Andrew Fischer

In case you missed this piece on Friday (or want to be reminded that humanity is not facing imminent demise), here's your chance to learn why demographers aren't panicking about low birth rates.

As far as I can tell, Japan and South Korea are way ahead of China in per capita terms. Even Germany is ahead. Just the US is behind among those top five.

Yes, the “this is the biggest crisis of the century” crowd annoys the heck out of me. The worst is that it plays into far right Elmo politics.

Good to know. It is just that you cited econ dev and cultural contagion as the reasons, and I thought you were citing the article.

A Demographic Case for a Global South Focus in Development Studies - The European Journal of Development Research Although demographic transitions across the Global South have been progressing towards what might be considered as convergence with the Global North, an understanding of this core socio-structural tra...

I really wish economists would read demographers, realise that they have been showing & saying this for decades, but that it is not fundamentally due to econ dev, but to mortality.

My latest short commentary on this: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I meant that social scientists often complain about the 2 yr IF, that it is biased towards medical & physical sci where things get cited much faster after they are pub’ed. So, there is a pref for the 5-yr bc it gives more time for getting cited. But I find it makes almost no diff to the rankings.

The logic is that it takes longer to get cited in social sciences than in medicine or physical sciences, hence the 5-yr IF is supposed to better capture that.

So, they are averages of sorts, but of very narrow and specific date ranges.

No, the standard JIF is literally: all cites in 2024 (only from other WoS listed journals) of articles published in 2022-23 / # of those articles.

The 5-yr IF is cites in 2024 of articles from 2019-23 / # of those articles.

So both are citations in only one year, but of different date ranges.

Although your explanatory note at the bottom isn’t very precise & gives the impression it is all citations, rather than just citations in one year.

2-year JIF is specifically citations in 2024 to articles published in 2022 & 2023. 5-yr to articles published from 2019-23.

Useful list!

Note that Development and Change @devandchg.bluesky.social, which also publishes a lot of heterodox economics articles, had a JIF of 3.2 this year.

Exactly. Massive outmigration is an expression of how bad the employment situation is, altho it’s also a response to pop pressure at household level, as more children survive to adulthood over several generations. Nepal pop will still grow for a generation, even with fertility below 2.

I think Eric doesn’t realise that populations will continue growing for most of our lifetime even after fertility falls below replacement.

And as long as there is massive room for increasing productive and decently paid employment in the Global South, fertility concerns are not relevant.

Not only that, poor countries have massive underemployment problems, so there is massive room for productive employment gain before any concerns of falling fertility would even become relevant. The strain is political and economic, not demographic.

The Guardian view on Zambia’s Trumpian predicament: US aid cuts are dwarfed by a far bigger heist | Editorial Editorial: As the US decries corruption, a paper suggests the real scandal is multinationals legally extracting billions from Africa’s resource-rich nation

Wonderful to have my research featured in the lead editorial of @theguardian.com, but only because the information is so important to share, about massive transfers of wealth out of Zambia.

They did an amazing job packaging it into 560 words in a way I could never.
@stillwatersrandeep.bsky.social

Haemorrhaging Zambia: Prequel to the Current Debt Crisis Following a stand-off with commercial creditors and protracted but unresolved negotiations with the IMF, Zambia defaulted on its external sovereign debt on 13 November this year. Whi…

Andrew Fischer: We have detected massive outflows of private wealth over the past fifteen years, hidden away on an obscure part of Zambia's financial account. The outflows are most likely related to the large mining companies... developingeconomics.org/2020/11/24/h...

He was also active in the 1980s, chief economist of the world bank. He and Krueger were basically swapping positions back and forth. They were the new guards, in the changing of the guards that was the neoliberal counterrevolution.

Brad Setser says this a lot, with data analysis, but he does it on X not here. E.g., 23 hours ago:

x.com/brad_setser/...

These people need to be told to leave if they don’t like it in First Nations territories.

I thought that’s what you meant, but just wanted to make that point because there is a tradition of exploratory data analysis that is very valid and useful, even while not p-hacking, e.g., for analysing structural trends over time, etc.

I agree there is a huge amount of abuse of statistical methods, bad practice, etc.

But if the critique is extended to non-inferential methodologies (not pretending to be stats), such as in social sciences, then it could come off as Popperian fundamentalism.

Re-sharing this piece b/c one of the problems with pronatalism is that it sees women's reproductive labor as the only possible solution to issues related to population size and structure.

Too many people? Too few people? The intervention point is always women's reproductive labor.

Perspective | Don’t pin the birth rate problem on the birth givers A lot of women don’t want 2.1 kids. We need an economic model in which that’s okay.

"I am curious to know why an economic dilemma, the kind you might expect to be tackled by corporations or governments or NGOs, is instead presented as a dilemma to be solved by uteruses." wapo.st/4cEcfeg

Is our population collapsing? Throwing some cold water on "population panic"

On population collapse, @drjenndowd.bsky.social: "social engineering designed to change this unknown distant future is bound to fail, at potentially high human cost." jenndowd.substack.com/p/is-our-pop...

I call it the Phoenix syndrome.

Just one step away from defending colonialism.

From @adamtooze.bsky.social Chartbook today, quoting Gavekal.

Did they actually to look at EM exchange rates when writing this?

MEX peso & BRA real both depreciated to USD in the last week. Slight appreciation of rand or rupiah, but nothing exciting & after sharp depreciation in case of rand.

Oh dear…

Do you think there is any chance in the run off?

I wondered the same and I agree. It’s also based on the presumption that most investment funding comes from reinvested earnings, although I don’t think US corps work that way.

There is also an issue of assuming the macro investment share is the same as firm level investment, which is problematic.

We will not be out of work just yet!