babyboom

The Australian Financial Review seems these days only to speak for the corporate land speculators and financiers. Bugger small or medium business which must pay the cost of mass immigration in high rents and reduced profit margins, making its products globally uncompetitive and underpinning the very high rate of business failure in Australia. Predictably, in its support of corporate business interests, the AFR is again trotting out the 'mass immigration keeps us young line' again. (See Jacob Greber,"Immigration supports ageing population, RBA says." June 19, 2018.) If we were to apply logic, however, immigration keeps us older. It's not just because, when immigrants arrive, they are always older than Australians who are born here, aged zero - although that is true. The fact is that Australia never had a big problem with an aging population and what problem anyone has with 'aging populations' is self-solving, through death - as long as we do not keep artificially adding new people. Even in Europe, the baby-boomer bump will pass away around 2050, giving Europe a more natural demographic. If you want to see real aging population problems before they happen in Australia, consider the 'developing world' as its swollen youth cohort ages.

Artificial creation of large fertile cohorts creates huge problems

When you have a lot of young people, then you have a huge increased fertility. If those young people also live long lives, then both the population total and the population inertia are huge. You start to get problems of scale, scarcity and resource inflation (not to mention loss of natural spaces and increases in regulation and surveillance). You then get policy conflict between those who benefit from the resource inflation and those who have to pay for it. This is what we have now in Australia.

The 2nd world war baby boom followed mass access to cheap petroleum, which permitted the rise of the car and many marriages that would not have been possible without access to the new suburbia that cars serviced. This was a once-only event.

Trying to normalise the post war baby boom is demographically grotesque

Although the conditions of available land, and cheap petroleum and consumption per capita have changed, there has been a tendency, in governments that subscribe to growth economics, to try to prolong this situation by artificially extending the baby-boom as if it should or could be a demographic norm. They try to do this through mass immigration and by policies to stimulate fertility.

But, imagine if most people were young and only few people were old. That would require a continuous feed of babies, accelerating faster and faster, because the minute those babies were born, they would start aging! And, if you imported immigrants, well, all of those immigrants would be older than babies, since they would already be born, so you would have to import immigrants even faster in order to combat their higher age cohort.

Third world trajectory accompanies massive fertile cohorts

Impossible to imagine! Come to think of it, though, something like that has already happened in places like Africa, India and in some parts of Asia and the Pacific. And the same situation is being created in any country that has persistent mass immigration and or persistent high fertility - including in developed countries that are supposed to have had the ‘demographic transition’. (The demographic transition 'theory' never counts immigration.)

Real democracies tend to stabilise their populations

So, in my opinion, it is important to have only a small proportion of the population of fertile age. And I think that is what happens when you allow a population to self-govern, rather than imposing population growth somehow. After the 1789 French Revolution the French had a ‘demographic transition’ without any industrialisation (not supposed to happen). They did this by using contraception, even though there were more marriages and even though life expectancy increased and infant mortality decreased. This probably occurred, in part, because the power of the church waned and couples chose their family size according to what they wanted, rather than according to what the church had to say.

Today it is the power of the growth lobby over government that has replaced the church in 'developed countries' where mass immigration is imposed.

Growth lobby wants overpopulation

In Australia, America, and Canada, were it not for mass immigration, those populations would probably be a lot smaller, maybe close to stable numbers. In Continental Europe population growth has been much smaller than in the Anglosphere since the 1973 oil shocks - because immigration was greatly reduced in continental Europe whilst it was increased in the Anglosphere.

Continental Europe does not have the Anglosphere's growth lobby, although the European Union is trying to impose one by endorsing waves of informal migration from the countries where US-NATO bombing has destroyed large sectors of their economies.

I would like to add that the citizens of the European Union countries who are dealing with this influx should not be blamed for the wars that their governments maintain in the Middle East. It is the leaders of the European Union and the war industries who influence its policies who should be blamed and brought to trial.

These sociopathic policies appear to be the result of a gambling-like addiction to huge transactions in money and power in people of enormous wealth. If we the people do not bring these human behaviour abberations to heel, our suffering will be immense, as will the damage to our natural world and all things bright and beautiful.

The page I am writing about is on the Australian ABC website, entitled, "You decide Australia’s population, we’ll show you how it looks," by journalist Inga Ting, Mark Doman, Ri Liu and Nathan Hoad. The arguments presented are a kind of demographer's fantasy. Demography is not population science; it is maths and statistics. Maths and statistics are not themselves science. They can be used as much for population science, to test theories, as they can be used for advertising and propaganda. Demographers are often also economists and they usually try to establish trends in population numbers in isolation from the environment, social values, or deep history. What they call population science is usually only economics, which many people think is now practised as a dogma. They do not tend to challenge propaganda and, for this reason, they are very useful for governments and corporate media that want to push peoples' thinking in a certain direction about population.[1] This interactive article on the ABC gets the reader to make certain decisions, comes up with biased feedback, and then invites the reader to change their minds. To be unbiased, this interactive would need to list the positives of lowering population growth. It fails to. It does mention some as opinions, but it does not employ related arguments in its presentation of demographic trends in Australia.

The message of "You decide Australia’s population, we’ll show you how it looks," is that if we choose low immigration, the size of the population over 64 will be greater than the size of the population under 15 yrs old. It compares the size of the post WW2 baby-boomer population, as if this were a norm, with the projected elderly population.

"In 2101, one in eight Australians will be children, compared to nearly one in three in 1960. At the same time, one in three will be 65 or older, compared to one in 10 in 1960."

There are a number of flaws in this.

1. The baby boomer population was the first of its kind, and should not be used as a norm.

2. There is an insistence on maintaining and increasing our current population in Australia and, by implication, everywhere else, but our current populations are the largest by an order of magnitude that have ever existed. They are not 'normal'. They are out of proportion to all human history and other species. They are an exception that is very hard to maintain materially, has many political, energy and biological-ecological problems, and few positives, except in terms of profits made by a few through inflation of resource prices.

3. Comparing numbers of children 15 and under to people over 64 is comparing one arbitrarily selected cohort over a limited number of years - 15 - to another of a larger number of years - 64 to, say, 100 - amounting to 36 years. If we were to compare a similar number of years in the older cohort, we might compare older people in 15 year cohorts, such as people aged 85-100, or people aged 70-85, or people aged 65-80.

4. The dependency ratio of children to adults 64 and over is not cut and dried, not predictable. Elderly people are much less dependent than babies, toddlers, school children, who almost never earn their living. These days children's dependency may last far longer than 15 years. Some people will never find any reliable legal work in our future society, due to the declining affordability and standard of Australia's education system, the effects of industry automation, and competition from immigrants selected for their education and skills.

5. The greatest cost in all cohorts - dependent and independent; children, adults and older adults - is the cost of land for housing and business. These costs are hugely inflated by population growth. If we allowed population growth to slow naturally, then no-one would have to work so hard to have housing, businesses would have much bigger profit margins, wages could fall and people would still have enough money to live well, and the few elderly people who finish up in high dependency care units for long periods of time, would not have to pay nearly so much for their care, because the land and therefore wage costs of those old-age care facilities would be greatly reduced.

This manipulative article talks about 'demographic problems' associated with Japan's population decline, but there were more problems associated with the overpopulation that Japan suffered from, including reliance on nuclear power plants in earthquake and tsunami-prone areas:

Perhaps most alarming, however, is the threat of a shrinking population. In South Korea and Japan, for example, very low birth rates combined with few immigrants and high life expectancy have led to a dwindling workforce and rapidly-growing elderly population. "Demographically these countries are in quite serious trouble," Dr Wilson said.

These 'problems' solve themselves. Expatriots are returning to Japan from Australia because the housing has become affordable again and it is a pleasant place to live. An older population does not need the frantic productivity that a young industrialising one does. The population will presumably return to much lower levels, perhaps those of the Edo period, which was a Japanese social pinnacle, when the country was self-sufficient.[2]

It is the property development lobby that wants population growth and which has lobbied for it since the 1904 Royal Commission into the Decline in the Birth Rate in New South Wales (which was actually caused by men leaving the state to goldmine in Queensland and then in West Australia, but don't tell anyone).[3] If the population growth rate fell now in Australia, then the growth lobby would just shrivel up and die, industry-wise, and we could get on with our actual lives. You can imagine the fuss and bother that the death throws of our malignant growth lobby would cause as they thrashed around in our parliaments and councils, our banks and insurance industries, our mining and road-building industries - but after the dust settled, most of us would be so much wealthier because our cost of living would have plummeted. Necessary industries would continue - as they did in Australia before the two wars, when we built most of the things we now import: cars, aeroplanes, scientific instruments, pharmaceuticals ...

Evolutionary population theory argues that the long-lived elderly people in tribal societies were the repository for knowledge and judgement. If everyone had only lived to thirty years old (as is often supposed) a society would have little capacity to develop culture or complex language. Consider what it may mean to our societies to have people living to one hundred years old and more. It might make the difference between a society that is wrecked by capitalist demands and a society with people who have many years of experience and can identify snake oil because they have heard it before.

Actual dependency: Are treatable illnesses that cause dependency and death in the elderly being systematically overlooked?

With regard to actual dependency in the elderly, as a person with a background in nursing, as well as sociology, I would suggest that we restart Vitamin B12 therapy for people over 60 [and for vegetarians and vegans and new mothers and their children. There is now a higher risk for everyone due to the addition of Folic Acid to our foods.] Diagnosing Alzheimers is not an exact science and I know from experience that much treatable Vitamin B12 deficiency goes under the radar, even while it is resulting in dementia and loss of the ability to walk. [See /node/4463.] There are so many more people in walkers and on electric carts these days. Question them and you will find that almost none have any idea of their Vit B12 status. I would also suggest that we revise our therapeutic levels for these upwards, to at least the Japanese norms. (Note that you can buy high-dose sublingual Vit B12 now which in many cases does the job the injections do.)

I will also just raise here the idea that we should question the use of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) as the ultimate measure of thyroid health as many thyroid sufferers do on various forums growing round the world. We need also to be measuring T4, but especially T3, and taking note that quite a substantial number of people with hypothyroidism do not really improve on T4 replacement alone. Australia used to add iodine to salt, but this was discontinued and tests for iodine are not even rebated, yet our country and our diets are still low in iodine. Few doctors even test for this. Iodine is not the only cause of hypothyroidism, but it is a common cause. Several books have been written by doctors about the need to increase the use of specific hormone testing for suspected thyroid disorders.

NOTES

[1]
I think that ANU Demography Crawford School Unit's professor Peter McDonald's 'coffin-shaped populations' is a case in point. Here is one of many examples: "This is a projection for Australia that leads to the 25 million population in 50 years time and close to zero growth subsequently. The essential difference between the two is that the Sydney population is younger. The Sydney population is beehive-shaped and the rest of Australia is somewhat coffin-shaped. As we shift Melbourne, Brisbane etc from the right side to the left side, this impression would become very pronounced. That is, a projection that provides a reasonable outlook for Australia is the sum of high population growth in the existing cities with considerable ageing and labour supply decline in the non-metropolitan regions. We need more work on this and we shall be doing this as a component of the AHURI study of future housing needs."

Professor McDonald seems to me to truly to believe that Australia must have a continuously growing population to fulfill a continuously industrialising economy based on youthful manpower. The growth lobby and its corporate press reward such theories and present their proponents in a very favourable light. That is why we hear so much from them and so little from the rest. How would a student in Professor McDonald's unit fare if he argued for a small population to keep essential resource costs low and wildlife corridors for native fauna? Would you even enroll in the Canberra Demography unit if you had those views?

This man also advises our ministers and people overseas, including Europe.

"Peter McDonald is Professor of Demography in the Crawford School. He is President of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population for the years, 2010-2013 and is a Member of the Council of Advisers of Population Europe.

He is frequently consulted on the issue of population futures (causes, consequences and policies) by governments around the world, especially in Australia, Europe and East Asia. In 2008, he was appointed as a Member in the Order of Australia. He is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research. In 2012, he was appointed as an inaugural ANU Public Policy Fellow. He is a member of the Australian Ministerial Advisory Council on Skilled Migration. He has worked previously at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, the World Fertility Survey and the University of Indonesia." https://crawford.anu.edu.au/people/visitors/peter-mcdonald

[2] See Tony Boys, "How will Japan feed itself without fossil energy?" in Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Ed. 2018.

[3] See, Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, Chapter 6, Thesis minus 6 appendices.