The [Vienna] Circle listed Ramsey in their Manifesto of 1929 as one of those ‘sympathetic’ to their mission, and this is still a frequently expressed opinion. But it simply isn’t true. Ramsey, young as he was, pulled against Russell, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, who at the time were engaged in a quest for certainty and purity. In contrast, Ramsey sought conceptions of truth and knowledge that had their basis in what would work best for human beings. He called himself a ‘pragmatist’, after the founder of the American tradition of pragmatism, Charles S Peirce (1839-1914). While Peirce too was committed to taking experience seriously, and to declaring abstruse metaphysics meaningless, he thought that truth was what would best fit with human experience and knowledge – a conception of truth miles away from the reductionist theory typified by the Vienna Circle.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-trut
By 2050, the statistics agency estimates, 15-64-year-olds could make up little more than half of Italy's total population, or 54.2 percent. That would be a drop of around 10 percent from an already low level today, or more than 6 million fewer potential workers, with potentially drastic consequences for productivity and demands on welfare.
It represents "a true numerical decline whose only precedent in Italy's history is the long-ago period of 1917-18, an era marked by the Great War and the dramatic effects of the Spanish flu pandemic", said Istat's president Gian Carlo Blangiardo.
"If until the last century our demographics demonstrated vitality and often helped boost the country's growth, including economic, on the contrary today they could have a restrictive effect," commented Blangiardo.
At the heart of the imbalance is a plunging birth rate, which has been declining for years at the same time as more Italians are living longer. Some 439,000 births were registered in Italy last year, according to Istat, a decrease of nearly 140,000 compared to 2008. By 2016 nearly half of women in Italy aged 18-49, 45 percent, didn't have any children at all.
https://www.thelocal.it/20190620/it
“These communities basically shut themselves down,” explains Howard Markel, an epidemiological historian at the University of Michigan who was one of the authors of the study. “No one came in and no one came out. Schools were closed and there were no public gatherings. We came up with the term ‘protective sequestration’, where a defined and healthy group of people are shielded from the risk of infection from outsiders.”
The people of Gunnison managed this by erecting guarded barricades on the main highways in and out of the surrounding county. Railway passengers were forced to submit to two days of quarantine upon arrival.
The sanatorium and school for the blind benefited from being relatively closed communities already, with walls to confine those who lived there also helping to protect those inside from the disease running rampant through the communities on the outside.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2018
In the 15th century Venice had a population of 180,000 people, making it the second largest city in Europe. By 1633 it was 102,000. With demographic decline always comes a fall in commerce and power.
Source: http://www.lulu.com/shop/thomas-fli
A study by the UN’s Population Fund and Moldova’s Centre for Demographic Research estimates that by 2035 the country’s population, without Transnistria, will have shrunk to 2.08 million, a decrease of 22.38 per cent from 2019.
If one were to estimate that Transnistria’s population had also dropped by about a quarter and is by then about 300,000, the population of the entire country will by then have fallen by a whopping 45 per cent since 1989.
A mid-level civil servant said her husband works in a hotel in a London suburb while he acquires the diploma needed for him to work as an IT programmer, which is his real profession. They have calculated that, if he sticks out being separated from the family, he can pay off their 30-year mortgage in two years.
Labour shortages also mean that farmers cannot find enough people to work on bringing in the harvest, including in the vineyards that produce Moldova’s valuable wine and brandy exports. Now Uzbeks and Kazakhs, who cannot work in the EU, are coming as seasonal labourers, including to Transnistria.
In a similar displacement, Moldovan doctors are taking up the posts of Romanian doctors who have gone to Western Europe but, in this case, no one is replacing them at home. In 2018, some 600 doctors applied to the Ministry of Health for the documents they need to be able to work abroad, Pistrinciuc said.
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/01/16/mo
Serbia is set to lose almost a quarter of its population by 2050 as the young and the skilled emigrate in search of work.
Today, Serbian women give birth to an average of 1.48 children, well below the 2.1 needed just to maintain a country’s population.
Officially there were 7.82 million people in Serbia minus Kosovo in 1991.
In fact, that figure was boosted by 283,000 people who were not there. By this time, about 1 million Yugoslav citizens lived abroad as so-called gastarbeiters or their family so the population census for Yugoslavia and its constituent parts overstated population figures.
In 2002, Serbia reverted to the international norm of only counting those who actually lived in the country.
Taking all this into account, Serbia’s population has shrunk by 8.42 per cent since the demise of Yugoslavia.
Serbia’s authorities are well aware of the demographic crisis, the labour shortages it is beginning to create and the ongoing problem an ever older population creates for the pension system.
In 2021, according to the Statistical Office, Serbia will have more pensioners than working age people.
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/10/24/to
According to Bosnjak, emigration from the country peaked last year and an increased number of births in 2018 heralded some really good news.
In 2020, Croatia’s demographic decline will stabilise and from then on, government policies will lead to an increase in population, he said.
Croatian women have an average of 1.44 children, which is not only below the 2.1 needed for replacing a country’s population, but the second-lowest of all the seven post-Yugoslav states.
A Demographic Revival Council was founded in 2017 to coordinate ministerial policies. A new strategy for halting and reversing Croatian decline is being prepared to replace a national population policy from 2006.
Bosnjak said huge sums were being invested in everything from kindergartens to agriculture, especially in areas that have been depopulating over the last quarter of a century, such as the east of the country.
The numbers who have gone abroad permanently since Croatia joined the EU represent five per cent of its population. A large proportion of them are young, of child-bearing and of working age. Increasingly whole families have departed.
The government hopes that measures such as making pension contributions for mothers on maternity leave will help push the fertility rate back up to 1.6 in the next couple of years. But a big problem is the nature of women’s employment.
A UN study predicts that Croatia’s population will fall to 3.46 million by 2050.
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/10/31/cr
In 1990, the country’s population peaked at 23.2 million but at the beginning of 2019 it was 19.4 million. So, since the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, the country’s resident population has declined by 16.4 per cent or 3.8 million people.
And the projections do not look good: according to the Romanian National Institute of Statistics, by 2050 the country’s population could shrink to 15 million or 35 per cent less than in 1990. (A UN projection is less gloomy, foreseeing population at 16.39 million in 2050, a fall of just over 30 per cent.)
During the Ceausescu era, few Romanians could leave the country, with two distinct exceptions: Jews and ethnic Germans. Large numbers of them were in effect ransomed by Israel and West Germany which, under various guises, bought exit visas for them.
By 1990, there were relatively few Jews left and some 200,000 of the remaining ethnic Germans then left rapidly for Germany.
[S]ome one million to 1.2 million left for Italy while another million went to Spain.
The situation was so dramatic, he says, that virtually whole towns in the hardest-affected regions emptied.
This period came to an end because of the economic crisis that hit Italy and Spain hard and because Romania joined the EU at the beginning of 2007.
Since then, says Anghel, approximately one million have left.
Initially nine of the then 26 EU countries imposed transitional labour restrictions but these have since been lifted.
Britain lifted restrictions in 2014, for example, leading to a huge leap in the country’s Romanian population, which hit 415,000 in 2018 compared with 19,000 in 2007.
According to the World Bank, 20.6 per cent of the country’s working age population was abroad in 2017.
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/11/28/ro
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