Population

[Peter_Puget]

Interesting essay:

 

 

"Between 2000 and 2025 China’s median age is set to rise very substantially: from about 30 to around 39. According to unpd projections for 2025, in fact, China’s median age will be higher than America’s. The impending tempo of population aging in China is very nearly as rapid as anything history has yet seen. It will be far faster than what was recorded in the more developed regions over the past three decades and is exceeded only by Japan. There is a crucial difference, however, between Japan’s recent past and China’s prospective future. To put the matter bluntly, Japan became rich before it became old; China will do things the other way around. When Japan had the same proportion of population 65 and older as does China today (2000), its level of per capita output was three times higher than China’s is now. In 2025, 13.4 percent of China’s population is projected to be 65-plus; when Japan crossed the 13.4 percent threshold, its per capita gdp was approaching $20,000 a year (constant 1990 ppp dollars). One need not be a “Sino-pessimist” to suggest that China will be nowhere near that same economic marker 22 years from now....

 

Thus, China’s rapidly graying population appears to face a triple bind. Without a broad-coverage national pension system, and with only limited filial resources to fall back on, paid work will of necessity loom large as an option for economic security for many older Chinese. But employment in China, today and tomorrow, will be more physically punishing than in oecd countries, and China’s older cohorts are simply less likely to be up to the task. The aggregation of hundreds of millions of individual experiences with this triple bind over the coming generation will be a set of economic, social, and political constraints on Chinese development — and power augmentation — that have not as yet been fully appreciated in Beijing, much less overseas."

 

PP

[Bohanon]

boy howdy, I'm losing a lot of sleep over this one

[Stonehead]

Just some ideas...

 

That is interesting but I don't take it so much as a Cassandra warning. It would seem to be such if conditions remained the same as regards the influence of an aging population on economic activity.

 

Consider the convergence of technology. There is a movement underway to usher in the use of robots from the industrial realm into the domestic realm. Seems I read somewhere that Japan was a strong proponent of introducing widespread use of robots in many different facets of life.

 

It seems the limiting factor would be availability of inexpensive energy, in what form could it be readily available and at the same time be relatively safe?

 

There's a lot of space between here and there but is this 'brave new world' that far into the future?

[Dru]

boy howdy, I'm losing a lot of sleep over this one

 

NO SHIT!

 

by the way they found a diamond the size of the Earth 4,000 km across, so you might want to get out of your de Beers stocks before the market crashes.

[Stonehead]

They named her Lucy, as in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

[murraysovereign]

Didn't Arthur C. Clarke suggest this very thing in "2001: A Space Odyssey"? As I recall, at the end of the novel Jupiter's core is revealed to consist of a giant diamond.

 

He did the same thing with his descriptions of some of Jupiter's more unusual moons - when NASA and JPL finally got some interplanetary probes making close observations, they found those moons were almost exactly as Clarke had imagined them in "2001".

 

I may have to read it again, just to see what we're going to "discover" next.

[Dru]

Actually there is no diamond in Jupiter's core. Metallic hydrogen all the way down. Clarke was wrong on this and it's in 2010 Odyssey 2 anyways.

 

OTOH another SF author, Jack Vance, was talking about gemstones in the core of dead stars back in the early 1970's.

[HerbertWest]

Actually there is no diamond in Jupiter's core. Metallic hydrogen all the way down.

 

Actually, we have made no direct observations to conclude this to be a fact. Actually.

[Dru]

Be my guest!

 

We haven't observed any WMD in Iraq either but this does not prevent us saying they are not there.

[HerbertWest]

Jupiter is a WMD. You only need to catalyze a fusion reaction, and you'll have a THERMONUCULAR EXPLOSION. Sodam Hussain had his eye on Jupiter for a long time.

 

BTW, where is that guy these days? I wonder how the place where there is no darkness is treating him.

[Stonehead]

He's secretly sequestered in a place where the streets have no names.

[badvoodoo]

And we STILL haven't found what we're looking for.

[Dru]

shine on you crazy white dwarf remnant carbon core