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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Demographic drivers

In his very well known blog entry " Twenty reasons why it's kicking
off everywhere"
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html]
which you sent me a while ago, Mason lists the very first driver of
current global resistance movements as follows:

"1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate
with no future"

he continues that:

"11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of
the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of
poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic
setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers,
teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and
starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop
and broadband connection."

In this context is it a fait accompli that it is capitalism that has
produced this condition of failure. Could it rather be driven by
demographic factors?
If you look in most post-industrialised western countries their ageing
populations look like this

[http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/d3310114.nsf/home/Population%20Pyramid%20-%20Australia]

could it be that what is driving the lack of opportunity among
educated youth is rather the fact that baby boomers are hanging on to
top jobs beyond the traditional retirement age of say 65 and this
causes a certain bottleneck of oppurtunity being felt by the educated
youth today?

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