Group items tagged

"To the amazement of many from my generation, who grew up in real fear of "Soylent Green"-type scenarios of over-population, our primary demographic challenge going forward is to maintain a decent worker-to-retiree ratio as national populations age at an unprecedented speed." By Thomas P.M. Barnett in World Politics Review on July 12, 2010

"Until relatively recently the spread of agriculture in Europe, and to some extent the whole world, was pigeon-holed into two maximalist models: cultural or demographic diffusionist. Neither of these models were maximalist in that they denied the impact of culture or demographics in totality, but they tended to be rhetorically brandished in a manner where it was clear which dynamic was the dominant mode of explaining the nature of cultural and genetic variation and their origins."

"Chinese society is on the verge of a structural transformation even more profound than the long and painful project of economic rebalancing, which the Communist Party is anxiously beginning to undertake. China's population is aging more rapidly than it is getting rich, giving rise to a great demographic imbalance with important implications for the Party's efforts to transform the Chinese economy and preserve its own power in the coming decade."

At The Daily Dish, by Andrew Sullivan on April 29, 2010. The role of demographics in the tea party along with a look at how two opposing views of conservatism could play out.

This is a really great read by Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor. Volunmuous highlights follow.

"The Pew Research Center has an amazing new report about America's shifting demographics that shows how the country is getting older, less white, and more liberal. The entire report is worth your time, and it includes some beautiful animated visualizations to put the demographic changes in context."

"War is always spoken of as an option; to be averse to it is taken as a sign of weakness. Indeed, why are the Americans so much more jingoistic today than, say, the Europeans? I offer three reasons that I believe, taken together, provide an answer: (a) The demographics of the American military (b) Historical inexperience of war and the world, and (c) The impetus from corporate capitalism. " By Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily on September 13, 2010.

Hat Tip from Andrew Sullivan: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/a-generational-struggle.html By William H. Frey at Brookings on April 29, 2010. A look at the demographics driving new racial tensions.

"U.S.-Russian relations seem to have been relatively quiet recently, as there are numerous contradictory views in Washington about the true nature of Russia's current foreign policy. Doubts remain about the sincerity of the U.S. State Department's so-called "reset" of relations with Russia - the term used in 2009 when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed a reset button to her Russian counterpart as a symbol of a freeze on escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington. The concern is whether the "reset" is truly a shift in relations between the two former adversaries or simply a respite before relations deteriorate again."

"Several polls are now out, assessing the demographics of the Tea Party Movement that largely agree the majority of its members are Republican, largely white, above the mean in age and income and voted for John McCain. So do Tea Party people reflect the average American as they represent themselves? Not usually if you are a middle-aged woman of Hispanic background, an African-American male or a union member in New England just scraping by, according to the polls." By Carol Forsloff at Digital Journal on March 30, 2010.

"China's urban population may grow by as many as 230 million people in the next 15 years. But most growth will take place not in metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing but in the myriad small- and medium-sized satellite cities around them. And as residents flock to these cities, China's working-age population will begin to decline, and its elderly population will grow dramatically."

"A bipartisan group of eight leading U.S. senators on Wednesday officially filed the most comprehensive immigration reform bill since 1990, opening the door for the United States to address an issue that will help to shape the country's economic and demographic future. The bill links the issue of border security with that of immigration and will require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to significantly ramp up its monitoring of the U.S. border over the next 10 years."

"2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush's immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country's first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation's press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of '08 as more flukish than transformative - or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments."

"Does growing wealth and income inequality in the United States presage the downfall of the American republic? Will we evolve into a new Gilded Age plutocracy, irrevocably split between the competing interests of rich and poor? Or is growing inequality a mere bump in the road, a statistical blip along the path to greater wealth for virtually every American? Or is income inequality partially desirable, reflecting the greater productivity of society's stars?"

"I'm in the demographic that this article is talking about and I nodded my head in agreement to everything they said. My attitudes about lifestyle and my relationship to driving has shaped my value system about new car ownership and home ownership. When I owned a car it was simply a means to an end and not an identity. A method of getting from one place to another. Living in the city (I've lived in several) the car gets beat to hell, so having a new car is largely impractical without an off-street parking space. I also have absolutely no desire to live in distant cul-de-sac style suburbs, and I'd prefer to walk to the store if I can, even though I'm at the point where I'm thinking about buying a house and raising a family.  "

"Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated."

"After thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest people in the US are pulling away from the rest. But it seems we don't. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: 'the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood'. Some commentators point to economic factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways. What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism."