“
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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John Berger
“
Demography is destiny.
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Auguste Comte
“
Demography, not democracy, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century
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Lee Kuan Yew
“
As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.
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”
Dan Smith (The State of the World Atlas)
“
Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.
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Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
“
Just as geopolitics tells us that the free trade era is closing, demography tells us that the era of consumption-driven growth that has been the economic norm for seventy years is coming to an unceremonious end.
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Peter Zeihan (The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On)
“
... the Sangam Tamil corpus is essentially a literature of diverse landscapes and a plural demography. Sangam texts stand witness to the plural social systems, polity, cultural ethos and ideology of the early Tamils. At the same time, they also represent some of the ‘carried forward’ memories that probably emulate the ideologies of the IVC [Indus Valley Civilization], including its inherent pluralism.
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”
R. Balakrishnan (Journey of A Civilization: Indus to Vaigai)
“
- What do you want to be when you grow up?, asked a Macedonian father his child.
- A foreign citizen.
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”
Ljupka Cvetanova (Yet Another New Land)
“
Considering how complex and ever-shifting the “politics” part of geopolitics can be, demography’s solidity and high levels of certainty can be incredibly refreshing.
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”
Peter Zeihan (The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On)
“
(The United States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of Mexican demography.)
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”
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
“
The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past.
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Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World))
“
The new element in part III is the headwinds—inequality, education, demography, and debt repayment—that are buffeting the U.S. economy and pushing down the growth rate of the real disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution to little above zero.
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”
Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70))
“
… what right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity’s environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries’ consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world’s resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?
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”
Mark Hertsgaard
“
What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?
It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
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Isaac Asimov
“
Everything about modern China—from its industrial structure to its food sourcing to its income streams—is a direct outcome of the American-led Order. Remove the Americans and China loses energy access, income from manufactures sales, the ability to import the raw materials to make those manufactures in the first place, and the ability to either import or grow its own food. China absolutely faces deindustrialization and deurbanization on a scale that is nothing less than mythic. It almost certainly faces political disintegration and even de-civilization. And it does so against a backdrop of an already disintegrating demography.
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”
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
if current immigration and fertility trends persist, the United States will be almost three-quarters pro-life by 2100, up from 60 percent today.
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”
Eric P. Kaufmann (Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century)
“
Victory must begin to mean more than winning a single election. Our obligation, in Georgia and across the nation, is to seize the high road by changing how we campaign and to whom. Demography is not destiny; it’s opportunity. We have to expand our vision of who belongs in the big tent of progress, invest in their inclusion, and talk to them about what’s at stake.
”
”
Stacey Abrams (Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America)
“
... neither the metaphor of ‘melting pot’ nor of ‘salad bowl’ can accurately explain Indian culture. My preferred metaphor is that of the Rain Forest. The ‘tropical rain forest’ characteristically has a number of layers, each with a variety of flora and fauna adapted for life in that particular layer. The layers include the uppermost ‘emergent’ layer that rises above to form the canopy of the forest, the ‘under-story’ and finally the ‘forest floor’, the foundational core. This emergent layer has its roots in the forest floor that is full of shrubs, vines and fungi... A ‘bird’s-eye view’ cannot reveal this rootedness, the underlying substratum, the under-stories and the forest floor.
If the metaphor of ‘tropical rain forest’ is applied to the Indus Valley Civilization, the citadels, the rulers, and the rich merchants with their maritime wealth, the urban structure and its finesse are comparable with the ‘emergent canopy’. Yet the bulk of the demography was at the root – the substratum, from which the mature urban cities emerged... The nature of its religion, the cultural practices, cockfights and bull-vaulting visually represent the ‘under-story’ of the IVC.
”
”
R. Balakrishnan (Journey of A Civilization: Indus to Vaigai)
“
Female prophecy must be situated in the crisis of reproduction in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the peak period for the criminalization of women in England and throughout Europe, as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and witchcraft reached their highest rate. It was also the period in which men began to wrest control of reproduction from women (male midwives appeared in 1625 and forceps soon thereafter); previously, "childbirth and the lying-in period were a kind of ritual collectively staged and controlled by women, from which men were usually excluded." Since the ruling class had begun to recognize its interest in increased fecundity, "attention was focussed on the 'population' as fundamental category for economic and political analysis." The simultaneous births of modern obstetrics and modern demography were responses to this crisis. Both, like the witchcraft prosecutions, sought to rationalize social reproduction in a capitalist context - that is, as the breeding of labor power. A recurring motif in the ruling-class imagination was intercourse between the English witch and the "black man" - a devil or imp. The terror was not limited to an imaginary chamber of horrors; it was an actuality of counterevolution.
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”
Peter Linebaugh (The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic)
“
All respected economists know that long periods of prosperity have never been assured by markets, but by political leaders who guarantee a high-quality education, spur a dynamic demography through pro-natal policies, encourage investments by great national programs, keep taxes low, limit imports, assure a free and transparent domestic market, support national entrepreneurs, develop research and strictly control immigration.
”
”
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
“
When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s,’ Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher, once observed, ‘the great turning point has come.’2
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”
Eric P. Kaufmann (Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century)
“
Saving democracy is not an overblown call to action—we are in trouble. The changing demography of America speaks to more than whether Democrats or Republicans control political decisions. Young people will be financially responsible for the largest population of elderly Americans in our history, but without the resources necessary to provide for them. The increased frequency of extreme climate events costs billions of dollars that will not be spent on education or infrastructure. The past fifty years of public policy toward communities of color have consequences. For decades, black and brown children have had higher dropout rates, higher incarceration rates, and lower earning power. This very same population continues to grow in size and political might, but America has largely abandoned our tradition of civic education to help guide their decisions. And international crises will demand American attention, but without a cogent and consensus-driven electorate, we will likely be paralyzed by inaction or stupid decision making. We
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”
Stacey Abrams (Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America)
“
Few societies have come to grips with the new demography. We cling to the notion of retirement at sixty-five—a reasonable notion when those over sixty-five were a tiny percentage of the population but increasingly untenable as they approach 20 percent. People are putting aside less in savings for old age now than they have at any time since the Great Depression. More than half of the very old now live without a spouse and we have fewer children than ever before, yet we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
The successive waves of hypergrowth—concentrated on the coastal zones where the world can see them—make China’s rise seem inevitable. The reality is China has borrowed from its interior regions and its demography in order to achieve what, historically speaking, is a very short-term boost. Never let anyone tell you the Chinese are good at the long game. In 3,500 years of Chinese history, the longest stint one of their empires has gone without massive territorial losses is seventy years. That’s. Right. Now. In a geopolitical era created by an outside force that the Chinese cannot shape.
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”
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
How I Got That Name
Marilyn Chin
an essay on assimilation
I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g
of “becoming.” Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paperson
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond
transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse—for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.
My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.”
She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot”
for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die
in sublime ignorance, flanked
by loving children and the “kitchen deity.”
While my father dithers,
a tomcat in Hong Kong trash—
a gambler, a petty thug,
who bought a chain of chopsuey joints
in Piss River, Oregon,
with bootlegged Gucci cash.
Nobody dared question his integrity given
his nice, devout daughters
and his bright, industrious sons
as if filial piety were the standard
by which all earthly men are measured.
*
Oh, how trustworthy our daughters,
how thrifty our sons!
How we’ve managed to fool the experts
in education, statistic and demography—
We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning.
Indeed, they can use us.
But the “Model Minority” is a tease.
We know you are watching now,
so we refuse to give you any!
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!
The further west we go, we’ll hit east;
the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China.
History has turned its stomach
on a black polluted beach—
where life doesn’t hinge
on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our new lover
in the final episode of “Santa Barbara”
will lean over a scented candle
and call us a “bitch.”
Oh God, where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources!
*
Then, one redolent spring morning
the Great Patriarch Chin
peered down from his kiosk in heaven
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge
Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd.
A third, the sad, brutish one
may never, never marry.
And I, his least favorite—
“not quite boiled, not quite cooked,"
a plump pomfret simmering in my juices—
too listless to fight for my people’s destiny.
“To kill without resistance is not slaughter”
says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death.
The fact that this death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.
*
So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong,
granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch”
and the brooding Suilin Fong,
daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong
and G.G. Chin the infamous,
sister of a dozen, cousin of a million,
survived by everbody and forgotten by all.
She was neither black nor white,
neither cherished nor vanquished,
just another squatter in her own bamboo grove
minding her poetry—
when one day heaven was unmerciful,
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She did not flinch nor writhe,
nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed! Solid as wood, happily
a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized
by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away!
”
”
Marilyn Chin
“
Laws are made to save the democracy directly and demography indirectly.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2070. No one has any idea of what the world will look like in ten years’ time, let alone in 2070. There are two major drivers of change—technology and demography.
”
”
Ken Robinson (The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything)
“
Internationalism’ is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership.
”
”
Amit Chaudhuri (Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (Peter Lang Ltd.))
“
This, to Netanyahu’s mind, was why America was so crucial: it was the only country in the world in which all foreign affairs were primarily domestic; the only country in the world in which—by dint of its immigrant demography and democratic system—the foreign did not exist.
”
”
Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus)
“
In the 1920s, the Rockefeller family bankrolled the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography, which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich.
”
”
Daniel Estulin (Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses)
“
The demographic character of India is such that whereas the Hindus think they belong to it, the Muslims feel it belongs to them and the Christians want to own it in time.
”
”
B.S. Murthy
“
The irony of India's partition is that Muslims wrested Pakistan from the British and retained their hold over Bharat to stymie the Hindus for ever, and that's absurd.
”
”
B.S. Murthy
“
Broad changes in demography invariably have political effects. The migration to the Sun Belt changed the political map of America. Once a Democratic stronghold, the South was besieged by a massive influx of retirees who were more conservative in their political outlook. As the historian Nelson W. Polsby demonstrates in his book How Congress Evolves, Northern Republicans moving south in the post-AC era did as much to undo the “Dixiecrat” base as the rebellion against the civil rights movement. In Congress, this had the paradoxical effect of unleashing a wave of liberal reforms, as the congressional Democrats were no longer divided between conservative Southerners and progressives in the North. But air-conditioning arguably had the most significant impact on Presidential politics.
”
”
Steven Johnson (How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World)
“
What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, "The world has never been a level playing field." The idea that the world would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and facts. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, but to automatically make those sins the sole, or even primary, cause of different outcomes among different peoples is to ignore many other reasons for those disparities. Geography and demography, for example, are among the many factors that make equal or random outcomes among human beings very unlikely.
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”
Thomas Sowell;
“
In addition to the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, a ban which had added force because of the religious cohesion of the ethnic neighborhood, one of the main things which fueled this demographic increase in Philadelphia was the rowhouse. It was cheap enough for a worker to own. It was more spacious than an apartment, and instead of paying rent and being at the mercy of landlords, a man could own his home free and clear in the time it took him to pay off his mortgage. Since it was located in the city near public transportation, the rowhouse did not require the expense of owning a car. Since it was surrounded on both sides by other houses, it was cheap to heat. As a result, it allowed the working-class Catholic family to have a large family, and over a period of time, it allowed him to benefit from the political power which followed demographic increase, which is precisely what was causing Blanshard and the Phillips crowd concern.
The attack on the rowhouse which the Better Philadelphia Exhibition orchestrated meant an attack on all of the cultural attributes that went with the rowhouse, a building which symbolized the cultural independence of the ethnic neighborhood based on religious cohesion and the economic independence of immigrant workers who could own their own homes. The attack on the rowhouse in Philadelphia was a covert attack on the Catholics who lived in them, orchestrated by a ruling class that knew, as good Darwinians, that demography was destiny and that they, because of their all but universal adoption of contraception, were on the losing end of the demographic equation. Urban renewal, like the sexual revolution which followed it eighteen years later, was the WASP ruling class’s attempt to keep “the United States from becoming a Catholic country by default.
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”
E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
“
The world is a tapestry of psyops
”
”
Henry Joseph-Grant
“
Those institutes can develop research-based teaching initiatives in which they work with colleagues across the university to tackle problems. They might focus on why certain groups of students (defined by whatever demography) do not achieve the kind of learning expected, or about how to help all students achieve a new level of development. The initiative would refine the questions; explore the existing literature; and fashion a hypothesis about what might work, a program to implement that hypothesis, and a systematic assessment of the result, ultimately contributing to a growing body of literature on university learning.
”
”
Ken Bain (What the Best College Teachers Do)
“
WHY IT HAS TO CHANGE Why should this time be different? Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better. Debt and demography mean that government in the rich world has to change. Even before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Western governments were spending more than they raised. The U.S. government has run a surplus only five times since 1960; France has not had one since 1974–75. The crunch has
”
”
John Micklethwait (The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State)
“
Books about colonization in early America more typically dwell on themes of politics, trade, religion, demography, and warfare. Without discounting the importance of these topics (for each has a place here) and with no intention of offering a monocausal explanation for complex events, this book argues that sometimes mundane decisions about how to feed pigs or whether or not to build a fence also could affect the course of history.
”
”
Virginia DeJohn Anderson (Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America)
“
Few societies have come to grips with the new demography. We cling to the notion of retirement at sixty-five - a reasonable notion when those over sixty-five were a tiny percentage of the population but increasingly untenable as they approach 20 percent. People are putting aside less in savings for old age now than they have at any time since the Great Depression. More than half of the very old now live without a spouse and we have fewer children than ever before, yet we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone.
”
”
Atul Gawande
“
The north-east has, to a certain extent, been a victim of geography. Unlike the east and south of China, which straddle major international trading lanes, the north-eastern provinces’ two foreign neighbours are North Korea and the sparsely populated far east of Russia and it is not far from the equally desolate expanse of Mongolia. Their dominant commercial relations have been with Japan, but heightened tensions between China and Japan in the past couple of years have got in the way. Japanese investment in Liaoning was 33.5% lower year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2014. South Korean investment, about a third of Japan’s, fell even more sharply. Demography has also started to hurt. China as a whole is struggling to adapt as the working-age population peaks. The birth rate in the north-east, however, is less than one child per woman:
”
”
Anonymous
“
Likewise, effectively incorporating a diversity of people into congregational life will demand greater flexibility and creativity on the part of faith communities. Ministry strategies and discipleship programs that were successful in the past may need to be reimagined or even scrapped for something new. Rather than spawning ever-more-segmented ministries that further silo various demographics, what would it look like if churches started with the premise that godly relationships nurtured over the long haul can transcend the science of demography? What if churches prioritized seeking and finding God together over activities and events designed to appeal to ever-shrinking slices of their constituency?
”
”
George Barna (Churchless: Understanding Today's Unchurched and How to Connect with Them)
“
Palestine was always the land between the river and the sea. It still is. Its changing fortunes are characterized not by geography but by demography. The settler movement that arrived there in the late nineteenth century now accounts for half the population and controls the other half through a matrix of racist ideology and apartheid policies.
”
”
Ilan Pappé (Ten Myths About Israel)
“
Even as India's left-lib ecosystem, planted by 'Muslim by culture' Nehru and fertilized by 'Christian by birth' Sonia, sprints on the congregational track, the right-wingers tend to plough their opinions in lonely furrows on the lines of Hindu infirmities.
”
”
BS Murthy
“
By having the self-confidence to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to human situations, they developed several new scholarly fields. In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57 (Xenophon’s Oeconomicus might from its title appear to claim to be a foundational document, but it really is about how to manage a household, which is what the word means in Greek.)58 Gay does not mention it, but Hume’s essay on “The Populousness of Ancient Nations” also was an early venture into creating the field of demography. Another Scot, James Hutton, came up with an astonishing new way to think about time, and so invented modern geology, a subject to which we will return. It is noteworthy that several of these innovative scholarly ventures—the ones by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—were rooted in the studies of the history of Rome.
”
”
Thomas E. Ricks (First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country)
“
Cheap novels and cheap films about cheap people ran concurrent with American boosterism and yahooism and made a subversive point just by being. They described a fully existing fringe America and fed viewers and readers the demography of a Secret Pervert Republic. It was just garish enough to be laughed off as unreal and just pathetic enough to be recognizably human.
”
”
James Ellroy (The Best American Noir of the Century (The Best American Series))
“
The twin pillars of the multicultural doctrine are “proportional representation” (hiring and admissions must reflect national demography) and “disparate impact” (intentional bias is automatically assumed and need not be proved for remediation). Because the former is not enforced systematically and the latter operates without proof of bias and prejudice, the result is the rise of “thought crimes” that must be addressed to ensure reparatory government action.
”
”
Victor Davis Hanson (The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America)
“
The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization.
”
”
Patrick J. Buchanan (The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization)
“
Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to under- standing the populist moment. Immigration is central. Ethnic change - the size and nature of the immigrant inflow and its capacity to challenge ethnic boundaries - is the story. Indeed, if history is any guide, we shouldn't be asking why there is a rise in right-wing populism but why it hasn't materialized faster in places such as Sweden or the US. Politicians say diversity is a problem for the nation-state, but it's actually much more of an issue for the ethnic majority. The real question is not 'What does it mean to be Swedish in an age of migration?' but 'What does it mean to be white Swedish in an age of migration?' The Swedish state will adapt to any ethnic configuration, but this is much trickier for the Swedish ethnic majority. While Sweden can make citizens in an afternoon, immi- grants can only become ethnic Swedes through a multi-generational process of intermarriage and secularization.
”
”
Eric Kaufmann (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities)
“
To me, international investing is largely a story of demography. Just look at population growth.
”
”
Sam Zell (Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel)
“
Yet Rousseau, like many later believers in this seemingly invincible fallacy, took it as axiomatic that only human biases create inequalities. Geography, demography, cultural differences and differences in the quantity and quality of parenting all vanish from this vision, in favor of one causal factor, for which many have imagined that they had a “solution.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
“
Deliberate, biased suppressions of other people’s opportunities are just one of the various other impediments to equal outcomes. But those things which offend our moral sense do not automatically have more causal weight than morally neutral factors such as demography, geography or language differences. Determining particular reasons for particular differences at particular times and places requires the hard work of examination and analysis, rather than heady rhetoric and sweeping presuppositions.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
“
In fact, though not immigrating to a “refugee state” according to the definition used here, most of the Jewish immigrants to Israel during the early years of statehood were undoubtedly refugees—people who could not return home for fear of persecution. Yet for the institutions of the migration regime, they were primarily an important demographic factor, in terms of both their ethno-demography—after all, the Jewish state needed Jewish inhabitants—and their utility as workers, soldiers, and agricultural settlers. In keeping with the terminology of the day, they were “human material” of value for the project of building the state.16 German expellees were also a significant source of labor for the subsequent “economic miracle,” though the refugee state conceptualized them mainly as clients to support
”
”
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
“
The limitations of geography, demography and resources which have kept Scotland dependent upon the UK are still there;
”
”
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
“
the science of demography (founded by another clergyman, the Anglican Robert Malthus).
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
In the period 1519–1939, an estimated 5,300,000 people, whom scholars delicately dub ‘unfree migrants’, were carried on British ships, of whom approximately 58 per cent were slaves, mainly from Africa, 36 per cent were indentured labour, mainly from India, and 6 per cent were transported convicts, both from India and other colonies. If nothing else, this British endeavour, motivated as always by the simple exigencies of the colonial project, transformed the demography of dozens of countries, with consequences that can still be seen today.
”
”
Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
“
States and Britain (and indeed between Britain and many other countries) in terms of geography, demography, and social history. Britain is a small, crowded island, largely oriented
”
”
Philip Norton (British Polity, The, CourseSmart eTextbook)
“
A long-standing question in the assembly of communities, ecosystems and regional biotas concerns the relative contributions of abiotic environmental conditions (such as climate), species interactions (such as competition and predation), evolutionary and coevolutionary adjustments, and stochastic processes (such as population demography)
[32]. This question has increased importance in a world where species ranges are rapidly shifting in response to climate change and human transport [14,34]. In this context it is important to ask whether species assemblages with novel combinations of species (including both native and exotic species) function in the same way as native
assemblages, even when many of the constituent species do not have a shared evolutionary history. The answer to this question, although pressing, is still unclear [16,35–37]. What is becoming clear, however, is that assemblages composed largely of exotic species can and do occur (e.g. plant communities that dominate portions of many oceanic islands, such as Ascension Island [16,36]), and that assemblages
dominated by exotic species, such as Eucalyptus
globulus woodlands in California, can be as species-rich as those dominated by native species [38]. We believe that these findings support Janzen’s [39] conjecture, which was based largely on patterns observed with native species, that diverse assemblages of species with complex ecological
relationships can be formed by the ecological ‘fitting’
[40] and ‘sorting’ of species (sensu Ackerly [41]), that is, solely through ecological interactions among species, and that a long history of coevolution is not always necessary to explain the species composition of communities. Although species coexisting in such recently formed assemblages might not have a prolonged history of evolutionary coadaptation,
rapid evolutionary adjustments might still have occurred over timescales of decades to centuries.
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Dov F. Sax
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While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences.
Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.”
Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.”
How will the department behave when whites become a minority?
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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I’ve tried to show in this book, the polarization we see around us is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions. It implicates capitalism and geography, politicians and political institutions, human psychology and America’s changing demography. And for now, at least, it’s here to stay.
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Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized)
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Before independence, huge numbers of Somalis, who could best be described as semi-pastoralists, moved to Mogadishu; many of them joined the civil service, the army and the police. It was as if they were out to do away with the ancient cosmopolitan minority known as “Xamari,” Xamar being the local name for the city. Within a short time, a second influx of people, this time more unequivocally pastoralist, arrived from far-flung corners to swell the ranks of the semi-pastoralists, by now city-dwellers. In this way, the demography of the city changed. Neither of these groups was welcomed by a third—those pastoralists who had always got their livelihood from the land on which Mogadishu was sited (natives, as it were, of the city). They were an influential sector of the population in the run-up to independence, throwing in their lot with the colonialists in the hope not only of recovering lost ground but of inheriting total political power. Once a much broader coalition of nationalists had taken control of the country, these “nativists” resorted to threats, suggesting that the recent migrants quit Mogadishu. “Flag independence” dawned in 1960 with widespread jubilation drowning the sound of these ominous threats. It was another thirty years before they were carried out.74
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David Kilcullen (Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla)
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It is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of trust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests on the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do. Conversely, where immigration and visible minorities have altered the demography of a country, we typically find suspicion of others and a loss of enthusiasm for the institutions of the welfare state.
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Tony Judt
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The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography
Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy by Stephen Steinlight
I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.
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Stephen Steinlight
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Americans sometimes hint that it's not worth saving people's lives in poor countries because then they'll just have more kids....We disagree. That Malthusian argument is a canard. In fact, it's increasingly clear that one reason some people have large families is because they expect some children to die. Give them hope that their children will live, and they'll have fewer kids. The history of demography is that after child mortality rates drop, birth rates tumble as well, after about a twenty-year lag. Indeed, we're already seeing fertility rates dropping sharply in poor countries. Indian women, for example, now average just 2.6 babies-down from almost 6 in 1950. Bangladeshi women average just 2.3 babies, and Mexican women 2.2 babies. The United Nations Population Fund calculates that the number of children under the age of fifteen will end the century no higher than it is now....The way to deal with population pressures is to reduce child mortality and support family planning and education, while planting hope.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy
By Stephen Steinlight
The white “Christian” supremacists who have historically opposed either all immigration or all non-
European immigration (Europeans being defined as Nordic or Anglo-Saxon), a position re-asserted by Peter Brimelow, must not be permitted to play a prominent role in the debate over the way America responds to unprecedented demographic change.
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Steinlight, Stephen
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The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy
By Stephen Steinlight
Many new immigrants are and remain, in effect, primarily citizens of their home countries and resident aliens in America, here merely to benefit from American resources and return income to the home country before returning themselves. (There are even cases of immigrants to the United States that hold political office in their home countries!)
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Stephen Steinlight
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There are, at least, four sets of explanations for such worsening trends in within-country inequality. These are: i. Ineluctable Trends ii. Technological Changes iii. Growing Monopoly Power and Concentrations iv. Globalisation and Demography
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Charles Goodhart (The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival)
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Hollywood is the creator of "mass situations," which Reich described in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Remember the question which began our discussion? "Why in the world," one woman wondered, "should one do such a thing?" Why in the world would Israelis broadcast pornography over Palestinian TV stations? The Israelis did it because sexual liberation is a form of control. Hollywood is now putting those Trotskyite globalist ideals into practice by promoting the widespread dissemination of things like pornography and MTV. Stephen Steinlight indicates that "MTV, for better or for worse, will prove more powerful with young Muslim immigrants than the mullahs" (see "The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography," Center for Immigration Studies, October 2001).
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E. Michael Jones (The Jews and Moral Subversion)
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Sharon’s push to Judaize the Negev, as well as the Galilee, developed against the backdrop of the government’s decision to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza. After ending Jewish settlement there, Israel began to treat Gaza effectively as a territorial jurisdiction whose population it could consider as outside the demographic calculus of Jews and Palestinians who live in Israel and in the vast majority of the OPT—the West Bank including East Jerusalem—that Israel intends to retain. Israeli officials at the time acknowledged the demographic objectives behind the move. Amid the push to withdraw settlers from Gaza, Sharon said in an August 2005 address to Israelis, “Gaza cannot be held onto forever. Over one million Palestinians live there and they double their numbers with every generation.”
Peres said the same month, “We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography.
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Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution)
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Even angry intellectuals realised how irresponsible it was to preach that all ideas are created equal. For in the end, postmodernist multiculturalism has no standard by which to elevate gender equality over sharia.
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Eric P. Kaufmann (Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century)
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People with four kids will eventually inherit the wealth of those with one—no preparation can save you if you're not having children; it's just a matter of time.
Along with the wealth you're trying so hard to accumulate, you'll lose your history, civilization, culture, philosophies, identity, faith, and everything that defines you.
You will exist as if you never existed.
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Anupam S. Shlok