Staging a meaningful protest requires several things, and a large young population is one of the key components. So, what happens when there aren’t enough young people left?
Youth movements have been a driver for massive change across the globe, from politics to war and everything in between. Demographic trends show us that populations are growing older and taking the wind out of the sails of the youth. Countries like the US, Mexico, India, and much of Europe have already eclipsed the “youth protest” phase. We can still listen to For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield…but those days are over.
Sure, there are countries with the youth to protest, but we’re talking about places like Nepal, Madagascar, and Nigeria, which simply don’t move the needle on a global scale.
Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re gonna talk about these Gen Z protests that are bringing down governments, most notably in Nepal and in, Madagascar. And if these are two places that you don’t know much about. You’re not alone. What to keep in mind. Young people protest. Young people bring down governments.
That’s just part of the math. They have less of a stake in the system. They have less experience, and they don’t see the cost to them as a society, and certainly not personally. Now, once you have kids, once you have a mortgage, once you have something to lose, then you have more of a vested interest in, say, reforming the system rather than overthrowing it.
And so when you look at youth protests, you have to make sure that there is a youth to protest. So if you dial back to, say, the 1970s, in the 1980s, the most active student protest movements in the world were in, say, South Korea, where there was a large chunk of the population that was under age 30. If you look around the world today, there aren’t a lot of those places left.
As you industrialize, as you would urbanize, birth rates drop. And so here in the United States, we’re now below replacement levels, while in Europe they’ve been
below replacement levels for 50 years. Places like India and Mexico and Indonesia, Turkey, they all fell below replacement levels even before the United States did. So when you think of a place that matters because they’re economically large or strategically viable, all of these places have kind of aged out of the protest stage.
And what’s left are much younger countries where the birthrate is still falling, but there’s still a substantial percentage of the population that’s below age 25. So we see Nepal and Madagascar. We’re seeing Yemen. We will see places like, Nigeria and maybe even Pakistan fall into that category. But for the most of the world, this youth bulge is long gone.
And so the places where you can or might see youth protests actually change in government structure. They’re becoming fewer and fewer and fewer and places that are less and less important to the wider world.
