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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

A peaceful change

"The relation between the number of people who aren't of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio.
In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a pay check.
That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old.
Last year, Ireland's dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country's extraordinary economic surge.

Demographers estimate that declines in dependency ratios are responsible for about a third of the East Asian economic miracle of the post-war era; this is a part of the world that, in the course of twenty-five years, saw its dependency ratio decline thirty-five per cent.
Dependency ratios may also help answer the much-debated question of whether India or China has a brighter economic future.
In the nineteen-sixties, China brought down its birth rate dramatically; those children are now grown up and in the workforce, and there is no similarly sized class of dependents behind them.
India, on the other hand, reduced its birth rate much more slowly and has yet to hit the sweet spot. Its best years are ahead."

That could partially explain the economic strength of the West world in the age of the "Baby Boomers".
As strange and hideous as it can look, a war is sometimes what helps the economy.
Like a big fire in a Forest allows the birth of new and stronger plants (and the death of the old) so, usually a war produces a radical change in a society.
On the other end, aren't we cultured enough to understand that what we need IS NOT a war, but just a peaceful change in leaders?

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