Commoditization of populations

The American Thinker ^ | Dec. 13, 2004 | Noel Sheppard

[Kitten Festival]

Twenty years from now, what might the world’s most precious, depleting, natural resource be? Oil? Steel? Lumber? How about working-age adults who are still contributing to a nation’s entitlement programs rather than receiving benefits from them?

Want to know how short the future supply of such people is? Well, across the globe, nations like Japan, Australia, and Singapore are actually begging their child rearing-age population to procreate. For instance, according to the Tokyo correspondent for the BBC:

Japan currently has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. [And] the government says that unless the trend is reversed quickly, the shortage of children risks doing damage to the economy. The decline in Japan's birth rate is so severe they have invented a word for it - 'shoshika', meaning a society without children. Unless women here start having more babies, the population in Japan is expected to shrink more than 20% by the middle of this century. Nearly half would be elderly, placing impossible burdens on the health and pension systems.

AAP reports a similar condition in Australia :

Treasurer Peter Costello has already beseeched healthy young couples to procreate for their country, and now a report on the economic implications of the ageing population has given his words extra weight. Far from blaming the baby boomers for a projected doubling in the proportion of people aged 65 years or more by 2044, the draft Productivity Commission report has found that falling fertility is the major culprit.

[Kitten Festival]

A fascinating essay by a truly brilliant and innovative economist. It's all good.

[BobL]

Daaaaa,

Now they're realizing the nightmare in store for them. At least Japan is relatively homogeneous and won't be destroyed from the inside. If they can just get their brains working, they can have more kids and rescue their country.

Europe is a completely case. It may take another decade or so, but at some point the Anglos are going to wake up and realize that all of the kids in their countries either have head scarves or beards, and they pray to Allah 5 times a day. What they'll also find, once they try to do something about it, is that they also have guns and heavy weapons.

It's going to get very ugly there, and very soon.

[dr_pat]

My life-partner and self take people aback sometimes with our (chorused) answer to the question, what is the most rapidly-diminishing natural resource. As one person, we answer: Aggregate. Needed for concrete. Being built-over and zoned out of exploitation all over the country.

But people? Folks, we're not a commodity no matter how easy it makes it for the marketing types to label us that way.