Liz Allen and demographers who ignore population doublings at our peril
Dr Liz Allen of the ANU, who describes herself as a demographer, has written another mass immigration promotion article within the disappearing post-war paradigm of jobs and growth. In ”Here’s what a population policy for Australia could look like,” she pays no attention to the diminishing prospects offered under that model by Australia’s shallow economy of holes and houses.
Allen argues that we need more young people to “fund the Australia we’ve become accustomed to”, but she should question the rising costs of that Australia where population pressure is inflating all the basics, whilst continuing to erode our manufacturing base, due to these costs, which affect wages and profits.
Allen advocates increasing the youth cohort for Australia. She is unoriginal in this goal of population engineering, which she, like many others before her, has put forth dishonestly as if it is an uncomplicated benefit. However, to increase the youthful cohort in Australia also means increasing the aging cohort, because immigrants also age. This is a classic population Ponzi. Henri Leridon, senior demographer with INED in France, once wrote an article lampooning this kind of ‘replacement demographics’ which Liz Allen would do well to read. See “Warning on folly of trying to increase and maintain a country’s youthful cohort by mass immigration”.
Allen pretends that Australia’s population policy isn’t really about numbers
Allen writes,
“But contemporary population policies, for countries like Australia, are less about controlling numbers and more about ensuring population well-being. The core tenet of a population policy for Australia should be about the population’s quality of life, now and into the future.”
This is casuistical. Australia already has a de facto population policy that is all about control - controlling numbers upwards by flooding the country with more and more migrants. And Liz Allen is advocating more of the same!
As for ensuring population well-being, Australians are constantly complaining about their quality of life deteriorating due to the effects of this population engineering, but no-one in power listens and the mainstream media - in which I include The Conversation - continually publishes articles like Liz’s, favouring the politics of the growth lobby.
The growth lobby are a small number of people who benefit from the continual inflation of prices of land, power, energy, water. They either form or influence the government and the opposition. The rest of us pay for this.
Australian demographers ignore population doublings at our peril
Liz Allen is a demographer - essentially a mathematician or a statistician. I have come to realise that Australian mathematicians specialising in demography rarely have interest in or knowledge about the natural environment or political concepts like democratic representation and local self-determination. At best they filter everything through the narrow lens of econometrics.
Despite this, I continue to be amazed at how none of the demographers writing about population in Australia ever raise the major issue of doubling times. At 1.6% growth Australia is destined to double, with an ever enlarging population base, every 43.67 years. But populations increase more rapidly when they are constantly in movement, as they are in Australia, because this breaks down the natural population brakes associated with endogamy. At 2.4% growth, Victoria’s population is set to increase in under 30 years - to about ten million, then in 30 yrs time, to 20 million.
The great question that Dr Allen avoids or somehow actually fails to think about, is where does it stop? And can you stop it when you have huge population bases rapidly growing? Australians were slowing down their population growth and the population would have declined in around 2030 (recollection from old projections) but population engineering by politicians and corporations associated with the growth lobby and the corporate media, has prevented this democratic adjustment. To my mind it is obvious that Australians were noticing the rising cost of living and the crowding of positional advantages, so they stopped having so many children.
Surely any demographer unable to consider the problem of population doubling and population inertia and democracy should stick to maths and stay away from policy.
Moving population out of the cities won't solve the problem
Finally, Allen also recycles the very old political argument that population growth problems can be alleviated by getting people to move to the country. There is an equally old argument against this. It is that, despite every attempt to get people to move to the country, people keep moving to the city. Even those who move to the country tend to move back to the city. It is very hard for me to believe that Liz Allen, demographer, is unaware of the failure of this ‘solution’, so once again, I think that she is simply promoting propaganda.
"The Conversation" recycles fake news
The Conversation is abusing the authority it derives from its association with universities because it does not apply academic rigor to the articles it publishes. The article I have criticised would go well as an op-ed piece in the property pages of any Australian newspaper, along with the other fake news. In the article’s collage of frequently used population fallacies, nothing justifies the term ‘expert’.
A few years ago I was introduced to Dr. Al Bartlett's "Arithmetic, population and energy" lecture recorded at the University of Colorado , (Boulder) U.S.A. To me, the message was so clear, engaging and logical that no-one could fail to understand it and hopefully none would fail to see the significance.
– He was saying that what may look to be ample reserves , for example, 500 years of coal still in the ground will not last anywhere near that as the demand for that resource increases with exponential population growth.
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