If Israel’s total fertility rate holds at three, its population will reach 24 million by the end of this century, the United Nations’ population model predicts. And if the low fertility rates prevailing elsewhere hold steady, Israel will have more people under the age of 25 than Turkey, Iran, or even Germany. It will be able to field the largest army in the Middle East. And it will have a thriving high-tech economy, enormous energy resources, and a reliable supply of desalinated water. Israel has a near-optimal mix of economics and demographics, while time is running out for Arab countries that have failed over and over again to rise to the demands of the modern world.
Friday, August 19, 2011
We Shall Overcome
David Goldman in Tablet:
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Sounds good, i already see a greater Israel and the star of david flying over the Suez. Because he is talking about a quadrupling of the population, where will they go? It's already crowded as it is and people are demonstrating because you lack housing.
And if we can believe your tales about Israels excellent bureaucracy, a century isn't long enough to build hundreds of Burj Khalifa type of super skyscrapers.
The only place to turn for the lebensraum will be west into the Sinai, the sojourn was yesterday!
I remember hearing about a recent report that basically said that the dwindling water supply is going to be the next casus belli. You're a water engineer. Is there even going to be enough water to supply all those people?
They will "emigrate" to Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Jordan.
Anon..
It is ridiculous to postulate the population growth rate will stay the same over a long period of time, either for Israel or other countries. Economic collapse, resource shortages, cultural shifts, etc. could all derail a high growth rate, and currently unforeseen good fortune could raise a low one. Goldman is also delusional in thinking that a high Israeli population would fuel a "thriving high-tech economy." Almost all of population growth comes from ultra-Orthodox who discourage their young from studying anything other than Talmud. More likely, Israel would end up with an unsustainable welfare burden if population growth continued at the same rate among that subpopulation. One other problem is that the bolus of young people will eventually age, so 50 years further on, Israel would have giant entitlement funding problems due to the overabundance of geezers.
As Goldman observed, the water supply issue has been solved by Israel through massive desalination. Anyone talking about water wars is ignorant of reality.
Regarding demographic projections, eighty years ahead in the future is too much even for me. I am sure that the Germans, for example, will solve their demographic problem. Regarding Israeli haredi population there is total misconception (even in Israel) that they dont work and are a burden to the State. It is just not true, I meet haredim in every business and factory. Some are very rich.
Regarding Israeli bureaucracy, the situation is much worse than imagined. All of us are in infraction in one way or other, and when recently they wanted to sack the Chief of Staff, they found he had built his house without a permit on "public" land. That is, in the last ten years, he was unable to get the permit. Dubai we are not.
Perhaps the song should be "We shall come".
Anon.
The same Goldman writing as "Spengler" in the Asia Times calls Israel the happiest country on earth.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE13Ak01.html
He shows that Israel is unique among the nations of the world as having both a high birth rate and a low suicide rate. See the graph in the article. Israel is a clear outlier in the 2-dimensional birthrate-suicide plane.
The people of Israel must be optimistic about their future and satisfied with their current life. Having children is all about the future. When a happy person has a child he anticipates all those future milestones. The first day at school. The Bar and Bat Mitzah. The graduations. The wedding. The grandchildren. A happy person looks forward to the future, the miserable person dreads it.
No wonder the Europeans and the Arabs hate the Jews and Israel. The Europeans are dying out. Their future lies in extinction. Islam is a kind of death cult. The Jews have survived 5,000 years where virtually all other groups have withered away. To quote Spengler,
"They [the Jews] are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations."
I dont know. My individual live is not so pleasant and the notion of covenantal life leaves me rather cold. I find Goldman's concept of "eternal life" strange and mystical.
Just because you've met some haredim in business, it is not a total misconception that the haredim are a net burden overall. A high proportion of them do not work in order to study in kollel, and worse, aspiration to do so is encouraged by most of the UO rabbis. Many of them also irresponsibly have so many kids that they cannot support them without public assistance money(i.e. your tax dollars). Kiryas Yoel in NY state has one of the highest population percentages on public assistance in the country. Also, the rag trade or a matzoh factory are quite different from any business requiring real R&D. You still haven't connected the dots plausibly for how a bunch of scientifically ignorant Talmud obsessives are going to sustain a "thriving high-tech economy."
I had the same negative reaction to that comment by Goldman/Spengler when I first read it. He can be a delusional mystic, and his views cannot always be trusted.
Optimism is one of the few delusions which is actually adaptive.
Jews have a lot to be optimistic about. They (you) exhibit intense tribal loyalty, high and inheritable problem-solving ability and a perpetual leadership with an unswerving and even ruthless dedication to the well being of the group, and its long-term interests.Intense debate is not generally seen as conflict, but as a normal component of problem resolution and truth-seeking.
WASPs, on the other hand, are more individualistic, fractious, violent and prone to exploit and compete with each other. Paradoxically, and as a compensation, WASPs have evolved control mechanisms that make for compliance and gullibilty en mass, and are aggressively conditioned to trust their own leadership. Witness our media, for instance. High intelligence and scepticism occur, of course, but usually serve to isolate the individual even more.
Our Western leadership, often comprising our people, and which is currently acting to exploit and cheat its own population, sees only the compliance and the gullibility, and not the beast snarling under the bed.
One can only hope and pray that they wake up, remember who they are, where they come from and who they are meant to be representing.
You guys can pull off an Israel, but we can not pull off a Rhodesia, and in fact cannot even prevent our own territories being sold out beneath our feet.
It is right you are optimistic, and we are not.
Anon.
"They (you) exhibit intense tribal loyalty,"
Fuck you, liar.
Jews are not tribal.
It isn't necessary to be so hostile to Anon. He does overestimate the intra-group loyalty of Jews, but his intentions don't seem hostile. I do wish he could see that most of us get basically nothing from our fellow Jews and that there isn't a united Jewish leadership at either a religious or political level. Jews don't all agree about the religion, and we non-Israeli Jews don't accept dictates from the Israeli government.
There is nothing derogatory intended in the use of the word "tribal" and one often encounters the term in the context of the "12 tribes of Israel". It just means your own people; we are also tribal in that sense, and so is just about everybody else.
Certainly the perception of mutual self-help might be exaggerated, but my main point is that you do not sell each other out. This is a strength and not a weakness, and at a broad, societal level we would do well to imitate that.
Anon.
"Certainly the perception of mutual self-help might be exaggerated, but my main point is that you do not sell each other out."
?
Jews stab other Jews in the back all the time.
Look at Madoff or anti-Zionist Jews such as MJ Rosenberg.
Yes, but it is unusual, and there is, I believe, less propensity to destroy your own group's future for short-term private profit, or egregious moral sanctimony.
One could also perhaps acknowledge that some of the proponents of the Israel academic boycott appear to be Jewish. Perhaps George Soros might be a candidate as well. Furthermore, there does appear to exist a leftwing suicide lobby within Israel itself, but outside the universities, it looks ineffectual.
I guess that what I intend to convey is that Jews are in general better stewards of their national future than we are of ours; both because Jews are less easily manipulated by faux-guilt, and because they are in a more precarious position demographically and geographically.
As things get worse for gentile whites, which is just a short matter of time, I hope we too will discover these virtues.
Anon.
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