With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Demography

The Long View 2007-10-12: Doris Lessing, the Zombie Continent, Orthodox Revival

The birth rate in Poland did tick up a bit, but in overall terms it was pretty small compared to the decrease over the twentieth century. Doris Lessing, the Zombie Continent, Orthodox Revival The more interesting Nobel Prize award of recent days is not the one to the Goracle (only

The Long View 2007-10-07: War, Demography, & Belgium

While demography does have interesting things to tell us about the shape of history, it is of not much use in isolation. For example, Europe having gone through a population explosion in the nineteenth century certainly enabled the mass conscript armies of that era, but it didn’t determine them.

The Long View 2007-09-05: Eureka; Babyboomski; Chambers Initiative; The Deal to Save Iraq

Demography is always more mysterious, and the data messier, than the models that get used often imply. In this post, John looks at early signs that Russian demographics were exiting the death spiral state of more deaths than births in 2007. The absolute difference wouldn’t cross zero for another

The Long View 2007-06-21: Immigration and Rotten Boroughs; Zero Population Growth Anachronism; NASA's Greatest Triumph; No Black Holes; Global Warming Plan B

Here is a case of John should have checked the numbers and didn’t: No, the problem is not "too many people": Japan and California are roughly the same size, but Japan has four times as many people as California and is substantially richer. In part, CAPS is

The Long 2007-05-21: In Praise of Piracy; Immigration as Weakness; Perpetual Copyright; Flicker Today

John Reilly references an “anti-natalist project” here, and in other places. It was largely implicit in many policies of the late twentieth century, but you can find the evidence if you look. If you want to get a feel for why this was seen as a huge problem, the science

The Long View 2007-05-11: Merry Warming; Grasshoppers; Opinion Monkeys; The Defense of Socialism Continues; The Purpose of GWB

Here is a prediction that definitely did not happen: The shift from deterrence to defense has gone too far to stop, I think, though the Left seems determined to make the transition as slow as possible. The awkward bit, still a decade in the future, will be the negotiation with

The Long View 2007-04-20: Gonzales, Bering Tunnel, Mass Murder Today

John J. Reilly’s idea that managing demographics is a pre-constitutional power of government is one my favorites. Gonzales, Bering Tunnel, Mass Murder Today Regarding Gonzales v. Carhart, the United States Supreme Court decision upholding the federal law banning partial-birth abortion, the first thing to note is that the law