/the-incredible-shrinking-land-of-the-rising-sun/62509/
Median age is almost 50, fast approaching the retirement age.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-birthrate-falls-to-record-low/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=20371527
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Is this racist?
https://anncoulter.com/2020/06/10/why-you-no-longer-recognize-your-country/
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Is this racist?
https://anncoulter.com/2020/06/10/why-you-no-longer-recognize-your-country/
Start with "Do you recognize your country"?
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Is this racist?
https://anncoulter.com/2020/06/10/why-you-no-longer-recognize-your-country/
Yes, we had lax border enforcement and sanctuary cities etc. people from south of the border came in. These 'immigrants' voted majority Democrat and now we have one party rule, Leftism, cities on fire, debt, etc. In Latin they call that logic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after this, therefore, because of this, and it's partly true. But that's not the only thing that was going on.
One could also make the case that in this period of time we let our k-12 and all universities be taken over by indoctrinating Leftists. Young people coming out of mostly federally funded college s are even more Leftist than Hispanic families working hard jobs, trying to make a living and raise a family.
One could also make the case that our welfare system and the so-called war on poverty perfectly overlap this time frame. The underclass, black inner-city people in particular vote further Left than immigrants.
Instead, why not argue that the border should be controlled with a big beautiful, attended gate, and we get to decide who comes in - because that's what's what sovereign nations do. We have an investment here we would like to protect. We also have a debt here and would like those coming in to share in the financial responsibility.
Of course she is partly right but is her line of argument helpful? Does it tell the whole story? Does it win votes in the persuadable center? More importantly I think, the politics of immigration exposes the motives of the powerful white liberal elite. They want what they call blacks and browns for their votes and then they neglect them, destroy their families, their neighborhoods, tell them they need assistance not jobs and that private enterprise that lifted more people out of poverty than all other systems combined - sucks. Destroy it. All in pursuit of their own ugly political power, everyone else be damned. We want people for their God-given potential, not identity groups.
Let's allow people in, in a planned, orderly manner and argue our constitutional principles to them as we go.
Open borders is wrong. Gangs control the border. Huge numbers are getting raped as they come in. Permitting this empowers and enriches organised crime on both sides of the border. It's wrong. We need sovereignty. We need assimilation. We need to know who is coming into our country. We need to know why. We need to control the numbers and the flow. We need a balance of where people come from. How does blaming everything on the people who did that help? One might also argue that giving women the right to vote was the start of our budget problems. I don't find that argument persuasive with that gender.
Our better message IMHO is: we need police, free enterprise, property rights, law and order, individual rights, due process, self defense, protections against mob majority rule, not just the trendy rights. And we need sovereignty. We need citizens who understand and support our constitutional system.
Why can't we argue all our principles rather than make it sound like all problems are the fault of one group? My two cents.
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"Of course she is partly right but is her line of argument helpful? Does it tell the whole story? Does it win votes in the persuadable center? More importantly I think, the politics of immigration exposes the motives of the powerful white liberal elite. They want what they call blacks and browns for their votes and then they neglect them, destroy their families, their neighborhoods, tell them they need assistance not jobs and that private enterprise that lifted more people out of poverty than all other systems combined - sucks. Destroy it. All in pursuit of their own ugly political power, everyone else be damned. We want people for their God-given potential, not identity groups.
"Let's allow people in, in a planned, orderly manner and argue our constitutional principles to them as we go."
THIS!
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"Of course she is partly right but is her line of argument helpful? Does it tell the whole story? Does it win votes in the persuadable center? More importantly I think, the politics of immigration exposes the motives of the powerful white liberal elite. They want what they call blacks and browns for their votes and then they neglect them, destroy their families, their neighborhoods, tell them they need assistance not jobs and that private enterprise that lifted more people out of poverty than all other systems combined - sucks. Destroy it. All in pursuit of their own ugly political power, everyone else be damned. We want people for their God-given potential, not identity groups.
"Let's allow people in, in a planned, orderly manner and argue our constitutional principles to them as we go."
THIS!
The lowest rate for homicide in the US is Americans of Japanese ancestry. Anyone surprised by that? Anyone think the Somali immigrants to the US share similar numbers? No?
So, what percentage of Somali immigrants to Minnesota are interested in our constitutional principles? I bet the Federalist Papers are a big seller in Little Mogadishu!
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It wasn't Somalians who put Somalis in Mpls. It was white, college educated suburbanites from the middle that we lost to the Left who empowered them to do that.
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It wasn't Somalians who put Somalis in Mpls. It was white, college educated suburbanites from the middle that we lost to the Left who empowered them to do that.
Yes. Virtue signalling just how wonderful and enlightened they are. I wonder how many were sure to live in those same areas so their children could go to school with the Somali children.
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Not sure if y'all will be able to see this
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/WG_World-Popultion-Shrinking.png?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3A%2F%2Fgeopoliticalfutures.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F07%2FWG_World-Popultion-Shrinking.png&utm_content&utm_campaign=PAID+-+Everything+as+it%27s+published
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Global Population Projections
Expected demographic shifts could have major consequences for the global economy and balance of power.
By: Geopolitical Futures
(click to enlarge)
As a starting point, to get a sense of what the world might look like at the turn of the next century, it’s worth looking closely at demographic trends. The predictive power of demographic projections is often overstated. Nonetheless, if recent projections on population trends were to bear out, we would expect them to contribute to a number of potential major shifts in the global economy – and possibly even the global balance of power. For example, places like Western Europe, China and Japan that are already starting to feel the economic effects of aging and/or shrinking populations will see their demographic woes worsen. It's an open question to what extent technological advances will offset problems like rising health care and eldercare costs and allow them to sustain high levels of productivity. On the other end of the spectrum are those places where populations are expected to boom – India and Africa, in particular. Higher populations mean more mouths to feed and heavier strains on resources, of course, and thus higher potential for instability. But larger labor forces generally mean larger capacity for a country to begin amassing wealth and influence – as well as larger capacity to field a robust military.
And then there’s the U.S, which is expected to be home to another 100 million people by 2100. U.S. birth rates are declining in line with what is happening in most advanced economies, so the bulk of its increase would presumably have to come from immigration. Political volatility regarding immigration in the U.S. isn’t going away any time soon, of course, and thus immigration policy will likely remain chaotic and at times incoherent. But the reality is: The United States’ ability to attract the best and brightest from abroad, along with its ability to continually meet its low-cost labor needs with foreign workers, is a fundamental – and, per these projections, likely enduring – source of national strength.
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Global Population Projections
Expected demographic shifts could have major consequences for the global economy and balance of power.
By: Geopolitical Futures
(click to enlarge)
As a starting point, to get a sense of what the world might look like at the turn of the next century, it’s worth looking closely at demographic trends. The predictive power of demographic projections is often overstated. Nonetheless, if recent projections on population trends were to bear out, we would expect them to contribute to a number of potential major shifts in the global economy – and possibly even the global balance of power. For example, places like Western Europe, China and Japan that are already starting to feel the economic effects of aging and/or shrinking populations will see their demographic woes worsen. It's an open question to what extent technological advances will offset problems like rising health care and eldercare costs and allow them to sustain high levels of productivity. On the other end of the spectrum are those places where populations are expected to boom – India and Africa, in particular. Higher populations mean more mouths to feed and heavier strains on resources, of course, and thus higher potential for instability. But larger labor forces generally mean larger capacity for a country to begin amassing wealth and influence – as well as larger capacity to field a robust military.
And then there’s the U.S, which is expected to be home to another 100 million people by 2100. U.S. birth rates are declining in line with what is happening in most advanced economies, so the bulk of its increase would presumably have to come from immigration. Political volatility regarding immigration in the U.S. isn’t going away any time soon, of course, and thus immigration policy will likely remain chaotic and at times incoherent. But the reality is: The United States’ ability to attract the best and brightest from abroad, along with its ability to continually meet its low-cost labor needs with foreign workers, is a fundamental – and, per these projections, likely enduring – source of national strength.
BS
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https://www.aei.org/multimedia/why-chinas-one-child-policy-is-a-tragedy-like-no-other-documentary-deep-dive/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWW1Nd1pqUTRORGhpWWpKbCIsInQiOiJ0dWRta0Nhc3RCcjNVSk92amRqc2lreUluTE9lZU9qK2RONk1tWFNBbExiV3h2QnM0VWVBRjlibzZYVUp0VndNRXBqd3VkMnlpRHlWV1RKeVhIMFV3OUtrc0JWNTNZNit0b0Z1ZitEelpnZ2VVNXFnTFBHMlRZMjU2RVM2XC9iZ1cifQ%3D%3D
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https://www.aei.org/multimedia/why-chinas-one-child-policy-is-a-tragedy-like-no-other-documentary-deep-dive/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWW1Nd1pqUTRORGhpWWpKbCIsInQiOiJ0dWRta0Nhc3RCcjNVSk92amRqc2lreUluTE9lZU9qK2RONk1tWFNBbExiV3h2QnM0VWVBRjlibzZYVUp0VndNRXBqd3VkMnlpRHlWV1RKeVhIMFV3OUtrc0JWNTNZNit0b0Z1ZitEelpnZ2VVNXFnTFBHMlRZMjU2RVM2XC9iZ1cifQ%3D%3D
The only child aspect of this over generations is amazing. Imagine everything in our lives that has to do with siblings. Gone. No aunts, no uncles. No cousins? Bizarre. Imagine our social security system run with those demographics. The rural aspect of that is devastating.
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The percentage gender gap isn't as wide as the millions in numbers might suggest.
48.78 percent of China's population is female [Hard to find this broken down by age group and China's statistics are notoriously inaccurate.]
There were 33.59 million more men than women in China in 2016, according to figures from the country's National Bureau of Statistics that were issued last month, and 48.78 percent of China's 1.38 billion people are female, compared with a global average of 49.55 percent.
- Feb 14, 2017 NYTimes (via google)
Population of China (2020)
1,439,323,776
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/china-demographics/
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Comparing with US: 2010 Census population, 157.0 million were female (50.8 percent) while 151.8 million were male (49.2 percent).
2016, US: 73.7 million women report voting. 63.8 million men report voting.
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/genderdiff.pdf
2017: 57 percent of college students were female
https://nces.ed.gov/
We have our own imbalances.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/25/judge-says-2020-census-must-continue-for-another-m/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=e%2FY4jCggtjk9pPOcLG2XG1N8u3qF7YYx9vBMZJrh%2BSRAVNKFhJyISvgUWRZgNdRA&bt_ts=1601025280868
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Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)
By Eve Rodsky
I’m fascinated by the effects demographics have on the labor force. From longer life expectancies to lower birth rates and the introduction of artificial intelligence, it’s clear that dramatic changes in the labor market have been underway for a while. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing people to reexamine how they manage their work life, a challenge that’s perhaps best illustrated by the inopportune appearance of children and pets in Zoom calls as parents try to balance child care with working from home.
Though I have been less affected by the recent changes than most, I still find myself reflecting on the current situation. The economic shutdowns have affected people differently based on a number of factors, including their income bracket, location, age, sector, gender, etc. I’ve been thinking recently about how the pandemic affects men and women differently, as many of my friends have expressed their anxiety over balancing working from home with online schooling for their children. Just last week, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. published a report indicating that 1 in 4 women were contemplating downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce altogether due to challenges brought on by COVID-19. The U.S. Department of Labor also reported that, of the nearly 1.1 million people who left the workforce in September, three-quarters were women. Given that at least two-thirds of U.S. households rely on dual incomes, this could have a significant impact on household consumption and debt if the trend continues.
These issues reminded me of a book I read about a year ago. “Fair Play” presents a corporate approach to finding a work-life balance in dual-income households. Author Eve Rodsky starts by framing the household as a single entity with pooled resources and expenses measured in time (where money is time and time is money). Rodsky then identifies 100 household activities – some of which need to be completed daily and others at various intervals – that fall into five categories. She outlines how these activities can be managed by delegating, outsourcing and condensing.
The book was written for a niche audience that may not overlap with our own. But it’s still an interesting and important concept to consider. The idea of running one’s home life as a business struck me as very American. And the idea of efficiency was oddly appealing, though at the same time unrealistic, as it doesn’t take into account the emotions felt by every member of a household. I question how well this framework will hold up now that so many people have merged their work and home lives. In addition, I question the idea that household activities can be grouped into 100 items, and since the onset of the pandemic, I have been wondering which tasks have vanished completely, and how that’s impacted my personal perception of “having time” (though the thought that some activities have vanished for good is quite liberating).
Gender, of course, is just one angle through which we can think about demographics and labor. Another angle through which I hope to explore this topic further is age, and in particular, how people staying in the workforce longer will affect younger generations. I’ve heard that “Culture Shock” by Joanna Massey can shed some light on this topic, but I would welcome any other suggestions
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https://www.aei.org/articles/rogue-superpower/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkdGaU1UaGpNREU0WVRnNCIsInQiOiJWWjB0UDhINFdiS3E1b2wxck9nSnpyV3lMSGhPeDFjc1drallYdUJJXC9kRFdHdFdEc0lVNVJlTXF0cExFS0RrTFpMQXFudTFSYU02enRSdHI2cUM0d3B4YUNZQkRVY1NlZDRJc2FZZko0eWM5K0xhY0t3ZkpCM0NISUZQOFFuK0sifQ%3D%3D
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‘The Great Demographic Reversal’ Review: The Perils of Aging
As workers become fewer in number and global wages rise, we may see less inequality but more inflation and higher interest rates.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
By William White
Dec. 7, 2020 5:47 pm ET
Mountains are thrown up by colliding tectonic plates, but the forces at work in their creation are hidden from view and were, for a time, ill-understood. In advanced societies in recent decades, we have seen striking changes in work, investment and income distribution, yet central bankers and ministers of finance, among others, have failed to grasp the underlying forces that brought them about. In “The Great Demographic Reversal,” Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, both Britain-based economists, vividly document past demographic changes, along with their broad effects, and outline the strikingly different changes that, in their view, are soon to come. Not only is their book well argued, but it is bold as well. It defies the conventional wisdom that inflation will not be a problem in the near future.
The authors begin by focusing on a critical event: the opening up of an urbanizing China—as well of other, smaller countries, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe—and the insertion of many millions of low-paid workers into the global trading system. This increased workforce sharply increased the production of goods and services, which put downward pressure on global prices. But the wages of workers in advanced countries fell even more as employers moved production offshore or made credible threat to do so. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers bore the brunt of the wage shift, and income inequality rose accordingly.
The ramifications of this positive supply shock, as Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan show, were wide-ranging. With domestic wages flattened or lowered, and offshore investment beckoning, domestic investment in new plant and equipment stagnated, and income was distributed ever more unequally. The combination of rising global supply and falling domestic demand also had financial effects: With inflation suppressed, interest rates fell to historic lows. This is the world we see around us now. In the U.S., at the moment, the 10-year Treasury yield is less than 1%; the European Central Bank charges commercial banks for holding deposits with it; and there are now around $17 trillion of bonds world-wide offering a negative rate of return.
As convincing as their portrait of past trends may be, Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan, in “The Great Demographic Reversal,” are intent on arguing that things are going to change again. Indeed, they note that the new trends are already becoming evident. Urbanization in China is slowing, and its working-age population is shrinking. In advanced countries, the ratio of “dependents” to workers is rising sharply as baby boomers retire. Retirees are not only living longer but are increasingly prone to dementia at older ages. As the need for caregivers intensifies, there will be fewer workers available for other work.
PHOTO: WSJ
THE GREAT DEMOGRAPHIC REVERSAL
By Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Palgrave Macmillan, 260 pages, $29.99
A rising dependency ratio, Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan explain, is inherently inflationary, since “dependents” consume but do not produce. Meanwhile, workers are likely to consume more as a shortage of labor pushes up wages, and investment will rise in advanced countries as companies substitute capital for more expensive labor. In short, demand will rise even as supply potential falls. While new technology could increase productivity enough to offset the shortage of workers, the authors (quoting conflicting views by respected experts) refuse to assume that it will.
Extrapolating from these prospective developments, Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan foresee income inequality narrowing—and inflation and interest rates going up. To some, like poorer workers and soon-to-retire savers, these shifts will obviously be good news. But they could well cause severe problems for governments as well as for agents in the private sector that, under the influence of low interest rates, have taken on outsize debt. Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan ponder various approaches to a debt overhang without endorsing any one policy: e.g., debt restructuring and, for governments, higher or new taxes (e.g., taxes on land and carbon). It’s hard not to conclude that the authors expect inflation to be a significant part of the solution, since it is easier to pay back loans in dollars that are worth less.
Undoubtedly “The Great Demographic Reversal” identifies crucial if overlooked forces that may lead to an inflationary future and higher interest rates. But there are other forces at work to which the authors might have given more attention. A complementary narrative might emphasize, for instance, the role of central banks. They have helped to bring us to our current state, by an excessive reliance on monetary stimulus and debt expansion, and their future policies might yet lead us into a world quite different from the one that Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan project.
In recent years, central banks, instead of letting prices fall “naturally” in response to demographic shifts, have resisted such a price decline with ever more aggressive monetary expansion. Moreover, the resulting borrowing has gone toward consumption more than productive investments. Debt, both public and private, had hit record high levels even before the pandemic and had been recognized as a “headwind” constraining economic expansion. The economic effects of the pandemic had to be met with still more expansion, adding to the debt-overhang problem. Worse, easy money and easy access to credit can, over time, threaten the stability of the financial sector as the “search for yield” draws investors to riskier creditors. Should these conditions culminate in another financial crisis, a debt-deflation spiral might follow—not inflation.
Even if Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan are right to predict an inflationary future, inflation might hit much higher levels than the authors suggest. Indeed, history shows that high inflation is a common outcome when large government deficits are increasingly financed—as they are now—by central banks. Still, “The Great Demographic Reversal” provides an instructive glimpse of a possible future and a reminder of the forces that have brought us to this point. No one can say we haven’t been warned.
Mr. White, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, was formerly the economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.
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China’s population problem. The number of newborns formally registered in China’s household registration system, known as hukou, fell around 15 percent in 2020, from 11.79 million in 2019. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.
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COVID-19 Expedites Demographic Change
The pandemic adds urgency to the rebalancing of education and work.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
Editor’s Note: The following was inspired by a presentation delivered by the author at a webinar for Scholas Occurrentes, an international scholastic organization founded by Pope Francis. The topic of the webinar was “Education and Development in (post) pandemic Times.”
In geopolitical analysis, we focus on the behavior of societies organized into complex, geographically defined systems – otherwise known as nation-states. The list of factors that shape a nation-state’s behavior is extensive and, as the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates, not always static. In trying to understand how the pandemic will affect geopolitics, we need to understand what COVID-19 means for demographics.
A country’s demographics dictate its socio-economic model, and through that affect its relationship to other countries in the global system. An older population translates into more retirees and fewer workers. When people retire, they typically consume less. As a larger share of the population transitions from work to retirement, the burden on society grows – there are relatively fewer workers contributing to pension systems, and labor is diverted to care for the elderly.
On a national scale, the shift in favor of retirees over workers means private consumption no longer drives economic growth, which means consumption-led economic growth must give way to either investment-led or export-led models of growth. Increases in private investment translate to higher national output, but if domestic consumption is declining – as it is in an aging society – then that added output must be exported.
2021 Demographics
(click to enlarge)
Germany is the perfect example. More than a quarter (28.6 percent) of the German population is over the age of 60. The less Germans consume, the more they must export, and the more money is available for investment. At the same time, a shrinking labor pool compels Germany to invest in the development of a European supply chain to support its industry. This model works as long as there are no major economic crises hitting its buyers (export markets) and as long as the demographics remain fairly stable. In other words, as long as the system remains balanced.
Preserving this balance has been a German obsession since the financial crisis hit in 2008. Defending its primary export market and production network – the European continent, united under the flag of the European Union – is an existential concern. With the U.S. market aging and thus shrinking, Germany sought alternatives in Asia, which meant improving its trade relations with Asia’s biggest market: China. Moreover, Berlin’s immigration policy has been friendly to those who are interested in working in the manufacturing sector, thereby supporting the country’s export power. When the refugee crisis hit in 2014-16, Germany’s view was that refugees could stay as long as they integrated into the country’s socio-economic model. Berlin designed educational programs intended to get them assimilated into society in an effort to solve its demographic problem.
Other countries, including China and Russia, face similar challenges. Though their economic problems are different in nature, they too have export-dependent economies and low birth rates.
Data on how the pandemic is affecting national demographics are still limited. Figures from the U.S. and some European countries, however, suggest life expectancy and birth rates have dropped. In the United States, life expectancy dropped by more than a year, while in France it fell by six months. Some of this is obviously caused by the disease itself, but other factors, like increased uncertainty and stress, are also at play. It’s unclear how long these effects will persist, just as it’s unclear how long the pandemic will last or how COVID-19 will affect survivors later in life. It seems likely, though, that national demographics will change.
Life Expectancy, 2019
(click to enlarge)
The world started to change rapidly after the crisis of 2008. Consumption decreased, and large markets like the United States became smaller. For a variety of reasons, protectionism slowly returned, posing another obstacle to export-led growth. The crisis highlighted the global imbalance between demand and supply, and a slow rebalancing began. Part of this manifested in the U.S.-China trade conflict. Another manifestation was social strife within countries, between social classes and between urban and rural communities. A prominent example is Brexit, where the division between the British urban and rural realities essentially caused the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU. But there are others, including Russia, where the realities of urban life differ dramatically from life in rural areas. An important feature of the rebalancing is that governments generally had fewer and fewer resources available for the less developed, usually non-urban parts of their countries.
Restructuring is a slow process, but something governments can do rather quickly is adjust educational models to support shifts to new economic models. For instance, in the United Kingdom, the need to reform the university system was apparent as talks around Brexit began. The problem was accessibility: It had become increasingly difficult for Brits to access British education. Discussions on reforming the U.S. higher education system to increase affordability have also increased since 2008.
The COVID-19 pandemic amplified these problems, increasing the urgency of the rebalancing. As the coronavirus spread, working and studying from home became the new normal for much of society. Not everyone could work from home, of course, but remote studying was simpler, at least from a technical perspective.
Last month, Gallup released a report on the learning experiences of high school students in Massachusetts during 2020. One of its findings was that technological barriers (connectivity and hardware-related problems) prevented lower-income students – who are among the most likely to be learning exclusively from home – from fully accessing learning at a high rate. Studies in Europe have found similar results. In France and Germany, technological access is dependent on household income. According to an April 2020 report by the European Commission, more than a fifth of children lack at least two of the basic resources for studying at home: their own room, reading opportunities, internet access and parental involvement (for children under 10 years old). The same is true of other countries.
Some issues with education existed before the pandemic and will still exist after it – namely, the apparent disconnect between the educational market and the needs of the labor market. Learning experiences and satisfaction depend on the teacher’s engagement and pedagogical method. But traditional teaching methods were criticized, both in the U.S. and Europe, even before the pandemic.
The disconnect between traditional pedagogical methods and the modern world is not surprising – changes in society have outpaced changes in teaching, and some divergence is natural given the generational disconnect between the young (students) and the old (teachers). But in light of the pandemic and its accelerating effect on all matters, this tension is greater now than it would have been under normal circumstances. We’re living through a time of unprecedented social change, including a high-speed restructuring of the educational models at national levels, triggered by changing economic models. We don’t know how China or Germany will change as the U.S. shifts away from its role as the global consumer. We don’t know how Russia will reshape its economy, or how the European Union will evolve. But all these changes will be triggered by demographic changes that are happening faster than ever before. The urgent reset that all societies are going through will likely mean an increase in inequalities, something that might raise the potential for conflict at both local and international levels.
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April 27, 2021
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What We're Reading: Babies and Bad Guys
Weekly reviews of what's on our bookshelves.
By: George Friedman and Ryan Bridges
Challenge of the World Population Explosion
U.S. Government Accountability Office
While browsing Amazon, I came across a literary wonder: a book published by a federal agency on challenges posed by the world population explosion. It brought me back to my youth. That was the time that the fear of the population explosion was real. Serious people, from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Club of Rome, were positing an imminent breaking point at which the food supply could no longer support the population and raw materials could not support the demand. The fear it generated was real. Something had to be done to stop the birth rate from rising. China adopted the one-child strategy. Serious discussions were had over issuing licenses for having children. The people saying this were no fools, but they couldn’t imagine being wrong.
The world did not end in 1970 as the Club of Rome predicted. What the club failed to predict was technological advancements such as birth control. It neglected to consider that children were no longer instruments of production or providers in old age. They had become, financially speaking, a net loss. The urge to reproduce is biological, of course, but for generations it was also economical. That no longer being the case in much of the world, the population explosion dissolved in industrialized countries. And now, seemingly everywhere, birth rates are falling dramatically.
I was therefore stunned and delighted to discover that as late as 2013, the government was issuing studies on the population explosion – quite a while after it had ended. Washington had genuine concerns about the disaster facing us. Meetings were held, papers were published, and demands were made. But now, everyone knows that the real thing that will kill all of us is … something else. Even so, there is clearly at least one person at the GAO warning us of the coming baby apocalypse.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-fertility-rate-fell-to-record-low-in-2020/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=23746555
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May 7, 2021
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The Decline of Births and the Transformation of All things
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
The U.S. birth rate fell by 4 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, resulting in the lowest number of babies born since 1979. The fertility rate now stands at 1.64 births per woman, calculated over child-bearing years, which is the lowest since the 1930s when record-keeping began. To maintain the population level, American women need to average 2.1 births. To some extent, the decline is due to COVID-19, of course, but the bulk of babies born in 2020 were conceived prior to March, when the fury of the pandemic struck the United States.
The decline is the continuation of a massive shift in reproduction patterns. It is not unique to the United States. Birth rates started falling in Europe and in China (thanks to the one-child policy), but it is now a global phenomenon. Global population has not yet begun to fall, but the data shows that the advanced industrial world’s population will begin contracting in the coming years, and population will stabilize in the poorer countries before declining.
I wrote about this in my book “The Next 100 Years,” published in 2009, where I labeled it as the most significant social process facing the world. I argued there that the birth rate was falling because prior to the Industrial Revolution, children were valuable in helping to produce wealth and in guaranteeing parents would be looked after in their old age. Six-year-olds could weed vegetable gardens and plant food and, many years later, feed their aging parents, who had a life expectancy much lower than our own now. Children have become fiendishly expensive. A middle-class family in the city with a large number of children faces economic challenges, especially if the children intend to go to college. Oftentimes, the impulse to reproduce is tempered by economic reality.
That impulse has been hardwired into the human spirit by the power of sexual desire. And yet, a series of technical innovations – namely, contraception – have severed sexual impulse from reproduction. Those innovations, particularly the birth control pill, have had a radical impact on women’s lives. My grandmother had 10 children. This wasn’t an unusual number in her day. The production can be explained by economics and a lack of birth control, but never forget that money and lust, coupled with medical improvements that lowered infant mortality rates, drove the population explosion.
The cost of children imposed a self-limiting factor on reproduction without forcing us to suspend our psyches. This affected women’s lives more than men’s since unintended pregnancies were something for which women bore the brunt of the burden. Further technical innovations such as reusable bottles and baby formula meant that the father could share at least somewhat in nurturing the infant. The birth rate fell. But as important, the distinction between men and women narrowed. Women alone can bear children, but she now has control over whether and when this will happen, and the feeding of the infant can be transferred to others.
The economic imprudence of having children was controlled by technology instead of ineffective rules of celibacy. The experience of having children shifted to a small but significant extent. As being a woman became less grueling, the pattern of female life began to track with a male’s. And this in turn created feminism, one of the most radical social shifts in human history. It took a relatively long time for reality to intrude on culture, but now the old role of women is seen as a form of discrimination imposed by men, instead of a necessity imposed by nature.
This is a vast experiment in the question of biological determinism. Women need not be turned into mothers by sexual desire. They do not have to engage in the intense nurturing of a newborn. The biological bond is broken. But does that change what Goethe called the eternal feminine and the eternal masculine? Can the transformation of a woman’s role change a woman’s psyche, or for that matter, does bearing the obligation of nurturing the child change not only the experience of a man but his psyche? With the birth rate plunging and gender norms converging, perhaps the greatest experiment in human history is taking place. The one thing a man can never do is become pregnant and experience what it means to give birth. Having been the helpless onlooker in such events, it does seem to transform life, but then the experience is no longer a byproduct of desire. For many, it’s separate and therefore elective.
Not nearly as fascinating but still of interest is how a contracting population affects humanity as a whole. The dynamic of political life will obviously change. With life expectancy increasing from the same medical innovations that have redefined relations between men and women, there will be in the next couple of decades more people over the age of 60 than under. If democracy lasts as long, they will define the national agenda, very likely in their own interests, creating taxes that cripple the younger citizens and benefit the older. Moreover, the old will be decreasingly productive due to the many diseases of old age, and the cost of keeping them alive will stagger society.
United States Demographics, 1979 and 2020
(click to enlarge)
At this point, there is an affection for the elderly, particularly from their children, but since the elderly divert time and money, there is increasingly a sense of frustration. With the tilt in birth rates, many elderly will be without children. It will be the price they pay for the pleasure of having been free from responsibility. Their emotional and financial needs will be met wholly by the government, which is not so good at financial help and laughable at emotional help. In almost all traditional societies, the elderly are revered. What seems more likely in the future is that the elderly will be resented.
Of course, just as technological change transformed the lives of women, it might redefine the lives of the elderly. We hear rumors of extraordinary strides in medicine and in artificial intelligence. One might cure the miseries of old age, the other might maintain production without the need for a mass society. And one might add that the fear of global warming might subside with a smaller population.
The range of transformative possibilities contained in the decline of the birth rate is staggering. So is the opportunity for economic, cultural and social chaos. We have begun to feel the very earliest breakers on this beach, but clearly they will intensify. To my thinking, the issue of a shrinking population is the center of any imagining of the future.
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A point I have been making here on this forum for years:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57067180
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Xi Jinping’s Achilles Heel
China’s birth dearth is becoming more acute as its population ages.
By The Editorial Board
May 11, 2021 6:31 pm ET
President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his ambition to make China the dominant global power of the 21st century. But the latest Chinese census reveals a major vulnerability: What if the Middle Kingdom doesn’t have enough young people?
After some delay China finally released its census results Tuesday. Though the population grew a little last year—to 1.412 billion in 2020 from 1.4 billion—the more salient fact is that its population continues to gray as Chinese women are having fewer babies. The proportion of people 60 or older increased to 18.7% of the population (from 13.3% in 2010), even as it recorded the lowest number of annual births (12 million) since 1961.
Beijing has seen this coming. In 2016 Chinese couples were allowed to have two children instead of one, reversing a policy in place for 35 years. Last month the People’s Bank of China recommended the government abandon its population control policies if it hopes to compete with America, but even that may be too late. Once fertility falls, the trend is hard to reverse no matter what incentives governments offer.
Many governments have tried, and some believe that Poland or Hungary (which now spends nearly 5% of its GDP to encourage its citizens to have more children) may have the answer. But generally these policies have either failed outright, or shown at best modest fertility gains.
The social and economic implications are enormous, involving everything from the dynamics of the Chinese family to the growing demands on China’s already stressed and underfunded health and pension programs. In March the government announced it will gradually raise the retirement age from 60 today, no doubt in expectation of these results. The retirement costs would be difficult in any country, but China hasn’t achieved broad prosperity beyond its coast and major cities.
Other nations also face graying populations and a declining total fertility rate, which is the average number of children per woman. The Japanese, Singaporeans and South Koreans are wealthier than the Chinese but have, respectively, total fertility rates of 1.36, 1.1 and 0.9. Europe’s overall is 1.522. The U.S. rate is 1.7, while China’s is 1.3.
The trend confirms that Beijing’s often brutal family planning interventions have left China with a demographic time bomb. We should also acknowledge that the ruling Communists were often encouraged by Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s who feared the world would soon be overpopulated.
Now the demographic bill is coming due. Mr. Xi may believe the U.S. is in decline. But he may learn that the greatest obstacle to his ambition to replace the U.S. as global leader doesn’t come from abroad. It is the aging Chinese population that is a legacy of his Communist Party predecessors.
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Three-body problem. Most Chinese couples will be able to have as many as three children following the approval of a major policy shift at a Politburo meeting chaired by Xi on Monday. This follows last month's release of China's latest census, which showed an acceleration of demographic trends that threaten to do all sorts of damage to China's economic trajectory.
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MARC: I have been making this point here for years.
By Phillip Orchard
The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.
The Damage Done
When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.
But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, nearly doubling in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.
Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.
This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.
Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.
The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.
Drags on China’s Growth
A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.
For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).
(click to enlarge)
Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.
To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.
Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.
Why It’s Worse For China
China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.
First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.
Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.
Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.
Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.
In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report misstated the rate of China’s population growth in the country’s post-civil war years. The growth rate was around 2 percent. The error has been corrected on site.
-
By Phillip Orchard
The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.
The Damage Done
When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.
But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, nearly doubling in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.
Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.
This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.
Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.
The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.
Drags on China’s Growth
A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.
For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).
(click to enlarge)
Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.
To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.
Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.
Why It’s Worse For China
China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.
First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.
Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.
Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.
Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.
In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report misstated the rate of China’s population growth in the country’s post-civil war years. The growth rate was around 2 percent. The error has been corrected on site.
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can't see w/o script
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How's this?
By Phillip Orchard
The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.
The Damage Done
When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.
But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, nearly doubling in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.
Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.
This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.
Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.
The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.
Drags on China’s Growth
A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.
For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).
(click to enlarge)
Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.
To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.
Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.
Why It’s Worse For China
China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.
First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.
Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.
Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.
Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.
In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report misstated the rate of China’s population growth in the country’s post-civil war years. The growth rate was around 2 percent. The error has been corrected on site.
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China Is Haunted by Its One-Child Policy as It Tries to Encourage Couples to Conceive
The country expands fertility services as decades of birth restrictions mean fewer women of childbearing age and a younger generation less eager to start a family
The number of babies born in China is expected to have dropped steeply again in 2021. A newborn at a hospital in Danzhai, Guizhou province.
PHOTO: STR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Liyan Qi
Jan. 3, 2022 5:30 am ET
When China put in place its one-child policy four decades ago, policy makers said they would simply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy.
“In 30 years, the current problem of especially dreadful population growth may be alleviated and then [we can] adopt different population policies,” the Communist Party said in a 1980 open letter to members and young people.
With the number of births declining year after year, China is now racing in the opposite direction, closing abortion clinics and expanding services to help couples conceive. But a legacy of the one-child policy, scrapped in 2016, is a dwindling number of women of childbearing age as well as a generation of only children who are less eager to marry and start a family.
In addition, infertility appears to be a bigger problem in China than in many other countries. According to a survey by Peking University researchers, it affects about 18% of couples of reproductive age, compared with a global average of around 15%.
For years, the government called on women to postpone marriage to encourage smaller families. Researchers say the higher age at which Chinese women are trying to have children might partly account for its comparatively high infertility rate. And some researchers say a widespread use of abortions over the years to heed birth restrictions may also play a role.
Demographers say it will be hard for China to stop the decline in births without financial subsidies to help families afford children.
PHOTO: WU HONG/SHUTTERSTOCK
Multiple abortions impact women’s bodies and infertility is a possible consequence, said Ayo Wahlberg, an anthropologist at University of Copenhagen who has written a book about fertility research in China.
Decades of policies to keep births low have left not just deep wounds but also financial obligations for many local governments, which cut into what they can devote to encouraging births.
Shandong province is known in China for sometimes extreme enforcement of birth restrictions, including a 1991 campaign in parts of the city of Liaocheng dubbed “Hundred Days, No Child.” A 2012 documentary by Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television details how local officials, to make their birth data look better, forced women found to be pregnant to abortion centers, even if the baby was their first and allowed under the one-child policy.
“Almost everyone old enough here has heard something about what they did,” said a 45-year-old college teacher in Liaocheng, though he added, “It’s something you can never find anywhere in written history.”
Beijing years later banned birth-control enforcement deemed as too cruel, including imprisonment or beating of couples violating the one-child policy and destruction of their property. The National Health Commission didn’t reply to a request for comment. An official with the Shandong Provincial Health Commission declined to comment beyond saying that Shandong is revising its family-planning law to encourage births.
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Today, Shandong pays compensation or subsidies to millions of couples who lived by the rules, including retirees who now don’t have support because their only child died or became disabled or women who suffered injuries in connection with abortions or other birth-control methods. In 2019, such outlays totaled more than five billion yuan, equivalent to $780 million, according to the provincial health commission. That corresponds to more than one-fifth of that year’s biggest budget item, education spending.
The use of abortions hasn’t fallen off a cliff. In 1991, the year of the 100-day campaign in Shandong, around 14 million abortions were performed in China, according to National Health Commission data. The number was just below nine million in 2020. More striking is that the number of family-planning centers, primarily used for abortions, sterilizations and insertions of intrauterine devices, has dwindled to 2,810 across China in 2020, less than 10% of the number in 2014.
Meanwhile, rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF—each round being a multistep process over four to six weeks—have more than doubled, from about 485,000 in 2013 to more than one million in 2018. In the U.S., a little over 300,000 rounds were performed at 456 reporting clinics in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“What is so mind-boggling for me is that after all of these years of [birth] restrictions maybe fertility clinics will become more important than abortion clinics,” Prof. Wahlberg said.
According to his research, assisted reproduction has a surprisingly long history in China. In March 1988, a decade after the world’s first test-tube baby was born in Britain, Zhang Lizhu, a Beijing gynecologist, delivered China’s first baby conceived through IVF. Another followed three months later in Changsha, under the guidance of Lu Guangxiu, a geneticist.
Both doctors had to conduct their research mostly in secret; with the one-child policy defining the demographic agenda, infertility services didn’t become legal until the early 2000s.
A woman in Wuhan, Hubei province, receives treatment for in vitro fertilization, which has grown in popularity in recent years.
PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS
Now, the methods Drs. Zhang and Lu pioneered are among measures the government is counting on to shift the demographic trajectory.
The number of Chinese newborns fell 18% in 2020 from the year before, and data expected in January is likely to show another steep drop in 2021. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—already dropped below replacement levels in the early 1990s and in 2020 came in at 1.3, below even Japan’s 1.34. After dipping to a record low of 1.26 in 2005, Japan’s fertility rate, among the world’s lowest, began to recover with the help of support measures by the government, though in recent years, the rate has started falling again.
China currently has 536 infertility centers, according to the health commission, but most are clustered in wealthy metropolitan areas like Beijing and Shanghai, and vary widely in their quality. Major hospitals have added fertility services to family-planning clinics, and China is also trying to get such services to smaller cities.
The health commission has set a goal of at least one institution offering IVF for every 2.3 million to three million people by 2025. Nationwide, China isn’t far from the goal but less economically developed provinces say existing services can’t meet rising demand. There are only three fertility institutions in the western province of Gansu, all in Lanzhou, the provincial capital. Gansu aims to have seven by 2025.
Dr. Lu, one of the early IVF pioneers, in 2002 set up one of the world’s largest fertility hospitals in Changsha, the Reproductive and Genetic Hospital of Citic-Xiangya, which has delivered more than 180,000 babies since its inception, according to its website. The average cost of a treatment cycle at the hospital is about 40,000 yuan, equivalent to some $6,000.
To encourage births, some local governments in China have promised cash rewards and longer maternity leaves.
PHOTO: TANG KE/SIPA ASIA/ZUMA PRESS
After a miscarriage in 2018, an assistant professor at a Beijing university who gave only her last name, Wang, said she wasn’t sure she would be able to ever become a parent. But last year, she gave birth to a baby boy after IVF treatment.
Her treatment cost a little over 50,000 yuan. “I would have another one if I were a few years younger and if the whole process wasn’t so difficult,” said Ms. Wang, 36, who agonized over the possibility of another miscarriage.
Infertility-treatment costs aren’t covered by public insurance in China. In Japan, the government has proposed expanding public medical-insurance coverage for some infertility treatments.
But advancing infertility services only goes so far, said Prof. Wahlberg, the Copenhagen anthropologist. “Low births is a social issue, not simply a biological one,” he said.
Chinese people’s views about family and birth have been reshaped over the past few decades, and the government’s latest efforts can’t easily reverse that, said Yi Fuxian, a U.S.-based researcher who has long criticized the Chinese government’s population policies. Mr. Yi expects 2021 data may even show China’s population has started to shrink, years ahead of government forecasts.
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To encourage births, some local governments have promised cash rewards and longer maternity leaves. But some researchers question whether that is enough.
James Liang, a well-known businessman and a research professor of economics at Peking University who has long been an advocate for the lifting of China’s birth restrictions, says it will be hard for China to stop the decline in its birthrates without huge financial subsidies to help families afford more children.
“It all comes down to money,” Mr. Liang said. “You cannot change people’s mind or force upon them some kind of value system.”
He estimates that to raise the fertility rate to the replacement level, the government needs to subsidize families by an average of one million yuan, or around $160,000 per child in the form of cash, tax rebates and housing and daycare subsidies.
Wang Pei’an, a former family-planning official, who in 2017 said China would be unlikely to face a population shortage, “not in 100 years,” is now urging young people to be more responsible and have children.
“We should pay attention to the social value of births,” Mr. Wang, now a political adviser, told state media.
Beijing’s about-face—in six years going from harshly restricting how many children couples could have to now encouraging them to have more—makes little mention of the lingering effects of the one-child policy on demographics, nor its human cost.
“I really have a lot of thoughts and sympathy for women who grew up with that system, who now are listening to the state telling young women to have children,” Prof. Wahlberg said. “My heart breaks when I think about that situation.”
Jilin, one of the northeastern provinces with the country’s lowest fertility rate, said last month that local banks will offer a government-backed credit line of 200,000 yuan at lower interest rates for each married couple with children.
The provincial government also said it won’t pay back any fines meted out for “historical” birth violations, adding that officials need to explain to residents punished for having too many children that the situation has changed and now it needs to “stimulate birth potential.”
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https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=51172&fbclid=IwAR3pF4PuD2UozZGu23pga6I_MyHfWDHjKeUTOy84ZWF2N5oLUYqMYZ61QD0
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18567/europe-demography-democracy
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https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Population-Hit-Record-47-Million-April-2022%29
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policies:
https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-something-happening-voters-turn-26-democrats-wont-able-stop/
but before 26 yo
free tuition free debt forgiveness free health care etc
sounds like a no brainer.
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/07/07/victor-davis-hanson-disappearing-american-abortion-birth-rate/
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/viktor-orban-ally-resigns-over-pure-nazi-speech/ar-AA100eeg?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=4e61669323e94ca28c92896d7a6e5b3f
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/viktor-orban-ally-resigns-over-pure-nazi-speech/ar-AA100eeg?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=4e61669323e94ca28c92896d7a6e5b3f
"Only one race inhabits this earth, Homo Sapiens. And it is unique and undivided," chief rabbi Robert Fröhlich commented.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-06-19/ty-article/.premium/israels-policy-on-asylum-seekers-is-unsustainable-un-representative-charges/00000181-77ba-d5d7-abc9-f7fed7ef0000
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Mercola is not always a reliable source IMHO:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-jabs-impact-both-male-and-female-fertility_4619827.html?utm_source=Health&utm_campaign=health-2022-07-28&utm_medium=email&est=Yz3i6wrAxI2Sc3baSXc%2FYI4A04Ag%2FXSOnlh6hK8TVcQCBUtBOqgrrIjJCQUokX6KbbRi
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August 5, 2022
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Population Growth Trends
The global population is expected to reach 8 billion later this year.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Global Population Review | 2022
(click to enlarge)
Over the long term, demographics affect geopolitical trends and state behavior. Population size has implications for public pension systems, economic growth, food demand and more.
In November, the global population is expected to reach 8 billion, before climbing to 9.7 billion in 2050. India will also soon surpass China as the most populous country. Global population growth, however, is slowing. Two-thirds of the population shows lifetime fertility below the 2.1 mark per woman needed to support population growth. That said, longer life spans are also a notable contributor to global population growth. There are roughly 771 million people over the age of 65, triple the number in 1980. This figure is expected to grow in the years ahead, particularly in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.
It's also important to note differing trends around the world. The states of the Baltics and Balkans, as well as Japan, account for the 10 sharpest declines in population in coming years, ranging from 16 percent to 22 percent. Sub-Sahara Africa, on the other hand, will account for more than half the world’s anticipated population growth to 2050. The countries leading global growth include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.
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https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/more-frightening-news-about-fertility?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-life-expectancy-falls-again-in-historic-decline_4732330.html?utm_source=Health&utm_campaign=health-2022-09-17&utm_medium=email&est=7AK%2F85Srm2UXUaNYRTnszJ%2BcpW8Cj908N7BVfPrCoAmd5HBxaEY0eUb8bl2UHL8fo3SU
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https://www.facebook.com/HooverInstStanford/videos/756684352300392/
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Hat tip CCP
https://www.statista.com/statistics/312701/percentage-of-population-foreign-born-in-the-us-by-state/#:~:text=As%20of%202020%2C%2026.6%20percent,other%20than%20the%20United%20States
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Hispanics Like What the GOP Is Selling
The message of work and opportunity appeals to this disproportionately middle-class minority.
By Phil Gramm and John Early
Oct. 19, 2022 6:14 pm ET
Hispanics are one of the fastest growing census demographics in America, and their realignment away from the Democratic Party is a political earthquake in the making. If polls are right and increasing numbers of Hispanics vote Republican in November, the much-touted inevitability of Democratic political dominance will have proved to be a pipe dream.
The creation of a separate ethnic classification for Hispanics in the 1970 census was a political decision. If someone in your family history spoke Spanish, you are counted as Hispanic—a definition that includes people whose ancestors were here before the Pilgrims landed as well as those who are arriving in the country today.
According to the census, there were 62 million Hispanics in 2021, comprising 19% of the population. After the third generation in the U.S., however, many no longer identify as Hispanic, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study. Asked about their race on the census, 58% of Hispanics said they were white, 27% selected the undefined option—“some other race”—8% selected two or more races, and 2% said they were black. Hispanics have the highest intermarriage rate of any ethnic or racial group. The American melting pot is boiling for Hispanics.
Like the Germans, Italians and Greeks before them, many second-and third- generation don’t speak the language of their forbears. In the past 50 years, median income for Hispanic households has grown 17% faster than for the population as a whole. Today Hispanics, in their labor-force participation and income distribution, look more like Republicans than Democrats. And a strong case can be made that the same forces driving the political realignment of middle-income workers generally is increasingly moving Hispanic voters as well.
We have shown on these pages how the explosion of government transfer payments, which in the past 50 years have far outpaced growth in the after-tax income of middle-income working families, has largely equalized the incomes of the bottom 60% of Americans. In addition to the collapse in work effort among low-income households, this government-created income equality has unleashed a populist political realignment. The inherently unstable Roosevelt coalition, between blue-collar workers and the recipients of government largess, is unraveling.
According to census data, middle-income American households earn more than 10 times as much as households in the bottom 20% of earners because their work-age adults are 3.1 times as likely to work and, when working, they work more than twice as many hours. But working and nonworking households alike now have roughly the same income after accounting for transfer payments and taxes.
Working people are increasingly hostile to an unjust system in which those who don’t break a sweat are almost as well off as those who do. This worker revolt, which was building in the 1980s with what were then called Reagan Democrats, was fully manifested in the Trump blue-collar political base.
Today this worker revolt is a prime mover of Hispanic voters, and it’s hardly surprising: Hispanic Americans work. Hispanic households receive 10% less in transfer payments than the average American household. They are underrepresented by 13% in the bottom income quintile, where only 36% of work-age persons actually work and where government transfer payments make up almost 90% of all income. They are 7% less likely to be in the bottom quintile than white households generally. Hispanic families are 31% overrepresented in the second income quintile, where 85% of work-age adults work; and they are 21% overrepresented in the American middle class, where 92% of work-age adults are employed. That middle-income working Americans think like middle-income working Americans shouldn’t come as a shock.
The Democratic response to the shift in Hispanic voters has been to hire more Hispanic political consultants. According to the Washington Post, the Democratic National Committee claims to have made “historic investments” in Hispanic voter outreach this election cycle. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has spent $46 million hiring Hispanic political advisers and engaging in Hispanic outreach. Its House counterpart has spent $31 million. These political committees, together with nonprofit groups, have hired Latino strategists and targeted Hispanic voters to amplify the Biden administration’s policy achievements, including expanded transfer payments and student loan forgiveness.
Only the vote count will give us the answer, but it is hard to believe that touting what the Biden administration has given them will work with middle-income Hispanic workers—especially when Hispanics are already less likely to receive welfare benefits than white voters generally. The grievance message would seem ineffective for Hispanic families that have worked their way into middle-income America in record numbers. Polls show that Hispanics don’t view themselves as a minority, much less an oppressed one, and their record of economic advancement proves that point.
A microcosm of this political realignment is playing out in deep South Texas. Republican Monica De La Cruz runs ads about how her grandmother would be proud that she owns her own business. Rep. Mayra Flores, who emigrated from Mexico as a child and worked with her family as migrant farm worker, notes that in “the promised land” she rose to become a respiratory care practitioner. Ms. Flores won a special election in a district Joe Biden carried by 5 points and is now running against a Democrat incumbent in a new district where Mr. Biden won by 15 points and Hillary Clinton by 30.
The open border that has filled South Texas with illegal immigrants, drugs and crime is a big issue for voters. So is the Democratic Party’s assault on traditional family values. But at its root the election is a choice between the opportunity that comes from the U.S. economy and the benefits that come from government. The Republican Hispanic candidates are running to share the American dream that hard work pays off. They have brought back the old political mantra of the Reagan era. They are for family, faith and freedom. Nowhere else in America is a clearer choice presented to the voter.
Mr. Gramm is a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Early served twice as assistant commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are the co-authors of “The Myth of American Inequality.” Mike Solon contributed to this article.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/oct/27/18-million-more-illegal-immigrants-living-in-the-u/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=vUl18RuQ1HXjm0AuDhTRtjRVbZdpgmkdoI6Ht0ePQtTB7pWjfh7bCBlAkOxNWSWe&bt_ts=1666865826828
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/one-way-or-another-population-globe-will-soon-be-much-smaller-it-right-now?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1077
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From article in previous post:
***"One of the big reasons why birth rates are falling in wealthy countries is because men in those nations are a lot less fertile than they used to be. In fact, researchers have just released a study that shows that the decline in sperm counts “has only accelerated since the turn of the century”…
Plummeting sperm counts ‘threaten mankind’s survival’, researchers dramatically warned today.
Counts have more than halved since the 1970s.
And the decline has only accelerated since the turn of the century, according to a global analysis.
Once your sperm count gets low enough, it becomes almost impossible to have children.
So this is a really big deal.
According to the study, average sperm counts have been declining by 2.64 percent per year since the year 2000…
Results showed the mean sperm count fell by 51.6 per cent between 1973 and 2018 across men from all continents.
And concentrations have been falling by 2.64 per cent per year since 2000, quicker than the previous drop of 1.16 per cent annually from 1972."***
My humble thoughts on the matter :
this is also very consistent with the massive increase in obesity in the US over the past 50 yrs
the one fact that seems to counteract that would the decrease in fertility in Japan which has a very low prevalence of obesity .
I am not clear the low fertility in Japan is due to low sperm counts
or indeed, anywhere else for that matter.
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Framing China’s Demographic Decline
undefined and Asia-Pacific analyst with RANE
Nate Fischler
Asia-Pacific analyst with RANE, Stratfor
9 MIN READDec 19, 2022 | 21:42 GMT
A girl stands in Tiananmen Square during National Day in Beijing, China, on Oct. 1, 2018.
A girl stands in Tiananmen Square during National Day in Beijing, China, on Oct. 1, 2018.
(FRED DUFOUR/AFP via Getty Images)
Editor’s Note: This column is the first part of an ongoing series that will explore China’s demographic challenges.
China’s impending population decline is often cited as a harbinger of its economic and strategic collapse. But while a shrinking population represents a major challenge, the assumption that a country derives its strength from the number of people living within its borders is often overly simplistic.
Indeed, China is facing various demographic issues with wide-ranging implications beyond population decline. The next five years will be critical in addressing these issues, which should be framed as part of an ongoing — and painful — middle-income transition that the Chinese government has determined requires strong central leadership to manage.
Centralization of Power
In October, Xi secured another five-year term as China’s leader, along with a thoroughly loyal cabinet. Since he came to power in 2012, there has been a clear trend of ever-growing power being concentrated in Xi’s hands — moving China away from the rule-by-consensus model established in the 1970s. This shift is a direct response to the various development challenges that China has been late to address, as a strong central government theoretically enables policymakers to be flexible, quick and decisive in addressing ongoing crises, as well as mitigating the societal turmoil that often accompanies middle-income transitions.
Each of the various demographic issues China is facing — which include a shrinking and aging population — would be difficult to overcome individually in a much smaller country, let alone simultaneously and at the unprecedented scale that China is grappling with. This daunting socioeconomic dynamic will, in turn, provide political justification and rationale to double and triple down on centralized power as Beijing prioritizes alleviating China’s various demographic crises through top-down policymaking.
A Hyperexpression of the East Asian Model
China’s meteoric rise was bound to slow. A low-income country implies production potential, and a country can develop from a pre-industrial to a post-industrial society only once, which China accomplished with impressive speed from the 1970s. Reaping the benefits in the form of seemingly boundless economic growth thus must occur within a constrained time frame, which has now run its course.
In many ways, China is experiencing a typical transition of East Asian economies. Japan and the Asian Tigers (i.e., Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) underwent similar middle-income transitions. This model involves low-income, high-growth stages leading to middle-income, middle-growth stages that then require reform, innovation and boosted per capita productivity to lead to a high-income, slow-growth stage.
China is broadly attempting to enter into the final stage and escape the so-called middle-income trap — a phenomenon where countries that undergo rapid economic growth are unable to make the final leap to become high-income developed economies after successful low-income to middle-income transition stages. In its effort to avoid this trap, the country is experiencing sweeping structural, cultural and social adjustments that go far beyond population growth (or lack thereof). Indeed, this transition is natural from a socioeconomic and development perspective, regardless of birth rate.
But China faces particularly daunting challenges as it undergoes what is otherwise a typical phenomenon due to its sheer size, unique political and societal implications, and shrinking population. For one, China’s population, geographic size and industrial capacity dwarf all of the aforementioned East Asian economies; taking on the middle-income transition at such a mass scale and under such unwieldy circumstances has never before been attempted.
With the exception of Singapore (due largely to its manageable size), the other three East Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan) all experienced significant sociopolitical turbulence during their transitions to advanced economies and broadly democratic political systems, including high unemployment, social unrest and political upheaval. Likewise, Japan declined into economic malaise and Indonesia endured mass protests. China, however, is attempting to prevent upheaval typical of the later stages of this transition model while also nurturing economic development (a combination not seen in the other cases), which requires innovative and technologically-driven mass social control and the enforcement of desired cultural mores. This creates an acute risk in China, where people lack an outlet to express their discontent — creating a pressure cooker that could explode into mass civil unrest, like that seen in 1989 (which culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre) and, more recently, the Nov. 25-27 protests against the government's strict “zero-COVID” policies.
Then there is the issue of China’s looming demographic decline, as transitioning to an advanced economy with a population and workforce that has already peaked is far more difficult than doing so with a growing population (as was the case in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan).
Population Decline and Pronatalism
China’s population has long been expected to peak and start shrinking at some point between 2020 and 2040. But there are signs this decline may have already begun. China’s National Statistics Bureau recorded 10.62 million total births in 2021, down 11.5% from the previous year. Between 2020 and 2021, China’s birth rate also fell from 1.3 children per woman to 1.16 children — far short of the 2.1 replacement level.
These birth statistics are comparable to those China saw in the early 1960s, when the country was experiencing cataclysmic famine brought on by the Great Leap Forward and had half as many people. According to China’s 2020 census, the country’s population count stood at 1,411,778,724 people, though the actual number is likely smaller given Beijing’s tendency to massage national statistics and inflate demographic figures. After years of soft-pedaling or outright denying the issue, in 2017 the Chinese government finally began to acknowledge that the country’s fertility rate was suboptimal and has since become increasingly vocal on the issue, now admitting that population growth has slowed to the point of nearly contracting. But Beijing is acting far too late to reverse the trend, assuming it ever could.
The country’s population decline is compounded by rapid aging. Fewer people of working age (between 15-64 years old) create more retired dependents, reducing state revenues and increasing government expenditures on healthcare and pensions. This cohort of working-age Chinese citizens peaked in 2014 and, according to census data, has been declining at a rate greater than the total population — shrinking by 40 million from 2010-2021. The share of retired dependents, meanwhile, is skyrocketing.
A decreasing population, particularly among the working-age cohort, risks dragging economic growth in the absence of significantly increased per capita productivity. According to the data analytics firm CEIC, China’s growth in productivity per capita (where productivity outpaces labor force decline) is still outpacing the United States, but has been declining since 2010.
Additionally, increased labor costs in China — already twice that of neighboring Vietnam — will drive low-margin, labor-intensive manufacturing out of the country into markets with labor abundance. This, however, is partly purposeful given low-end labor moves overseas in developed economies. Nearby countries with cheaper labor (like Bangladesh, India or Vietnam) also can’t match China’s logistics and infrastructure, which will help mitigate this manufacturing exodus.
In response to its shrinking population, China has adopted pronatalist policies, ending its One Child Policy and Two-Child Policy and introducing the Three Child Policy in 2021. The country has also pledged to make pre- and postnatal services and fertility treatment more effective, affordable and accessible. Over the past decade, childhood education has emerged as a key government focus and is now widely available across the country. Local governments enacted subsidy programs for new parents and extended maternity leave. In wealthier regions, new mothers are now entitled to up to 158 days off, up from the 98-day statutory minimum established in 2012. This minimum maternity leave is on par with Japan and is higher than those set by several developed countries, such as Sweden and South Korea (which mandate at least 84 days of leave for new mothers). China also has the highest abortion rate among the world’s largest economies, at nearly 50 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-49 (compared with 12 in the United States and five in Japan). China is taking measures to curb abortions for non-medical purposes, including sex-selective abortions, and more restrictions are likely as Beijing seeks to boost its population rate.
However, these pronatalist policies have so far failed to increase China’s birth rate. Indeed, there are few historical examples of sustained fertility growth in any country once it has dropped. In reality, China’s society is rapidly evolving along the track of other industrialized Asian nations and the global north in general. Marriage rates are declining and divorce rates are increasing — especially in the country’s highly urbanized coastal and eastern cities — amid a general deterioration of traditional social norms.
More couples are also choosing not to have children, and those that are starting families are waiting longer to do so. This is due to several factors. For one, the high cost of housing and education has made child-rearing too expensive for many; according to the Chinese think-tank YuWa Population Research, the average total cost of raising a child in China is nearly seven times per capita GDP (compared with four times in the United States). China’s insufficient social safety net is also deterring people from having children.
The notorious One Child Policy is often cited as the catalyst for China’s shrinking fertility rates. But the ban on having large families may have, ironically, not been necessary to contain China’s population growth, as the effects of the country’s industrialization in recent decades — including urbanization, broad access to education, and women joining the workforce — would have likely naturally slowed fertility rates.
However, population growth is not inherently advantageous. If economic outputs cannot keep pace, resources will become scarce and expensive. Such a predicament led the Chinese government to institute the One Child Policy in the first place, to control overpopulation and increase the standard of living. Growth in terms of per capita GDP can outpace total GDP growth, which is an indicator of greater individual wealth and higher individual productivity. China does not, then, necessarily need to rely on population growth for a stable economic trajectory. At nearly one billion people, China’s working-age population still dwarfs every other country (for comparison, the U.S. working-age population is 215 million, while Japan’s is 74 million).
Instead, China will look to manage a strategic demographic contraction by reorienting its economic fundamentals. This, however, will prove to be a major challenge as such economic fundamentals are encapsulated in retirement and social security, real estate and capital, labor, geography, and broader regional and geopolitical developments — all of which will be explored in the subsequent parts of this series.
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second
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3203833/chinas-shrinking-working-age-population-send-ripples-through-global-economy
Explainer | China population: with 2022 set to be a turning point, what’s next as economy, coronavirus take toll?
After increasing by just 480,000 to 1.4126 billion last year, demographers have predicted that China’s population could reach a turning point in 2022
Some 13 out of China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions saw their populations shrink last year, with six suffering declines for the first time in modern history
Luna Sun
Luna Sun in Beijing
+ myNEWS
Published: 7:00am, 19 Dec, 2022
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China had 267.36 million people aged over 60 at the end of 2021, representing 18.9 per cent of the population, up from 264.02 million a year earlier. Photo: AP
China had 267.36 million people aged over 60 at the end of 2021, representing 18.9 per cent of the population, up from 264.02 million a year earlier. Photo: AP
As China’s path to fully reopening remains murky and chaotic with mounting economic headwinds, one pitfall seems to be more inevitable than others – the looming demographic crisis.
Demographers have predicted that China’s population could reach a turning point in 2022, with bleak birth rates and anecdotal evidence indicating that the increasing economic and political pressures have taken a toll.
The 20th party congress in November highlighted that “timely adjustments” have already been made to China’s childbirth policy, while President Xi Jinping also promised further improvements.
Demographers, though, have argued that it will be difficult for China to reverse the effects of its previous one-child policy amid the ongoing economic disruptions and changing attitudes within society towards marriage and family.
What key population figures were revealed in 2022?
Mothers in China gave birth to just 10.62 million babies in 2021, representing an 11.5 per cent drop from 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) confirmed in January.
The national death rate was 7.18 per thousand last year, putting the national growth rate at 0.34 per thousand.
This contributed to an overall population increase of just 480,000 to 1.4126 billion last year.
The national birth rate also fell to a record low 7.52 births for every 1,000 people, down from 8.52 in 2020, to the lowest rate since records began in 1949.
Some 13 out of China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions saw their populations shrink last year, with six suffering declines for the first time in modern history.
What’s the make-up of China’s population?
China’s working-age population age – between 16 and 59 – stood at 882.22 million at the end of 2021, representing 62.5 per cent of the population, down from 63.35 per cent in 2020 and 74.53 in 2010.
China had 267.36 million people aged over 60 at the end of 2021, representing 18.9 per cent of the population, up from 264.02 million a year earlier.
Last year, 200 million people were aged 65 and over, up from 190.64 million in 2020, and accounting for 14.2 per cent of the population.
Permanent residents in urban areas increased by 12.05 million to 914.25 million, while rural permanent residents fell by 11.57 million to 498.35 million last year.
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China’s so-called floating population, featuring mostly migrant workers, reached 384.67 million in 2021, 8.85 million more than in 2020.
How many people are getting married in China?
The number of marriage registrations in China dropped by 7.5 per cent in the first three quarters of 2022, reaching 5.4 million, according to official data.
Last year, 7.64 million marriages were registered, which was the lowest total since records began in 1986, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
The number of people getting married for the first time, a statistic more closely tied to new births, dropped to a record low of 11.58 million people last year, down by 708,000 from 2020, to the lowest since 1985.
00:13 / 01:05
Population decline in China raises concerns of economic implications
In November, authorities from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region said three years of coronavirus restrictions had not only brought tremendous impact on the economy, but also affected the normal life of residents, with marriage rates suffering.
Official records from Sichuan province showed that the number of marriage registrations dropped by nearly 30 per cent in 2021 compared to 2016.
The local government attributed the decline to a fall in the population within a marriageable age, rising wedding costs and a more diverse perception of marriage.
What’s been done to address China’s population problems in 2022?
After officially ending its one-child policy in January 2016 and responding to the 2020 census results by allowing each couple in the country to have up to three children since May 2021, China has taken further steps this year.
Provincial and municipal authorities have rolled out initiatives to encourage people to have more children, including offering parents more days off work as well as financial support.
In May, Jiangsu also became the first Chinese province to subsidise companies for paying insurance to female employees during their second and third period of maternity leave.
Companies can be reimbursed for 50 or 80 per cent of the social insurance paid to women who have a second child or a third child for six months, in a move viewed as a bid to help counter discrimination against hiring women.
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16 Dec 2022
In November, Ningshan county in Shaanxi province became the first to offer cash subsidies to all couples, with a one-time subsidy of 2,000 yuan (US$287) for one child, 3,000 yuan for two and 5,000 yuan for three.
It also vowed to provide a monthly subsidy of 600 yuan for couples with two children until the second child turns three-years-old, while couples with three children can receive 1,200 yuan per month until the third child reaches 36 months.
In December, Yunnan province also offered one-time cash subsidies for families with a second and third child.
Cities are also loosening home purchase limits for parents with more children, while many have also started to cover assisted productive techniques under medical insurance.
00:04 / 00:30
China to roll out new incentives for couples to have more babies amid birth rate drop
In February, officials in Beijing announced that the city will include more than a dozen fertility services in a government-backed medical insurance scheme.
To address the problem of declining marriage registrations, provincial authorities are even playing the role of matchmaker, with vows to help young people find a partner while also implementing policies to ease financial burdens.
China has also launched a new nationwide marital and maternity survey to gain insight into what is driving the country’s declining marriage and birth rates.
The survey, authorised by the NBS and carried out in conjunction with family planning and demographic authorities, kicked off in September in several regions of Hunan province.
What’s next for China’s population?
Demographers predict that the negative effects of the coronavirus on births will bring the fertility rate in 2022 even lower than it was last year, while many have estimated that China’s population will peak this year and start declining in 2023.
“We will improve the population development strategy, establish a policy system to boost birth rates, and bring down the costs of pregnancy and childbirth, child rearing, and schooling,” Xi said in his speech to the 20th party congress.
Some demographers also see China entering a normalised phase of population decline, meaning the population level could fluctuate around the point of growth stagnation in the coming years before it starts to decline.
00:09 / 00:20
As world population hits 8 billion, China frets over too few babies
Chen Wei, a professor with the Population Development Studies Centre at Renmin University, said earlier this year that China’s natural population growth might not continue falling in the next 10 to 20 years, instead it will fluctuate around zero and could see small declines without rapid decreases.
India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year, according to the United Nations’ “World Population Prospects 2022”.
Just three years ago, the UN projection was for India to overtake China by around 2027.
By 2050, China’s population is expected to have fallen to around 1.32 billion, while India’s will have hit 1.67 billion, according to the UN.
China is expected to release its official 2022 population figures at the start of next year.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/elon-musk-says-ape-expert-jane-goodall-s-take-on-human-population-is-the-death-of-humanity/ar-AA15zjgk?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=c930c18d79a34ec69337ae244b14a9a0
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/health/us-life-expectancy-reaches-25-year-low-cdc_4940342.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-12-23&src_cmp=gv-2022-12-23&utm_medium=email&est=RX5SowPNHiqyo6p3rDAtUZS7G9mf0W2H870jnbyp8txEJCRmzofih%2FEWn48KqH5J57Ev
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’60 MINUTES’ STARTS NEW YEAR WITH POPULATION GROWTH PANIC… SEGMENT FEATURES INFAMOUS CONSPIRACY THEORIST PAUL EHRLICH… NO MENTION OF COLLAPSING HUMAN FERTILITY… CBS: Scientists say planet in midst of sixth mass extinction, Earth’s wildlife running out of places to live (VIDEO)
In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet’s 3 and a half billion people were sustainable. But on this New Year’s Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you’re about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs. […]
At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true.
Scott Pelley: You seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable?
Paul Ehrlich: Oh, humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. Not clear where they’re gonna come from.
FLASHBACK… 2020… BBC: Fertility rate:‘ Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born
The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a “jaw-dropping” impact on societies, say researchers.
Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.
And 23 nations – including Spain and Japan – are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.
Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.
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Not the UN extrapolations have Asia and Europe declining
growth trends are declining everywhere
population growth increasing in US , I don't know if this includes illegals pouring in at present rate 5 million per yr
no stats found for Antarctica :?
Asia
https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/asia-population.php#:~:text=Asia%20is%20the%20most%20populous,percent%20of%20the%20world%20population.
S. America:
https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/south-america-population.php#:~:text=South%20America's%20population%20is%2016,home%20to%20492.8%20mn%20people.
N America:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/population-growth-rate#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20North%20America,a%200.53%25%20increase%20from%202019.
Australia:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/population-growth-rate
Europe :
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/population#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20Europe,a%200%25%20increase%20from%202019.
Africa :
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/population-growth-rate#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20Africa,a%202.43%25%20increase%20from%202020.
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saw 60 min. last night
thought the point about loss of biodiversity to be true though
do we really want to wipe out 75 % of World's life......
hard to fathom
or assess
what that would mean
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGkELtG8IMw
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED_yPDdqG5Y
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second
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x64f7NxQKKk
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntDCHvVKzE4
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Birth rate of 1.16?!?
--------------------------
ON GEOPOLITICS
What China's Demographic Decline Means for Its Retirement and Pension Systems
undefined and Asia-Pacific analyst with RANE
Nate Fischler
Asia-Pacific analyst with RANE, Stratfor
11 MIN READJan 13, 2023 | 22:11 GMT
Elderly women sit together on benches in Chongqing, China.
Elderly women sit together on benches in Chongqing, China.
(Tim Graham/Getty Images)
Editor's note: This column is the second part of an ongoing series that explores China's demographic challenges.
As discussed in the first part of this series, dropping birth rates are driving China's demographic decline. But its population's rapid aging (and Beijing's failure to timely adjust the country's pension and retirement systems accordingly) presents an additional acute compounding challenge.
China's life expectancy is now 78 according to the World Bank, the oldest in the country's recorded history. This is still low compared with developed countries, where the life expectancies range between 82 and 85 years old. But it is nonetheless a dramatic, society-altering improvement from the early 1960s, when people in China on average died before they were 45 years old.
As China's population ages — and the birth rate drops ever further below replacement level — the combined cost of healthcare and public pensions will place a massive (and potentially insurmountable) burden on public expenditures. In the immediate term, the government will look to confront this challenge by reforming the country's pension system and decades-old retirement system, the latter of which was instituted at a time when most people did not live past middle age. The question, however, is whether those reforms will be large enough to sufficiently mitigate the greater demographic decline that risks impeding China's economic development and keeping it trapped as a middle-income country.
Rapid Aging
China's birth rate has fallen to roughly 1.16 children per woman, according to the latest official data released in 2021 — far short of the replacement level of 2.1 (the number of births needed to keep population levels stable). The country's population is also aging at a record pace, with the number of Chinese citizens aged 65 and older growing by nearly 100 million people from 2000 to 2021, according to the World Bank.
Having a higher proportion of elderly to working-age citizens has proven a natural trajectory in developed economies as people live longer due to healthcare advances, improved nutrition and safer working conditions, and as couples opt to have fewer children due to the heavy cost burden as well as increased education and career opportunities for women (among other factors). China's challenge, however, is unique in that it remains in aggregate a developing country that has not yet emerged from its middle-income transition — a complication compounded by the drastic discrepancies in economic development across regions.
The greater concern is not that China is aging but that it is doing so at an unprecedented speed. The United Nations considers a country's population ''aged'' when at least 7% of people are 65 or older. In most developed nations, the transition to an aged population has occurred over the course of three or four generations. But China has done it in one.
In 2000, China was near the 7% threshold to be deemed an aged population. Two decades on, it has not only surpassed that threshold but nearly doubled it, with people aged 65 or older making up 13.5% of China's population in 2021. That percentage is only set to exponentially grow in the coming years.
This has sharp implications in the near term as China's ratio of retired dependents to workers will quickly become so lopsided that it could collapse the country's entire pension system. At 1.4 billion people (according to the government), the sheer size of China's population, in addition to accounting for its massive geographic area and sprawling bureaucratic needs, renders the attendant administrative challenges highly dubious. China had a ratio of 9.9 workers to one pensioner in 2000 and 5.8 in 2020. That ratio is set to fall to a minuscule 2.3 by 2050, altogether far too low to simultaneously support the ballooning retired cohort and pursue sustainable economic growth. China will thus look to implement reforms throughout President Xi Jinping's third five-year term to account for the wide-reaching vulnerabilities of its retirement and pension systems.
An Outdated Retirement System
China's outmoded statutory retirement age — 60 for men, 55 for women and 50 for female blue-collar workers — is exacerbating the economic impact of its population's rapid aging. The retirement age law was instituted in 1951 when life expectancy was much lower and, considering the vast economic and societal changes China has gone through over the past 70 years, is in need of urgent reform. China's average retirement age ranks near the youngest in the world. Without any changes to this trend, the working-age cohort of China's population is expected to shrink by 35 million people between 2021 and 2025, while the cohort of retirees is expected to increase by 40 million. Looking further out, the ratio of retirees to workers in China is projected to explode from 17% in 2020 to 33% in 2035.
The more years an individual spends in retirement (and out of the workforce), the fewer taxes China's government is able to collect from their wages and fewer years of contributions to the country's public pension fund. Under China's Social Security Law, statutory pensions received after retirement are also classified as tax-exempt income, further reducing sources of revenue.
To account for this, the government included gradually raising retirement ages nationwide by 2025 as part of its 14th five-year plan. According to the Chinese business publication China Economic Weekly, authorities in all of the country's 31 provinces had rolled out pilot programs for retirement deferrals in February 2022. If widely replicated and expanded, these gradual steps could lead to a change in national retirement age requirements.
However, the revelation of the government's intention sparked backlash, as did previous calls to raise the retirement age in 2008 and 2012. Older workers were not keen to delay access to their pensions. Younger workers coming from an increasingly over-educated generation were worried about losing job opportunities in what is already a tight labor market for degree holders, which has left many younger Chinese citizens underemployed in recent years.
Moreover, the prospect of raising the retirement age touches on a cultural taboo in China, where caring for the elderly is a deeply ingrained cultural norm. Traditional social and family structures also often involve retired grandparents providing childcare for working parents. Within this context, both young and old have balked at the prospect of having older people stay in or return to the workforce, viewing it as a sign the government is not sufficiently attuned to its well-established social responsibilities. To mitigate the risk of public backlash, Beijing will thus likely gradually reform the country's retirement system in a more piecemeal fashion by adjusting rules for specific regions and occupations, as opposed to enacting a blanket national policy change.
The Pensions Predicament
China has one well-established pension scheme, which is the government-led public pension fund that covers around 1.03 billion people. The fund is already showing indications of unsustainability as it reported a drop in income as well as a deficit for the first time at the end of 2021. According to the Chinese non-profit Insurance Association of China, the public pension fund is facing up to a 10 trillion yuan or $1.5 trillion shortfall in the next five to ten years. A 2019 report from the state-sponsored think tank called the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that the fund will be depleted by 2035. There is little reason to expect a turnaround without substantive policy reforms as China's diminishing working age cohort results in ever-fewer contributions to the fund, along with ever-larger payouts.
The Chinese government is also developing another pension scheme, which is a supplemental occupational annuity for public sector employees and a voluntary enterprise annuity scheme that was introduced in 2004. However, participation is mostly limited to state-owned enterprises comprising a workforce of less than 5% of the total working population, and despite the government's issuance of guidelines in 2018 encouraging private enterprises to participate in annuity systems, such enterprises rarely offer coverage, sitting at a 0.5% coverage rate in 2020. Enterprises that do participate tend to rely on risk-averse investments that generate fewer returns. The government is also hesitant to impose more costs on private businesses that already struggle with overhead, particularly for small and medium enterprises and even more so amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, high employer contributions to social security are legally mandated, which often leads employers to seek cost-saving measures by underreporting wage payments or seeking part-time or temporary workers. A 2018 study by social insurance research think tank 51Shebao found that only 27% of companies paid out the full total of mandated social security payments, making the potential for further payments in the form of enterprise annuities unlikely. In general, owing to its many constraints, this second pillar is not a sufficient alternative or supplement to the public pension fund.
Even with strong backing, China's public pension and annuity accounts are often insufficiently funded to disperse payments to recipients. As the government is forced to increase financial subsidies and receives less revenue yearly, the country intends to develop the nascent third commercial pillar in the coming years.
The Three-Pillared Potential Solution
As it is with a slew of other challenges related to China's demographic decline, the government is acting far later than ideal. Private wealth management and commercial pensions are severely underdeveloped. China made clear its intention to address the shortcomings of its unwieldy social security and pension systems in 2018 by introducing regulatory guidance for various supply-side products and private pension insurance schemes aimed at establishing a starting point for the industry as a viable third pillar. China then began inviting foreign asset management players into the market in earnest in 2020, marked by France-based Amudi's establishment of the first wealth management joint venture with the Bank of China in September of that year. Outfits like Schroders, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Fidelity and Blackrock soon followed. In January, U.S.-based Principal Financial Group became the first foreign company to invest in a bank-sponsored Chinese pension company.
China is now actively experimenting with the private wealth management sector. In October 2022, five government bureaus jointly promulgated private pension implementation measures. In November, these bureaus oversaw the initiation of a full pilot program in over 30 cities, including some of China's largest in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chongqing. The pilot program allows residents in participating locales to invest in around 130 approved wealth management, commercial pension insurance and mutual fund products. Both courting foreign companies and unveiling new private sector schemes are likely signs of things to come as China hopes to develop and integrate its private pension industry with its other two pillars, with the former offering enormous investment and innovation potential to industry players anxious to break into the lucrative China market.
Over the next five years under its top-heavy political model, the Chinese government will look to develop a private pension scheme and a retail asset management industry to serve as a viable and flexible third pillar, as well as reform the country's retirement age laws. Successfully doing so would serve to mitigate some of the severe risks inherent to a growing dependent population in a country with rapidly rising incomes and living costs. By the same token, failure to properly reform the pension system will leave China's growing retirement cohort not only without disposable income, but also without the wherewithal to acquire specialized goods and services needed in old age.
This issue is thus one of the high-stakes challenges coloring China's demographic decline, but it does not sit in policy isolation and is intimately linked with China's stock market and real estate dynamics. The nascent private pension industry may take off, but prospects are constrained by the country's underdeveloped stock markets. Similarly, real estate remains the primary mechanism for investment and savings in China, even as the government acts to deleverage it. This means China's retirement schemes are not only burdened by a rapidly aging society that lacks a replacement generation, but are also in trouble due to the unwinding of its de facto primary savings mechanism. In effect, China cannot reel in its runaway real estate industry without first developing a reliable alternative mode of savings.
In the next part of this series, we'll more thoroughly explore the challenges China faces relating to its real estate and capital flows in the context of the country's demographic decline.
image of globe
Connected Content
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https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-population-shrinks-first-time-since-1961-2023-01-17/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=011723
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MSV2bh48MA
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Birth Rates Plunge in Heavily Vaccinated Countries
In many countries, births dropped sharply nine months after peak COVID vaccine uptake. Let’s look at how this happens. And will these populations recover?
Vital Statistics–Hidden Data
Since the beginning of COVID, vital statistics as reported by governments around the world, are hard to come by. Spotty availability hinders analysis and understanding.
For example, even today in the United States, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Washington are four of the states that, as of this writing, have not updated births data since 2019 [1] and 2020. [2] [3] [4]
Nineteen European Countries
By August 2022, Raimond Hagemann, Ulf Lorré, and Dr. Hans-Joachim Kremer had compiled data on birth rate changes in 19 European countries and produced an extremely important paper. [5] In country after country, the inflection point of reduced births is consistent at the end of the year 2021.
This was nine months after the spring zeitgeist to take the COVID vaccines. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia, as well as Iceland, Northern Ireland, Montenegro, Serbia—all show this pattern. Nine months after peak vaccine uptake—the births decline.
From R Hagemann, U Lorré, et al. Danish data (p 31):
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The corresponding graph for each of the 19 countries has a similar pattern: peak uptake of COVID vaccines in spring of 2021, followed by precipitous birthrate declines beginning nine months later.
All of the nineteen countries studied saw accelerating declines in births in 2022, beginning at nine months after peak COVID vaccine uptake. Note the small p values in the following table, favoring temporal association of the two events. This, in turn, supports the Bradford Hill temporality criterion regarding causation of infertility, rather than a highly coincidental correlation between peak vaccination in spring of 2021 and sharply declining birth rates nine months later.
Epoch Times Photo
Sweden
Data analyst Gato Malo has noted, as have others, that too many countries are locking their vital statistics data away from public view, which pre-empts any valid analysis. Occasional glimpses are available.
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Looking at Sweden, he found that if he overlaid month-to-month change in births, that the strong dip in births beginning in November—December 2021, lines up very tightly with the percentage of people who were unvaccinated 9 months earlier. [6] This was consistent with the R Hagemann, U Lorré, et al. findings. And births in Sweden have not yet shown signs of recovery from this decline.
Epoch Times Photo
(data scb.se, owid) boriquagato.substack.com
UK
At a similar time as in the above countries, we see births decline in the UK. After December 2021, the number of women giving birth is no longer in the forty thousands, but now crosses down into the thirty thousands, and stays there. [7] See the column “Women giving birth.”
From the UK Health Security Agency (p 18):
Epoch Times Photo
Comparing year-over-year decline, we might write this mean decline from the first two quarters of 2021 to the first two quarters of 2022, where b is births, as (Σ b1, 2021…b6, 2021) – (Σ b1, 2022…b6, 2022) = 256,785 – 227,302 = 29,483. This is a deficit of 4,913 births per month in the UK. Similarly to Sweden, the inflection point of decline is at a 9–11 month point following the months of peak vaccine uptake in the UK. [8]
From Johns Hopkins University, Our World In Data, peak vaccine uptake in the UK was in the first quarter of 2021:
Epoch Times Photo
Switzerland
Switzerland saw its largest drop in birth rates in 150 years, more than in each of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and even the introduction of widely used oral contraceptives. [9]
Why Is This Happening?
Naomi Wolf explored menstrual irregularities reported following COVID vaccination, and even following contact with COVID-vaccinated people. As the first to discuss these problems publicly, and to gather data online from women who were experiencing these menstrual changes, she was criticized and censored on social media.
Her Daily Clout organization led a team of over 3,000 researchers, including Pierre Kory M.D., to dissect the documents released by Pfizer/FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] under court order regarding clinical outcomes of the 44,000-person clinical trial of the Pfizer COVID vaccines. The Daily Clout team summarized their findings in their book on Kindle: “Pfizer Documents Analysis Reports.” [10]
They report Pfizer’s findings of overwhelming injuries in their experimental group. Of the 22,000 individuals who had received the Pfizer vaccine, “Johns Hopkins University, Our World In Data.” [11]
The Daily Clout team explores in their book topics related to the COVID vaccines’ impacts on male and female fertility. As their team traced the data reported by Pfizer, it was found that 270 of the pregnant women in the Pfizer trial reported a vaccine injury. “ … but Pfizer only followed 32 of them and 28 of their babies died. This is a shocking 87.5% fetal death rate.” [12]
Pfizer logged over 158,000 separate adverse events during that clinical trial, under 1290 different types of adverse events, an enormous compendium of human suffering, as partially imaged below from the first part of the letter A. [13]
From Pfizer Worldwide Safety (p 30):
Epoch Times Photo
Wolf’s team notes that “If Pfizer had a TV commercial for its COVID vaccine listing the 158,893 adverse events reported in the first 12 weeks, the announcer would be reading them for more than 80 consecutive hours.” [14]
Even this exhaustive list could not be complete, because Pfizer could not account for the outcomes of 22 percent of participants. Pfizer does list 11,361 of the patients as “not recovered” at the time of their report. [15] This is 51.6 percent of their experimental group “not recovered” from adverse events.
No Liquid Will ‘Just Stay in the Shoulder/Arm.’
We have known, and Pfizer has confessed to, the transmission of spike proteins from one person to another by skin contact and exhalation. I cite and discuss that in the context of one adult to another in a community setting. [16]
Adverse effects on vaccinated breastfeeding mothers and their babies included a range of vomiting, fever, rash, partial paralysis, blue-green discolored breast milk, and other side effects.
Not surprisingly, the injected vaccine liquid passes from mother to nursing infant as well, in accordance with long-established physics principles of dispersal and diffusion of liquid introduced into a semi-solid (55–60 percent water) body, as well as centuries of basic, undisputed physiology and circulation of blood and lymph: Liquids introduced into the body diffuse throughout the body, as always.
It has also been known of lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery of medication—since its first development—that it, of course, enters the circulation. Those who alleged—and those who believed—that a liquid injection would “stay in the arm” had not even a junior high school student’s grasp of basic biology or physics.
But Pfizer knew. It advised male participants in the trial to avoid sexual contact with women of childbearing age or to use condoms.
Here is an overview of the impact of LNP-delivered substances on human male and female reproductive organs. [17]
Epoch Times Photo
From Wang R, Song B, et al. Potential adverse effects of nanoparticles on the reproductive system
Male Infertility and the COVID Vaccines
mRNA vaccine ingredients are observed to disperse throughout the body, collecting in the testes, among other organs. [18] An adverse event of note in Pfizer’s list of 1290 such events post-vaccination is “anti-sperm antibodies.”
From Pfizer Worldwide Safety:
Epoch Times Photo
An Israeli study later confirmed damage to sperm, both in total numbers and motility, from the Pfizer vaccine. [19]
Epoch Times Photo
The word “temporarily” in the title is misleading because the researchers assumed sperm would recover after their three-month study period, although they ended their observation at that time. And they did not show any evidence that sperm did actually recover. So their word “temporarily” is so far unverified.
Pfizer did not test for male reproductive toxicity, [20] nor for the adverse effects that may be transmitted by vaccinated men’s semen on their children’s development.
One might think that male reproductive effects would have been tested for in Pfizer’s trial on rats. However, only the female rats were vaccinated; the male ones were not. [21] When Pfizer pronounced the male rats’ reproductive organs free of toxicity, they neglected to emphasize the earlier fine print: male rats had not been vaccinated at all.
But Pfizer did instruct human male study participants to avoid intercourse or to use a condom.
Harm caused by LNPs to male reproductive organs and ability had already been established years earlier. As seen in this 2018 study, such organs were known to be vulnerable to toxic influences from LNPs. [22] Besides lowered sperm counts and motility, researchers have found “folded amorphous spermatozoa, cells lacking or showing a small hook, and cells with undulating or elongated heads were the most frequent abnormalities found.” [23]
Moreover, toxic chemicals, such as phthalates and other endocrine disruptors, [24] were already abundant in the environment prior to the COVID vaccines. These have likely contributed to declining sperm number and quality for a half-century, [25] in which sperm counts have been dropping by about 1 percent per year since 1972. [26]
However, the COVID vaccines are making spermatogenesis even more rare. The problem is that most of the male reproductive cells, including spermatogonia and spermatozoa, express ACE-2, which is what spike proteins use for entry into human cells. Just as happens in blood vessels throughout the body, the spike protein arrival at the ACE-2 receptors was found to damage not only sperm, but also the blood-testis barrier, and to contribute to orchitis. At day 150, sperm concentration was 15.9 percent below baseline, below even the 75 to 120-day period, and had not begun to recover by the end of the study.[27]
Female Infertility and the COVID Vaccines
The World Health Organization had long taken an interest in “anti-fertility vaccines” and “fertility regulating vaccines,” as they wrote in 1992. “Chorionic gonadotropin is the one antigen that fulfils criteria for an ideal contraceptive vaccine.” [Emphasis mine.] [28]
Fetal death was so rampant among COVID-vaccinated pregnant women observed by the CDC in the V-Safe Surveillance System [29] that I compared the miscarriage rate to the “morning-after pill” in the abortive effect of those pregnancies for which outcomes were reported. [30] That is, between 80 to 90 percent abortive effect. This is comparable to what the Naomi Wolf/Daily Clout team found, 87.5 percent, as referenced above. However, that V-Safe data had been released too early for accurate tally of all pregnancy outcomes, simply because it included women still in their first two trimesters.
This paper examines the cohort of pregnant women in the second half (second 20 weeks) of their pregnancies. [31] However, it seems to be flawed by missing data. [32]
Miscarriages also show a dose-dependent response. The Pfizer vaccine is a 30 mcg dose and the Moderna vaccine is a 100 mcg dose. At an October 2022 CDC expert committee meeting (ACIP), the following data were presented:
12,751 women took the Pfizer vaccine, and 8,365 women took the Moderna vaccine. 422 Pfizer-vaccinated women, that is 3 percent of the Pfizer total, miscarried (lost their pregnancy by 20 weeks gestation), and 395 of the Moderna-vaccinated women, that is 4.7 percent of the Moderna total, miscarried. [33]
Epoch Times Photo
CDC. COVID-19 in pregnant people and infants ages 0–5 months. (pdf)
So this means that 42 percent more of the Moderna group miscarried than the Pfizer group. This large percentage difference in such large cohorts (in the thousands of participants) supports a dose-response relationship of the COVID mRNA vaccine with miscarriage, worsened with the more potent dosing. This dose response is another of the Bradford Hill criteria to establish cause and effect.
The documents that Pfizer sought to have concealed for 75 years, but instead was forced to release by court order, reveal the 1290 types of adverse events, and 158,000 total adverse events, noted above.
Also revealed in the same documents was that Pfizer excluded 21 groups of people from their trials, including “women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.” [34]
The vaccines had been tested on 44 pregnant rats over 6 weeks, as required by protocols of Developmental and Reproductive Toxicity studies, but they had not been tested on pregnant women. Ill effects were not reported from the rat study. [35]
However, nine of the ten study authors were employed by and held stock in Pfizer or BioNTech companies, as acknowledged in small print at the end of the article. Therefore, a highly-conflicted study of only 44 rats, studied over six weeks, was the sole research basis for the obstetric profession to urge pregnant women to be vaccinated.
Pfizer’s reporting of women in the trials who became pregnant following vaccination found 413 pregnant women, of whom 270 cases were considered to be serious and 146 to be non-serious. The serious cases included “spontaneous abortion (23), outcome pending (5), premature birth with neonatal death, spontaneous abortion with intrauterine death (2 each), spontaneous abortion with neonatal death, and normal outcome (1 each). No outcome was provided for 238 pregnancies.” [36] A problem with the short 12-week trial is that nearly all of these new pregnancies were apparently in early gestation, first trimester, at trial end.
The Daily Clout research team determined after examining and comparing miscarriages following various vaccines over time:
“If you are pregnant, you are more likely to lose your baby in a miscarriage if you receive a COVID-19 vaccine than if you receive measles, mumps, flu, tetanus, or any other vaccine.” [37]
They found from the U.S. government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) that in VAERS’ 30-year history, through March 2022, a total of 4,693 had experienced miscarriage in all those years. 4,505 of those had received a single vaccine. 3,430 of those miscarriages were in women whose vaccinations included a COVID vaccine. Sixteen of those 3,430 had also received another vaccine near that time. So 3,430 – 16 = 3,414 miscarriages were after the COVID vaccine alone.
Compare this number with 4,505 for all single vaccines over the 30-year history of VAERS. Therefore, 3,414 / 4,505 = 76 percent of all miscarriages ever reported to VAERS occurred after the COVID vaccines, during the short time that they have been in use, December 2020 through March 2022.
Since at least 2010, it has been known that nano-particles were hazardous to the ovaries and to fertility generally, and bioaccumulation has been known. [38] [39]
In the case of spike proteins, it comes as no surprise that the ACE-2 receptor is the port of entry for spike proteins to gain access to ovarian cells, both granulosa and cumulus cells. [40] These are the ovarian cells that support the development of oocytes.
Congenital Malformations
The U.S. Defense Medical Epidemiology Database System (DMED) [41] is the largest database of health statistics of the generally young, healthy, and fit military population. That is until military service members were forced to take the COVID vaccines or to be dishonorably discharged, with loss of benefits. Few if any religious exemptions were permitted.
The DMED database reported when comparing 2021 to 2020, a 419 percent increase in female infertility reports, a 320 percent increase in male infertility reports, and an 87 percent increase in congenital malformations. The report shows a mean baseline rate of 10,906 cases per year, 2016 to 2020. Then part of 2021, not even the full year, showed 18,951 such cases. [42] This is a 74 percent increase over the 2016 to 2020 mean.
Prevention is massively easier than cure. Avoiding toxins such as LNPs, especially those that generate spike protein, such as the mRNA vaccines, is a necessary first step. Let’s hope that the coming years show the fertility crisis for both males and females to be reversible, as we learn how that may be accomplished.
Reposted from Colleen Huber’s Substack.
◇ References:
[1] Annual Massachusetts Birth Reports. Screenshot taken Jan. 27, 2023. Mass.gov. https://www.mass.gov/lists/annual-massachusetts-birth-reports
[2] New York State Dept of Health. Vital statistics of New York State. Screenshot taken Jan 27, 2023. NY.gov. https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/vs_reports_tables_list.htm
[3] Birth Statistics. Screenshot taken Jan. 27, 2023. Illinois.gov. https://dph.illinois.gov/data-statistics/vital-statistics/birth-statistics.html
[4] Washington State Dept of Health. All births dashboard – ACH. Screenshot taken Jan 27, 2023. WA.gov. https://doh.wa.gov/data-statistical-reports/washington-tracking-network-wtn/birth-outcomes/ach-all-births-dashboard-0
[5] R Hagemann, U Lorré, et al. [Decline in birth rates in Europe; in German]. Aug 25, 2022. Aletheia Scimed. https://www.aletheia-scimed.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Geburtenrueckgang-Europe-DE_25082022_2.pdf
[6] El gato malo. Swedish birthrate data: November update. Jan 25, 2023. Substack. bad cattitude
[7] UK Health Security Agency. COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report. Week 5. Feb 2, 2023. P. 18. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1134076/vaccine-surveillance-report-week-5-2023.pdf
[8] Johns Hopkins University. Our World in Data. Daily number of people receiving a first COVID-19 vaccine, UK. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
[9] K Beck. Analysis of a possible connection between the COVID =19 vaccination and the fall in the birth rate in Switzerland in 2022. Sep 22, 2022. Univ of Lucerne. Quoted in R Chandler, Report 52: Nine months post-COVID mRNA “vaccine” rollout, substantial birth rate drops in 13 European countries, England/Wales, Australia, and Taiwan. Jan 16, 2023. Daily Clout. https://dailyclout.io/report-52-nine-months-post-covid-mrna-vaccine-rollout-substantial-birth-rate-drops/
[10] A. Kelly, War Room / Daily Clout. Pfizer Documents Analysis Volunteers’ Reports eBook. https://www.amazon.com/DailyClout-Documents-Analysis-Volunteers-Reports-ebook/dp/B0BSK6LV5D/
[11] Ibid, p 10.
[12] Ibid, p 10.
[13] Pfizer Worldwide Safety. 5.3.6 Cumulative analysis of post-authorization adverse event reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) received through 28 Feb 2021. Appendix 1: List of adverse events of special interest. Pp 30-38. https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf
[14] A. Kelly, War Room / Daily Clout p 14. https://www.amazon.com/DailyClout-Documents-Analysis-Volunteers-Reports-ebook/dp/B0BSK6LV5D/
[15] Pfizer Worldwide Safety, Table 1, p 7. https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf
[16] C Huber. Secondary vaccine effects. Feb 9, 2022. The Defeat Of COVID Substack.
[17] R Wang, B Song, et al. Potential adverse effects of nanoparticles on the reproductive system. Dec 11, 2018. Int J Nanomedicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6294055/
[18] Acuitas Therapeutics, Inc. A Tissue distribution study of a [3-H]-labelled lipid nanoparticle-mRNA formulation containing ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 following intramuscular administration in Wistar Han rats. Nov 9, 2021. p. 24. https://www.phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/125742_S1_M4_4223_185350.pdf
[19] I Gat, A Kedem, et al. COVID-19 vaccination GNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors. Jun 17, 2022. Andrology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.13209
[20] Gov.UK. Summary of the public assessment report for COVID-19 vaccine Pfizer/BioNTech. Jan 6 2023 update. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approval-of-pfizer-biontech-vaccine-for-covid-19/summary-public-assessment-report-for-pfizerbiontech-covid-19-vaccine
[21] Acuitas Therapeutics, Inc. A Tissue distribution study of a [3-H]-labelled lipid nanoparticle-mRNA formulation containing ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 following intramuscular administration in Wistar Han rats. Nov 9, 2021. p. 29. https://www.phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/125742_S1_M4_4223_185350.pdf
[22] R Wang, B Song, et al. Potential adverse effects of nanoparticles on the reproductive system. Dec 11, 2018. Int J Nanomedicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6294055/
[23] Ibid. Wang.
[24] R Sumner, M Tomlinson, et al. Independent and combined effects of diethylhexyl phthalate and polychlorinated biphenyl 153 on sperm quality in the human and dog. Mar 4, 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39913-9
[25] E Carlsen, A Givercman, et al. Evidence for decreasing quality of semen during past 50 years. Sep 12, 1992. BMJ. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1393072/
[26] H Levine, N Jorgensen, et al. Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis of samples collected globally in the 20th and 21st centuries. Nov 15, 2022. Oxford: Human Reproduction Update. https://academic.oup.com/humupd/advance-article/doi/10.1093/humupd/dmac035/6824414?login=false
[27] I Gat, A Kedem, et al. COVID-19 vaccination GNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors. Jun 17, 2022. Andrology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.13209
[28] World Health Organization. Fertility regulating vaccines. Aug 17-18 1992. Geneva. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FKMhagpd6bRZJ8la96bgH7UwQ8CmFNnI/view
[29] T Shimabukuro, S Kim, et al. Preliminary findings of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines safety in pregnant persons. Jun 17, 2021. NEJM. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104983
[30] C Huber. COVID vaccines may rival or exceed ‘the morning-after pill’ in abortion efficacy. Aug 2021. The Defeat of COVID Substack.
[31] L Zauche, B Wallace, et al. Receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and risk of spontaneous abortion. Se 8 2021. NEJM. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8451181/
[32] Arkmedic. The curious case of the miscalculated miscarriages. Sep 14, 2021. Substack.
[33] CDC. COVID-19 in pregnant people and infants ages 0-5 months. Slide 32. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2022-10-19-20/02-03-04-COVID-Ellington-Kharbanda-Olson-Fleming-Dutra-508.pdf
[34] Pfizer Worldwide Safety. Annotated book for study design. Exclusion number 2.h, 11. p 33. https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/125742_S1_M5_5351_c4591001-fa-interim-sample-crf.pdf
[35] C Bowman, M Bouressam, et al. Lack of effects on female fertility and prenatal and postnatal offspring development in rats with BNT162b2, a mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine. Aug 2021. Reprod Toxicol. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34058573/
[36] Pfizer Worldwide Safety, Table 6, p 12. https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf
[37] A. Kelly, War Room / Daily Clout. https://www.amazon.com/DailyClout-Documents-Analysis-Volunteers-Reports-ebook/dp/B0BSK6LV5D/
[38] A Schadlich, S Hoffman, et al. Accumulation of nanocarriers in the ovary: A neglected toxicity risk? May 30, 2012. J Contr Release. 160 (1), PP 105-112. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168365912000892?
[39] M Ajdary, F Keyhanfar, et al. P{otential toxicity of nanoparticles on the reproductive system animal models: A review. Nov 2021. J Reprod Immun. 148. 103384. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165037821001145
[40] F Luongo, F Dragoni, et al. SARS-CoV-2 infection of human ovarian cells: A potential negative impact on female fertility. Apr 23, 2022. Cell. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9105548/pdf/cells-11-01431.pdf
[41] Health.mil. Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED). https://health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/Health-Readiness/AFHSD/Data-Management-and-Technical-Support/Defense-Medical-Epidemiology-Database
[42] A. Kelly, War Room / Daily Clout p 91.. https://www.amazon.com/DailyClout-Documents-Analysis-Volunteers-Reports-ebook/dp/B0BSK6LV5D/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3676494/chinazis-weaponized-migration-to-hong-kong
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3676494/chinazis-weaponized-migration-to-hong-kong
Good thing that wouldn’t be used against us!
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https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/?fbclid=IwAR21XZykyIan57vFM4xkN-jwPSYcQ99IBKtvgV6mVUmhboFbgGkcQzi7HHM#:~:text=Most%20common%20age%20of%20whites,it's%2027%20%7C%20Pew%20Research%20Center
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https://www.popsci.com/health/infertility-world-health-organization-study/
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Africa's Population Boom, Part 1: The Opportunities and Risks
undefined and Sub-Saharan Africa Analyst at RANE
Clara Brackbill
Sub-Saharan Africa Analyst at RANE, Stratfor
Apr 10, 2023 | 21:26 GMT
Editor's note: This column is part of an ongoing series that explores the opportunities and risks provided by Africa's expected population boom in the coming decades. In the first part, we outline the factors that will indicate countries' preparedness and capacity to positively adapt to their demographic growth, which we'll then use to analyze the impacts on specific sub-Saharan nations in future parts of this series.
At a time when many countries around the world are grappling with demographic declines, Africa remains poised for rapid population growth. According to the United Nations' 2022 World Population Prospect report, countries in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to ''contribute more than half of the global population increase anticipated through 2050.'' Sub-Saharan Africa's population is currently growing at 2.7% per year, more than twice as fast as South Asia (1.2%) and Latin America (0.9%). The number of people living below the Sahara desert is expected to double in the next 50 years to more than 3 billion, with coastal West Africa, the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian highlands seeing the sharpest population spikes.
These estimates, of course, are only projections based on current fertility, mortality and migration trends — all of which could change in the coming decades due to various factors, such as increased access to education and service sector jobs. But sub-Saharan Africa has so many women of childbearing age that even if most decided to have fewer children today, the region's population would keep growing — a phenomenon demographers call ''population momentum.''
What's at Stake
Sub-Saharan Africa's demographic change has the potential to create political, economic and humanitarian problems of massive proportions. But it also offers major new possibilities for growth and prosperity. The increase in population will be accompanied by changes in the age structure of the region's population (or ''population pyramid''). As the youth population and the number of Africans over 65 years old shrink, the working-age population will grow for decades to come.
Sociologists refer to this high ratio of working-aged people to dependents as the ''demographic dividend,'' or the potential to unlock economic growth through an expanding labor market and dwindling populations of children and elderly. The extent to which African states will capitalize on this opportunity will vary greatly. Some countries will innovate to improve agricultural production, job growth and service delivery. Others, however, will struggle to reach ''demographic fatigue,'' wherein a lack of financial resources leaves them unable to stabilize population growth and effectively mitigate risks like land degradation, irregular migration, insecurity and poverty.
African countries' responses to their exploding populations will have far-reaching implications, ranging from migration to the global balance of power. Hunger is already a problem across the Continent. But with a projected 3 billion mouths to feed by 2070, agricultural land will become increasingly scarce as agricultural production struggles to keep pace with booming demand, while urbanization leads to declines in agricultural labor — posing new challenges to food security that could drive migratory flows to more developed parts of the world at ever-increasing rates.
Technological advances will also make Africa's youth populations more connected than ever. And these younger Africans will increasingly demand greater economic stability and social protections from their respective governments, in some cases precipitating political liberalization and in others surges in authoritarianism. The coming surge of young adults will also pose new risks to social instability on a continent with relatively young governing institutions, potentially sparking global social, environmental and/or political movements that challenge the ruling order. Furthermore, African states' political ideologies and geopolitical orientations will likely become all the more important amid the accelerating transition to a multipolar world order, as is already evident in Russian, Chinese and Western competition for influence in Africa.
Indicators for Positive Adaptation
While sub-Saharan Africa's population boom by 2050 is largely a foregone conclusion, the pace of population growth beyond 2050 is not. With effective policymaking, governments can still encourage lower fertility rates so that the supply of resources and services may eventually catch up with demand. The United Nations estimates that current efforts to curb population growth will only be felt after 2050, which means that the demographic interventions African governments undertake over the next few years will be critical in determining whether they catalyze population growth into ''demographic dividends'' or reach states of ''demographic fatigue.''
To better understand the associated risks and opportunities ahead, there are several key factors that will help indicate African countries' capacity to harness their population growth as an engine for political, economic and social progress:
Girls' education. Few inputs have a stronger influence on fertility rates than girls' education. African women with no formal education tend to have six or more children, whereas women who have completed primary school tend to have about four kids and those who have finished secondary school have an average of two. Beyond reducing the number of children per family, quality girls' education is also correlated with improvements in quality of life. With fewer children, families can invest more in healthcare, education and savings, leading to improvements in the skilled labor market. Furthermore, smaller families can increase the availability of educational funding per child, leading to compounding improvements in school enrollment and quality of education. The United Nations estimates that there is a 20-year lag between changes in education and changes in fertility, meaning policy changes that impact girls' education over the next five years will have a direct impact on African countries' fertility rates in the 2040s and 50s.
Agricultural innovation and production. Food security will be central to African governments' capacity to catalyze population expansion into growth opportunities. In West Africa and the Great Lakes region, food insecurity already drives destabilizing migration outflows and makes communities more vulnerable to insurgencies and extremism. In West Africa alone, over 24 million people are estimated to already be in need of food assistance. Huge population increases will very likely exacerbate these challenges unless African governments can boost agricultural productivity and trade to feed their respective citizens. While this can take myriad forms, countries' capacity to avoid a larger food crisis will largely hinge on their government's efforts to attract investments into their agricultural sectors, which could put downward pressure on food prices, boost innovation and agro-processing, and enable higher returns to public sector investment in agriculture.
Urban infrastructure and services. Sub-Saharan Africa's population boom is expected to spur accelerated urbanization as more Africans migrate from rural areas to city centers in search of work. In 2015, 50% of Africans lived in urban areas, up from 31% in 1990, according to The Economist. By 2050, the share will rise to more than 70%. Urbanization has generally benefited national development and the incomes of individual workers, given that wages in African cities are about twice as high as in the countryside. But the infrastructure and services of those cities have struggled to keep pace with their growing populations, leaving more than half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa living in slums. Ken Opalo, a researcher at Georgetown University, calls this phenomenon the ''ruralization of urban areas,'' or subsistence living in cities. As African cities continue to expand over the next decade, a combination of accelerating urbanization and ''ruralization'' of metropolitan areas will present challenges ranging from lack of access to water, power and transportation services to insufficient natural disaster response. Development of urban infrastructure, including public utilities like waste disposal, water and electricity, will be crucial to governments' ability to create jobs, attract investment and ensure political stability.
Job creation. Mass job creation is a necessity for African countries to reap the economic benefits of their growing working-age population. Without more jobs, an influx in labor supply will result in unemployment and underemployment, likely triggering political instability and crime — especially among Africa's budding cohort of young adults. Some academics have suggested that the solution to unemployment and underdevelopment lies in expanding Africa's manufacturing sectors, often pointing to Asia's rapid, manufacturing-fueled economic development. But Africa is unlikely to replace Asia as the world's manufacturing hub given Africa's lack of established infrastructure and the fact that Asia maintains its own labor reserves that will compete with African labor growth. As such, African governments will be forced to seek alternatives that are attractive to an increasingly politically active population, likely in the form of high-productivity formal sector jobs, as opposed to the low-wage informal jobs that proliferate in high-population centers like Nigeria. For job creation to be an effective catalyst for growth, it must be sustainable. This means that current attempts to employ large swaths of the population through public sector jobs that spur unsustainable government wage bills — as is the case in South Africa — will fall short.
Burden or Opportunity?
These indicators — while certainly not exhaustive — generally represent the forces that could drive positive adaptation to population growth. The African countries that are expected to see the most rapid population growth in the coming decades are concentrated in the Great Lakes region (including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), the Ethiopian highlands (namely Ethiopia) and coastal West Africa (primarily Nigeria). None of these countries, however, are adequately prepared to meet the vast challenges of the population boom already well underway within their borders.
In the next part of this series, we'll use the above set of indicators to evaluate the preparedness and impacts of population growth in major sub-Saharan African countries where the stakes will be the highest.
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Incredible Shrinking Japan
The great country’s population has fallen for 12 years in a row.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 16, 2023 6:22 pm ET
Remember when global elites worried about overpopulation? Tell it to Japan, where the internal affairs ministry announced last week that the country’s population fell in 2022 for the 12th consecutive year, dropping 556,000 to 124.95 million.
This marks the 16th year in a row in which deaths exceeded births, with a record drop in births of 731,000. All of Japan’s 47 prefectures except Tokyo saw declines.
To maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of at least 2.1. Japan’s is 1.34. The U.S. has a birth rate of 1.64. Twenty-seven percent of Japan’s 50-year old women have never had a live birth, the highest share of childlessness among developed countries. Finland is next at 20.7%.
Japan’s shrinking population is an accelerated version of the trend across the developed world. More women are seeking professional careers rather than motherhood, more men and women are delaying marriage and family decisions, and the overall cultural zeitgeist runs toward individual fulfillment rather than the sacrifices of child-rearing.
A shrinking population has consequences for economic and national vitality. In Japan it is straining the aging workforce, and burdening a shrinking number of young taxpayers with a growing cost of elderly care. Japan’s saving grace is that millions of its seniors are willing to work past retirement age. According to a 2021 Annual Report on the Aging Society from Japan’s Cabinet Office, 40% of seniors in Japan want to continue earning an income, compared to 30% in the U.S.
Japan’s leaders have tried numerous pro-natalist policies to arrest the decline. This includes more money for child care, longer maternity and paternity leave, and paying mothers a lump-sum of 500,000 yen (about $3,700) per baby. Nothing has worked. That’s a warning for American conservatives who think they can fire up a new baby boom by turning the dial on child subsidies. Cultural trends are hard to overcome.
One policy alternative is more immigration, which was once taboo in insular Japan but was increased under former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Most migrants to Japan are guest workers from other countries of East Asia who fill openings in the labor market. But Japan has never made it easy for foreigners to assimilate.
Immigration has helped to offset the birth dearth in the U.S., which for 200 years has had a genius for assimilation. But that may be ending as voices on the left preach that American society is corrupt and racist, while many on the right want to stop all immigration.
Japan is a highly stable and successful society that is managing to cope with slower growth and less dynamism caused in part by its declining population. We doubt the U.S., with its cultural diversity and history of seeking new frontiers, would cope as well.
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Incredible Shrinking Japan
The great country’s population has fallen for 12 years in a row.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 16, 2023 6:22 pm ET
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Remember when global elites worried about overpopulation? Tell it to Japan, where the internal affairs ministry announced last week that the country’s population fell in 2022 for the 12th consecutive year, dropping 556,000 to 124.95 million.
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This marks the 16th year in a row in which deaths exceeded births, with a record drop in births of 731,000. All of Japan’s 47 prefectures except Tokyo saw declines.
To maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of at least 2.1. Japan’s is 1.34. The U.S. has a birth rate of 1.64. Twenty-seven percent of Japan’s 50-year old women have never had a live birth, the highest share of childlessness among developed countries. Finland is next at 20.7%.
Japan’s shrinking population is an accelerated version of the trend across the developed world. More women are seeking professional careers rather than motherhood, more men and women are delaying marriage and family decisions, and the overall cultural zeitgeist runs toward individual fulfillment rather than the sacrifices of child-rearing.
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A shrinking population has consequences for economic and national vitality. In Japan it is straining the aging workforce, and burdening a shrinking number of young taxpayers with a growing cost of elderly care. Japan’s saving grace is that millions of its seniors are willing to work past retirement age. According to a 2021 Annual Report on the Aging Society from Japan’s Cabinet Office, 40% of seniors in Japan want to continue earning an income, compared to 30% in the U.S.
Japan’s leaders have tried numerous pro-natalist policies to arrest the decline. This includes more money for child care, longer maternity and paternity leave, and paying mothers a lump-sum of 500,000 yen (about $3,700) per baby. Nothing has worked. That’s a warning for American conservatives who think they can fire up a new baby boom by turning the dial on child subsidies. Cultural trends are hard to overcome.
One policy alternative is more immigration, which was once taboo in insular Japan but was increased under former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Most migrants to Japan are guest workers from other countries of East Asia who fill openings in the labor market. But Japan has never made it easy for foreigners to assimilate.
Immigration has helped to offset the birth dearth in the U.S., which for 200 years has had a genius for assimilation. But that may be ending as voices on the left preach that American society is corrupt and racist, while many on the right want to stop all immigration.
Japan is a highly stable and successful society that is managing to cope with slower growth and less dynamism caused in part by its declining population. We doubt the U.S., with its cultural diversity and history of seeking new frontiers, would cope as well.
WSJoke. Muh diversity!
:roll:
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IN-DEPTH: As India’s Population Surpasses China’s, Experts Say Get Ready for a Power Shift
People walk through a market in Bangalore, India, on Nov. 15, 2022. (Manjunath Kiran/AFP via Getty Images)
People walk through a market in Bangalore, India, on Nov. 15, 2022. (Manjunath Kiran/AFP via Getty Images)
Venus Upadhayaya
By Venus Upadhayaya
April 28, 2023Updated: April 28, 2023
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According to the United Nations, this week, India will outstrip China as the world’s most populous country. This monumental change of status between the two Asian giants that share a long, militarized Himalayan border indicates the burgeoning possibility of change in their respective global statuses, enhanced competition, and the chance of war, according to experts.
Demographics play a key role in geopolitics which presents both opportunities and challenges, according to experts who said if India’s policymakers overcome the challenges, the population increase translates into massive political, economic, and military power, which threatens adversaries like China.
“You can compare this situation with US-China competition. Power shift theory indicates that the ‘declining US’ is threatened by rising China. Before WWI, declining Britain was threatened by rising Germany. Now India is catching up with China, and China is worrying about India’s rise,” Dr. Satoru Nagao, a visiting fellow at the Washington-based The Hudson, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Contrary to popular belief, according to Nagao, the United States is staying strong. But people think the United States is declining. “Thus, the U.S. is worrying China too.”
“China is rising now, but the population indicates they will face an aging society in the coming decades. Before China declines, China would want to attack India,” he said.
India and China have accounted for over two-thirds of the global population since the mid-twentieth century. The birth rate in China plunged last year for the first time since 1961. China also lost a significant chunk of its population during the COVID pandemic.
India’s fertility rates have dropped to 2.2 births per woman, but DESA (a UN think tank ) predicts India’s population will continue growing for several decades.
Frank Lehberger, a Germany-based Sinologist and geo-political analyst, told The Epoch Times that the most direct benefit for India surpassing China in population is gaining global recognition as a leading engine of economic growth, able to attract a growing volume of foreign investments and develop its export industries at a faster pace than before.
“India seems well on the road of becoming the ‘next China,’ with a golden decade of India gradually materializing. However, that era dawns only if no major war erupts, by accident or design, involving both Russia with its new quasi-ally China,” said Lehberger.
Meanwhile, China’s economy has been hammered in recent years due to the communist regime’s draconian zero-COVID policies, severely disrupting businesses and factories nationwide. Experts are expecting slow growth shortly. According to a recent analysis by Michael Pettis, a nonresident senior fellow with Carnegie China, Beijing’s annual GDP growth is unlikely to exceed 2 to 3 percent for many years.
However, India was one of the best-performing economies last year, and its GDP growth outpaced China’s in the previous quarter, according to the World Economic Forum. In 2022, China posted one of its worst economic performances in nearly half a century.
According to Morgan Stanley, New Delhi is further estimated to be the third-largest economy by 2027, overtaking Japan and Germany, while its global exports are expected to double by 2031.
Lehberger said China under Xi will remain undeterred or unimpressed by India and continue attempting to gradually occupy tracts of land on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
“Of course, only if it suits Xi in his internal agenda. Therefore he might still start short skirmishes at the LAC, more or less the same as the ones we have seen several times since May 2020,” said Lehberger.
Epoch Times Photo
This video screenshot taken from footage recorded in mid-June 2020 and released by China Central Television (CCTV) on Feb. 20, 2021, shows Chinese (foreground) and Indian (background) soldiers during a clash on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Galwan Valley. (AFP Photo/China Central Television)
Far-Reaching Implications
India surpassing China’s population is not an ordinary country but a country with an equally ancient civilization and a functional world’s largest democracy. Thus, the geopolitical implications of India becoming the world’s most populous country are far-reaching and complex, according to experts.
Nagao said the implications are positive and negative—a massive population means a massive market, which indicates enhanced economic and military power.
“Especially India’s population is young. This means that they create active energy in the society,” said Nagao.
Sixty-six percent of India’s population is 18-35, according to the International Labor Organization, and the Indian labor force is set to grow by 8 million annually, most of which will be driven by youth entering the labor market.
Lehberger said that India’s population’s first and more visible results in international diplomacy would likely be it’s increased contending for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
“Enabling any government in Delhi of wielding veto power in international interactions is something which the Chinese have stubbornly tried to prevent for several decades,” said Lehberger.
Being the most populous democracy on the planet is also believed to boost India’s nuclear capabilities, he said.
“The need for energy and resources is constantly increasing, driving India’s nuclear energy program forward, with the help of Japan, France, or the U.S.,” said Lehberger, adding that India’s growing nuclear defense capabilities could be put to good use as a strategic deterrent to China and other less friendly regional powers, such as Pakistan or Turkey.
It could also be used as a tool for power projection from the Gulf to Singapore and along the entire east coast of Africa, according to Lehberger.
He said that the Indian nuclear triad, meaning its land-based inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM), submarines with ICBMs constantly patrolling underwater in stealth mode, and its strategic aircraft carrying nuclear bombs or missiles, could, therefore, in a matter of years, match or even surpass that of China at current levels.
[Thus] “making Chinese military attacks on Indian assets and territories rather implausible.”
Since ancient times, geography has contributed significantly to India’s rise in power. Even today, according to experts, having outstripped China’s population, geography, and particularly its oceans, has raised India’s stakes in geopolitics.
Lehberger called it “favorable geography” and said that India should use it now with its burgeoning markets and increasing defense capability to project hard and sharp power and condemn the Chinese to remain trapped in disparate bases such as Hambantota, Sri Lanka; Gwadar, Pakistan; or smaller ones on the Myanmar coast.
“Modern Submarine and surface units like nuclear carriers would then help India become the foremost naval power in the entire Indian Ocean region, securing the international sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the strategic Malacca and Lombok Straits through which roughly 40 percent of world trade in goods and commodities flows on a daily basis,” he said.
Lehberger believes as this situation evolves, India will become the primary challenger, geopolitically, militarily, and diplomatically for China and vice-versa.
“As the two countries compete globally for resources, investment and trade, and political influence, for example, soft power, the potential for escalating military conflict could increase, particularly in the nuclear domain,” said Lehberger.
According to Lehberger, China challenging India will exist until the Chinese communist regime is defeated externally or implodes under the weight of its political and socio-economic contradictions, similar to the Soviet Union in 1991.
Epoch Times Photo
South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in (center left) shakes hands with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center right) as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh state Yogi Adityanath (R) looks on during the inauguration of the world’s largest smartphone factory in Noida, India on July 9, 2018. (Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images)
Challenges for India
According to experts, India outstripping China in population means how many other internal challenges are dealt with would determine if the changing demography brings increased opportunities or increased crisis.
Burzine Waghmar, Visiting India Fellow, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and SOAS South Asia Institute, London, told the Epoch Times in an email that India was the first modern state to implement a family planning policy in 1952, which continues to date. China’s one-child policy directive was enforced in 1980 and discontinued in 2016.
He cautioned that one-third of India’s projected growth would mostly happen in the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and both are socio-economically poor. “Where decline is most pronounced and expected to continue is in the southern states, which are more advanced on all social indicators and where falling birth rates are in tandem with an increase in the aging population. For example, one in five Keralites, by 2025, will be over 60,” said Waghmar, adding that this will have internal political consequences for some time as it will feed north-south disparity in the country, leading to long-standing issues of regionalism and representation.
He also pointed out that this surge in population, which denotes an increase in the workforce compared to what is occurring in China, is only partially in India’s favor. It will continue to face severe challenges as Indian unemployment remains above 7 percent. The booming services and IT sector, which has fuelled much of India’s recent prosperity, will not be able to absorb everyone, especially the 254 million Indians aged 15-24.
“PM [Narendra] Modi will have to factor this in as he stands for reelection next year and New Delhi attempts to capitalize on the current trend among western supply chains to relocate from China,” said Waghmar.
According to Lehberger, successive governments will face a considerable array of social and economic problems if they don’t come up with solutions to the issues that accompany opportunities.
“And especially if those future governments do not manage to decrease levels of poverty, inequality, unemployment among the large low-skilled workforce, as well as related environmental degradation, all of which are putting a considerable strain on India’s political fabric, on the distribution of natural resources, and on modern infrastructure,” Lehberger said.
The government will almost certainly face increased logistical problems while caring for the needs of its citizens. Among them is the increase of suitable employment opportunities for India’s huge semi- or low-skilled workforce, according to Lehberger.
He said India should be cautious of China’s attempts to influence India to toe the China line in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
“So as to gradually become an unwitting accessory to counter or even obliterate leading democracies as well as the established international rules-based order that they represent. To achieve their goal, both Putin and Xi hope to capitalize on Indian nonaligned traditions as well as anti-Western undercurrents and reflexes,” Lehberger said.
As the competition between India and China intensifies, India should build its defenses against Chinese predatory investment and technological colonization.
“As India navigates these challenges and seeks to maintain or expand her strategic interests, one thing is clear, however: India’s growing population will continue to shape its role in the world for years to come,” said Lehberger.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3978198/you-are-being-replaced
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today is the big day - end to title 42
and nothing we can do about it .
come here have babies then dare us to deport.....
10 million mostly future democrat voters
more citizens being displaced
we just have to sit here and have it rammed down our throats
and all media does is highlight the suffering of the illegals
to make us feel guilty , happy to help .
unbelievable
40 yrs ago I would never have dreamed this would happen here.
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If I have it right, Title 42 ends at midnight.
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A Visual Breakdown of America’s Stagnating Number of Births
Births stayed flat in 2022, with numbers down among younger women
By Anthony DeBarrosFollow
June 1, 2023 12:01 am ET
Gift unlocked article
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(4 min)
The government tallied about 655,000 fewer births in 2022 than the 2007 high of 4.32 million. PHOTO: JOY MALONE/REUTERS
About 3.66 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2022, essentially unchanged from 2021 and 15% below the peak hit in 2007, according to new federal figures released Thursday.
The provisional total—3,661,220 births—is about 3,000 below 2021’s final count, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Final government data expected later this year could turn that small deficit positive.
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Experts have pointed to a confluence of factors behind the nation’s recent relative dearth of births, including economic and social obstacles ranging from child care to housing affordability.
Absent increases in immigration, fewer births combined with ongoing baby boomer retirements will likely weigh on the labor force supply within the next 10 years, said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, an insurance and financial-services company.
“You’re going to have a real shortage of workers unless we have technology somehow to fill the gap,” Bostjancic said.
A look at the trends in charts:
Births stay well off peak
The government tallied about 655,000 fewer births in 2022 than the 2007 high of 4.32 million, reflecting ongoing decreases. With still-elevated deaths due in part to the latter phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. in 2022 saw only about 385,000 more births than deaths.
20223.66 million
20074.32 million
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The 2022 total might tick higher when final data is tallied later this year. Final 2021 births were about 5,000 above the provisional number; for 2020, the final tally was about 8,400 greater.
Fertility remains below ‘replacement’ level
The total fertility rate—closely watched because a level of 2.1 children per woman is the “replacement rate” needed for a population to maintain current levels—was 1.665 in 2022. That was essentially unchanged from 1.664 in 2021 and only a slight recovery from a record low in 2020.
Replacement level: 2.1
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The U.S. has generally been below replacement level since the early 1970s.
Hispanic fertility rates climb
The general fertility rate for Hispanic mothers increased 4% in 2022, second only to people of Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander origin. Fertility rates among Asian women rose 3%; rates for all other groups fell.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
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Hispanic mothers accounted for 25.5% of U.S. births in 2022, a record, while the shares of births from non-Hispanic white and Black women declined. White women accounted for 50.1% of births in 2022, Black women for 13.9%, and Asian women for 6%.
Birthrates continue declining among the young
The trend of decreasing birthrates among younger women continued in 2022. For teens ages 15 to 19, the birthrate fell 3%, and for ages 20 to 24 it was down 2%. The rate for the next oldest group, 25 to 29, edged up only slightly. Increases were mainly seen among women 35 to 44.
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If trends continue, the birthrate for women ages 35 to 39 might soon eclipse the rate for ages 20 to 24.
Write to Anthony DeBarros at anthony.debarros@wsj.com
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the June 1, 2023, print edition as 'U.S. Births Held Flat in 2022'.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMSZ7v3KxQf
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https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/very-urgent-the-fertility-crisis?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=363080&post_id=132134503&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
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https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4125661-high-school-boys-are-trending-conservative/
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https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4125661-high-school-boys-are-trending-conservative/
A few ideas, one is girls sports. Democrats are destroying that.
Second might be if they find out abortion is a really shitty form of birth control. As they say, one dead, one injured. A planned abortion isn't healthcare.
Third would be if we could convert the arguments for a growing economy from logical to emotional. )
Fourth, gas prices, etc. What happens when you get a job, a car. and dad stops buying gas, and you find out filling the tank costs $60-100, twice what it should. You could do some real shopping with that kind of money.
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* definition of gender is male - female FYI
https://news.gallup.com/poll/245618/abortion-trends-gender.aspx
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/analysis-america-grapples-with-plummeting-fertility-rates-5478154
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China 2022, < 10 million babies born out of a population > 1.4 billion.
They are going to collapse in their own debt. (Us too.)
https://nypost.com/2023/09/16/chinas-population-is-falling-from-its-former-one-child-policy/
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no one is emigrating to China
wonder why
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/shock-poll-on-hispanic-voters-is-bad-for-democrats/ar-AA1iXumt?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=7495a934700c4e01aff7eb1946fd6508&ei=8
Republicans still at a large deficit here but trend is in right direction (pun intended)
The Right is right !
Left-Hander Superstitions and Terms
Sinistrophobia is the fear of left-handedness or things on the left side.
Many people believe that the devil is left-handed.
The Latin word for left, sinister, also means unlucky, evil, and suspicious.
The French word for left, gauche, also means clumsy.
A left-handed compliment is an insult.
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The market for adult diapers is now greater than the market for baby diapers.
I wonder why the population keeps increasing. (unlawful entry run amok)
Birth rate has been plummeting since 2009. Hope and change words mask the world is going to end in a decade message.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/deaths-outnumbered-births-in-half-of-states-between-2020-and-2021.html
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-suicides-reached-record-high-last-year/
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January 31, 2024
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China's Bid to Manage the Silver Economy
The country’s coming demographic crisis is inevitable but manageable.
By: Victoria Herczegh
From a struggling real estate sector to serious labor shortages, China is beset by problems that will require a lot of time and effort to solve. And as if this weren’t enough, Beijing will have to address these issues amid a much more potent challenge that affects its long-term economic trajectory more than the others: a declining and aging population.
According to figures published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics last week, the overall population in mainland China fell by roughly 2.1 million to 1.4 billion in 2023. Slightly over 9 million babies were born last year – the lowest amount since records began in 1949 – while about 11 million people died, pushing the death rate to a five-decade high. And though this burgeoning demographic problem has already affected the economy – the NBS also announced that the Chinese economy grew by a disappointing 5.2 percent in 2023 and is expected to slow further – the long-term consequences could be more dire as it impacts consumer and housing demand, public finances and health care.
These issues began in 1979, when President Deng Xiaoping introduced measures that would eventually be referred to as the one-child policy. The measures were meant to manage overpopulation and to free up as much of the population for work as possible ahead of the country’s economic opening. Accordingly, Chinese fertility rates fell in the 1980s from an average of six to seven births per woman to less than three. By the 1990s, that average had fallen to less than two, which was considered the point below which the population would decline. It has stayed that low since. The relief from child-rearing needs did free up more people to work outside the home in China’s factories, contributing to the export-driven economic surplus China came to be known for and providing finances for the ambitious infrastructure projects headlining China’s “miraculous” development. NBS estimates say the economy grew by 10 percent per year for decades.
However, the low birth rates of the last roughly 40 years have radically slowed the replacement of older workers by their children. Over the past 10 years alone, shortages of available labor have held back overall growth rates. According to NBS statistics, China has only half the number of factory workers it needs – not nearly enough to prop up sagging economic growth.
Within the broader problem of unemployment, youth joblessness is an especially pressing issue. The jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed since 2020, reaching nearly 15 percent in December. This number owes largely to a protracted pandemic-induced government crackdown and skittishness among big tech companies to hire new employees. Put simply, fresh college graduates are struggling to find jobs appropriate for their degrees, and many of them have refused to take blue-collar jobs or move to the smaller cities and rural areas that desperately need workers. There is now an uneven supply-demand ratio that has proved extremely difficult to rebalance.
Since the failures of the one-child policy emerged, Beijing has sought to encourage births by gradually easing the measures imposed by Deng to allow a second – and even a third – child. Local governments have even offered incentives for new children. A municipality in China’s Inner Mongolia region, for example, has started to offer payments of 2,000 yuan ($280) for a second child and 5,000 yuan for a third, and has required employers to give an extra 60 days and 90 days of paid maternity leave for second and third children, respectively.
Yet these measures have found little success for a variety of reasons. Many Chinese residents are delaying marriage or choosing not to have children at all, and those who do often feel that financial considerations limit them to one child. The population of women of childbearing age has also fallen. Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic only reinforced these trends as the economic slowdown, the high unemployment rate among young people, and the overall uncertainty about the future discouraged people from getting married and having children. This helps to explain why 61 percent of China’s population was of working age in 2023, down from about 70 percent a decade ago.
All this creates a bleak outlook for China. Because workforce and productivity growth greatly influence overall economic growth, it’s reasonable to assume that a decline in the former will result in a decline in the latter. Moreover, as the pool of workers shrinks, hourly wages increase. If that happens, factories in China may choose to relocate to countries with cheaper labor, such as India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Fewer people will mean lower demand for goods and services, and lower demand could obstruct China’s efforts to transition from an investment-led to a consumption-led economy. (Already this is hurt by China’s massive wealth gap.) And with more people choosing not to have families, demand will decline for real estate, which, despite its struggles, still accounts for 20-30 percent of the economy.
Given the policy failures to reverse China’s demographic trends, one available alternative is to goose immigration. Currently, China has only around 1 million foreign-born residents living in the country, equal to less than 0.1 percent of the population. In fact, China has the smallest number of immigrants of any major country in the world. Because of an insistence on maintaining racial purity, however, the Chinese leadership is disinclined to heterogeneity, and its policies reflect as much. For example, foreign-born people cannot earn Chinese citizenship unless they are children of Chinese nationals, and foreigners are allowed to purchase only one piece of property in China (their residence). If Beijing were to relax its immigration policies, there would be long-term benefits, but for it to make a difference in the short term, the numbers would need to increase tremendously in the next decade – which is unlikely to happen.
Even so, Beijing is dead set on boosting economic growth and recovering from the pandemic, and though the odds are against it, it still has some options available. If the labor pool remains stagnant, it can increase the economic output per hour worked by, for example, using more sophisticated equipment, relying more on automation technology like robotics and AI, investing in education and training, improving infrastructure, and boosting research and development. Of these options, the tech-based ones are likely the most promising, and the Chinese government seems to understand has much; Beijing has already upped its use of industrial robotics, especially in regions and industries that have been hit the hardest by the recent population shifts, such as the textiles industry in the Mekong Delta. China’s current “robot density” – the number of robotic units per 10,000 manufacturing workers – is 392. Total operational stock in China passed the 1.5 million-unit mark in 2022, with 290,000 units installed last year, according to the International Federation of Robotics. (The IFR estimates that China accounted for more than half of industrial robots installed worldwide last year.) The downside here is that though robotics have the potential to reduce the impact of aging on China’s manufacturing sector, they won’t necessarily prevent companies from moving to cheaper countries.
It’s worth noting that Beijing recently announced a plan to manage China’s “silver economy,” which entails all the goods and services targeted to older people – meal delivery, nursing homes, entertainment options, and, most significantly, health-related consumption of everything from medical devices to pharmaceuticals. According to recent estimates, the silver economy will be worth an estimated 30 trillion yuan in the next decade, accounting for 10 percent of China’s overall economy by 2035. Biotech firms that were hit hard by the post-pandemic slowdowns are especially well-positioned to benefit.
The reality is that China’s population decline is a process that cannot be stopped. Its demographic trends will place downward pressure on Chinese consumer spending and upward pressure on wages and government spending. This can be managed and its risks mitigated through shrewd formulation of policies to bolster the workforce, but given some of the other problems present in the Chinese economy, even this is no sure thing.
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February 5, 2024
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Russia Walks a Demographic Tightrope
Protests over migrant labor show the precarity of Moscow’s situation.
By: Ekaterina Zolotova
January was a month of widespread dissatisfaction and protest in Russia, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Demonstrations erupted in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk when a 26-year-old was killed by a Tajik migrant. In Bashkortostan, police dispersed thousands of residents protesting against the sentencing of a Bashkir activist who was charged with committing hate speech against people from the Caucasus and Central Asia. And several police raids took place in Moscow, Krasnoyarsk, Tver, Rostov-on-Don and elsewhere in response to the passing of certain pieces of migration legislation.
The Kremlin isn’t in immediate danger; in fact, few of the protests were directed specifically at the government. Yet they speak to the difficulty Moscow will encounter as it tries to manage some of its dire demographic challenges.
Put simply, the Russian population is in decline. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, birth rates have fallen while emigration has risen, and bringing in foreign workers was the quickest and easiest way to offset the losses. To that end, the government enacted a series of immigration-friendly measures, including ones allowing residents of Eurasian Economic Union states to work without any special documents and citizens of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Moldova to easily obtain work permits and work patents. Hailing mostly from former Soviet satellites, they now live predominately in Russia’s larger cities working jobs in retail, transportation, services and construction. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, at the beginning of the year there were nearly 2 million migrants in Russia with work patents and 70,000 with work permits, but these statistics exclude immigrants who have already received citizenship and those who are in the country illegally.
Russia | International Migration, 1997-2022
(click to enlarge)
The policies achieved their purpose to some degree, but their successes were short-lived, and many argue that they replaced one problem with another. For example, immigration proved unsustainable. The global economic crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic and the outbreak of war with Ukraine all discouraged immigration and thus contributed to Russia’s labor shortages. Moreover, immigration has never really been a smooth process in Russia. Though many are native Russian speakers, they often find it difficult to acculturate to their new home and often work “lesser” jobs than their Russian peers. Just as often they work in the gray or even black markets. This has led to interethnic tension over the years, resulting in higher crime and incarceration rates among migrant communities.
Crime Levels in Russia
(click to enlarge)
It’s unsurprising, then, that anti-immigration rhetoric is intensifying. Federal and local authorities are increasingly discussing ways to revisit their migration policies and enforce existing laws more stringently. It’s also unsurprising that they are doing so in an election year. Reinforcing ethnic nationalism, and especially Russian nationalism, is a common electoral trope across the Russian political spectrum. As the March elections approach, expect migrant labor to be raised again as a way to divert attention from the more complex geopolitical problems that will take longer to solve – the war in Ukraine, the subsequent sanctions campaign, economic growth, and so on. These periods of piqued migrant phobia typically end without significant changes.
Even so, it isn’t only political theater. Migrant labor is an issue many Russians feel strongly about. After all, attracting migrants without sufficient assimilation and integration into Russian society could lead to anti-immigration protests, which could, in turn, create conflict between the government and the people and within certain corners of the government itself. But the government doesn’t have many alternatives to address its demographic challenges. To maintain the population at least at the current level, Russia would need to bring in 390,000 migrants per year. And it seems intent on doing just that. Despite the recent protests, Moscow has simplified its naturalization process for those who fight for Russia in Ukraine and has prepared agreements granting certain guarantees for migrant workers from countries such as Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, companies such as food retailer Magnit announced that they are launching programs to recruit foreign workers to fill job vacancies. (Magnit has already signed an agreement with Uzbekistan’s Agency for External Labor Migration to recruit workers for a distribution center in Tatarstan.)
The migrant issue has put Russia in a tricky position. The Kremlin cannot afford to soften its migration policies, which could create further ethnic conflict, but neither can it afford to overly strengthen them if it wants its economy to recover. Candidates may trumpet migration one way or the other on the campaign trail, but it isn’t in the Kremlin’s best interest to inflate the issue so much that anti-immigrant sentiment begins to spread to otherwise calm regions. This would not only weaken the country, which is eager to maintain solidarity as it arrays itself against the West, but also potentially divert resources from the more pressing conflict in Ukraine.
Moscow’s actions are limited because this is a decades-old problem that defies easy solution. Russia realizes it cannot significantly limit the rights of migrants, tighten entry or establish tougher conditions for them because the addition of labor (skilled and unskilled) is too important to domestic economic production. This is complicated by the fact that Russia wants to maintain relations, especially trade and political relations, with post-Soviet spaces, which have become all the more important for Russia’s sanctions-induced parallel import schemes. Enflaming anti-immigrant rhetoric threatens these relations. (Indeed, just this week the Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry summoned Russia’s ambassador to give him an official notice of the mistreatment of its citizens working in Russia.)
Interestingly, this balancing act suits Russia’s broader strategy of preventing domestic division by painting itself as a custodian of traditions, religions and nationalities. President Vladimir Putin himself seems to have adhered to this strategy for 10 years now, trying to promote the idea that historically Russia has been a multinational state in which various cultures mixed and mingled and adapted for something greater than the sum of their parts. The question is how long Moscow can keep up the delicate balance.
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India already passed up the population of China. What other country is on a path to do that before the end of the current century?
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/02/12/you-wont-believe-what-country-will-overtake-china-in-population-n4926368
[Spoiler: Nigeria]
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perhaps the US after we get another 2 billion people rushing in if Trump loses.
seriously, none, but the African continent will:
Population of Africa:
2.5 billion
According to the forecast, Africa's total population would reach nearly 2.5 billion by 2050. In 2020, the continent had around 1.34 billion inhabitants, with Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt as the most populous countries. In the coming years, Africa would experience significant population growth and would nearly reach the Asian population by 2100.