Society & Demographics News and Discussions

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Society & Demographics News and Discussions

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Society & Demographics News and Discussions

This thread covers a wide variety of topics including population, employment, cultural trends, life expectancy, drug use, gender and sexual issues, immigration, wealth inequality, death rates, and how these relate to the future.

More specific and indepth coverage of particular subjects will be found in other threads (e.g. technological unemployment, LGBT news, UBI).


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Yuli Ban
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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The U.S. birth rate began dropping years before the pandemic. Here's why
For the sixth year in a row, Americans had fewer children, and births in the U.S. decreased by 4 percent compared to 2019. The new numbers released by the CDC last Wednesday signaled the continuation of a trend that first began following the 2008 recession and has drawn the attention of many demographers and economists in years since.

Despite talk of a possible COVID-19 “baby boom” at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, births declined by about 8 percent from the previous year in December, nine months after the pandemic began.

Economists Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney previously predicted that a “baby bust,” driven by the dual economic and public health crises of the past year, would occur in 2021, forecasting that some 300,000 fewer children would be born next year. Levine told the PBS NewsHour that the decline in births is indicative of a “much larger childbearing problem” going on in the U.S. that is likely to extend well beyond the pandemic. “In the long-term, COVID is going to be a blip,” in this much broader cycle, he said.

But for families who were deciding whether or not to have children over the past year, the coronavirus pandemic felt like more than a blip, and uncertainty surrounding the economy as well as conditions in hospitals spurred many Americans to put off starting or expanding their families.

Even as the U.S. economy turns a corner, several women told the PBS NewsHour that the pandemic exacerbated already-existing anxieties they had about raising children in America, and they’re not certain when they’ll feel equipped to support a family.
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Rich list: Number of UK billionaires jumps by nearly a quarter during pandemic
1 day ago

The wealth of the UK’s billionaires has soared by more than a fifth - despite the pandemic.

The Sunday Times Rich List revealed that there are now a record 171 billionaires in the UK, with Ukranian-born Sir Leonard Blavatnik topping the pile as the richest person in the country.

The number of billionaires jumped by 24 per cent, in stark contrast with the wider economic turmoil of the pandemic which saw millions enter furlough and the rate of unemployment lift to its highest in almost five years.

Wealth among billionaires increased by 21.7 per cent over the year, rising by £106.5 billion to £597.2 billion.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newslond ... ar-AAKeFxp
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Declining birthrates will take the strain off our planet
Thu 20 May 2021

I must take issue with your editorial that seems to suggest that declining birthrates need to be reversed (The Guardian view on declining birthrates: there may be trouble ahead, 16 May).

With climate change and environmental destruction accelerating worldwide, and the obvious reluctance of politicians to spell out to their electorates the economic, lifestyle and societal changes required to tackle this, natural population decline is in fact a golden opportunity for humanity to have its cake and eat it. Can you imagine a planet with only, say, 3 billion people on it, and eventually even fewer? Where everyone could have enough resources to enjoy a clean, high-tech, fulfilling lifestyle, and where the planet’s natural systems had enough space to regenerate themselves once more?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... our-planet
"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

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Machines are taking up the slack as China’s population shrinks
  • China’s factories are turning to automation to upgrade production lines, and at the same time prepare for fewer, higher-skilled workers
  • Chinese manufacturing companies like Midea have already embraced automation to sharply reduce the number of humans needed
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One in seven recipients of SNAP benefits earned associate's or bachelor's degrees, Census Shows
Gripping fresh diplomas from Penn State in 1979, Suzan Neiger Gould and her husband, David Gould, were ready to cash in on the hard work that the world had told them was the price of admission into the middle class.

But it all crashed quickly after David was laid off from his research associate position. Suzan’s part-time job running after-school programs wasn’t enough to support the couple and their baby daughter in their State College home. “We had nothing to fall back on,” said Suzan, now 66, the executive director of Manna on Main Street, an anti-hunger nonprofit in Lansdale. “We ate cheap, almost spoiled food to get by.”

The couple signed up for food stamps, now known as SNAP, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. “Even for two educated individuals like David [now an attorney] and me,” Suzan added, “it was a struggle. ... So many people need the emergency food system.”

A U.S. Census Bureau analysis released earlier this month proved that:

More than one in three adults receiving SNAP had attended at least some college classes, and about one in seven had earned associate’s or bachelor’s degrees in 2017, the year of the most recently available data.

And even among participants in the federal program known as WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children), one in five had college degrees.

There is a “broad socioeconomic range of adults who rely on government assistance,” according to the Census Bureau.

3 million got SNAP benefits

About 3 million college graduates, including 1.6 million bachelor’s degree holders, received SNAP benefits in 2017, according to the Census. When the years 2020 and 2021 are closely studied, that number may well balloon, anti-hunger experts surmise, as so many people with degrees lost their jobs during the pandemic.
[link:https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/one-i ... ar-AAKvyC7|
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^ It's almost like we've allowed ourselves to be plundered to such an extent that we need basic income just to function as a society

COVID-19′s demographic fallout has begun: We have fewer babies, fewer immigrants and more trouble ahead
The COVID-19 pandemic is shifting the shape of population in countries around the world, both in lives lost and in babies not born. We are becoming fewer even faster than before.

More than a year after governments closed borders, shut down businesses and ordered people to stay home, the latest data show significant declines in fertility in some countries – declines that could become permanent. At the other end of life, so many people have died prematurely that life expectancy has gone down in some countries. This pandemic will influence the demographic makeup of countries, including Canada, for years to come.

When lockdowns first arrived more than a year ago, some commentators snarked that all this enforced intimacy would lead to a baby boom. But as we wrote last July, the very opposite was likely to happen. In times of economic insecurity, couples tend to put off having a child until the situation becomes clearer.

And that is what has happened.
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Japan logs record low 840,000 newborns in 2020
The number of babies born in Japan fell to a record low 840,832 in 2020, a year when the nation was hit by the coronavirus pandemic, government data showed Friday.

The figure marked the lowest level since the health ministry started taking such surveys in 1899. It was down 24,407 from the previous year, when the number dipped below 900,000 for the first time.

The data revealed that the trend of rapid aging of the nation’s population is accelerating amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The average number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime declined 0.02 point from 2019 to 1.34, and the number of marriages decreased 73,517 to 525,490, the lowest in the post-World War II era, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

Analysts predict the impact of the pandemic on births will become more severe in 2021, with the number of newborns from January to March this year dropping 9.2% from a year earlier on a preliminary basis.

For the whole of 2021, the number may fall to the 700,000 level, 10 years earlier than the government had projected.
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Italy to have fewer than 400,000 births in 2021
Italy's birth rate is set to continue on a downward trend this year, with births going under the 400,000-mark for the first time in the post-war period, the head of national statistics agency ISTAT said on Friday.
"There were 404,000 births in 2020," ISTAT President Carlo Blangiardo told a conference organized by the Forum of Italian Family Associations.
"It is estimated that there will be between 384,000 and 393,000 in 2021". (ANSA).
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