The birth dearth
This is probably a transitional stage. Non-maternal women are self-excluding from the gene pool and the maternal remainder could have quite a high birthrate. So growth will eventually resume from a lower base
And there is a silver lining to it all. The group least likely to have children would have to be feminists. So the genes of these unhappy women will be much less likely to be passed on. To a degree feminists will breed themselves out of existence -- leaving the world a much happier place
China’s population has begun to decline, a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. Experts had long anticipated this moment, but it arrived in 2022, several years earlier than expected, prompting hand-wringing among economists over the long-term impacts, given the country’s immense economic heft and its role as the world’s manufacturer.
With 850,000 fewer births than deaths last year, at least according to the country’s official report, China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or even negative net migration, a group that includes Italy, Greece and Russia, along with swaths of Eastern and Southern Europe and several Asian nations like South Korea and Japan.
Even places that have not begun to lose population, such as Australia, France and Britain, have been grappling with demographic decline for years as life expectancy increases and women have fewer children.
History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it. And as a country’s population grows more top-heavy, a smaller, younger generation bears the increasing costs of caring for a larger, older one.
Even though China’s birthrate has fallen substantially over the last five decades, it was long a country with a relatively young population, which meant it could withstand those low rates for a long time before starting to see population losses. Like many developed countries, China’s older population is now swelling — a consequence of its earlier boom — leaving it in a position similar to that of many wealthy nations: in need of more young people.
Countries such as the U.S. and Germany have been able to rely on robust immigration, even with relatively low birthrates. But for countries with negative net migration, such as China, more people requires more babies.
“The good news is that the Chinese government is fully aware of the problem,” said Yong Cai, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who specializes in Chinese demographics. “The bad news is, empirically speaking, that there is very little they can do about it.”
That’s because the playbook for boosting national birthrates is a rather thin one. Most initiatives that encourage families to have more children are expensive, and the results are often limited. Options include cash incentives for having babies, generous parental leave policies and free or subsidized child care.
Two decades ago, Australia tried a “baby bonus” program that paid the equivalent of nearly $6,000 per child at its peak. At the time the campaign started in 2004, the country’s fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman. (For most developed nations, a fertility rate of 2.1 is the minimum needed for the population to remain steady without immigration.) By 2008, the rate had risen to a high of around 2, but by 2020, six years after the program had ended, it was at 1.6 — lower than when the cash payments were first introduced.
By one estimate, the initiative led to an additional 24,000 births.
Dr. Liz Allen, a demographer at the Australian National University, said that the program was largely ineffective and that publicly funded paternity leave and child care would have been a more effective use of taxpayer money. “Government intervention to increase fertility rates is best focused on addressing the issues that prevent people from having their desired family size,” she said.
Experts say the most effective initiatives address social welfare, employment policy and other underlying economic issues. France, Germany and Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark have had notable success in arresting the decline in birthrates, often through government-funded child care or generous parental leave policies.
But even the success of those efforts has had limits, with no country able to reach a sustained return to the 2.1 replacement rate. (The U.S. rate fell below 2.1 in the 1970s, slowly rose back up to the replacement rate by 2007, then collapsed again after the Great Recession to a current level just below 1.7.)
“You’re not going to reverse the trend, but if you throw in the kitchen sink and make childbearing more attractive, you may be able to prevent the population from falling off a cliff,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research institution in New York.
Sweden is often cited as a model for increasing fertility rates, thanks to a government-boosted jump in its birthrate. After introducing nine months of parental leave in the 1970s and implementing a “speed premium” in 1980 (which incentivized mothers to have multiple children within a set period), Sweden saw fertility rise from around 1.6 early in the decade to a peak just above the replacement rate by 1990. (The country has since increased its parental leave to 16 months, among the highest in the world.)
After that uptick, however, Sweden’s birthrate fell through the ’90s. Over the last 50 years, its fertility rate has fluctuated significantly, rising roughly in tandem with economic booms. And while the country still has one of the highest fertility rates among the most advanced economies, over the past decade it has followed a trajectory similar to that of most developed nations: down.
Recent research suggests a reason Sweden’s fertility spikes were only temporary: Families rushed to have children they were already planning to have. Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said financial incentives seldom increase the overall number of children born but instead encourage families to take advantage of benefits that may not last. The spikes, he added, can have unforeseen consequences. “When you have 50,000 children born one year, 100,000 the next, and then 50,000 the year after that, it is really bad for planning and education,” he said.
Few countries have embraced pronatalist policies as vigorously as Hungary, whose right-wing populist leader, Viktor Orban, is dedicating 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product toward increasing birthrates. The government encourages procreation through generous loans that become gifts upon the birth of multiple children, tax forgiveness for mothers who have three children, and free fertility treatments.
Around the time these efforts began under Orban in 2010, Hungary’s fertility rate was just over 1.2, among the lowest in Europe. Over the 2010s, that rate climbed to around 1.6 — a modest improvement at a high cost.
It remains to be seen how far China will go to stem its decline in population, which was set in motion when the country’s fertility rate began to plummet decades ago. That drop began even before the country’s family-planning policies limiting most families to a single child, introduced in 1979. Those who defied the rules were punished with fines and even forced abortions.
The official end of Beijing’s one-child policy in 2016, however, has not led to a rise in births, despite cash incentives and tax cuts for parents. The country’s fertility rate rose slightly around that time but has fallen since, according to data from the United Nations: from around 1.7 children per woman, on par with Australia and Britain, to around 1.2, among the lowest in the world. That recent drop could be a result of unreliable data from China or a technical effect of delays in childbearing, but it likely also reflects a combination of various pressures that have mounted in the country over time.
Even though they are now allowed to, many young Chinese are not interested in having large families. Vastly more young Chinese people are enrolling in higher education, marrying later and having children later. Raised in single-child households, some have come to see small families as normal. But the bigger impediment to having a second or third child is financial, according to Lauren A. Johnston, an economist at the University of Sydney who studies Chinese demographics. She said many parents cite the high cost of housing and education as the main obstacle to having more children. “People can’t afford to buy space for themselves, let alone for two kids,” she said.
China’s government could ease the burden on young families through housing subsidies, extended parental leave and increased funding for education and pensions, experts say. Other policy changes, like reforming the country’s restrictive household registration system and raising the official retirement age — female blue-collar workers must retire at 50, for example — could boost the nation’s working-age population, alleviating some of the economic strain that comes with population decline.
Although the Chinese are unlikely to find more success than the Swedes in recovering a high fertility rate, “there is low-hanging fruit that can allow them to squeeze more productivity and higher labor force participation from the population,” said Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
All this points to a Chinese population, currently 1.4 billion, that is likely to continue shrinking. In contrast to economists who have cast China’s population decline as a grim sign for global growth, many demographers have been more sanguine, noting the benefits of a smaller population.
John Wilmoth, director of the Population Division at the United Nations, said that after decades of exponential growth in which the world’s population doubled to more than 7 billion between 1970 to 2014, the doom-and-gloom assessments about declining fertility rates and depopulation tend to be overstated. Japan has been battling population decline since the 1970s, he noted, but it remains one of the world’s largest economies. “It has not been the disaster that people imagined,” Wilmoth said. “Japan is not in a death spiral.”
Worldwide, fertility remains above the replacement rate, which means that allowing more immigration will continue to be an option for many developed nations, even those that historically haven’t relied on it: Before the pandemic, net migration into Japan, while relatively low, had been increasing steadily.
Without immigration, pragmatic and noncoercive measures that encourage parents to have families while pursuing careers — as well as policies that allow people in their 60s and 70s to keep working — are the key to managing negative population growth, Wilmoth said. “Population stabilization is overall a good thing,” he said. “All societies need to adapt to having older populations. What really matters is the speed of change and how fast we get from here to there.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/upshot/china-population-decline.html
***************************************************Death Penalty Looms in a New York Courtroom
The commencement of the penalty phase in the trial of a man convicted of killing eight people in a New York City bike lane rampage — Sayfullo Saipov, who was inspired by the Islamic State — surfaces the possibility that New York will see its first death sentence since 1963.
Saipov was found guilty on all 28 counts in a United District in New York. Sensing that a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, Saipov’s attorney did not call or cross-examine any witnesses at trial. A unanimous jury is required to levy the death penalty; just one dissenter means life in prison for Saipov.
The presiding Judge, Vernon Broderick, told the jury that it “is impossible for me to overstate the importance of the decision before you.” Saipov’s attack, which occurred on Halloween in 2017, claimed the lives of six tourists and two Americans.
Saipov drove a truck into a bike path on the west side of the West Side Highway at Pier 40 and mowed down his victims between there and Stuyvesant High School at Chambers Street. It was the deadliest terrorist attack at New York City since the Twin Towers fell.
One of the prosecutors in the case, Amanda Houle, argued that the death penalty is required because Saipov has not “not abandoned his jihad, his fight,” and because he is “dangerous even in prison.” According to the New York Times, Saipov’s lawyer, Mark Stern, urged jurors to send him to a “harsh and impregnable prison in the middle of nowhere.”
The history of the death penalty in the Empire State is one of abolition and reinstatement. Most recently, an order signed by Governor Pataki reviving the practice via lethal injection was declared unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals, the Empire State’s highest judicial body.
Since 2007, death row has been empty, and in 2008 Governor Paterson issued an executive order mandating the removal of all death penalty equipment from state facilities. New York was the first state to execute a man, William Kemmler, via the electric chair, in 1890. The inventor Thomas Edison was an enthusiast.
Saipov’s execution is possible because he was tried in federal rather than state court. The killer was tried in federal court because of his link to foreign terrorism; the prosecutor, Jason Richman, described to the jury how Saipov requested the Caliphate’s black flag be hung in his hospital room after he “turned a bike path into his battlefield.”
If jurors do decide that Saipov’s life is forfeit, they will render a decision at odds with the policy of the Biden administration. While a campaign pledge to abolish the death penalty has as yet gone unfulfilled, a moratorium on executions is currently in place at the direction of Attorney General Garland.
If Saipov is convicted, he could be executed in the event the moratorium is lifted, or by a future president. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there are 44 men currently on federal death row and more than 2,000 people await execution at the state level.
This approach stands in stark contrast to the one pursued under President Trump. The final six months of his administration witnessed 13 executions in federal cases. Those were the first federal executions in nearly two decades. According to the Associated Press, more people were executed under the Trump administration than in the 56 prior years, combined.
The death penalty has lived several constitutional lives. In Furman v. Georgia, from 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty as applied in a set of state cases was unconstitutional, holding that those executions violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because of its disproportionate application to minority communities.
Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the high court held that capital punishment was not per se unconstitutional and upheld Georgia’s renovated sentencing procedures, which remedied the earlier problem of arbitrary application.
The next year, in Coker v. Georgia, the justices ruled that for an execution to be constitutional, it must be proportional to the crime. Further rulings ruled out the ultimate punishment for minors and cases of child rape where the victim lives.
In seeking to forestall what prosecutors have called the “most severe penalty that the law provides,” Saipov’s attorney, Mr. Stern, told the jury that the “cycle of death has to stop somewhere.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/death-penalty-looms-in-a-new-york-courtroom
********************************************The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning. From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations and accrediting associations that support their efforts.
“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms).
Yet however defined, it's clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.
“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”
It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.
“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”
Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.
The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history – from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.
The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.
The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddled by birth.”
And in many ways it appears to have worked. Just look at the tech industry, where immigrants from East and South Asia have flourished. Nigerian immigrants are perhaps the most successful group in America, with nearly two-thirds holding college degrees. Doors have opened wide to the once-closeted LGBT community.
But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, healthcare, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth.
More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power.
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Transgender college athletes will be banned from competing in Texas
Transgender athletes will not be allowed to compete in college sports in the Lone Star State, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has vowed.
“This next session, we will pass a law prohibiting biological men to compete against women in college sports,” the governor said during a meeting of young conservatives in Dallas, the NY Post reports.
Under his leadership, the state imposed a similar ban in 2021 on transgender competitors in public schools from kindergarten through high school.
Texas politicians are now turning their attention to universities, with two politicians filing a bill to ban trans women from competing against biological women in college sports.
Alongside Texas, 17 other states have passed laws or placed restrictions on transgender people participating in sports, many of which have subsequently been challenged in court.
Abbott referenced Harvard transgender swimmer Lia Thomas during his remarks.
The 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania swimmer sparked a national debate on whether athletes who were born male should be allowed to compete against biological females.
Thomas, who is originally from Austin, Texas, did not have the support of many of her teammates — sixteen of which argued she had an “unfair biological advantage.”
“We’ve fought for the rights of women to be able to succeed in this world only to have that now superseded by this ideology that men are going to be empowered to compete against women,” Abbott added during his comments.
The 6’1″ swimmer dominated in the pool, breaking records and winning titles. She was able to participate due to hormone treatment to lower her testosterone level, a requirement by the NCAA, which updated its policy in the last year to support transgender athletes.
If politicians in the Lone Star state do pass a bill restricting trans athletes, a court battle would almost certainly follow, as it has in many other states.
Florida passed a similar law in 2021, called the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act which banned anyone born biologically male from being able to compete against women at public school and college levels. The Florida law requires players to submit a birth certificate showing their sex when they were born when signing up for a team.
It quickly resulted in multiple legal challenges at court — including from a lawsuit from a 13-year-old trans girl from Fort Lauderdale who was not allowed to continue playing on girl’s soccer teams. However, despite these it is still currently in place.
In Texas, LGBTQ groups were quick to speak out against Abbott’s proposal. “This type of legislation would abandon trans athletes and leave them without a way to express themselves in sports,” Equality Texas tweeted.
Trans people have pushed back on Texas’ law restricting them from competing since it was introduced.
“These laws are not ‘protecting girls’ they are hurting girls because transgender girls are girls. Science supports that transgender people are valid and you should to. Let us play sports,” trans youth Elliot told the It Gets Better project.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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