I don´t believe for a split second that once the evidence for this thesis is in (which I am serious about – it´s not a straw man argument I am just making up for the sake of discussion) – you will start to rethink your position. There is “plenty of room for testability” indeed – and you are busily plastering signs all over it that it may not be accessed since testing is not what you have in mind. Or are you seriously suggesting that you would accept an economic recovery in Japan and Germany occurring at the same time as an economic recession in India as counterevidence?

Your post on Lutz (quantum and tempo effects) doesn´t address the issues I was referring to under the heading of “social components” (abortion/contraception).

Malmberg/Lutz may be well respected for collecting and presenting demographic data. That respect is not likely to be extended to the habit of using unsubstantiated metaphors. A “trap” is a device that an animal cannot escape from due to genuine physical limitations. The implication of using the metaphor is that previously unknown
physical limitations will in the future prevent birth rates from rising again.
We are not just disagreeing about facts. I know that I can shed light on some basic demographic time series by taking recourse to social and economic data, whereas you are disputing that this direction of research can be meaningful at all because you have decided that demographics is the a priori cause of a posteriori economic effects. To buttress that position, you have to filter all evidence to the contrary. This can be done most efficiently if the filter works subconsciously – as is indicated in your case by the fact that you don´t realize that abortion and contraception statistics would document trends and shifts in the expectation patterns governing procreative behaviour.
(Admittedly, these statistics are hard to obtain. However, there is at least one time series of usable quality. Since it comes from a country that also happens to be a showcase of the demographic thesis – Russia -, it is highly significant indeed. Looked at carefully, this data clearly suggests that there are real-world alternatives to the metaphysical “trap”-metaphor. From a century´s worth of British and American time series, we know that birth rates are following the trends evidenced by broad-based
indicators of collective perceptions of economic well-being. Such perceptions, then, are a sufficient condition for engaging in the high-risk behaviour of having sex without taking contraceptive measures. They are not a necessary condition, though. What´s indispensable is the autonomous decision of consenting adults in favour of the child. The steady decline in the number of abortions in Russia over several decades shows that Russians are asserting their autonomy in regard to decisions about offspring.
However, Russians still predominantly prefer to complement one method – abortion – with another one – contraception -, since they do not yet share the optimistic outlook that would allow them to make a different choice more frequently.)

What we are watching here is a development on the timescale of the Kondratieff cycle. There is, of course, no guarantee that it doesn´t stop at some point in the future. Ultimately, there are no stable paths in human affairs apart from those that we choose to pave. An argument in favour of Russian EU-membership would be just as cogent as the argument in favour of Turkey: the human-rights concerns would be the same. In the case of Turkey, there is a sense of obligation owed to the fact that the Turks have been promised long ago that their application would be considered seriously. In the case of Russia, the obligation would stem from the fact that the Western world chose to push Russia across the brink to bankruptcy based on totally faulty economic reasoning. That act plunged Russia into an economic crisis which precipitated a dramatic fall in life expectancy. While such a catastrophe could not have happened without the collusion of a greedy Russian elite, it also represents a moral responsibility on the part of the Western world. Turkey definitely can´t point to any similar damage inflicted upon it by the West. (Keynes would likely have compared Russia´s position vis-á-vis the West to that of Germany post-WWI. “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” were that Germany´s living standard was cut in half. Germany had its own Khodorkovskij then – an inflation profiteer whose name was Hugo Stinnes. Due to the reluctance of Germany´s elites to learn their lesson, Germany was not prepared to withstand the impact of a
second economic shock. It´s not clear that Russia is, either. Putin appears to be trying hard, but so far a large part of the Russian population regards him as a “structural reformer” and yearns for a return to the past, no matter how good some of the recent economic data have turned out to be. There will have to be a long sequence of positive data for the situation to turn around, and the EU needs to do everything it can to contribute to such an outcome. If Russia indicates an interest in becoming a member of the
EU, it ought to be taken just as seriously as Turkey is.

Back to square one:
We need to start with the question of motivation. I seem to recollect that you have two kids, so it´s an issue you can also approach introspectively. Do people decide to have
children in times when they fear that their economic status is going to deteriorate? When they are either afraid of or actually losing their jobs in large numbers? When they
realize they can´t pay their mortgages? Note that what´s important here isn´t objective well-being only – pessimistic and optimistic delusions are equally relevant. People make up their minds on the basis of their perceived well-being. Even economic and political disasters can be correlated with spikes in the birth rate – as can be inferred from incidents like the power outage in New York and the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. What counts is the perceived opportunity to divert time away from economically and socially mandated uses to uses individuals decide upon autonomously. (I guess I needn´t explain that the power outage may well have provided actual welfare benefits to those who seized the opportunity to engage in sexual activity, whereas the welfare benefits of begetting lots of little Adolfs and Adolfines would seem to have been somewhat questionable if we are safe in assuming that their parents´ dreams for the kids´ future included a peaceful youth.)
People get kids when they look confidently forward to tweaking the niche of the economic system that they inhabit in such a way that their time budget will finally allow them to allocate more time to uses of their own choosing without having to face those “hard choices” economists love to impose on others. During long periods of their lives they would not expect to be able to do so – most likely not during spells of unemployment when they may have much time on their hands but no sense of being sovereign in their decisions about their lives: they “should”, after all, be working.

Note that there is a whole research programme hidden here. Trade-offs between time and money in decision-making processes haven´t been paid much attention to by both Keynesian and other mainstream economists (the only exceptions that come to my mind are Keynes himself – his correspondence with T.S. Eliot, e.g. – and Wassily Leontief). Modern experimental economics offers new methodological toolkits that could shed more light on the issue by complementing the macro-economic perspective with a micro-economic approach.

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how adamant advocacy of fraud – “pensions need to be reduced” – is likely to be self-defeating, no matter how “innocent” – to return to the Galbraithian phrase – it may seem.

He also seemed to find that his views really stirred things up (Joerg, there is no direct reference to you intended here):

DISCUSSIONS of the population problem have always had the capacity to stir up public sentiment much more than most other problems.

For one thing this problem happens to touch spheres of individual morals which in western civilization have traditionally been the focus of interest for preachers and moralists: the relation between the sexes, mating and marriage, propagation and the family. In our cultural heritage “morals” means specifically and particularly “sexual morals” — and so according not only to Puritan tradition but to Christian tradition broadly. The ordinary citizen in our type of culture is complex-ridden in his sexual life, and this emotional charge is carried over to the scientific discussion of the contiguous social problem, both because the scientist, as a person, is mostly, in this and other respects, quite ordinary himself;

This comes from the start of a series of lectures entitled:

POPULATION, A PROBLEM FOR DEMOCRACY

Again, another interesting detail was that he, like Axekl Börsch Supan today, drew attention to the fact that the US was in the fortunate position of being able to learn from the experiences of others:

AMERICA has the unique strategic advantage — if it could only be capitalized — that several of its social and political problems are maturing to acuteness a couple of decades later than in some of the older democracies of northern and western Europe, among them my own country, Sweden. Certainly this is true of the problems dealt with in this book. America has still an aggregate fertility which nearly matches its mortality, even when corrected for the factor of age structure -although it is now steadily declining and although during the decline there have developed within the nation reproduction differences between regions, racial groups, and classes of perhaps a still more alarming nature. And in America social policy is only in statu nascendi.

He even realises that the time scale of the problem may lead some not to consider it worthy of close attention:

“I am fully aware of the probability that the problems dealt with in this little volume, which comprises in slightly rearranged form the content of these lectures, are not going to be acute in this country in the near future, except in the minds of a very small minority of people with a long-range interest in political questions. I have viewed the problems very much as they have appeared on the Swedish horizon, where for various reasons they have reached an early actuality, but have kept the general perspective of western democratic industrial society in mind.”

Well thank you for an extensive exposition of your arguments. I think there is only one thing which is clear here: we disagree.

This I think is our mutual right.

Just a couple of points:

“The first relevant term that comes to mind is “fertility”. Is this a strictly biological term?”

Well funnily enough I did post on this very topic recently here:

http://bonoboathome.blogspot.com/2005/08/welcome-to-menagerie-ii.html

“There is no field of research where an author could get away with a line like “I fear that a strange attractor will emerge at a TFR level of x”"

Well this is Lutz’s hypothesis, and he is a widely published and highly respected demographer: he suggests that there may be a low-fertility trap below 1.5. Counter examples of countries that have escaped the trap and why would be interesting.

“even if that process unexpectedly manifested itself in Germany and Japan”

I think noone is disputing that Germany and Japan are modern well-functioning democracies, the issue, I seem to remember was whether Turkey was capable of becoming one. That was how I used the argument.

The question with Germany and Japan (and now Italy) is whether they can develop self sustaining domestic-demand driven recoveries, and if they can’t, why can’t they? I would say that there is plenty of
room for testability here.

“You´d also have to decide whether you consider the concept of “population pressure” to be part of your core thesis”

I can put your mind at rest here: it isn’t. Have I used the term? It’s possible, but it isn’t the way I think. This, it seems to me, is part of the old, neo-Mathusian paragigm, which puts the emphasis on population quantity.

I normally talk about age structure, and yes, there is a convenient metric – median age – which is what I normally refer to.

“be relevant!” (H. P. Grice) – even if you are only responding to a comment from me.
I was not disputing that African countries are located in Africa. I was not disputing that characterizing a group of countries as being “all … unstable” is a generalization across a group of countries. I was not disputing that Islamic fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism and market fundamentalism are variants of fundamentalism. I was not disputing that fundamentalism is an immature belief system. In fact, these were the very premises of my comment.

I will confess, though, that I did entertain the notion that “the civilization process” (Elias) “might be a good idea” (Gandhi) – even if that process unexpectedly manifested itself in Germany and Japan instead of being restricted to your list of usual and not-so-usual suspects.

There is a problem in trying to engage you in an argument about demographics: if presented with questions or counterevidence, you don´t always resist the temptation to ignore the most significant portions of your opponents´ statements or to move on to a different issue or to dilute your position until it becomes unrecognizable – only to return days or weeks later with new posts or comments containing the exact same version of your concept that you had been unwilling to defend earlier on.

I don´t have much hope for a meaningful discussion without precise definitions of terms. The first relevant term that comes to mind is “fertility”. Is this a strictly biological term? Does it have a social component? What about contraception and abortion?
To me it seems that the term “fertility” is used in such a way that available information and suggestive data goes unnoticed. Those blanks are then filled in with mystical allusions. There is no field of research where an author could get away with a line like “I fear that a strange attractor will emerge at a TFR level of x”. Such sentiment-driven statements would prevent him or her from getting access to the standard fora of scientific discourse, such as peer-reviewed journals. They only document a nearly limitless capacity to worry about the fate of the human race and a preference for rhetorical devices from the deus-ex-machina category.

You´d also have to decide whether you consider the concept of “population pressure” to be part of your core thesis. If so, you´d have to provide criteria that define the term so we can see where and when it applies – and to which degree.

Finally, we´d have to look at the following assumptions you implicitly made in previous posts:
1) “Productivity” is systematically related to age in such a way that for most economic activities relevant to economies as we will see them emerge in the near future employment of people younger than the average age of the sample is the most successful predictor of above-average productivity data, while employment of people older than the average age of the sample is the most successful predictor of below-average productivity data.
2) Financial restrictions limit the amount of money that can be dedicated to childcare, support for parents or other related expenditures
3) Short-term effects may be explained by causes working on long-term time scales, while long-term effects may be explained by causes operating on short-term time scales
4) Conditions necessary for causing an effect are by definition sufficient to cause the effect in question
5) Edward Hugh´s value judgment is the final arbiter of all economic discourse on the matter

Incidentally, just in case this seems like a bit of a private party, Joerg and I have been arguing over this for the last three years. All that time Germany and Japan have been ‘coming out of’ their long recessions, but each time they start to come out they fall back in again. This is what puzzles me. As an empiricist I will have no difficulty at all in recognising I have been wrong should Germany and Japan achieve that *sustained* recovery we have been promised for so long, in the waiting time please forgive me if I hang on to my thesis.

Incidentally (a second time), three years ago I suggested Italy would be next (they are the next oldest after the other two). And what do you know, here it is in the sick room. If I’m right Finland should be the next man down. All this is testable, and falsifiable.

If one were asked to enumerate characteristics common to child abundant countries, such as Sweden in the 19th century, a first observation to be made is that child abundance is closely related to poverty. Another characteristic feature of child abundant economies is the occurrence of child labour, a phenomenon clearly connected to the state of poverty.A third characteristic feature of child abundant countries is a strong dependence on the exploitation of natural resources. Finally, child abundant countries are dependent on foreign capital.

The young adult period in Sweden is strongly associated with modernisation. This was a time of agricultural transformation, liberalisation, railway building,emigration, urbanisation, industrialisation, popular movements, and, towards the end of the period, rapidly falling birth rates. New industries emerged, international trade developed, and financial markets boomed – and collapsed. Furthermore, the increase in the share of young people coincided with increasing social and political conflict, and, in response to this, democratisation and more extensive state intervention.

In view of the typical life cycle pattern, it is actually not surprising that observations from the young adult phase show a largely positive macro-economic development, mixed with reports about individual economic hardships and political instability. In contrast to children, young adults can support themselves with their labour. This favours economic development. However, young people are in general less stable than older citizens are: they are more mobile, lack life experience, earn less, and have a limited capacity to generate savings. Furthermore, it is probable that a large increase in the share of young, less experienced labour will push down the relative wages of this age group, while the growing need for investments, not least in housing and infrastructure, will drive up the price of capital. Income inequality and inflationary pressures may follow.

more stable economic conditions characterise the third phase of the age transition, the phase of population maturity….If we look for common characteristics among countries that have entered the phase of population maturity, the most obvious choice would be
sustained economic growth. Countries that for a number of decades have benefited from increases in the middle-aged group seem without exception to have entered the club of industrialised countries. An increase in the group of middle-aged people is thus clearly associated with a more developed stage of economic growth, a stage that the economist Walt Rostow once designated ”the drive to maturity”.

OK this is only an indicative sketch, and obviously I have left out the fourth, ageing, phase, as this is what we are debating day in and day out here. The interesting point is that this demographic transition as he defines it does have an arrow, there is no road back. You can find the full paper here:

http://www.framtidsstudier.se/aktuellt/2000.6.pdf

“The youngest societies in the world are home to islamic fundamentalism and export violence to other parts of the globe.”

Are you talking about Niger, for example, or Guinea-Bissau with 7.1, or Mali also with 7.1, or or Uganda, no, no, you probably mean Somalia – since the TFR there is 7.0 and there were people from Somalia arrested in connection with the July 21 bombings in London.
The point is Joerg, if you want to argue against a thesis, you should try to address what the thesis actually says, not put up your own version and knock it down (incidentally, I can’t understand what it is about demographic research which makes people so angry, I mean Iraq I can understand, but the fact that we’re getting older..??). So lets see what Malmberg says:

Only two groups have a record of no significant decline in mortality. In these groups we find a number of very poor countries many of which have experienced strong social disruption: Afghanistan, Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, and Yemen all belong to the group where the total fertility rate still is close to 7 children per woman. Also for Bhutan, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea , Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Lao People’s
Democratic Republic, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, and Pakistan there has been very little change in the total fertility rate, almost constant around 6 children per woman.

Now in this list I recognise three names which have been associated with islamic fundamentalist terrorism – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. I hardly think that this bears out your generalistaion. What is clear, as Malmberg says, is that they are all highly unstable.

Incidentally, I don’t think Malmberg makes any forcasts about the kinds of leader a society may or may not elect. What he talks about are underlying structural questions.

Interesting, Edward. Actually, I enjoy your rhetorical blunders more than your flashes of inspiration
Still, the idea doesn´t work, and the flash is just that: a light in the sky which can´t be looked at twice since it´s just too ephemeral. You´re unsuccessfully trying to put a prestigious horse before your cart here. How about an age-structure-related barbarization process?
Check:
1) The youngest societies in the world are home to islamic fundamentalism and export violence to other parts of the globe.
2) The youngest country among the traditional global powers ignores sustainability issues and elects a leader who is hell-bent on engaging in wrestling matches with countries from category 1)
3) Look at Africa and try to see whether there is no correlation between the likelihood of civil war, age structure, the incidence of AIDS etc.
4) Please recognize that Germany and Japan are in (resp. coming out of) an economic depression that is essentially homologous to what they went through in the 30s when they turned to fascism. This time around, they prove to be stable, peaceful, worthy contenders for a seat on the Security Council, most generous donors of international aid during the Asian flood – and they are also pretty much the “oldest” countries in terms of age structure.

Executive summary: The ageing thesis is the most egregious example in the history of post-Malthusian and post-Marxian economics of what John Kenneth Galbraith has labeled “innocent fraud” (which is the title of Galbraith´s latest book).

“except that it is presented as a unilateral alternative to membership”

Yes, I understand this, and I am explicitly saying that ‘partnership’ gets interesting in the post Turkey phase, not for Turkey. We could let a variety of countries enter the partnership chamber without offering any explicit committment to membership. This would make it easier to draw countries towards the EU, and then we could just see how it goes.

On Turkey, I’m reminded of the Dylan song: hanging in the balance. Maybe it is the one thing which does depend on Sunday’s vote. If there is a grand coalition I don’t think Germany will be pressing for a ‘partnership’.

I don’t think that there is any segment of the Russian leadership or polity that is interested in actual membership in the EU, so it is a moot point. The EU’s “natural” border is the point at which peoples and leaders say, “No, we’re not really keen on joining.” Russia. Iran. The Central Asian republics. Into the Levant and the Maghreb — ancient Roman provinces all around — I’m on much less solid footing.

Merkel’s idea of partnerships is admirable, except that it is presented as a unilateral alternative to membership. Countries, particularly Turkey, are being rejected out of hand as full members and being offered something else instead. It’s a substitute for actually dealing with the issues. It also encourages the retrograde elements in the candidate countries.