On birth rates, educating the fairer sex and economic slavery
For decades, the Arab Muslim world was seen as a region of unstoppable population growth. Today, that assumption is being turned upside down as birth rates fall across the Middle East and North Africa, reshaping economies, societies, and the future of the region.
Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP93kvPhQZo
For decades, the Arab Muslim world was seen as a region of unstoppable population growth. Today, that assumption is being turned upside down as birth rates fall across the Middle East and North Africa, reshaping economies, societies, and the future of the region.
(Tom: The authors of this presentation observe that in an agrarian society the children of farming parents contribute significantly to the economic viability of the family whereas the children of an urban society family are a significant financial burden to the parents, making having children a larger cost than may can afford.
They further note that despite the various efforts of governments to subsidize parents for having children, those subsidies have not yielded the desired increase in birth rate. The net result is that if the present trend is not greatly altered then the civilization is potentially headed for extinction.
They either fail to extrapolate the logical result or leave it to us to come to that conclusion on our own.
That conclusion is that if the government subsidies offered had been inadequate to reverse the trend, then the subsidies do not adequately reverse the financial disadvantage and need to be increased to the point where they do so.
Of course some will argue that the cost of doing so would be too great for the country to bear.
The very easy counter to that is that extinction is a far greater cost! Pick your price!
My second point is that of more educated women right around the world choosing to defer having children or eschew having them in favour of a career.
As the script writer observes, take a woman who in many of these countries may have married at 17 and immediately started a family and keep her at university for 3 or 5 more years and you instantly remove the potential for one or two children from her child-bearing years. Then if she wants to gain experience in her chosen field, slice another 3 to 5 years from her progenating time line and all of a sudden she is now closer to 27 years old. Fast approaching what my younger daughter tells me is now regarded as ‘geriatric pregnancy’ age!
That is purely the age mechanics. Now let us consider with what data she inculcated at university. My guess is that like most areas in life, to a greater or lesser degree an attitude of ‘we are good, they are less good’, ‘what we are doing is superior to what they are doing’ and ‘we are the educated elite, they are uneducated breeders’ prevails. A ‘baby bonus’ is not going to alter that attitude.
And lest you jump to the erroneous view that I am against educating women, I hold the opposite view. You’ve probably heard the old saying, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Well in my humble opinion the head that rules that hand needs to be as wise as possible because we are presently facing enormous challenges globally that result from very unwise leadership.
No, I think we need to figure out how to enable women to do both – to attain a higher level of wisdom with which to raise a more aware, intelligent, capable, competent and ethical next generation and not discourage or disincentivise doing so.
My third point is related to the economic slavery towards which the man in the street, all over the world, is being relentlessly pushed.
There is a famous quote often attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
Some might argue that global trends supersede country governments and are not the result of central planning. I would argue that those men do not have enough data to hand. I have read the writings of men and women with access to more data than I and an above average ability to connect dots and see patterns and their conclusion is that President Roosevelt’s observation apply equally on the global stage as they do to a country.
As an example of which most of us alive are able to bear witness, the November 2019 Event Pandemic 201 conference convened just after the Covid outbreak was reported which proposed the aligned government response to a key set of strategies that not only failed to promote but actively suppressed proven natural remedies like Vitamin D supplementation and repurposed drugs like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine in favour of waiting for an unproven and novel mRNA technology that turned out to be a bioweapon designed at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill and removed from office the leaders of four countries that did not follow the vaccine script.
I observe in my own country and hear it is common overseas that it is far more difficult for people currently in their 20s to purchase a home. That it costs 10-20 times their annual salary.
My late wife and I purchase our first home in 1975 for $37,750 when we each earned just over $9,000 a year, just under 25% of the purchase price. And that was in East Malvern, a relatively inner suburb of Melbourne, not out in the sticks!
Back then we did not consider it easy to save for a 25% deposit but we did it in a year when we were 21. No wonder this generation feel hopeless, having to come up with today’s equivalent in Sydney, of about $300,000 for a 25% deposit! Not many couples I know at any age let alone age 21 have a combined income of $600,000!
Which brings me to the heart of the matter, the deliberate eradication of the middle class and the consolidation of wealth and influence into the hands of fewer people at the top of the food chain by a policy of paying wages as low as possible to staff in order to maximize the C-level salaries and the return to shareholders.
I recently watched an interesting conversation on this point at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLBsHXNEwAU
