criminalizing youth

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Mon Sep 20 19:55:56 PDT 1999


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



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list