Posted on 08/22/2002 8:41:42 PM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
For what it's worth, the management guru Peter Drucker said that the changing demographics of the world are one of the ten most significant forces that will change it in the next fifty years. I think he's right.
This article places way too much emphasis on population. The United States has already been the most powerful nation in the world dating back to when it had just 150,000,000 people during WW2. If population meant anything with respect to power or position in the world, then China and India would be far ahead of the U.S.
And in the 1950's when the population was still about half of the current population, the best things in life were much more affordable: houses, food, health care, energy, low crime rates, freedom and manhood, education, good music, and feminine women--all were more affordable.
And it was rare for someone having something to offer to be unemployed for very long.
I'd trade that kind of prosperity for the kind of prosperity an extra 150 million people have since brought us.
I wouldn't. The quality of life was wonderful back then. And everyone who worked could afford a fair lifestyle. Today only the few are rich, rich, rich. The rest are struggling, and underemployed at an unlivable wage thanks in large part to immigration. NO WAY! We were safe, we were happy and we were productive.
In the 1950's , a tenured teacher's salary, was around $3,000 in N.Y.C. and a ride on a subway or bus cost a dime. Cigarettes were a quarter a pack, and most candy cost a dime. Few people had air conditioners, few had a T.V., let alone two or three ( even fewer had ones that were bad color ones ! ), most houses had only one bathroom, and only the upper middle / upper classes could afford to fly in a plane. Kids got measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, and Cancer was a death sentence.
In 1950, out of a population of 149,188,000 there were 3,288,000 unemployed. There were 4,843 strikes ( when was the last time there were even 20 strikes, in the USA ?) , and the average salary was $2,992.00 ! That year, there were 328,000 Bachelor degrees handed out to males and 103,000 earned by females.
I suggest that you remove your rose colored glasses. Some things were better, life was NOT ; however , easier.
Thanks to the feral gummint's most insidiously Evil form of taxation; that corrupt and evil institution's deliberate debasing of the currency by way of inflation; [Couterfeiting by any other name] the 1950 US Dollar bears about as much relationship to the 2002 "dollar" as the Swiss Franc does to the Uganda Shilling -- and it costs two workers per family eighteen months and ninety skwillion 2002 "dollars" to buy the equivilent of a 1950s [Actually EDUCATED!]New York school teacher's more than adequate salary!
In 1916, the average man earned $15.00 per week and that was in N.Y.C., where salaries were far higher ( so were costs ! ) than in the rest of the country. Because of safetynets and a lot of other things, wages and prices haven't fallen , since the Great Depression. OTOH, if you measure what 2002 dollars buy, as opposed to what 1950 dollars buy, we have actually progressed ... not degressed; your blinkered biases notwithstanding. LOL
out·li·er Pronunciation Key (out l
r)
n.
- One whose domicile lies at an appreciable distance from his or her place of business.
- A value far from most others in a set of data: “Outliers make statistical analyses difficult” (Harvey Motulsky).
- Geology. A portion of stratified rock separated from a main formation by erosion.
KEEP MOVING!!
1. Someone die; make you G-d -- and give you license to savagely and gratuitously personally attack?
2. And here I was, all this while, thinking that Psychopathological Projection Syndrome
[Ref: QUOTE: ..... there were 328,000 Bachelor degrees handed out to males and 103,000 "earned" by females ..... END QUOTE >> ]
was a symptom of the libbburrrrul disease!
This demographic alone will cause a major shift in strategic alliances in coming decades (if not sooner). We are already seeing the beginnings of this now with our fresh relationship with Russia. NATO will gradually cease to be in its present form. It will become solely political- sort of a sub-group of the UN, like the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Congress. The real alliances that count though will be whoever aligns themselves militarily with the US in the future. This will be where the future history of the world is written. The two big strategic threats/problems we face (the way I see it) are China and the Middle East. The emerging alliance will be dedicated to ultimately countering these two threats. A US/Russia/India menage makes sense in this respect. That will be the alliance of power in the future.
The Europeans will gradually drop in influence to little more than Africa- not because they don't have a lot of paying customers (which they surely will) but because when push comes to shove, they will no longer be able to at least "take part" in a military situation even symbolically. They already start to see this as we no longer "really need" them to go off to war somewhere. In the future they will be bypassed with ever greater frequency. Also, Europe will begin to "look" much different and have a different voice because of this. To fund those pensions, they will have to have even more immigration. Those immigrants will eventually get to vote. When they do, the immigrant voice will eventually reach the parliamentary level. Europe, if they do not tread very carefully, could wind up being the first western culture to adopt Sharia throught constitutional ammendment.
Your knowledge of economics is laughable. Inflation is necessary for sustained economic growth. Too often, in the past, we've had supplies of money that were far too tight, and too closely linked to the fluctuating supply of gold. That made the economy far more volatile than it is today.
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