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We know how many people are around today, how long they are expected to live, on current trends, and how many kids they are likely to have (similarly, on current trends). So you can get some okay ballpark figures.

And for shorter periods (say, up to 25 years), you can expect to be pretty close to reality given the huge inertia of population aggregates.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Wed Aug 27th, 2008 at 05:38:55 PM EST
Yes, though that would mainly go for endemic population growth / decline. Immigration policy is mainly a matter of the politics.

I'm sure that Germany could manage to get a few hundred thousand net immigrants a year if some effort were to be put in, but it is not desired (for a variety of reasons, some of which are reasonable, some of which aren't).

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Wed Aug 27th, 2008 at 06:00:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Unless you have some kind of black swan event.

And those are more common than one can think of.

Even the fact that we don't have a big war here since 45 is not enough: There was a demographic black swan in Portugal in 74 - The revolution made lots of people to return from Africa (here are talking hundreds of thousands in a country of 10 million - not negligible at all).

Outside of Europe we can still see big demographic movements caused by war (are you really sure we can ignore that happening again here?).

Also, resource constraints might make Europe unpalatable for more emigration (we are densely packed here).

And, by the way, Anglo-disease might the UK less competitive than other EU countries. I actually do believe that the forecast of the UK being the biggest country in population terms is utter bullocks precisely because of this.

by t-------------- on Thu Aug 28th, 2008 at 07:44:22 AM EST
[ Parent ]
There was a huge influx of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe following 1989.
by MarekNYC on Thu Aug 28th, 2008 at 09:21:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You don't have to go for wars and outside Europe. The collapse of the economies (and, arguably, societies) of the post-'communist' countries in the nineties resulted in drastic drops of birth numbers, waves of emigration, and (though maybe this was the weakest effect) reductions in life expectancy.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Mon Sep 1st, 2008 at 03:13:31 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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