GIVE ME YOUR POOR

by admin Comment Closed
Life offers few certainties but there are surely advantages to being a demographer and a country bumpkin. It makes you less cynical where most people are, and more cynical where trepidation is expected. The good place to start this essay is to say that I self-identify as a country bumpkin for a good reason. There are just three places I lived in and know well. Just three. One is a godforsaken location in the South-West of today’s Russia that might as well remain nameless, who cares after all..? Is it not just bears drinking vodka and playing balalaikas there? Another one is the majestic Jerusalem, second to none, I might have been born there if not the Romans. None of them prepared me for the third, and so far, the last: the South of England, the United Kingdom. Cambridge, to be precise. There are other small stations in the middle but they matter less for the purpose of this story. When...
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COVID-19 and fertility

by admin Comment Closed
COVID-19 pandemic for demographers was what the 9/11 events in the US were for experts in the Middle Eastern affairs. A sudden upgrade from an esoteric and who-knows-how-useful discipline to something actually interesting. At first, the focus was on mortality, understandably so. The concept of ‘excess mortality’ started travelling across publications read by ‘normal people’ and the humanity learned that the ‘force of death’ is (a) quantifiable and (b) obeys certain rules. Which also means that the effects of the pandemic could be captured in numbers and compared across countries, ethnic groups and medical systems. A small step for demographers themselves but a big step for humanity. So far so good. COVID-19 pandemic is over, at least the governments across the enlightened world decided that it is…and when the Government says, pandemic stop, is it not?….Irrespective of that, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are not over. It is now the turn of fertility, not mortality, to come under scrutiny. What...
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