Motivated by concerns over immigration I drew a graph of the size of each plot if the land of England was divided equally between the people. 50 means a plot 50mx50m. Until 2009 each person in UK had more than 50m x 50m each. A family of four then 100m x 100m. But in the last 5 years it has dropped off a cliff to below 44m x 44m. That is a loss of 17% of our plot and this is due solely to immigration, as the population is not growing, and in fact should be dropping soon due to the aging demographics.
Now it has been made clear that the reason for this policy is Capitalism. A falling population is a disaster for Capitalists as it shifts power to workers who find themselves in demand. They can pick and chose where they work and what they get paid, and it increases competition between employers. The whole point of Capitalism is to maintain power in the hands of the owners (who are the same as the rich) and then disenfranchise the mass of employees from their country. This is basic economics, first really noted during the Black Death plagues when falling populations meant that workers suddenly found themselves with all the power. The rich were giving away their wealth just to employ people.
But its a fraud because immigration not only leads to lower wages for the mass, but it leads to higher prices as competition for land increases. Given the huge debt bubble built against housing collateral high house prices is another symptom of the flawed economics we have in the West. The mass are being robbed in every direction to maintain the wealth and status of the rich. That appears to be the main function of every human society from Celtic times, through Roman occupation and any Imperial Dictatorship to the present: society functions to protect the status of the elite. But this is all just standard Capitalist economics.
Probably more interesting is the linearity of the graph above. It has a gradient of -0.3382x which means that each year on average the population increases so that we lose 34cm from each side of our plot, or 0.1m^2 = (0.3m * 0.3m).
Now mass immigration like we see recently is a new phenomenon and the fact that population growth is usually slow is part explained by the simple fact that food comes from the land and we need around 150m * 150m to grow enough food traditionally to live. This is complete self-sufficiency without importing fertilisers. So after about 1725 England could no longer support its population (and this assumes every sq m was being farmed which it was not). But then the Industrial Revolution hit and fossil fuels became a source of energy for mass production. The world had to wait until 1909 for artificial fertilisers.
So given the essential connection between land and population it looks like this constant of 0.3382 may relate to some efficiency measure that has been steadily increasing over the centuries. Each year a slightly larger population can be supported by agriculture in England. Or perhaps it refers to overall productivity increasing so that imports have steadily increased raising the food availability. Or perhaps it relates to increasing equity so that food is becomes more evenly distributed reducing food stress on the poor and raising populations. Or perhaps there is some innate social dynamic here that people only steadily allow new people into the country.
Anyway simply an interesting observation as yet unexplained.
===
Raw Data
(note that earlier populations are for England and Wales, while the last 200 years of just England)
Year Pop England Plot side per person
1500 2600000 223.8466164
1600 4110000 178.0394718
1700 5000000 161.4180907
1800 10500000 111.389065
1850 16800000 88.06078799
1901 32612000 63.2045715
1931 39988000 57.07847568
1971 46411700 52.98140487
2000 49230000 51.44252654
2008 51820000 50.14048192
2009 52200000 49.9576449
2010 52640000 49.74841721
2018 55980000 48.24149533
2019 67100000 44.06319131
2022 67508936 43.929532
No comments:
Post a Comment