Nothing much from me today – instead, for all of you who are more visual learners, here’s a video! This is on the beneficial effect that population has on poverty and was produced by the Population Research Institute. (You can also see another one of their videos in this earlier DID post.) Enjoy!
Learning from the demographics. (From nationalreview.com.)
Last week, when reviewing some of the family talk on the campaign trail, I mentioned a new study co-authored by Brad Wilcox called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. As many National Review Online readers know, W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also the president of Demographic Intelligence, the premier provider of U.S. fertility forecasts and fertility analytics for companies in the financial-services, food, household-products, insurance, juvenile-products, medical, and retail sectors. He talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy. –KJL Read more…
Asian marriage is in the news, with The Economist reporting on “the flight from marriage” in that part of the world and the London Telegraph noting the materialism which is delaying marriages in China. Read more…
by Robert W. Patterson
This article was originally published at WashingtonExaminer.com.
With his daring deficit reduction plan, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin deserves credit for courageous fiscal leadership. But he is painting Republicans into a corner if he thinks exploding federal outlays can be reduced without addressing underlying family demographics. Read more…
The world’s economies, especially in the West seem to be in somewhat of a bind. The markets around the world are currently in a slide; Europe is worried about Spain and Italy; the USA has had its credit rating downgraded by S&P for the first time in its history. It is therefore an appropriate time for the New York Times to publish an article by Chrystia Freeland, the global editor at large of Reuters, that argues that the world’s economic woes can be linked back to the fact that the West is getting old. Read more…
An article in today’s New York Times (“Russians Adopt U.S. tactics In Opposing Abortion”) mischaracterizes the upcoming Moscow Demographic Summit: The Family and The Future of Humankind – June 29-30 a the Russian State Social University – as “an international anti-abortion meeting.” Read more…
Two articles caught my attention recently. The first was “Japan population shrinks by record in 2010”. The title should be self-explanatory. Already the most aged nation on earth, Japan’s demographic winter in 2010 was the most severe on record.
The result of more and more of their young people “waiting to get married and choosing to have fewer children because of careers and lifestyle issues” is that the proportion of the population over the age of 65 is increasing ever rapidly. (25% now, 40% by 2050) Consider the strain on the economic and social resources of any nation when 4 out of 10 citizens are past retirement age. Read more…
What China imposed on its population, we’re adopting voluntarily.
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. Read more…
The Social Retreat from Children and How it is Affecting America
Interesting for those who are interested. 
Time to start having kids, China. If you still can.
Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com
China’s rapid economic development and America’s evident vulnerabilty after the Global Financial Crisis could make the Chinese a bit smug. But as leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt points out in a frightening article in the Far Eastern Economic Review, China faces gigantic economic problems as the legacy of its one-child policy. Read more…
Carolyn Moynihan, Mercatornet.com
Here is something for the inaugural European Union president, Herman van Rompuy, to put his stamp on: the revival of the European family. The EU is very active in telling member states what to do about certain social issues — for example, condemning a recent Lithuanian law which prohibits promotion of “homosexual, bisexual, polygamous relations” among children under the age of 18 — but it is dragging its feet on the most important social issue of all: the protection and support of the family. Read more…
Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com
The message is finally getting through: the population bomb has fizzled out and fertility is falling nearly everywhere in the world.
Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise… The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history. Read more…
Dermot Grenham, Mercatornet.com
The received wisdom among demographers and other social sciences is that as countries develop economically and socially their fertility rates decline. However, a recent article in Nature1 has shown that at higher levels of development, as measured by the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), the fall in fertility goes into reverse. Could this be the answer to the problem of ageing populations? Read more…
Vincenzina Santoro Mercatornet.com
Is Italy breaking out of a demographic nose-dive?
Each year the Italian Ministry responsible for health presents a report to Parliament on abortion trends. Data presented a few weeks ago by Undersecretary Eugenia Maria Roccella of the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Policy brings encouraging news: Abortions have continued to decline among adult women and minors, an overwhelming percentage of Italian doctors refuse to perform abortions, and Italy has a low contraceptive prevalence rate. Read more…
Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically. The release of the latest figures come at a time when Britain is already struggling to fund its benefits and health care systems moving commentators to warn that too little is being done to prepare for the ageing of the population. Read more…
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