Profs & Pints DC: Demography as Destiny

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Demography as Destiny,” on understanding the links between population trends and world events, with John Rennie Short, geographer, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Demography and the Making of the Modern World: Public Policies and Demographic Forces.

The size of a family doesn’t just affect food and clothing budgets and space needs. If it reflects a broader trend in birth rates, it also can have a profound impact on politics, the economy, and world affairs.

Come to Washington D.C.’s Penn Social for a fascinating look at how demographic forces shape the modern world and have driven developments such as the Arab Spring, political unrest in Sri Lanka and Nepal, economic growth in Vietnam and India, the budget crisis in the United States, and the rise of nationalist populism in Europe.

Dr. John Rennie Short, who has written several acclaimed books on world trends and gives excellent Profs and Pints talks focused on geopolitical affairs, will break down how various demographic changes can alter nations’ destinies.

You’ll learn how baby booms can dampen economic growth, as has occurred in central Africa, and how a “youth bulge” caused by the aging of a baby boom provides tinder for social unrest, as happened in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s and is the case today in Nepal and Sri Lanka.

We’ll look at the “demographic dividend” reaped when a youth bulge ages enough to become economically productive and the roles that such dividends played in periods of sustained economic growth in Japan, China, and, most recently, Vietnam. We’ll look at how the aging of a demographic bulge into retirement years can strain national budgets and strengthen the appeal of conservative or populist political movements.

You’ll emerge from the talk better equipped to make sense of political and economic developments in the United States and elsewhere around the world. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.