Seriously.

Here’s a guy that earned his money the old fashioned way. He married it.

As far as his new book, sure thing.

Some of the “free lunch” myths of recent history were:
• Bankers can make unrealistic mortgages on overpriced houses and nobody gets hurt because they’re bundled and securitized.
• The dot-com economy is a totally new phenomenon and immune to the business cycle or needing to create profits.
• We can make cutting taxes an end in itself and not damage our economy or society.
• We can endlessly build highways, bridges and airports and never have to pay to maintain them.
• We can encourage gas guzzling cars and 4,000 sq foot houses without becoming dangerously dependent on oil.
• The collapse of the Soviet Bloc means we can relax and be lazy.
• The proper reaction to 9/11 is to go shopping.
• Global warming is an unproven theory and can therefore be ignored.
Of course there are dozens more.

All of these chickens are coming home to roost at once. Nothing will “Get Us Out Of All This”. We’ll have to do it ourselves. Hopefully, Obama’s election is a sign that we’re realizing this. But it’s a first small step, not the solution itself.

Richard’s ideas of the Creative Economy are important to the future, but that economy is growing in the context of today’s other realities — financial crisis, global warming, energy shortages, etc. Hopefully it’s not lost in the shuffle but is seen as part of a solution.

I mean, the singularity is near, right?

I didn’t buy the book with the whole study and am certainly not an expert on UK or European populations. However I know Neil Howe is a respected demographer, so if it’s in the original study there’s probably some scholarship behind it. This is just what was in the newspaper article, it could be a misquote(??).

Maybe I shouldn’t have included that sentence, since it has little bearing on the main point about aging societies.

That is utterly, utterly farcical.

I’ve read many demographic predictions that state that Birmingham will be the first major city in the EU where whites make up a minority by 2020. That’s a statement about ethnicity, not religion.

In the 2001 census, 2.7% of the UK population were Muslim. London (not Birmingham) has the highest proportion of Muslims at 8.5%. Even if this doubled by 2030 as the article suggests, that makes 17%, not 51%. (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/ethnicity.asp#religion)

Unless a lot of white people covert to Islam, it is fanciful and dangerous to publish (and re-post) such ridiculous analysis: what has religion got to do with ageing populations other than pandering to prejudices, extremists, and bigots?