World Demographics

[Jacob]

Interesting article: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=519403

Summary:  Northern Europe's birthrates has been increasing so the "impending demographic disaster" there may not materialise at all, possible shifts in employment patterns (female participation in labour market, pushing retirement back) could neutralize the problems associated with smaller proportion of young people to old people; Middle Eastern birthrates (with a few exceptions) have been declining to European levels so the "Muslim demographic time bomb" may not happen; population growth is highest in Africa, potentially causing shifts in focus of both Islam and Christianity; Russia still on a path of depopulation and high mortality; highest growing single segment of population growth is the middle class; China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are all facing a "missing women" problem as there are more boys than girls being born.

[Josquius]

to the 'OMFG teh moozlums r gonna overrun teh euros coz theyre infertil' folks.

Russia though is very interesting.

[garbon]

Did they do any cross cutting of the birth data to see what portion was due to immigrants?

[Jacob]

Did they do any cross cutting of the birth data to see what portion was due to immigrants?

The article doesn't mention the data as a whole, but they mention that immigrants birthrates tend to end up the same as native populations after two generations and which proportion of the birth rates are by certain segments (though they don't give all the data).  They also mention that a not-insignificant amount of the unpredicted "bump" comes from (presumably native) women having children in their late 30s and 40s.

So I think they did take that into account, yeah.

[garbon]

K, thanks.

[Siege]

I don;t care about powerless populations.

[Olive]

Nice post. Great read. Thanks!

[Slargos]

You people will never learn.

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but the Swedish economy and subsequently the welfare system is buckling under the load of mass unemployment specifically among wellfare leeching shellshocked imports from inferior cultures.

That a seething mass of arab filth are having lots of babies will do nothing to stave off the inevitable collapse, since your truism that "people are people, regardless of race" is obviously false.

Hiding declining birthrates behind mixing in the arabs under the "citizens" number is fooling no one.

[jimmy olsen]

You people will never learn.

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but the Swedish economy and subsequently the welfare system is buckling under the load of mass unemployment specifically among wellfare leeching shellshocked imports from inferior cultures.

That a seething mass of arab filth are having lots of babies will do nothing to stave off the inevitable collapse, since your truism that "people are people, regardless of race" is obviously false.

Hiding declining birthrates behind mixing in the arabs under the "citizens" number is fooling no one.

Read the actual article and you'll see that is not what they're doing.

[The Brain]

Read? He sells kitchens.

[Slargos]

You people will never learn.

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but the Swedish economy and subsequently the welfare system is buckling under the load of mass unemployment specifically among wellfare leeching shellshocked imports from inferior cultures.

That a seething mass of arab filth are having lots of babies will do nothing to stave off the inevitable collapse, since your truism that "people are people, regardless of race" is obviously false.

Hiding declining birthrates behind mixing in the arabs under the "citizens" number is fooling no one.

Read the actual article and you'll see that is not what they're doing.

You're saying they're actually taking ethnicity into account when counting births? I seriously doubt it.

[Valmy]

You're saying they're actually taking ethnicity into account when counting births? I seriously doubt it.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies. Germany's minister for the family, Ursula von der Leyen, announced in February that the country had recorded its second straight year of increased births. Sweden's fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put. Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the current 60 million each to more than 75 million by ­mid­century. Germany, despite its recent uptick in births, still seems likely to drop to 70 million or less by 2050 and lose its status as Europe's most populous country.

In Britain, the number of births rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain's fertility rate has increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from women in their thirties and ­forties—­just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest level since 1980. The National Health Service has started an emergency recruitment drive to hire more midwives, tempting early retirees from the profession back to work with a bonus of up to $6,000. In Scotland, where births have been increasing by five percent a year, Glasgow's Herald has reported "a mini baby boom."


Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years. Children born to eastern European immigrants accounted for a third of Scotland's ­"mini ­baby boom," for ­example.

In 2007, France's national statistical authority announced that the country had overtaken Ireland to boast the highest birthrate in Europe. In France, the fertility rate has risen from 1.7 in 1993 to 2.1 in 2007, its highest level since before 1980, despite a steady fall in birthrates among women not born in France. France's National Institute of Demographic Studies reports that the immigrant population is responsible for only five percent of the rise in the ­birthrate.

The French peril will soon overwhelm Europe with hordes of cheese eating Frenchmen.

[CountDeMoney]

Still too many brown pipple in this world.

[Malthus]

This sort of thing is why I never bother about demographic scares any more. They all rely on extrapolating some present trend into the future as if nothing will change - invariably the scare turns out to be untrue, as demographic trends seem to shift with amazing rapidity.

Around here there seems to be a bit of a middle class baby boom, as I've been reporting for a while now - $2000 strollers and all (though I suspect that the recession may cut back on the Bugaboo sales    ).

[garbon]

Yeah it'd be pretty scary to see brown people replacing white people.