Excellent, this is an ideal case study for geography teachers, teaching about population and development. I will share with my geography teacher groups.
Hi, Antowan- Excellent article! A couple of comments:
- Yes, you hit the nail on the head. For China, a large youth population was a tremendous boon, enabling the fastest economic growth in history. For Pakistan and other countries that have much higher population growth than growth in jobs, high fertility leads to disaster. What enabled China to harness the human capital that resided in their youth? Job creation and investment in human capital (education). What enabled them to manage this? Strong governance, oriented strongly toward national economic growth. There is reason to say that good governance needs to come first, as the prerequisite for all the rest -- this is what Pakistan lacks. And it is hard for it to achieve that, because of national disunity -- largely as a result of Islamism. I would argue that Islamism, in a way parallel to Christian nationalism in the US, is a kind of populist rebellion against a long history of unwillingness on the part of elites to improve the situation of the lower classes. People hope/believe that Islam will make them better off culturally, but also more prosperous, as with US Christian nationalism. Unfortunately it is not true. In China Communism provided a revolutionary fervor that was eventually under Deng Xiaoping applied to making the nation more prosperous for its citizens. People believed the government was working for them. In South Korea national prosperity began as a rightwing dictatorship that nevertheless demonstrated that it was dedicated to the project of rebuilding the nation for the sake of the Korean people, so they worked hard to make it a reality. In Pakistan, and to a worrisome extent in the US, the population does not trust the government to be on the side of the people -- and largely for good reason.
Excellent, this is an ideal case study for geography teachers, teaching about population and development. I will share with my geography teacher groups.
Thanks, im glad you found it insightful. I love geography and try to draw from the field when and where I can.
Hi, Antowan- Excellent article! A couple of comments:
- Yes, you hit the nail on the head. For China, a large youth population was a tremendous boon, enabling the fastest economic growth in history. For Pakistan and other countries that have much higher population growth than growth in jobs, high fertility leads to disaster. What enabled China to harness the human capital that resided in their youth? Job creation and investment in human capital (education). What enabled them to manage this? Strong governance, oriented strongly toward national economic growth. There is reason to say that good governance needs to come first, as the prerequisite for all the rest -- this is what Pakistan lacks. And it is hard for it to achieve that, because of national disunity -- largely as a result of Islamism. I would argue that Islamism, in a way parallel to Christian nationalism in the US, is a kind of populist rebellion against a long history of unwillingness on the part of elites to improve the situation of the lower classes. People hope/believe that Islam will make them better off culturally, but also more prosperous, as with US Christian nationalism. Unfortunately it is not true. In China Communism provided a revolutionary fervor that was eventually under Deng Xiaoping applied to making the nation more prosperous for its citizens. People believed the government was working for them. In South Korea national prosperity began as a rightwing dictatorship that nevertheless demonstrated that it was dedicated to the project of rebuilding the nation for the sake of the Korean people, so they worked hard to make it a reality. In Pakistan, and to a worrisome extent in the US, the population does not trust the government to be on the side of the people -- and largely for good reason.
- Also, the idea that a US fertility rate of 1.6 is "too low" is debatable. Humans and their livestock and domestic animals make up 95% of all mammalian biomass on Earth. This is a railroad train running directly at human (and many other species) survival on this planet. We really do have to give up on increasing the human population of this planet. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass?utm_source=OWID+Newsletter&utm_campaign=700cc5fbd2-owid-brief-2025-12-12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-0c7f305164-515551285