Aging Gracefully (Unit 9)

The original article, Growing Old, Baby Boomer Style by Tom Valleo can be read online here at WebMD and here at CBS News. It was originally published in 2006. Some things have certainly changed since it was written, such as the predicted worker shortage of 2010.

[Click on the population pyramid on the left to see an animated projection of Japan's past and future population.]

In Japan, Seniors With an Edge was published in 2007 by the NYT. You may need to log in to the NYT to read it online, or read Google's cache of the page.

Read more at Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Be sure to see the animated population pyramid for Japan. They have a full report of Japan's population statistics (pdf).

The demographic transition to a stable industrial population is a centuries-long process that is ongoing in much of the world now.

Note that there are about four million births in the United States annually–only slightly below the peak years of the 1946-1964 Baby Boom.

The U.S. Census Bureau has a database of population information about many other countries of the world, too.

What is the population of the world? Over 6.8 billion in 2010!

Geohive, CensusScope, and the Population Reference Bureau

The Population Reference Bureau is a great site for finding population and statistical information and displaying it. For example, you can find and display the senior fraction of the population, or see a map that displays the projected percentage change in population from 2008-2050. Try visiting the DataFinder part of the site and click on World>Population Trends or World>Economic.

CensusScope is a similar data tool, but it is focused on the United States. The U.S. Age Distribution (or Population Pyramid) i

s shown here. You can find maps of the geography of multiracialism or even where the elderly live.

Geohive is more global-minded than CensusScope, but doesn't have as many graphs, charts, and maps as DataFinder. It still has some unique displays. When will India's population growth push it past China? Around 2030, if the projections are correct. Which countries have the largest populations? Japan is still barely in the top 10, but not for long. Which countries have the largest land area?

Unit 6--Globalization: Two Sides of the Same Coin

An earlier post had a link to a short encyclopedia article on globalization. Unit 6 is a difficult read, but you will find many of the same arguments discussed in the book are repeated in this longer encyclopedia article --and a Japanese version is available. The introduction of Wayne C. McWilliams and Harry Piotrowski's popular textbook, The World Since 1945, is available as a pdf at the publisher's website. An excerpt:

Meanwhile, both superpowers began rearming, and a relentless arms race was soon under way. Each claimed that security—both national and global—lay in military strength, but that the other’s armaments threatened world peace. Thus they justified the building of massive arsenals containing thousands of nuclear weapons far more powerful than the ones used against Japan in 1945. Their arsenals have long since been large enough to destroy each other many times over and possibly extinguish human life on this planet, and yet year after year they continued piling up more weapons, spending at a rate of millions of dollars per day. When they decided to scale back their nuclear arsenals, they found out that the genie was already out of the bottle, that even poor Third World nations had the capability to build and launch them.

The military standoff between the nuclear powers brought about a precarious truce between them, but the rest of the world was not free of war. On the contrary, there have been more than one hundred wars since World War II, and many of these lesser wars, though contained geographically and limited to conventional weapons, carried the potential of igniting a larger conflagration. Indeed, the combatants were all too often clients of the major powers and were armed by them.

Equally dangerous to the safety and well-being of humanity was the growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor, between the industrially advanced nations of the North and the underdeveloped nations of the South. In the South, often referred to as the Third World, one finds the world’s lowest standards of living, lowest economic growth rates, lowest levels of education, lowest rates of life expectancy, and the highest population growth rates and infant mortality rates. Thus, millions of the inhabitants of the Third World are dreadfully impoverished, malnourished, disease-ridden, and unable to live productively and in dignity. Governments of Third World nations struggled, usually ineptly, to lift their countries from such impoverishment, and while some have made marginal progress, many others were merely marking time or slipping even further behind. Many of these countries contracted enormous foreign debts they were unable to pay, and their indebtedness threatened the financial stability of the wealthier nations of the North. Economic failure made the Third World more volatile politically and more vulnerable to intervention and militarization by the superpowers. Nearly every war fought since World War II was fought in Third World countries, and all were fought with weapons supplied by industrialized nations.

You should know a little about the IMF (International Monetary Fund), The World Bank (Wikipedia) The Washington Consensus, The 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, anti-globalization movements, and the main criticisms of globalization. Note that globalization of a sort has been going on for thousands of years (e.g. the Silk Road), and that periods of globalization has alternated with periods of deglobalization, periods when the international flow of people, goods, and money has slowed down.

In the current financial and economic crisis, the largest since the 1930s, our understanding and attitudes toward the financial institutions which caused the crisis, the Washington Consensus, the IMF, and the World Bank may be changing. Some observers have called this the collapse of American capitalism, comparable to the collapse of communism. Time will tell. Others have pointed out that the official response to the crisis in the United States is quite different--even opposite--to the economic austerity that the IMF imposed on the Asian countries in the 1997 currency crisis. Is it hypocrisy or is the US economy so different that it requires different measures to recover?

A whale of a problem

If we are going to discuss whaling in modern Japan, it's useful to know as much as possible about whales, and other cetaceans. Are they intelligent? Are they highly evolved? Are they endangered?

You can read about some general background information about whaling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling

This is the site of Japan's ICR (Institute of Cetacean Research). Controversially, their "research" involves killing and eating whales.
http://www.icrwhale.org/abouticr.htm

Here is the Wikipedia article on the ICR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Cetacean_Research

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has a website that includes current population estimates, sounds, and other information. You could also read about the IWC from the Wikipedia, from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and from the Humane Society.

Greenpeace reports on Japanese whaling on their web site, and Greenpeace Japan has a site as well.

Another group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society calls themselves the "Whales' Navy" and uses direct action and even violence against whaling ships to try to save whales' lives. They were strongly criticized by NHK and other Japanese media.

Unit 1--Globalization: Leaving Babel Behind

Here are some interesting links related to Unit 1--Globalization: Leaving Babel Behind.

Where is English spoken?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

What do you know about the history of English? Why is it a "world language"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

What is meant by "International English"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English

What is globalization?
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization

Worldmapper

Worldmapper is an interesting site, especially for students, teachers, and people who are interested in the world. They have created about 700 maps which display information in a visual, map form. The sizes of countries are distorted to show various kinds of information in a proportional way. This map shows the number of elderly people in the country.

© Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

Other maps show distribution patterns of food, goods, resources, work, income, wealth, health, education, poverty, violence, cause of death, age of death, communication, religion, language, and other measurable qualities. This site also allows you to download high-resolution images, PDFs, Excel or OpenDoc data spreadsheets, and other resources under a Creative Commons license.