A brief note on demographics and sex and fear and envy

I'd like to thank Conrad from Facebook for pointing me to this Asia Times article, " India lost in 'love jihad'". The Indian state of Kerala, with its population both multiconfessional and well advanced in its demographic transition, is seeing some unusual tensions.

As part of an organized campaign, young Muslim men are deliberately luring women from different faiths into marriage so they will convert to Islam, say radical Indian Hindu and Christian groups in south India.

The alleged plot has been dubbed "love jihad". It first surfaced in September, when two Muslim men from Pathanamthitta town in the southwestern state of Kerala reportedly enticed two women - a Hindu and a Christian - into marriage and forced them to convert to Islam.

The women first claimed to have became Muslims voluntarily, but after being allowed back to their parents' houses said they had been abducted and coerced to convert. The men were reportedly members of Campus Front, a student wing of radical Muslim group the Popular Front of India (PFI).

The Pathanamthitta incident was followed by an avalanche of media reports on "love jihad". Some described it as a movement, others claimed that forced conversions through marriage were actually being run by an organization called Love Jihad, or Romeo Jihad.

Hindu and Christian groups have weighed in with their own "facts" on the "love jihad".

The Sri Ram Sene, a fundamentalist Hindu group, now claims thousands of girls were forcibly converted to Islam in the past few years after marrying Muslim men. It says that after conversion the women were "trained in anti-national activities". India's main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has said "love jihadis" have receiving foreign aid - from the Middle East - for the campaign.

Senior Christian leaders are now campaigning against the alleged threat.

"Around 4,000 girls have been subjected to religious conversion since 2005 after they fell in love," Father Johny Kochuparambil, secretary of Kerala Catholic Bishops Council's Commission for Social Harmony and Vigilance, wrote in an article in the church council's newsletter.

One thing that has constantly popped up in scare talk about population trends, not only in the discourses surrounding Eurabia (tackled here and here) and an Islamized India (here) but in relation to other disliked population groups, is the way that the superfecundity and ultratraditional family orientation of these other groups is made an object of fear and envy. The fear comes from a supposed recognition that these outsiders possess a population dynamic that is unstoppable, rooted in an unyielding tradition that is set on the destruction of our culture. The envy, well, it comes from a desire on the part of these terrified commentators to have the old-time family values reinstalled at home, traditional gender relations and economic structures and all. Take the Archbishop of Guam, who recently dispatched a letter praising Islamic fundamentalists, with their fervent belief and attachment to values of family and self-sacrifice, as an example of this sort of phenomenon.

Never mind if the reality fits, of course (people have been known to convert for love, and there are 30 million people in Kerala; methinks a Family Values Panic is ongoing); the threat is at least as effective a way to mobilize followers. Here, claiming that your group's young women are being enticed or worse abducted into the enemy's camp is as good a way of achieving this mobilization as any.

More on Australian population futures

Over at The Australian, that paper's David Uren and Michael Sainsbury report on how Secretary to the Treasury Ken Henry expects Australia's buoyant population profile to help sustain a long boom there.

The world's third-largest economy, which is due to pass Japan to grab second spot next year, saw growth of 7.7 per cent in the first nine months. Its latest figures will all but assure the country of hitting its 8 per cent target for this year.

"China's investment-fuelled recovery has propped up Australia's economy," said Royal Bank of Scotland China economist Ben Simpfendorfer.

Evidence of China's effect on the economy came as departing BHP Billiton chairman Don Argus warned the Rudd government to keep Australia's mineral resources from being snatched by foreign state-owned entities.

Speaking in Melbourne yesterday, Mr Argus said Australia was at risk of following Canada in having much of its natural resources owned by foreign investors.

Dr Henry told a business forum at Queensland University of Technology that the rapid growth in the population, caused by much higher migration and a rise in the fertility rate, had transformed thinking about the impact of population ageing on the economy, and would require large-scale economic and social infrastructure.

He said the projection that the population would rise to more than 35 million people by 2050 implied that Sydney and Melbourne would grow to cities of seven million, while Brisbane would more than double in size to four million.

Sydney's population would rise by 54 per cent, Melbourne's by 74 per cent and Brisbane's by 106 per cent. This would impose challenges for planners, as the cities could not expand simply by increasing their geographic footprints. It would also put pressure on skills training and government services.

A 2006 projection project that the Australian population could rise from 20.3 million to nearly 28 million by 2051. The growth in projected numbers between 2006 and 2009 can be linked to Australia's rising period fertility and growing levels of immigration. A relatively larger Australian population, one that was relatively younger than its other developed-economy peers and hence had a relatively advantageous age structure, would be well-positioned in the global economy.

That assumes that Australians would want that population level. Many Australians are hostile towards the idea of a substantially larger Australian population, not only because the need for extra investment in cities and overcrowding might hurt Australians' quality of life, but because the scarcity of basic resources like water create significant environmental limitations on Australian population growth.

Are Americans Becoming Less Nomadic?

I know that it is eons since I last posted here (thanks to Randy for ever great content), but I want to share this piece with you on declining nomadism amongst Americans; it is written for Newsweek by author Joel Kotkin. I am not quite sure whether he believes the ageing of the population to be the decisive factor contributing to the rise of localism which he speaks about or just a factor among many. I would presume that sociologists and historians could find an explanation for this development in their distinct theoretical tool kits too without invoking the demographic evolution. Although, it is tempting to go for a nostalgic narrative here I don't think this is appropriate. To me, an increase in physical localism could go well hand in hand with an ever greater degree of global integration and social mobility in the non-physical sense.

On almost any night of the week, Churchill's Restaurant is hopping. The 10-year-old hot spot in Rockville Centre, Long Island, is packed with locals drinking beer and eating burgers, with some customers spilling over onto the street. "We have lots of regulars—people who are recognized when they come in," says co-owner Kevin Culhane. In fact, regulars make up more than 80 percent of the restaurant's customers. "People feel comfortable and safe here," Culhane says. "This is their place."

Thriving neighborhood restaurants are one small data point in a larger trend I call the new localism. The basic premise: the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive, even in a downturn. Several factors are driving this process, including an aging population, suburbanization, the Internet, and an increased focus on family life. And even as the recession has begun to yield to recovery, our commitment to our local roots is only going to grow more profound. Evident before the recession, the new localism will shape how we live and work in the coming decades, and may even influence the course of our future politics.

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings.

(...)

After decades of frantic mobility and homogenization, we are seeing a return to placeness, along with more choices for individuals, families, and communities. For entrepreneurs like Kevin Culhane and his workers at Churchill's, it's a phenomenon that may also offer a lease on years of new profits. "We're holding our own in these times because we appeal to the people around here," Culhane says. And as places like Long Island become less bedroom community and more round-the-clock locale for work and play, he's likely to have plenty of hungry customers.

Well worth a look