Quotulatiousness

June 28, 2020

“Viking” was the word for “Incel” in the early Middle Ages

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, Health, History, India, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At least, that’s one interpretation offered by Mary Harrington at UnHerd:

Europe According to the Vikings (1000) from Atlas of Prejudice 2 by Yanko Tsvetkov.

Last week, World War 3 nearly started in Ladakh. A dry, high-altitude region of Indian Kashmir on the Himalayan border with China, it’s been the site of escalating tensions and military buildup for some time. On June 15, the first physical confrontation between the Indian and Chinese militaries for 45 years erupted, killing at least 20 Indian and 45 Chinese soldiers.

There are all sorts of geopolitical reasons cited for the escalating tension between the world’s two most populous countries, but there is one more central and timeless problem that is going to drive both countries towards violence and instability — women. Or a lack of them.

In his History of the Normans, written circa 1015, Dudo of St Quentin argued that the reason the Vikings went raiding was because they couldn’t find wives, an idea echoed by the Tudor antiquarian William Camden in his 1610 book Britannia. “Wikings”, Camden suggested, were what you got when there weren’t enough women to go round, resulting in an excess of young men hanging around full of machismo but without any prospect of finding a nice girl and settling down. (Viking literally means raider.)

So, whenever these spare males “multiply’d themselves to a burdensom community”, Camden reports that an area would draw lots. Those of the young troublemakers chosen in the lottery would be sent off on a ship to make a nuisance of themselves overseas. Which they did.

In evolutionary biology, the “operational sex ratio” is a term used to count the proportion of males and females in a given species that are seeking a reproductive mate. As soon as the ratio tilts away from 50:50, the sex that’s over-represented will have to compete to secure a mate from among the less-plentiful potential partners of the opposite sex.

Though they wouldn’t have used that phrase, both Dudo of St Quentin and William Camden were both describing this phenomenon in human males. Where potential wives are scarce and the “burdensom community” of spare men multiplies, the result is more violence and crime. One 2019 study showed that where polygyny — that is, multiple wives — is a social norm for higher-status men, attacks on neighbouring ethnic groups skyrocket. With a few men monopolising eligible women, the rest are forced to seek status and resources by attacking other tribes.

India and China both have an extremely “burdensom community” of spare males. The normal ratio of newborn boys to girls is around 105:100. But as Mara Hvistendahl documents in Unnatural Selection, thanks to prenatal ultrasound and sex-selective abortion the ratio in China is around 118:100, and 108:100 in India. In some regions of India, the ratio rises as high as 150 males to 100 females. Though sex-selective technology is now banned in India, it’s still widespread, and the country now has some 37 million more men than women. Studies estimate that China has around 30 million excess men.

February 28, 2020

A history lesson from Roman Thessalonika

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin recounts a story that has some interesting modern parallels for those who choose to look:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

It happened in Thessalonika near the end of the Roman Empire.

The empire had been in trouble for some time. It was not reproducing itself – “The human harvest was bad” (Seeley). “Agri Deserti” – once-cultivated lands now abandoned for lack of people to till them – could be found in every province.

Internally, the empire tried its usual solution: more government, more laws, more force. Legislation to reward large families and tax bachelors was kept on the statute books for centuries although “successful it was not” (Power). As the empire waned, laws to deal with the consequence of this failure were added: binding cultivators to the soil (the origin of serfdom) was merely the most common example of assigning a hereditary obligation to more and more of the professions the state relied on as soon as a shortfall appeared in them, legally punishing any son who did not follow in his father’s footsteps. To draft and regulate these laws, the numbers and privileges of bureaucrats ballooned from Rome’s former proportion (though still small by our standards).

Successful all these laws were not – so, externally, the empire addressed its chronic shortage of manpower by immigration,

    to dose it with barbarian vigour. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more

Goths arrived, first as recruits to Roman army units, then as foederate units under their own leaders, growing like a cancer within the armed forces until an Egyptian mother quite naturally wrote the emperor to return her citizen son who “has gone off with the barbarians” – by which she meant he had joined the “Roman” army.

Emperor Theodosius made the Goths obey him, but his was an insecure authority over them. He used Gothic troops in battles where pyrrhic victories may have been welcome. As one summary of the costly victory of Frigidius (394 AD) puts it,

    The loss of 10,000 Goths cannot have distressed Theodosius unduly.

Theodosius also had little choice but to use some of their leaders as governors. Mostly, the empire’s soldiers were also its police – so the leaders of those who were now increasingly providing those soldiers had to be both rewarded by, and used in, such posts. Thus did Butheric the Goth became governor (magister militum) over Illyricum, which included Thessalonika.

The urban elite of Thessalonika were university-educated Greeks.

    It would be hard to imagine an education less suited to help them understand the dangers they faced. The study of rhetoric, its links with reality long severed, …

So Eileen Power described the “learned” of the dying Roman world. (Today, 8 decades after she wrote those sentences, it is easier to imagine an education even less suited to helping elite intellectuals understand the dangers facing them, one whose links with reality are even more completely severed.) In the empire’s second century, Hadrian had dispersed those Jews he did not kill around the empire, confident they’d soon lose their primitive prejudices and assimilate to being broad-minded Graeco-Roman intellectuals like himself. Fourth/fifth century Graeco-Roman intellectuals thought the same of the immigrants. Sidonius Appolinaris wrote a “good-natured” description of the “embarrassing friendliness” of the new barbarian neighbours he encountered on a fifth-century visit to Lyons:

    “How can he be expected to compose six-foot metres”, [Sidonius] asks, “with so many seven-foot patrons all around him, all singing and all expecting him to admire their uncouth stream of non-Latin words.”

The shrug of the shoulders, the genial contempt of one conscious of an infinite superiority – how familiar it all seems.

Perhaps the Thessalonikan city leaders greeted their new governor in this spirit, as sure as Hadrian was about the Jews that this uncouth Goth would soon lose his barbaric prejudices.

February 13, 2020

Here’s a deceptive factoid … time for you to get angry to suit someone’s political agenda

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Did you know that “Three Billionaires Have More Wealth Than Half of America”!!!???!!! Are you angry now? You’re supposed to be, because this factoid was concocted specifically to make people irrationally angry. Daniel C. Jensen explains how this sound bite was created:

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet.
Fox Business.

People between 0 and 24 years of age account for about 32 percent of the United States population of 320 million. Almost all of them are going to be in the bottom half of the wealth distribution for reasons including diaper rash and puberty. That means they account for about 63 percent of the “bottom half of the wealth distribution.” Should it surprise us that some kid fresh out of college does not “hold any stocks or bonds”? Or a kid fresh out of the womb?

Then we must consider people with mental and physical disabilities. They will also tend to be in the bottom half of the wealth distribution because they face greater challenges to building wealth. “About 56.7 million people — 19 percent of the population — had a disability” at last count, according to the United States Census Bureau. But there is overlap between the disabled 19 percent and the young 32 percent of the population. If we assume disabilities are evenly distributed in the population, then young people and non-young disabled people account for 45 percent of the population. So we have now accounted for 90 percent of the “160 million Americans in the bottom half of the wealth distribution.”

Next, we must think about other groups who have had limited wealth-building opportunities. What about the 2.2 million people in jail and prison? What about people in their late twenties who pursued PhDs, law degrees, medical residencies, etc., and are just beginning their careers? Now we are close to accounting for 100 percent of the “bottom half of the wealth distribution.” But this wealth distribution is not what any sensible person would expect it to be.

Maybe the factoid is true. Maybe Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet have more wealth than all of the infants, children, students, handicapped, prisoners, and postgrads combined. But you don’t need a PhD to figure out that’s not useful knowledge. Even if the factoid is true, it’s deceitful. Whoever created it was obviously trying to manipulate people. And we uncovered this deception with nothing but some simple knowledge of the US population.

Next time you encounter an economic factoid, remember that it might be pitting a bunch of newborns against Jeff Bezos, and that hardly seems fair. Thankfully, you can save those babies from certain defeat simply by knowing some basic statistics about your country.

December 16, 2019

QotD: The Great Pestilence of 1348

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Long I have been curious about the Great Pestilence that trimmed the population of Britain and Europe by a third or more, in the fourteenth century. I make too much of it; the plague was a recurring event for centuries before and after. I notice from the tabloids that it is returning, through Africa this time. I know there will be pestilence to come, when we will all think it terribly important. It rivetted attention, I’m sure, in the autumn of 1348, and through the summer of 1349. And yet within a generation it is hardly mentioned.

England, below the Ribble and Tees, is special, thanks to the Domesday Book of the invading, tax-loving Normans, and their general propensity to good record-keeping. The towns and villages ennumerated in 1086 can be traced to the present day; nineteen in twenty are still there. Having figures to start, and through the parish books later, we can track an economic and demographic history with an accuracy possible in no other country. We can know, for instance, of the population boom through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which had slackened well before the “Black Death.” And with that boom, impressive advances in farming, technology, and building, as today. Nothing conduces to technical improvement, as a bit of crowding.

This proportion I cited — the nineteen-in-twenty (or more) — which I have from reading in economic history mostly years ago, fascinates my attention. We know large tracts were depopulated, we find the archaeological evidence easily enough. They were planting rye within the walls of Winchester, and many other towns. Everywhere, they had elbow-room again. Our deep ecologists would have been pleased — those who think life on this planet would be better had a few billion souls not been born. As Christianity, and environmentalism, are mortally opposed, and the fourteenth century was overwhelmingly Christian, I expect complaints of overpopulation were differently expressed at the time. Mostly it would have been moaning from younger brothers about the distribution of inherited land.

Always, there have been younger brothers. Always, there have been survivors. What delighted me was the speed with which all the vacant places were filled. As we’ve seen, too, after ghastly wars, demography abhors a vacuum.

David Warren, “Death the real illusion”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-11-04.

June 22, 2019

QotD: Militant Islam and the arts

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What I’ve learned since 9/11 is that the small pleasures — music, theatre, film — have to be earned. In the Muslim world, there is no music. In Libya they destroyed all the musical instruments — music was considered an abomination. When the demography changes, there will be no concert halls. Artists who take a multicultural view should be aware of this. Count the number of covered women in London’s West End. In Birmingham, where I went to high school, you have a provincial symphony orchestra in a Muslim city — I’m not sure it will survive. All art, all popular culture, is endangered by Islam, because there’s no room for it. It’s considered libertinism. And I’m not even talking about Miley Cyrus twerking at the music awards. What turned Sayyid Qutb against the morality of the West is that he attended a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, which was a dry town in 1948, and he heard the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. He thought it was evil. And now things are getting a lot worse. Ugly things are happening.

Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.

May 25, 2019

India’s “Modi generation”

Filed under: China, Economics, India, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mihir Swarup Sharma discusses the demographic, political, and social impact of India’s most influential generation:

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and IDF Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in Jerusalem, July 5, 2017.
Photo by Mark Neyman / GPO via Wikimedia Commons.

The Modi generation, which is and will be India’s most influential ever, will reshape this country the way that other demographic bulges — think of the US’ Baby Boomers — have done so elsewhere. Their India will be substantively different, in terms of domestic and global politics, than that which has come before.

What might this India look like? First, it will be impatient. Young people are less willing to wait for national glory. In the People’s Republic of China, the rule for the country, set by Deng Xiaoping, was to “bide your time and hide your strength”. Xi Jinping’s China, where the agenda is being set to appease a generation of young single men, has abandoned Deng’s maxim. This will be even more true for India, which is after all a democracy that must respond to the most powerful voting bloc in its history. It will be impatient about economics as well. Young Indians expect a better life soon. Today they are willing to give Modi some more time to achieve it. But, in the years to come, that patience will run out.

Second, it will be aggressive. India can no longer “hide its strength”. That was the lesson we must take from the political salience in this election of Balakot, of the promise by the ruling party to enter their houses and kill India’s enemies. A national machismo is the natural consequence of a bulge of young, unemployed and unemployable men. India is perhaps less able to sustain this aggressiveness than, say, China. But the times in which India would be able to absorb terrorist attacks, for example, without a major pushback have passed.

Third, it will be a risk-taker. Young people have a belief in their own invincibility, and Indian policy will be forced to reflect this. Others might argue demonetisation was a foolish mistake; but what matters to many voters is that Modi took a risk, and according to them in a good cause. The Balakot air strike on Pakistan may not have achieved a fundamental strategic transformation of the India-Pakistan relationship (though some experts disagree) but it played well politically because it was not just a demonstration of strength as a nation, but an example of a tolerance to risk. In this sense, the notion of Indian leadership has become one of risk-taking; Manmohan Singh was pilloried for caution and “silence”, Modi is considered an epochal leader because he takes risks.

February 19, 2019

Judging a book by its cover (or people by their appearance)

Filed under: Books, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reviews How to Judge People by What They Look Like, by Edward Dutton:

This short book is equally naughty and entertaining. It bounces along, making its points in a light-hearted and generally a witty manner. It is naughty so far as it is a flat challenge to many of the pieties of our age.

We are told never to judge a book by its cover — that the substance of a person, this being character and intelligence, have no measurable relationship to his external form, this being his physical appearance. At the extreme, of looking at correlations between race and intelligence, you can get into serious trouble for disputing this piety. Even moderate dissent earns hostility or just ridicule. Look, for example, at the relevant textbooks. The phlogiston theory is covered as an early theory of combustion, superseded by the truth. Phrenology is denounced as barely short of a moral and intellectual failing. No one thinks ill of Lamarck for this theory of inherited characteristics. Lombroso and his measurement of criminal heads are seen as steps on the road to Auschwitz.

The author of this book takes aim at every one of these pieties. He begins with the easy targets. Within ethnic groups, he goes over the increasingly rehabilitated claim that intelligence is largely inherited — about 80 per cent. He adds the other increasingly rehabilitated claim that there are differences of average intelligence between groups—that the peaks of each distribution curve occur at different points along the scale.

[…]

Now, what follows from all this? The answer is that all truth is important — so far as this is the truth; and I do lack the statistical grounding and the time or inclination to check the author’s scholarship. Even when a particular truth has no practical value, a regard for truth is a generally useful prejudice. But there are certain conclusions that appear to follow.

First, there is has been a progressively greater diversity of external form since the industrial revolution. The stated reason for this is that the harsh conditions of a traditional society, in which about 40 per cent of children died, and the higher classes had more surviving offspring, created a strong bias towards the survival of the intelligent and conscientious. Since then, the fall of infant mortality towards zero has thrown this process into reverse. That may explain the growing fall in genius or just high intellectual quality as a fraction of modern populations. It may also explain the decay — and the author says nothing of this — of free institutions, and their replacement by less complex and more maternal forms of government. Old England was free because its people were capable of being free. Modern England is unfree because the people have changed.

February 7, 2019

QotD: Generation Z begins to hit adulthood

Filed under: Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Those born after 1998 are currently (and quite unimaginatively) being called Generation Z. And, by Pew’s math, the eldest members of this nascent generation are turning 18 this year [2017].

Welcome to adulthood, Gen Z!

As one of the oldest members of your immediate ancestors in American youth, I’d like to officially transfer the think-piece mantle your way. As millennials’ misadventures in youthful entitlement and narcissism dwindle, may your place as a scapegoat for societal fears about sex, technology, and general change shine bright. May Gen X prove as much a collective nemesis for you as boomers have so generously done for my generation. And, perhaps most importantly, may you please be patient in a few years when you’re trying to explain to us how to upload a hologram snap to Mind Twitter.

Also, for what it’s worth, millennials may have spawned Facebook, but don’t blame us if Americans are more politically polarized these days. According to another recent generational study, it’s the oldest Americans who have grown the most polarized within their own generation in recent decades. While many people attribute political polarization to social media or the internet more broadly, the study’s authors found that, between 1996 and 2012, the increase in polarization was “largest among the groups least likely to use the internet and social media.” On a nine-point measure of different sorts of polarization, the gap grew by 0.38 index points for respondents ages 75 and older, but just 0.05 index points for adults ages 39 and below.

Lastly, don’t get too comfortable, kids — your generational predecessors are already arriving. Going by Pew’s parameters, the typical generation spans about 17 years … which means that the last of Gen Z babies were likely born in 2016. A new generation starts being born this year.

Welcome to the world, post-Gen Z generation! What a weird, absurdist time to be starting your lives. May we course correct a bit here before you hit adulthood. (Alternately, tell your kids to give President Ivanka’s reanimated corpse and V.P. Chelsea Clinton’s cryogenically frozen head my love, and sorry about the Kardashians. That one really is our fault.)

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Welcome to Adulthood, Gen Z: The post-millennial generation starts turning 18 this year, while the eldest members of the post-Gen Z cohort are starting to be born.”, Reason, 2017-03-22.

October 31, 2018

Great Britain Before World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 29 Oct 2018

Check out War2Glory: http://bit.ly/TheGreatWar_W2G

Great Britain was the center of a vast colonial empire and a rapidly changing world during the 19th and early 20th century. But what happened in the country in the years leading up to World War 1?

August 29, 2017

The benefits and costs of an “open borders” policy

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson linked to this Ben Sixsmith article on the pro and con arguments for open borders:

No one except a militant nativist would deny that some level of immigration is beneficial and should be accepted. After that, we face a question of scale. There are those, however, on the opposite end of the spectrum, who believe that no level of immigration should ever be denied. These are advocates of “open borders”; an idea as strange as that of the nativist — yet more dangerous for being considered respectable.

The liberal Economist magazine contains an essay promoting open borders. It imagines a world in which people are free to live and work wherever they please. It is an astonishingly biased and unreflective piece, which illuminates dangerous extremes of progressive utopianism:

Perhaps I sound inhuman. Who could dislike people living and working wherever they please? It can be a splendid thing, but if everybody did it think of what that would entail. The Economist reports that if borders were opened, 630 million people would be likely to migrate. Perhaps 138 million would go to the US, expanding its population by almost a half. About 42 million would join the British, expanding their numbers by more than a half. How many would go to Australia, a country with a population of 24 million, and with infrastructure already under strain? Such influxes would pose monumental demographic changes, soon made more dramatic by the higher birth rates. It will be exacerbated by the fact that local governments will not be able to keep up with the building of roads, hospitals, schools and transport systems that citizens — both old and new — will demand.

A commenter at David’s blog quips that “It’s amazing how quickly the Economist turned into the Guardian“, but The Economist began to go in that direction quite suddenly in the late 1990s … at least, that was the point I noticed and gave up my annual subscription. As The Economist generally does not use author bylines, it’s not clear whether the change was driven by editorial diktat or staff changes over time, but what used to be a pretty staunch free market newspaper (as they prefer to call themselves) turned into a British version of typical American “liberal” magazines.

As Sixsmith points out, the masses of would-be immigrants to the west are not an undifferentiated cultural mass with broadly similar cultural, educational, and demographic profiles:

But what of proposed merits of open borders? A consistent failure of the Economist’s article is a reluctance to distinguish between different migrants. If one finds the study, it turns out that 54% of the men and women who expressed a desire to migrate came from Africa and the Middle East — with another 20% being from Central America. Yet the most successful immigrants, in terms of launching businesses and earning wealth, have been found to hail from Asia and Europe. A UCL study found that European immigrants to Britain contribute more to the economy than they take from it while the opposite is true for non-European immigrants. It is senseless, then, to claim, as the author of The Economist article does, that immigrants are “more likely than the native-born to bring new ideas and start their own businesses”. Immigrants do not come from “Immigrantland”. Population differences related to entrepreneurial and earning potential are real, and significant, and difficult to bridge.

April 9, 2017

The Australian demographer’s Christmas

Filed under: Australia, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An amusing post at the Weekend Australian … an Advent Calendar for demographic tidbits:

The demographer’s Christmas is the day the ABS releases census results. It happens once every five years and that day, Tuesday 11 April, is fast approaching. Demographers are counting down the days until they can open their data presents. And now you can join in the fun with the demographer’s advent calendar.

Every day until the release we will be featuring a tasty data hors d’oeuvres to get you in the mood for a whole lot of Australian social demography.

H/T to Stephen Gordon for the link.

November 27, 2015

QotD: The myth of the “permanent majority”

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Many Republicans seem confident that last week’s performance in the mid-term elections bodes the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of the bright Republican future. Many Democrats seem confident that last week’s performance in the midterms was a mere blip on the way to the Emerging Democratic Majority. Both sides would do well to read Sean Trende’s 2012 book, The Lost Majority, which I made my way through this weekend.

To state Trende’s thesis simply: There is no such thing as a permanent majority. Parties are coalitions of disparate groups of voters, and they win by strapping enough different groups together to push themselves across the electoral finish line. Unfortunately, the broader your coalition, the harder it is to hold together. Those different groups may have radically different values and interests; satisfying one may end up alienating the other. Trende suggests that the longest-lived coalition was not, in fact Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famed “realignment,” which showed large cracks as early as 1937, but the Eisenhower coalition that lasted roughly from 1952 to 1988. As the dates suggest, the reason for unity was the external threat from the Soviet Union. That’s a pretty stiff price to pay for internal unity.

I took two major things away from the book: First, you can’t count on demographics to hand you a victory in such a vast and diverse country, because today’s coalition members may end up as a large and growing pillar of the opposition. And second, although both parties are constantly hunting for a mandate for radical change, the voters almost never deliver one. The party stalwarts may want to tear down the current edifice and start over, but the less ideological coalition partners are usually looking for some light redecorating, perhaps along with a specific personal interest like freedom of conscience in business operations, or less restrictive immigration policy. The harder the parties push on their ideological platforms, the faster the “coalition of everyone” starts leaking supporters to the opposition.

Megan McArdle, “No Party Will Get a Permanent Majority”, Bloomberg View, 2014-11-10.

October 4, 2015

Let us now discuss “the Conservative advantage among bigoted, ornery, vote-crazy oldies”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Believe it or not, the end of the seemingly eternal federal election is finally in sight. We’re getting to the wind-up stage of the campaign and we can now expect certain evergreen political topics to be discussed as we wearily struggle down to the wire. Colby Cosh covers one of the biggest “issues” of every federal election:

The parties are running low on ammunition in the election that never ends, and I can sense, like a tracker laying an ear to the ground, the approach of conversations about demographics and the getting-out of the vote. With this campaign sub-season — suitably located in the autumn — will come talk of “gray power”; dread of the Conservative advantage among bigoted, ornery, vote-crazy oldies; and, above all, the suffocating hatred of the young toward the liver-spotted hands that grip our levers of power and ward off change.

I rarely speak of Baby Boomers without a generous helping of contemptuous spittle. But the great equalizers, pain and death and dementia and distraction, are now starting to take them. The people I call Turnout Nerds obsess over youth voting: it seems unnatural to them, even revolting, that fewer than half of people under 35 bother to struggle to the polls, choosing to deny us their breezy new ideas and their orientation toward the future. (Not that I can see much actual evidence of either quality.)

They do not talk much about what happens to voter turnout once Canadians have passed their peak propensity to vote, which arrives, according to the official estimates for the 2011 election, at the age of 67. The graph, it turns out, looks like a skewed triangle. Voters in the age cohorts from 20-25 had less than 40 per cent turnout in 2011. There is a slow linear climb from there; turnout passes 50 per cent in the mid-30s, 60 per cent in the mid-40s, 70 per cent on the cusp of age 60. It rises to above 75 per cent at about the traditional retirement age.

But the dropoff in turnout from there is steeper than the rise — and how else could it be, given arthritis and lumbago and the other cruel facts of late life? And by age 67, according to an insurance man’s icy “life tables,” more than one per cent of the population is dying every year. If you adjust for mortality, and imagine a hypothetical pool of Canadian voters starting out at age 18, the estimated age at which the highest number of the original group will be voting isn’t 67; it’s more like a flat peak between the ages of 59 and 64. After that, coronaries start taking away more voters than enthusiasm is adding.

September 16, 2015

The African migrants are not driven by demographic change

Filed under: Africa, Europe — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Ridley explains that demography does not explain the sudden influx of refugees from Africa to the European Union:

Even the most compassionate of European liberals must wonder at times whether this year’s migration crisis is just the beginning of a 21st-century surge of poor people that will overwhelm the rich countries of our continent. With African populations growing fastest, are we glimpsing a future in which the scenes we saw on the Macedonian border, or on Kos or in the seas around Sicily last week will seem tame?

I don’t think so. The current migration crisis is being driven by war and oppression, not demography. Almost two thirds of the migrants reaching Europe by boat this year are from three small countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. These are not even densely populated countries: their combined populations come to less than England’s, let alone Britain’s, and none of them is in the top 20 for population growth rates.

Well then, perhaps that is even more ominous. If these three relatively small countries can cause such turmoil, imagine what would happen if say the more populous countries in Africa fell into similar chaos. Today Africa’s population (north and sub-Saharan) is about 50 per cent larger than Europe’s (East and West). By 2050, when — according to United Nations estimates — Africa’s population will have more than doubled from 1.1 billion to about 2.4 billion people and Europe’s will have shrunk from 740 million to about 709 million, there will be more than three Africans for every European.

Actually, demography is a poor predictor of migration. Nowhere in the world are people leaving countries specifically because of population growth or density. The population density of Germany is five times as high as that of Afghanistan or Eritrea: unlike water, people often move up population gradients. Tiny Eritrea, with only five million people, is a hell-hole for purely political reasons. It has a totalitarian government that tries to make North Korea and the old East Germany look tame: it conscripts every 17-year-old into lifelong and total service of the state. No wonder 3 per cent of its people have already left.

May 22, 2015

Reconstructing history – a population explosion in ancient Greece?

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Anton Howes deserves what he gets for a blog post he titled “Highway to Hellas: avoiding the Malthusian trap in Ancient Greece”:

There’s a fantastic post by Pseudoerasmus examining the supposed ‘efflorescence’ of economic growth in Ancient Greece, and some of the causal hypotheses put forward by Josiah Ober in an upcoming book (which I’m very much looking forward to reading in full). Suffice to say, the data estimates used by Ober raise more questions than they answer.

If the constructed data is correct, then not only did Greek population grow by an extraordinary amount during the Archaic Period roughly 800-500 BC, but Greek consumption per capita grew by 50-100% from 800-300 BC. As Pseudoerasmus points out, this would imply a massive productivity gain of some 450-1000%, or 0.3-0.46% growth per annum.

This seems quite implausible to me. Indeed, the population estimates imply that the Ancient Greek population would have been substantially larger than that of Greece in the 1890s AD, along with higher agricultural productivity! This is all the more puzzling as there appears to have been no major technological change to support so many more mouths to feed, let alone feed them better than before.

But assuming the data are correct, what would have to give? Pseudoerasmus explores a number of different possibilities, such as the gains from integrating trade across the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea; or that the Greeks might have shifted agricultural production to cash crops like wine and oil and imported grain instead. None of these quite seem good enough for such a massive and prolonged escape from the Malthusian pressures of population outstripping the productivity of agriculture (although I hope the so-far unavailable chapters from Ober’s book might shed some more light on this).

A remaining explanation offered by Pseudoerasmus may, however, be the winner: that Greeks weren’t using land more intensively as Ober seems to suggest, but rather expanding the land that they brought under cultivation by colonising new areas.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress