criminalizing youth

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Just to restate the point of my last post: there seems to be a resurgence
of demographic explanations, i.e., those that take the size and/or 
composition of the population (however it is partitioned in the
management of populations as statistical objects), to be the fundamentally
explanatory variable of various social phenomena: secular stagnation from
declining population growth; social security crisis from a greying and
more dependent population; anti Keynesianism from a greying population;
social degeneration from higher reproduction rates of racialized
populations (with their lower means to which they putatively regress as a
result of heredity conceived as a natural equilibriating mechanism), etc. 
I am quite uneasy with explanations of economic, social or
political phenomena based fundamentally on changes in the size and/or
composition of the population. But have never thought out what my
criticism really is. Any suggestions?
Yours, Rakesh