Brazil, Russia, India and China. The BRIC countries. The emerging economic powers who have become more influential in the world over the last decade or so as they begin to displace the United States hegemony.  They are countries with large populations, low labour costs and large quantities of natural resources.  In the last ten years, these four nations have contributed almost half of the world’s economic growth.  They are nations on the rise.  However, as reported by the Economic Times, according to Goldman Sachs, demographics are about to strike a telling blow against their (and consequentially, the world’s) expansion. 

It is a very familiar story - the labour pool is ageing and shrinking as people in Brazil, Russia, India and China are having fewer children.  According to UN projections, in eight years the number of people aged 65 years old and over… click here to read whole article and make comments

Past Eugenics and sterilisation programs in the United States are coming back to bite them, with North Carolina currently the first State to address compensation for victims.

According to the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, at one time 31 states in the United States had government-run eugenics programs. In North Carolina alone, close to 8,000 men, women, and children, largely poor, black, disabled or uneducated, were forcibly sterilized from 1929 to 1974.  The programs were aimed at creating a better society by eliminating those considered undesirable. 

Newsday reports:

It's a question that has not been answered before and doesn't have an easy solution: How do you repay people for taking away their ability to have children?...Many states ended their eugenics programs because of associations with Nazi Germany's program aimed at racial purity, but North Carolina in fact… click here to read whole article and make comments

I came across this book review the other day that I thought looked very interesting in the Washington Post. The author, Walter Laqueur, a German-born American historian, has written extensively on modern European history and has now turned his attention to the current European situation in his latest book: After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent. In it, he envisages the imminent decline of Europe into a type of cultural theme park, “a kind of sophisticated Disneyland for well-to-do visitors from China and India.” “The decline of Europe, once the center of the world,” he writes, “can be interpreted above all as a decline of will and dynamism.”

So how has this come about? How did a once world-conquering continent fall from global pre-eminence? After all, as William Drozdi writes… click here to read whole article and make comments

I do not pretend to know the intricate details of the Republican primary presidential race – reading about caucuses and the insane amounts of money spent on advertising leave me yearning for the simplicities of New Zealand’s intimate electoral system where every person gets two votes. (We see the slippery slope in action here – just over one hundred years ago the cry was for “One man, one vote” – would the cry have been answered if those granting it had known that the allotment would have been doubled in the future??)

Anyway, back to the story in hand – the interesting three-way split in the Iowa primary earlier this week.  Rick Santorum, the Catholic candidate known best for his socially conservative views, rocketed from nowhere to almost winning the primary from Mitt… click here to read whole article and make comments

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2012! I hope that you all had a fantastic Christmas/New Year break.  We certainly have here in New Zealand, although the rain has been pretty much constant over the last few days – not great for the thousands of campers throughout the country!!  With the start of another year, it is natural to start thinking of the passage of time, the march of the seasons and the spectre of advancing old age.  So now is a perfect time to reassess what age one considers to be old.  When I was much younger, old age definitely began in mid-20s, something I probably need to reconsider as I near late 20s.  Interestingly, according to Reuters, this process of continually revising upwards the date of old age continues throughout life.  According to a telephone survey commissioned by the Home… click here to read whole article and make comments

Late December is traditionally the time when one starts to make resolutions to start eating healthily again after the food packed days that have come before.  Or perhaps we can put it off for just a few more days – early January perhaps?  In any case, according to the The Economist it is no longer just the Western world whose waistlines are widening.  Surprisingly, South Africa has become one of the world's fattest countries, despite the poverty of so many of its citizens.  It reports:

Though 40% of its 50m people live off less than $2 a day, South Africa has become one of the world’s fattest countries. Six out of ten South Africans are now clinically overweight or obese, according to a recent survey by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a pharmaceutical company. So, apparently, are a quarter of teenagers and one… click here to read whole article and make comments

Hello everyone! I apologise for the recent radio silence on the Demography is Destiny blog, but we have been a little busy lately with getting married and honeymoon, new house to move into etc etc.  Thanks must go to Michael Cook, in whose very competent hands the blog was left over the last couple of weeks.

Anyway, back to the wonderfully varied and interesting world of demography! In the lead up to Christmas, the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life has released a report on the demographic breakdown of Christianity in the world.  The report can be found here on the Pew website and comes with interactive maps and even a quiz.  Some of the more interesting findings is that there are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world – nearly a third of Earth’s population.  This proportion is roughly… click here to read whole article and make comments

Singer Chuanzi (real name 姜亚川 Jiang Yachuan) was a troubled teen who ended up in jail. But after being released, he forged a new career as an entertainer. When he appeared on China’s Got Talent with his singing dog “Dudu” he became an instant hit. “Zheng Qianhua” is one of his best known songs. It's about a new father who names his daughter “Zheng Qianhua,” which literally means, “to earn the money to spend.” 

“I have a friend surnamed Zheng who was very happy at the birth of his daughter. He wanted me to help him write a song for her. So I asked him what her name was, he said Zheng Qianhua. I was so surprised I didn’t believe it, but he swore it was true. And he wanted me to write his daughter into a song. My friend has guts, and I promised him I would, so I wrote… click here to read whole article and make comments

 

As the locals joke sardonically, West Virginia is one of the few places in the US that has barely felt the effects of the current recession. It got there a long time ago. "I think the loss of population is the biggest problem ... we had at one time 13 car dealerships; now we have none," says a state senator. The result? Poverty, drugs, sickness...

click here to read whole article and make comments

 

New Zealand went to the polls on Saturday night to elect the 50^th parliament in its relatively short history.  As expected, the National party polled highest of the parties at 48%, but was unable to gather an absolute majority and govern in its own right (as most polls were predicting).  This means New Zealand will have a very similar looking governing coalition to what it has had from 2008.  The main opposition party, the Labour party, sunk to just 27%, losing many votes to the Green party and NZ First.

This means that we will not see any raising of the retirement age to 67, a policy that was announced by the Labour party to be one of its electoral planks last month.  As I blogged at the time, for the amount of controversy it generated, the policy was… click here to read whole article and make comments