EconAir

  INTRODUCTION   Japan gets special consideration because it is further along the demographics declining population curve than any other large country. Unless there are major changes in healthcare technology, immigration, public policy, and birth rates, most industrialized countries will follow Japan down the path of declining and aging populations, and smaller labor forces. Japan's demographics and immigration have become major political issues. In the July 2025 elections, two right-wing parties made substantial gains against the long-ruling Liberal  Democracy Party. Two of their main issues were the rapid rise of immigration and the repeal of a 10% consumption tax used to pay for the rising costs of supporting the aged. Both parties appealed to young voters.     PROJECTIONS   Japan’s current (2024) population is around 122 million people. This is the 15 th  year of population decline, down from a high of 128 million. The yearly decreases so...

    Otto von Bismarck   The recent excellent histories on the factors leading up to World War One don’t go back far enough in time.   The main contention of this essay is that the road to World War One begins with the long-run consequences of the policies and strategies of Otto von Bismarck and the way he created the First German Reich in 1871.   The heart of the Treaty of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) was the “Holy Alliance,” an agreement of the monarchs of Russia, Prussia (later Germany) and Austria (later Austria-Hungary) to stamp out any return to the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution. The three monarchies cooperated until the Crimean War.   The Crimean War (1853-56) was triggered by Russian attempts to expand its influence around the Black Sea, force the Ottoman Empire to allow Russian warships through the Dardanelles and increase influence in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire retreated. To keep Russia bottled u...

Kaiser Wilhelm INTRODUCTION Some historians believe that the twentieth century began with World War I.  But how did World War I begin? The horrors of Europe’s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, "the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang." The consequences lasted at least until 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union, which may mark the end of the twentieth century.  But the immediate cause of the war – instability and wars in the Balkans – reappeared again with the breakup of Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, which was created after World War I. Rivalry among nations over influence in the Central European "borderlands" continues. Violence in the Middle East is partly a result of the arbitrary national boundaries drawn up by French and British imperialists during World War I. The economic dislocations caused by Wo...