Unlike its OECD brethrens, Australia is facing a population crisis, in the other direction!
Australia now has the fastest population growth in the developed world, surpassing that of the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and even many developing countries, including Indonesia and China.
Nice. Except in a rather Malthusian twist, Australia has limitations when it comes to natural resources, and even more trouble catching in terms of infrastructure. So what to do?
Australian businessman Dick Smith is opposed to population growth and says Australia should cut its skilled migration intake, and encourage people to have fewer children.
But an uptick in population density has its benefits.
“And there will be opportunities there. Greater density will mean that certain public options become viable; better public transport’s viable … so there’s all sorts of ways that we can deal with this. But closing our minds and our hearts to people from around the world is not the way that’s going to do that,” he added.
Along with a heavily distributive society, what else do the Scandinavians get right?
A review of The Spirit Level finds the following:
Deep down, Norway and the other Scandinavian societies still have it right because there are a host of other social policies (affordable child care and greater paternity leave for men among them) that are sustainable on the back of a redistributive economy, but which themselves provide the basis for a more caring society.
So it’s not merely the act of wealth distribution that result in the happier, safer, and nicer societies as outlined in Wilkinson and Pickett’s research. It’s the social policies that consistently display a “degree of care” that some countries have neglected in our pursuit of individualism and fairness, so argues the authors.
Do you buy the arguments for nanny states?
Two arguments on why it won’t happen, and eve it does to a certain degree, it won’t matter.
Apparently, severe population decline is very limited to certain regions, also mentioned here last week.
There will be countries and regions that will suffer long-term depopulation due to low fertility and emigration – but a combination of the two phenomena is mostly concentrated in eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Germany, Bulgaria and Ukraine. But the European population will also continue to age, and some demographers predict that babies born in the first decade of this century will live to an average age of 100.
And size is not always proportional to influence, if that’s really the concern at hand.
Since the late 19th century, when a massive decline in birth rates began in most of Europe, some demographers and long-forgotten futurologists have been busy envisioning an inevitable demise of Europe and “western civilisation”. However, it is not population size but affluence and technology that make some countries more powerful than others. Switzerland, with a population of 8 million, is globally more significant than, say, Bangladesh, with a population 20 times larger.
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