I am a baby-boomer, I confess, but I have to acknowledge the justice of the fiery j’accuse launched at us by Financial Times analysis editor Frederick Studemann. He complains that the boomers have had a great party but trashed the family home. “We now get to clear up the mess. We are essentially little more than glorified pooper-scoopers.”

Strong words, but he goes on:

 

“This might all be just about bearable if they had not made such a mess of things. Yes, freedom of the individual and personal fulfilment are undoubtedly laudable. But my, did they come with a cost, as we now pick up the tab for decades of boomer debt-fuelled, take-now-pay-later consumerism that has blighted economies and ravaged the planet. Add to that the less measurable costs of an atomised,… click here to read whole article and make comments

Demography is not quite as simple as it looks. The key figure, everyone know, is that a population replaces itself if the birth rate is 2.1. However, what does that "2.1" measure?

This is the "total fertility rate" or TFR. This is "an estimate of periodic fertility and is defined as the sum of number of children born by women in a defined age range (16-49) extrapolated to the lifetime fertility of the total number of women in that age group". (I’m quoting Edward Hugh here, a Barcelona based economist of British extraction).

The important thing to remember is that TFR is an estimate, because most of the women in the age group have still not finished their child-bearing life. But, they might surprise us, although it is unlikely that an army of 35-year-olds will have 10 kids,… click here to read whole article and make comments

It had to happen. In China, as you probably know, there is a dearth of eligible women and an surplus of eligible men after years of sex-selective abortion. What would you expect when you have a scarce commodity? Higher prices and criminal scams. Which is what is happening.

The Wall Street Journal features a heart-wrenching interview with 27-year-old Zhou Pin, in Hanzhong, a rural village in central China's Shaanxi province. He was one of 30 men in his village who could not find a wife. Last December his mother learned that three eligible young women were visiting a friend from neighboring Sichuan province who had recently married a villager.

Mr Zhou fell for the youngest, Cai Niucuo, and proposed. She accepted – but she asked for a… click here to read whole article and make comments

Vietnam is becoming another country with “disappearing daughters”. According to a report in PLoS ONE by French and Vietnamese demographers, the sex ratio at birth has increased rapidly over the past 5 years. The latest figures show that it has reached 112 boys for 100 girls – where the natural biological ratio is 105 to 100. This is nearly the same as China and India. In some regions, it rises as high as 121 to 100.

Demographers say that Vietnam – which now has a population of about 85 million -- has a classic combination of factors which favour an increasing sex ratio: a patriarchal system with a  strong preference for sons, demographic and economic change, strong family planning regulations and easy access to abortion. Furthermore, the Vietnamese are being urged by the government to reduce their fertility, which encourages… click here to read whole article and make comments

I recently received an email with the challenging pseudo-statistic, "If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction." But the really challenging thing is to keep abreast of demographic forecasts. According to a fascinating survey of current trends in the Wilson Quarterly, "the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the century".

Written by Martin Walker, a well-known British journalist with several books to his credit and now a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the article tears to shreds the newspaper and blog cliches about world population. Although much of it is old news to demographers, it is required reading for anyone who wants to know what is… click here to read whole article and make comments

While President Obama was putting the finishing touches to a speech addressed to Muslims and delivered at an Egyptian university yesterday, an Egyptian doctor was the subject of a speech and an award at a United Nations Population Fund ceremony in New York (June 1). UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Dr Mahmoud Fathalla richly deserved the prize for making “a major impact in the field of family planning, reproductive rights and ending maternal deaths.”

Dr Fathalla (pictured here at last year's Women Deliver conference) is a former advisor to both the World health organisation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and in 1974, established the Egyptian Fertility Care Society, one of the first family planning organizations in the Arab world, according to a UN press release. One can see why he would, ahem, appeal… click here to read whole article and make comments

How much can governments do to boost birth rates and avoid population ageing? A lot of research is going into encouraging higher fertility, but demographers are still perplexed. In the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2008, John Bongaarts, who has worked with the Population Council in New York for 30 years and is one of the world’s most respected demographers, tackles the question. And his answer is: not much.

In most countries, there is a gap of about 0.8 to 0.9 births between the number of children that women have and the number that they want to have. Economic factors account for perhaps 0.2 or 0.3 births per woman. So creating ideal economic circumstances will not achieve a miraculous increase in fertility. Furthermore, no government policy will eliminate all economic obstacles, so the increase which can be achieved is very small indeed.

… click here to read whole article and make comments

Talk of the Zionist-Bolshevik-Masonic-Wall Street conspiracy to take over the world has been muted for the past few years, thank goodness. But Bill Gates & Co seem to be stoking the fires again. According to the London Sunday Times some of America’s best-known billionaires met secretly in New York on May 5 to discuss ways to fix the world through philanthropy. The little tete-a-tete, nicknamed “The Good Club” included David Rockefeller Jr, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. It took place at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize laureate and president of Rockefeller University.

Each participant was given 15 minutes to discuss his or her favourite cause, such as supervision of overseas aid spending, setting up rural schools or water systems in developing countries. Bill Gates apparently wanted an “umbrella” as a… click here to read whole article and make comments

Brazil has joined the zero population growth club. Official statistics show that its fertility rate plummeted to 1.9 children per woman in 2007. This was even lower than previous rates estimated by the UN and the US Census Bureau. Brazil’s long-term fertility rate is now lower than the United States (2.1) and even than France (2.0).

The statisticians project that the birth rate in Latin America’s largest country will continue to move downwards. It has fallen from 5.3 children per woman in 1970 to 2.8 in 1990, and a projected 1.8 by 2010. The rate levels off at 1.5 children per woman by 2030.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, this sharp decline has major implications for the region's future population size, and signals significant population aging:

Brazil's population, nearly 190 million in 2008... is projected to… click here to read whole article and make comments

Here is concise summary of the gloomy future forecast by some demographers:

“Within the next quarter century true depopulation — a persistent long-run excess of deaths over births — will manifest itself in nearly all the countries of Europe and in those non-European countries to which Western civilisation has spread. The present stream of concern over eventual depopulation—concern evident in the many European works dealing with depopulation, in the depopulationist inquiries being made in countries such as England and Sweden, and in the anti-depopulation measures already put into effect in certain countries—will assume the proportions of a deluge. The growth of alarm at depopulation in various countries will proceed along the lines of a rather definite and somewhat ‘naturally evolving’ pattern and will be accompanied by the enactment of a sequence of ineffectual measures designed to stem the decline in fertility.” click here to read whole article and make comments