POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Demography is destiny [UPDATE by Dan]

A tale of two societies: Greece [or, rather, Europe] and China

Let's look at Greece:

In my view, the root of the problem (in addition to the obvious irresponsible spending habits of most government officials) is demographic in nature; the easiest way to hint at the scale of the predicament is to look at projected population charts.

And now what is China up to?

Is China's one child policy the worst decision in all of human history?
Brian Micklethwait (London) Asian affairs • Historical views

Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they'll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication.

[go to link for the links in the original.... also, I think "Let's invade Russia in the winter!" was a pretty hideous decision, too...made by two different up-til-then-successful conquerors... I could probably start writing a list of just plain bad ideas, no matter how virtuous or evil they were in intent. China would probably still be on there, just due to the number of people affected.]

It doesn't take an actuary to figure out that all the 20-year-olds in 2020 had to have been born 10 years ago. You can't increase the number at this point in time [but you can decrease it... I love looking at old mortality tables as I can tell when pandemics and wars occurred. Pandemics hit both sexes; wars just bump up male mortality].

But think on this: by 2020 the youngest Boomers will be 60. They depend on having 20-year-olds [and other working adults] not just pay for their Social Security and Medicare [and public pensions], but they also need those strong backs for direct care. Luckily, "old age" really has been pushed out farther -- people used to fall apart at much younger ages, so you don't see the frailty and dementia until they get in their 80s.... but what will the demographic profile be like in the U.S. then?

Hmmm. Well, if we look at the Japan projections, you can see why they're so big on robotics: they're definitely not going to have enough actual people to do home visits or even provide care in nursing homes, so they're going to need substitutes for those services:
[All those images are coming from that first link to Greece]

As a follower of Julian Simon [and Jesus Christ], I can see that the low fertility cultures are going to have a rough time of it, most especially when you've got factors that mean you have a lot of "excess males".

Japan: I don't think your nursing home robots are going to save you from an invasion of sexually-frustrated Chinese men.

You might want to expand your R&D efforts a bit.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.