Thursday, August 22, 2002

Interesting piece in the Economist, about how the United States is the word's demographic outlier. Conventional wisdom is that in rich countries birth rates are falling, populations stabilising and perhaps ultimately falling, and populations are aging. The truth though is that this is happening in Europe but not in America. America has more immigrants, who are more likely to have larger families than the native born, and this is part of the story, but as well as this the issue is that Americans are simply having more children than Europeans. America's population is ageing, but this is because people are living longer rather than having anything to do with the birth rate. We have had various predictions over the years that America's importance will decline compared to more populous parts of the world, but this seems to suggest that this will not necessarily be so. For one thing, it is going to become clear over the next 20 years that the Chinese have economically crippled themselves with their misguided one child policy. Japan is a demographic basket place. The future of India looks interesting. The future of places like Indonesia and the Philippines could also be interesting if they can run their countries in a coherent manner.

The great demographic timebomb is of course the Middle East, which is full of countries with rapidly increasing populations and little semblance of their people ever becoming educated enough to be economically productive. We should be really depressed about this. (Okay, a lot of us are really depressed about this).

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