THE COMING GLOBAL DEPOPULATION - John Bonython Lecture 2024 - Nicholas Eberstadt

One of the demographic certainties about the generation ahead is that dif- ferentials in population growth will make for rapid shifts in the relative size of the world’s major regions. [...] And one of the remark- able and unexamined phenomena with the explosion of health around the world has been the change in the distribution of years of life on the planet. [...] By the same token, the distribution of years of schooling around the world is also shrinking pervasively and systematically with the improve- ments in mean years of schooling. [...] If one reads like the Soviet constitution upon which those guarantees were based originally by Mao in the ‘50s, the problem is that the guarantees only apply to a very small portion of the Chinese labour market, to the state-owned enterprises, and to some of the municipalities. [...] And the whole Reductio ad Hitlerum thing — the playing of the ‘Nazi’ card — that we’ve heard for the better part of the past decade, it seems to me as kind of hysterical and overblown.