Intractable problems of race and demography

Most societies are terrible at integrating minorities into their population. Just today there are two bad stories in our papers. We can easily imagine many more but we often only get to read or see it when it blows up.

Integration is so challenging, these societies might as well stop taking in people of other race and religion. It seems that the only safe to admit sort are the global citizens who are highly educated and mobile knowledge workers.

Myanmar is extraordinarily cruel to limit Rohingyas Muslims to two children per family. Only Pharoah of the Bible was more cruel when the Hebrews out produce the Egyptians.

Closer to home didn't Mahathir had a long term strategy to shrink the ratio of the Chinese in Malaysia. Alas he ran out of time. There are fewer Malaysian Chinese now but still enough to assert themselves powerfully.

Further away in Israel, Arab Muslim Israelis are also out producing the Jews. This will change the balance of power eventually. Israel's military, economic and technological superiority is unsustainable. Demographics is destiny and the world will have a real time experiment in Japan to draw important lessons.

At home, of course we can accommodate 7 million people but we will not because we have the wrong leaders taking us there. Our leaders would not try hard enough to make sure that the quality of life for most of us would get better despite the population squeeze. Worse, they have a blase attitude about integrating foreigners with the local population. They ignore the failures they see elsewhere. Today there are two sharp examples. Among the elite, one was callous and dumb enough to articulate that uncaring attitude. Ex SMRT CEO, Saw Phaik Hwa had famously retorted, "People can board the train - it is whether they choose to." With such an atas attitude, why would we back this bunch of leaders to a 7 million people society? No where could I find Peter Ong, the head of civil service shows that he gets it either. To them we exists in spreadsheets, powerpoint slides and may be computer models. So even if we have a different government in charge, the admin service leaders wouldn't change. The 7 million people idea is dead in the water. Many of our problems would not be solved. Those who disagree don't know how wishful they are. They are only seeing part of the larger picture.