While some look to demographics to determine the future state of their nations, the needs of the workforce, the location of schools, others use it to sell video games. According to a website called Gamasutra: The Art and Business of Making Video Games, Sony wants to catch up to rival Nintendo by marketing its PSP (Play Station Portable) to the 8 to 15 year-old demographic in addition to it’s core audience of 16 to 24 year-olds says product manager Claire Backhouse.

“PSP is going for a younger market, which isn’t something we’ve really done before,” she said. “Our heartland is 16-24-year-old men and always will be — they won’t be neglected in the slightest. But the summer’s game releases, such as Harry Potter and Petz, as well as the launch of the new colors, are certainly appealing to an 8-15-year-old audience.”

There you have it, selling to young kids with video games, new colours, and a social networking site. Truly science at its best.

It appears Michael Cook isn’t alone in paying attention to Russian demographic trends. The Daily Telegraph in London is hosting an online supplement on Russia from Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Writer Sergei Balashov takes on the issue of Russian depopulation, not from a position that this issue will change Mother Russia into a frozen caliphate but that Russia’s declining population will leave few workers to care for the elderly or the young.  

"Even more troubling is that the number of able-bodied adults is declining faster than any other demographic category. This group is expected to absorb the bulk of the losses, declining by 14m by 2025. According to the RBC daily, in 16 years every 1,000 employed Russians are going to be providing for some 800 dependents."

Like many politicians in the West, some Russian politicians evidently think immigration can solve the problem brought about by decades of empty cradles. Yet Balashov cites experts that disagree with this notion. In the end he says, it is, or it should be about the children.

“The public should show more love for children, families with two or more children should get the most favourable treatment in this country,” said Evgeny Yuriev, the president of the ATON Capital Group and an expert on Russia’s demographics. “The government should adopt this attitude and act accordingly. The goal here is to change this mindset.”

Read the whole thing here.

May 5 is Kodomo no Hi, or Children’s Day in Japan – a national holiday. The custom is to fly the carp-shaped koinobori flags, one for each child. But as a recent report from AP points out, each year for the past 28 years there have been fewer and fewer children to enjoy the holiday. Japan has the lowest percentage of children amongst 31 major countries – only 13%, compared to 20% in the United States.

But the number over 65 is currently 22.5% and rising. By about 2020, the percentage of children will fall below 11% and the percentage of elderly to 29%. Low birthrates and high life expectancy are already putting strains on government services, pension programs, and labour supply.

So far, government efforts to boost the birth rate have been utterly unsuccessful. Still, with the fashion for stimulus packages, Prime Minister Taro Aso is pushing for more financial support for child birth and an expansion of neonatal intensive care units. But a loosening of Japanese rigid immigration laws is still not on the cards. To help ease the looming labour shortage, the retirement age is gradually being extended from 60 to 65, and it could reach 70. ~ Miami Herald, May 5

 

US Medicare and Social Security will run out of money even sooner than expected because of the recession, according to the Obama administration. Medicare, which pays hospital bills for older Americans is expected to run out of money in 2017, two years sooner than projected last year. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted.

Spending on Social Security and Medicare exceeded US$1 trillion last year --more than one-third of the federal budget. This puts the US government in a bind. Its dependency ratio is growing – the proportion of the population which is supported by workers – because of the elderly are increasing and the workers are decreasing. It cannot count on rising numbers of taxpayers. Hence the only options are to cut costs, slash benefits, or raise taxes. All of these options are extremely difficult politically and economically.

And the problem could be worse than the government says. According to the blog of respected financial analyst Harry Dent, Medicare and Social Security have no money:

Currently, the two programs take in more money through taxes than they pay out in benefits. But those surpluses do not go into a giant national piggy bank. No, a more apt metaphor would be that of a pig trough, with Congress as the pigs. The surpluses are "borrowed" by the government and replaced with Treasury bonds. This means that the government is borrowing from itself. More accurately, it is borrowing from its future retirees.

This means that the entire concept of the trust fund is an accounting fiction at best and outright fraud at worst. Recent estimates had the Social Security surpluses turning to deficits by around 2014, and perhaps sooner due to the effects of this recession. This means that in less than 5 years, the Social Security Administration will be "calling in" its government IOUs. Unable borrow from itself (and now actually having to pay itself back), the government will have to turn increasingly to the public markets…and to higher taxes. And with a flood of new public debt, do you really think interest rates on government bonds can remain at their current low levels? More debt at higher rates will be an unmitigated disaster.

Bottom line: if you think the Federal deficits are bad now, just wait until the illusion of the trust fund disappears. It’s going to get a LOT worse.

Don’t trust demographic graphs, says Anatoly Karlin, a San Francisco blogger and Russia analyst writing in the Discovery Institute’s Russia Blog. He believes that there is room for cautious optimism about Russia’s future.

‘Though rhetorical hyperbole dismisses it as a dying nation with "European birth rates and African death rates", the reality is that it is already fast recovering from the extended transition shock of the post-Soviet collapse. Instead, it is likely that the next few decades will see stagnant or slow population growth as Russian fertility patterns converge to that of France or Canada, with any shortfalls between births and deaths filled in by immigration; and after 2030, the world system faces a series of discontinuities that rend apart any predictive enterprise.’

Karlin detects a growing optimism amongst Russians, with the birth rate inching up correspondingly.

"After a long period of disillusionment, at the end of 2006 more people began to believe Russia was moving in a positive than in a negative direction, and from early 2008 more people felt confident in tomorrow than not. Though positing dependencies between such semi-intangible variables and concrete demographic trends is risky, I do not think it is a coincidence that solid improvements in the TFR only began from 2006. Anyone closely observing Russia in the past few years will have noticed a new confident conservatism in Russian society, albeit many pessimists interpret it as mere petro-fueled swagger, about to be brought back down to earth by the unfolding economic crisis. Perhaps. Yet marriage rates, perhaps as good an indicator as any of social confidence, surged from a nadir of 6.2 / 1000 people in 2000, to 7.5 / 1000 in 2005 and 8.9 / 1000 in 2007, and continued increasing in Jan-Feb of this year."

And what about the notion that Russia is on track to becoming a Muslim nation? Nonsense, says Karlin. At worst (depending on your point of view, of course), ethnic Russians will still constitute about 69% of the nation in 2050. In any case, the two biggest Muslim groups, the Tartars (3.8% of the population) and the Bashkirs (1.2%), have sub-replacement fertility rates not too different from ethnic Russians.

‘Tatars, who make up more than a third of Russia’s Muslim population, are almost as secular to Islam as ethnic Russians are to Christian Orthodoxy. Even amongst the Chechens Wahabbism never truly took root, despite the best efforts of Arab mujahideen. As Fedia Kriukov put it, "the whole idea of Muslim takeover is predicated on one giant falsification — the substitution of the term "Muslim" for the term "representative of a traditionally Muslim ethnicity"…Absolutely nothing would change in the country if Tatars became the majority, however unlikely that situation is."’

And perhaps tongue in cheek, Karlin points out that Russia is one country which will benefit from global warming (bring it on!), so its population may be enriched by millions of climate refugees. Predictions are always tough, particularly about the future...

According to many experts and political analysts, Russia is headed for a demographic collapse because of a collapsing birth rate and a high mortality rate. Questions are being raised about its ability to defend its borders from immigrants from China, and to defend its identity as a country of ethnic Russians. There are dire predictions that Russia will be a largely Muslim country by 2050.

But some Russians take a more optimistic view. Writing in the Discovery Institute’s Russia Blog, Charles Ganske points out that these predictions fit very neatly into a US foreign policy agenda. "It followed from these premises that policies like expanding NATO into the Baltics, and building oil and gas pipelines from former Soviet Central Asia to bypass Russian territory, could be pursued without any consequences."

In fact, there is at least one Russian academic whose riposte is that the US is heading for the trash can, and not Russia. Professor Igor Panarin, an academic who teaches future Russian diplomats at Moscow's elite diplomatic academy, claims (rather bizarrely, I must say) that "that the decline in traditional morality in the U.S., federal overspending and excessive borrowing, long wars abroad, and other trends are pulling America apart."

"At the end of the day, [writes Ganske] pundits and policy wonks can argue about all the reasons -- whether of affluence in Europe, or of poverty in the former Soviet Union -- women and men around the world choose to delay childbearing, to have fewer kids, or to not have children at all. But human beings, regardless of nationality, are never as predictable as actuarial or demographic projections would suggest. Throughout its more than a thousand year history, Russia has never been as strong or as weak as it has appeared to outsiders. For my money, anyone betting on Russia to become too sick and depopulated to matter in the 21st century is making a losing wager. Russia is too proud of a nation to go gently into the night."

Here’s something you don’t read about every day: a United Nations official complaining about under-population. Karen Hardee, of Population Action International, reports on the PAI blog that the Ethopian representative of the United Nations Environment Program ticked her off at one of those posh UN summits. This one took place on Ethiopia's first celebration of Earth Day on April 22.

Dr Strike Mkandla told Ms Hardee, who was waxing eloquent on the need to slow down population growth to prepare for climate change, that Africa has lots of land that can contain many more people. There is no video  of the event on the internet, but I imagine that Ms Hardee was speechless. For a moment, anyway. "Dr. Mkandla left before I could respond or the audience could ask questions."

It would be interesting to why Dr Mkandla was so outspoken on the issue. His contribution to the conference dealt with the effects of climate change.

Not all Africans have signed up to the belief that a lower population is a better population. I recently received an email from Chief Albert Ngwana, the chairman of an opposition party in Cameroon, the Cardinal Democratic Party. This is what he had to say:

"Africa can only develop and industrialize quickly if there is a fast growing population. This is what happened to Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution, there was a population explosion in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this period the population of Europe increased from 190 million to 423 million. This is what is happening to China and India now. China for the past decade has remained the fastest growing economy in the world.

"Europe is far more densely populated per square kilometer than Africa. Europe as of 2003, had 115 persons per square kilometer, while Africa had 25. Europe is far richer per capita than Africa. Europe income per capita is US$23,660, while Africa is US$637."

He is puzzled, therefore, about why wealthy Western nations are pushing population control in Africa. More than puzzled, he is furious: "The UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation with branches all over the developing world are bent on executing this Obama/Clinton murderous agenda, but please be warned, we shall not allow you kill our children."

The Stanford Center of Longevity recently held a conference about ageing in Asia. Many of the Powerpoint presentations are available its website. One that interested me was a bleak snapshot of Japan (huge download, by the way). A few facts:

* There are 12 million "parasite singles" (below 35)

* Since the early 1990s, the proportion of single women who are not dating has been stable around 45%

* The number of Japanese children is about 17 million; the number of Japanese pets is about 25 million. Water for humans costs about 100 yen for 2 litres; water for pets sells at about 900 yen.

However, the scariest graph of all is below. It shows the proportion between children, productive adults and retired adults. How will Japan hold itself together?

 

The link between the swine flu epidemic was sure to pop up somewhere. And so it did, in a press release from the Population Media Center, another ginger group for population control.

"The calamity of Swine Flu is unfolding in the context of unbridled, exponential human population growth (bold in original). It’s front and center – and terrifying. Yet, looming catastrophes of climate instability, ecological impoverishment and resource shortages like oil, food, and fresh water are happening on that same population battle ground."

The theory is that to survive and prosper, diseases like cholera, TB and smallpox need large, densely-packed human populations. In small populations, the disease dies out too quickly for the infection to spread. One problem with this insight is that swine flue actually isn’t that dangerous, is no more infectious than a normal flu, and is treatable with anti-viral drugs. Densely-packed humans are not dense, and they find ways to combat the spread of disease.

In our last post, we pointed out that over-population is the worst problem facing the world today. Well, at least a couple of ecologists in the Adirondacks think it is. However, if we are scanning the horizon for things to worry about, we mustn’t overlook collisions with asteroids. This week the Planetary Defense Conference is holding a conference in Grenada, Spain. Although I come to this as a layman, I must say that the prospect of the instantaneous annihilation of the human race is a good deal scarier than the possibility of a declining lifestyle in an increasing population.

Did you know that there are about 900 Potentially Hazardous Objects out there -- asteroids and comets large enough to threaten Earth? This is an issue made for population controllers in the United Nations. According to Dr Ray Williamson, of the Secure World Foundation, "Because a NEO strike is an international problem, mitigating NEOs will require international decision making and international action, and this conference provides much of the information needed to take action."

And the chances of rapid population decline are not negligible. If a white paper at the 2004 conference can be trusted, we’ve got a big problem on our hands:

"Impacts span a huge range in severity and frequency, and the means to predict and mitigate these impacts vary accordingly. The probability of a "dinosaur-killer" impact is about 1 in one million this century. The probability of a civilization-ending impact is larger—a bit less than 1 in 1000 this century. The probability of a small or Tunguska-class impact (near the lower size for penetration of the atmosphere, but still large enough to destroy a city) is higher still: There is approximately 1 chance in 10 of such an impact this century."

From another point of view, perhaps it’s not something to worry about. If we want to shrink the Earth’s population from 6 billion to 10 million overnight, perhaps we should think of steering the planet into the flightpath of a Potentially Hazardous Object.