criminalizing youth

[Max Sawicky]

RB
> 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?

All those are bogus.  There is no stagnation.  Japan is in a bad recession.
The U.S. isn't.  The EU has a contractionary monetary policy, not too many
old people.  There is no social security crisis.  I'm not sure what
"anti keynesianism from a greying population" means; and the social
degeneration thing sounds like a right-wing theory that has so many
things wrong with it that there isn't enough time to explicate it all.

mbs