EconAir

    Demographic Issues   This is a summary of the essays in this blog on demographic projections.    It is not only the arc of population increases and then decreases that is important. It is what happens under the arc. Birth rates fall below replacement, the number of births go down, the size of the labor force decreases while the number of retired people go up. Eventually, the number of older citizens start to go down and the total population decreases faster and in larger numbers. This scenario happens in an increasing number of countries and then for the global population.   The demographic projections and discussion in this blog are based on the Lancet projections of birth rates and population using 2017-2020 data. Forecasts for global trends and for some countries have changed since the Lancet projections. The key projection is birth rates for each country, for geographical regions, and for the entire world.   But how good are estimates of future...

  Immigrants and their children account for a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs and CEOs of technology companies. Half of the graduate students in engineering, math and science in US universities are foreigners. In the past, a high percent stayed in the United States after graduation. Immigrants are founders or current CEOs of most of America’s leading tech companies. (Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, AMD, Intel)   The economic impact and importance of companies founded by immigrants or their children. More than 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies in 2025 (231 out of 500) were founded by immigrants or their children, including: 109 companies founded by immigrants. 122 companies founded by children of immigrants. Among the 14 companies that appeared on the Fortune 500 list for the first time this year, 10 were founded by immigrants or their children. In fiscal year 2024, these 231 Fortune 500 companies generated $8.6 trillion in revenue—an amount that, if compared with ...

  I am forwarding an article that appeared in The Economist in 2022, followed by my comments and a little humor. Love the cartoon.   American government is no match for global warming Jun 9th 2022 Even before it started raining, there were puddles by the roadside in the Little River area of Miami. Then the heavens opened and on June 3rd, the puddles became pools. It was a timely display of the process his guide was in the middle of explaining. “Sea-level rise, as I was saying, is not our only source of inundation,” Katherine Hagemann, head of climate adaptation for Miami-Dade County, noted drily. The threat Miami faces from rising sea-level is well-known. The seas off South Florida have risen by almost a foot (30cm) in a century, more than the global average. Parts of Miami are close to sea-level, so prone to flooding at high tide. As the ice sheets melt, another couple of feet of sea-level rise is expected by 2060; perhaps six by 2100. Yet this calamity is only h...