Demographics
Story Stream
A New Inflationary Era May 20, 2021
In this provocative but calmly argued book, The Great Demographic Reversal, Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan predict a new era of widespread and lasting inflation. Goodhart, who has been a respected expert in financial, monetary, and central bankin...
How Much Blame Do Boomers Deserve? February 15, 2021
So, I’m a boomer, okay? I mean, a real Zelig of a boomer. I started Brandeis University just a few years after Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis graduated. During my time there, two classmates, Kathryn Power and Susan Saxe, hooked up with a former convi...
Majority Minority? America? Don't Bet on It February 09, 2021
Remember the “coalition of the ascendant”? National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein invented the phrase in 2008 to describe the “growing elements of American society” that had elected Barack Obama and given Democrats commanding majorities in both congres...
OK, Boomers January 22, 2021
The story of America over the last half-century is the story of the baby boomers. Born between 1946 and 1964, the boomers were, for more than 50 years, the country’s largest generational cohort, and though millennials, born 1981-1996, finally overtoo...
Build Back Bigger January 04, 2021
Last April, as grocery stores in the United States struggled to keep toilet paper on the shelves and hospitals’ supply of protective equipment ran low, an essay from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen popped into the Twitter feeds of the quarantined ...
The Coming Global Backlash against China January 04, 2021
The Chinese Communist Party’s leader, Xi Jinping, is the most powerful leader in Communist China since Chairman Mao. Yet, Xi’s outward strongman image is a veneer over his inner insecurity. When he came into power in late 2012, China’s economy had sl...
More People, Fewer Problems December 07, 2020
Six years ago Matthew Yglesias co-founded the news and policy website Vox. That venture, begun when Obama-era progressivism appeared to have vanquished all before it, was designed not to argue for liberal policies but patiently to “explain” them to a...
How the GOP Can Win Over Millennials October 26, 2020
Joel Kotkin, the Presidential Fellow of Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has written extensively on demographics, housing, and issues related to income inequality in the 21st century. Kotkin often blends research on demographics...
Be Afraid, Very Afraid: Part III October 21, 2020
AmazonWhile California prefers to extort, humiliate, and harass its actual citizens—especially the law-abiding, tax-paying, productive ones—it rolls out a bright red carpet for everyone else. That passage in the U.S. Constitution where it says that...
Anne Applebaum's Pride and Prejudice October 16, 2020
This is not a book, but rather an Atlantic essay puffed into a $25 sale item with grotesquely large type and comically wide margins. The typography offends the eye almost as much as the content offends the mind. It is a barely coherent rant against e...
Be Afraid, Very Afraid: Part II October 16, 2020
AmazonNot that the aforementioned glamour and glory, wealth and wellness aren’t real. But they’re only part of the story—the parts that Governor Gavin, Sergey, Larry, Mark, @Jack, and, down south, Ah-nold, Steven, and the rest of tout-Hollywood wan...
Demography and the Populists’ Destiny August 02, 2019
Before Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) was stripped of his congressional committee assignments, he played a dangerous—some would say duplicitous—game. He would dance right up to the line of espousing racialist politics—retweeting figures linked to...
Is Demography Destiny? May 09, 2019
Unease with rapid demographic change is a major driving force in our politics. Neopopulist parties advocating tougher immigration restrictions continue to advance in Europe, most recently in Spain and the Netherlands. The more established parties of ...
The Peculiar Blindness of Experts May 09, 2019
The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopu...
Generation X's Existential Panic March 11, 2019
When actor Luke Perry, best known for portraying TV heartthrob Dylan McKay on the '90s teen drama “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died Monday after suffering a massive stroke, there were the usual public displays of sadness when a public figure leaves us. Bu...
Rosy Population Trends in an Ageing World February 26, 2019
A few years ago, I met Baratu Lee, a young mother living in a remote village in eastern Sierra Leone. She was – she thought – about 27 years old, and she already had 10 children. The first had been born when she was 12 or 13.The infant mortality rate...
Demography Is the Biggest Story on the Planet February 04, 2019
One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too many people,' she said. From among the many other piquant factoids in Paul Morland's The Human Tide, I was unnerved to learn that ‘H...
