What is your response to this article from IHT?
http://www.iht.com/articles/536363.html

It says the demographic ‘bomb’ is now fizzling to a ‘pop’, except for countries such as India and Pakistan. The surprising statistic was that China’s birth rate is now below France.

Venu Gopal

http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/ageing/agewpop1.htm

Demographics are a difficult yet very interesting area of study.

There are geographical or political areas of the world where it seems fairly obvious that there are just too many people per arbitrary measure (let’s say people per km squared). Examples come to mind such as India and China and right down to city level such as Manhattan and can even be down at the street intersection or neighbourhood level.

One of the potential outcomes is that a country has a huge population explosion driven by birth rates over the natural replacement rate and then during the lifetime of those people, health care improves radically (which is a good thing) thus increasing the life expectancy of the population. Concurrently, the birth rate plummets towards or perhaps even below the natural replacement rate (remember this would be over decades) and you end up ultimately with a population “bulge” moving through the pyramid that has significant implications for society in terms of jobs, housing, economics and political leanings.

Ultimately this bulge gets older and older and becomes from a work perspective “non-productive” (no emotional statements here – just the fact that as the body ages, it gets harder to work) and they need to rely on the younger generations (of which there may be fewer) to assist them.

There are no simple answers but there are significant implications to any population policy.

Very interesting post and welcome back!

My primary concern is the over population of India and what it means for hundreds of millions who have to suffer the consequences. The facts that some countries in the world have shrinking populations and that the global population growth rates are coming down are fairly tangential to my primary worry.

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