Showing posts with label Demographics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Demographics. Show all posts

Friday, March 2, 2012

BBC searches for 50-plus female newsreader



By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor 
5:57PM BST 24 Sep 2009


The BBC is at the centre of a fresh ageism row after announcing plans to hire a female newsreader aged 50-plus, only to be warned it would be breaching employment law.

Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, has asked news bosses to contact talent agents who have older women on their books. The recruitment drive follows the public backlash against the sacking of Arlene Phillips, the Strictly Come Dancing judge.

The BBC was heavily criticised for dispensing with female newsreaders Anna Ford, 65, and Moira Stuart, 60.


Moira Stuart was dropped by the BBC in 2007 

Ford left in 2006, saying that she feared "being shovelled off to a graveyard shift" if she remained.


Stuart was dropped in 2007 and Thompson was forced to defend the decision, saying it had nothing to do with ageism and arguing that the traditional newsreader role was dying out.


Dame Joan Bakewell, the broadcaster and government advisor on age issues, met with Thompson recently and said she was "really gratified" by the BBC's decision.


"I said there was a conspicuous absence of older women - of all the segments in society - that isn't seen. We get lots of jowly, white-haired men - that's no inhibitor of employment for them - but [age] seems to have been an eliminator for women until now."

However, employment lawyers said the new policy flouted age and sex discrimination laws. Jill Andrew of Dawsons LLP said: "The BBC seems to have got itself in a real pickle over this. Employers cannot specify that they are looking for someone of a particular gender or age. A young, up-and-coming male newsreader could have every right to feel aggrieved.

"Age discrimination applies to younger people being treated less favourably than older people, just as it does the other way around.

"The BBC is trying to redress an imbalance but you cannot correct an injustice by creating another injustice. It seems like a blatant attempt by the BBC to close the stable door after the horse has bolted.

"There is no compensation ceiling for discrimination cases. Should the BBC find itself in front of an employment tribunal, they and ultimately the taxpayer could face a hefty bill."

It is unlikely that the recruitment drive will herald a return for Ford or Stuart, as neither have been approached by the BBC. It is thought bosses will look to radio or local television news for a new star.

Agents were sceptical about the announcement. Sue Ayton, who represents a number of current and former news presenters, said: "If the BBC are really doing this I am absolutely delighted, but if it's not a stunt then the BBC will have to change some of their views across the board.

"They say they are reaching out to find people, but they have the likes of Angela Rippon and Jennie Bond right under their noses. Both are journalists with years of experience and they are doing programmes for BBC daytime. If the BBC means what it says, why not put them back in primetime?"

A BBC spokesman said there were a number of 50-plus female presenters at the corporation, citing Kirsty Wark, the Newsnight presenter, Martha Kearney, host of Radio 4's The World at One, and Maxine Mawhinney, who presents the BBC One weekend bulletins.

"We are always looking to make sure we have the best presenters on BBC News representing a wide range of ages and backgrounds, including older women," the spokesman said.

"News has a pretty good story to tell with Kirsty Wark, Martha Kearney and Maxine Mawhinney all flourishing, as well as highly experienced women out in the field like Bridget Kendall, Caroline Wyatt and Orla Guerin.

"However, we'd be the first to say that it's important not to rest on our laurels in this area and ensure we reflect the public we serve. And of course this isn't an issue just for the BBC - other broadcasters face the same challenges."


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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Trends: Demographics & Investment Trends


Matthew Lynn's London Eye
Matthew Lynn
Nov. 2, 2011, 12:00 a.m. EDT

7 billion reasons markets will change direction

Commentary: Five trends for investors to watch as population grows

LONDON (MarketWatch) — The markets may be full of their usual noise — another twist to the Greek tragedy, poor growth figures, a central bank somewhere printing some more money — but sometimes it is worth raising your eyes above all the day-to-day chatter and concentrating on the really important things that are happening in the world.
When the history books get written, 2011 won’t be remembered particularly for the overthrow of Col. Gadhafi in Libya, nor for the endless wrangling over the future of the euro, or even for the United States losing its triple-A rating, even though all of those events may manage to merit a footnote.
Click to Play

7 billionth person born in Philippines

Hospital workers and family welcome a newborn in the Philippines as the world population reaches 7 billion. (Video, photo: Reuters)
By far the more significant thing to happen in 2011 was the world’s population smashing through the 7 billion barrier — as it did on Monday, according to United Nations calculations.
The world’s population is exploding. How is that likely to impact on the global economy and markets in the next two decades? The West will decline in importance, Africa will rise in significance, commodities will get steadily more expensive, and the world will become more mobile. Despite all that, growth will resume, even if there will be some terrifying bumps along the way.
The world’s population has been on a steep upward trend ever since the industrial revolution taught us how to support more and more people on a planet that doesn’t get any bigger.
It took us from the beginning of time until 1922 to get up to 2 billion people, but these days we add the odd billion to the total faster than the Greeks run up their national debt. We went over 6 billion in 1999, so it has only taken 12 years to add the latest 1,000 million. According to U.N. estimates, by time we reach the end of this century, there will be 10 billion of us.

Reuters
The planet is getting crowded, but there are still opportunities to make money, as these commuters in Hanoi can attest.
In the end, economics is just demographics, with some extra charts and equations. How many people there are in the world impacts fundamentally on what gets made, what gets consumed, and how much you have to pay for it.
So what will be the medium-term impact of the fast-rising numbers of people? Here are five big trends to watch.
One, the decline of the West will accelerate. Europe and the U.S. will account for a smaller and smaller percentage of global population. They may be richer overall, if they follow the right policies, but they won’t be richer compared to the rest of the world, and they probably won’t feel better off either. Their influence will decline, and so will their currencies, as well as their bond and stock markets. Is a world with 7 billion people in it going to use the money of a country with 312 million people as its reserve currency? It doesn’t sound very likely.
Two, Africa will rise and rise in significance. The fastest increases in population will be in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that most investors and companies have mistakenly written off as a basket case. Not so. That is where the fastest growth will be. Industrialization and a rising population are a formidable combination, a lesson that has been proved many times over the last three centuries. They produced rapid growth in the past, and will do again. Some of the biggest winners of the next three decades will be the African markets, and the companies and investors who get into those counties on the ground floor.
Three, the pressure on resources will grow and grow. You don’t have to be a fully-fledged Malthusian to realize natural resources will get scarcer. For three centuries now, technical progress and human ingenuity have allowed us to continually out-wit the prophets of ecological doom. We are good at finding new resources in unexpected places, and at making what we have go further. We’ll carry on being good at that. Even so, there are limits. The rise in population will mean there is less food, less water, less energy, and fewer minerals to go round. That can only mean one thing. Prices will go up. We’ll learn how to live with that — but the bull market in commodities will run and run.
Four, mobility will rise. The developed world will have lots of old people, with plenty of money, but not many young people to look after them. The developing world will have lots of young people, but few well-paid jobs. It isn’t hard to see the fix to that — bring the young people to the old people, and vice-versa. The rapidly aging populations of Europe and Japan, and to a lesser extent the U.S., will all have to overcome their reservations over large-scale immigration. Increasingly, retired people will go and live in the developing world, where the meagre returns on the savings and their devalued pensions, will buy them a lot more than in the countries where they grew up. The world will see mass migration on a 19th-century scale — when huge swathes of the European population moved to the U.S. And every industry — from airlines, to telecoms, to property — involved in that will do well.
Five, growth will get growing again. True, there are lots of challenges ahead. There is too much debt. The currency system is in turmoil. Inequality is rising. Stocks seem stuck in a permanent bear market. But, at the simplest level, more people means a lot more stuff being bought and sold. Which means when that 7 billionth person starts looking for a job sometime in the 2030s, the world economy will be a lot bigger than it is now, and probably richer overall as well.
The markets will rise and fall as they always do, But so long as the human race is still expanding, it will always end up growing somehow. Keep those big themes in mind and your portfolio will remain in decent shape, even if there will be some inevitable bumps along the way. 

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Monday, October 31, 2011

2011: #7,000,000,000 Baby Born


"7 billionth" babies celebrated worldwide


    October 31, 2011 5:15 AM


Newborn Danica Camacho, the Philippines' symbolic seven billionth baby, as part of the United Nations' seven billion global population projection, lies on her mother's chest in the Fabella Maternity hospital in Manila, Oct. 31, 2011. (AP)
(CBS/AP)  
MANILA, Philippines - Countries around the world marked the world's population reaching 7 billion Monday with lavish ceremonies for newborn infants symbolizing the milestone and warnings that there may be too many humans for the planet's resources.
While demographers are unsure exactly when the world's population will reach the 7 billion mark, the U.N. is using Monday to symbolically mark the day. A string of festivities are being held worldwide, with a series of symbolic 7-billionth babies being born.
The celebrations began in the Philippines, where baby Danica May Camacho was greeted with cheers and an explosion of photographers' flashbulbs at Manila's Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital. She arrived two minutes before midnight Sunday, but doctors say that was close enough to count for a Monday birthday.
The baby received a shower of gifts, from a chocolate cake marked "7B Philippines" to a gift certificate for shoes.
"She looks so lovely," the mother, Camille Galura, whispered as she cradled the 5.5-pound baby, who was born about a month premature.
The baby was the second for Galura and her partner, Florante Camacho, a struggling driver who supports the family on a tiny salary.
Dr. Eric Tayag of the Philippines' Department of Health said later that the birth came with a warning.
"Seven billion is a number we should think about deeply," he said.
"We should really focus on the question of whether there will be food, clean water, shelter, education and a decent life for every child," he said. "If the answer is 'no,' it would be better for people to look at easing this population explosion."
Demographer Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University echoed that concern in an interview with CBS News correspondent Russ Mitchell, warning that rapid population growth, "makes almost every other problem more difficult to solve."
"If we could slow our growth rate, we have an easier job in dealing with all the other things like education, health, employment, housing, food, the environment and so on," Cohen told CBS News.
Click on the video player below to see the full interview with Cohen:

Last week, CBS Evening News reported how researchers with The National Geographic had averaged out the characteristics of the world population to come up with a "typical person."
The National Geographic researchers found nine million people who had the most in common. They overlayed the faces of 190,000 of them to create one image: Earth's everyman.
The average person is Han Chinese so his ethnicity is Han. He is 28 years old. He is Christian. He speaks Mandarin. He does not have a car. He does not have a bank account.
So CBS News went looking for that guy. We called and emailed Chinese-American groups around the country for help. And one of them led us to Main Street, in Queens, New York, and Mu Li.
National geographic researchers averaged the world's population to come up with a composite image of the most typical person in the world. CBS News found someone who fits the bill: Mu Li, a Han Chinese immigrant living in New York City,
National geographic researchers averaged the world's population to come up with a composite image of the most typical person in the world. CBS News found someone who fits the bill: Mu Li, a Han Chinese immigrant living in New York City,
(Credit: CBS/National Geographic)
He arrived five months ago from Chong Qing, a southwest China mega-city of 28 million people. Li is working in New York as a reporter for the People's Daily, China's state newspaper.
Li is Han Chinese. Mandarin is his first language. And he recognizes the universality of his personal profile.
"I have a common face, a common background. Suddenly you realize, you say, 'Wow, you are the most typical person in the world,'" Li said.
Li fits other criteria. He's right-handed, works in a service industry, lives in a city, owns a cell phone, but no car.
We showed him National Geographic's composite image, and he admits he sees himself in it, chuckling at the suggestion that he may be better looking.
Li's reign as Earth's Everyman will not last long. Earth's population could reach 8 billion people in 2026. By then, the most typical human, will be from India.




Illustrative infographic by Jorn van Dooren about birth of world’s 7 billionth inhabitant. With around 75,000 births per day India has the highest chance of any country to reach the population milestone





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10/31/2011 @ 10:32AM |128 views

7 Billion Reasons Malthus Was Wrong


+ Comment now
Via WikimediaYou’d think after 200 years, folks would eventually say, “That Malthus guy? Kind of wrong.” Yet, with the (projected) birth today of the world’s 7 billionth occupant, there’s no shortage of media hand-wringingabout the dim prospects of our world from here.
Thomas Malthus is famous (or infamous, depending on your view) for his belief that human population growth would outpace food production—and fast—which would lead to societal ruin. He was downright dismissive of the idea of “unlimited progress” in food production.
Can there be “unlimited progress” in food production? Not sure. But Malthus would never imagine that, with 6 billion more people than in his day, we have a holiday dedicated to handing total strangers handfuls of free food. Utterly non-nutritional food at that!
You can’t really blame Malthus for getting this so wrong. Long-term forecasts are right devilish. Example, the London Times columnist who predicted in 1894 that by 1950, London would be buried under 9 feet of manure likely died before he could have any egg on his face. (Though, no doubt, he had enough time to surmise that the horse-dropping build-up was going awfully slowly.) There was no way for him to know in a few short years, the combustion engine would make horse-drawn transport a cute relic for honeymooners.
And that’s how these long-term forecasts go. The peak oil date certain (the point at which oil production hits an apex and starts falling) has come and gone multiple times over the past decades. Yet, since the concept of “peak oil” was first popularized by Marion Hubbert in 1956, the amount of oil we produce has increased vastly. So too has the amount of known reserves in the ground. There was just no way for him to predict we’d be drilling in thousands of feet of water—or “fracking”! (Heck, in 1956, “frack” was still what polite Dads said after their thumbs got in the way of their hammers.) Or that we’d even have the technology to find the oil (or gas) to deep-water drill (or frack).
The popular 1968 book the Population Bomb posited that in the 1970s, hundreds of millions would starve to death. The theory was that if food production is growing at X rate and the population growing at much faster Y rate, that could pose quite a problem. But then, along came Norman Borlaug, who invented high-yielding, disease-resistant dwarf wheat. (Thank goodness Norman’s mom wasn’t a Malthusian.) Now, dwarf wheat may make those who shun “frankenfoods” mad, but it also meant the emerging world’s burgeoning populations didn’t all starve.
(Not too mention that sticky question, if you buy whole-hog into Malthus’s [long-disproven] concept, of how exactly you get the population to that lower, appropriate level. Let’s move on.)
I don’t care what it’s on—economies, capital markets, wheat yields, hemline trends—long-term forecasts are fraught with peril. And ones that underestimate humanity’s ingenuity and ability to problem-solve are particularly faulty. Yes, pockets of the world face famine—usually in regions with corrupt, despotic governments. But overall, the world hasn’t outgrown its ability to feed itself. Someone invented the steel plow, the tractor, the threshing machine, better fertilizers. Handily, someone also discovered penicillin, the pasteurization process, the Polio vaccine and DDT so we have a better shot at getting past age 5. (And the iPhone too, so we can live, not starve and be entertained all the while.) Malthus didn’t think about the iPhone anymore than he thought about dwarf wheat or the MMR vaccine. That doesn’t make him a bad person, just rather unimaginative.
And while global population has grown, life expectancies keep increasing, quality of life keeps improving, and per capita GDP keeps expanding. So bring on number 8 billion! (Malthus will still be wrong then.)
This constitutes the views, opinions and commentary of the author as of October 2011 and should not be regarded as personal investment advice. No assurances are made the author will continue to hold these views, which may change at any time without notice. No assurances are made regarding the accuracy of any forecast made. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in stock markets involves the risk of loss.

Population infographic Kate Snow



Explanatory infographic by Kate Snow. Population sizes of Russia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia for 2011 an 2031 – compared to respective land mass. Illustration for article about the three upcoming population giants. (Meanwhile the Russian population is in decline.) 
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