What happens when there are no “grown-ups in the room” — more on Gaza

Last updated on: July 16, 2014 at 9:59 am by Jane the Actuary

What happens when there are no “grown-ups in the room” — more on Gaza 2014-07-16T09:59:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Here’s a comment I made on a marginalrevolution.com post yesterday, about Israel’s actions in Gaza, in reply to a comment saying, in effect, that “even Egypt doesn’t want to take over Gaza because it’s so dysfunctional”:

I’m increasingly inclined to think that that’s the only solution, at least so long as the military is effectively in control of Egypt, not the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaza is so dysfunctional that they need adult supervision (almost literally — they have such a high TFR/population growth rate that their median age is 18, even worse than Egypt’s 25 years, according to the CIA World Factbook — and nearly 2/3rds are under age 25), and the Egyptians are the only passable option.

And here’s a small snippet of our family life: my husband was rear-ended over the weekend, and yesterday morning we were at the Enterprise car rental counter, a small branch, right in town, and it struck me that every one of the four employees there at the time was young, very young. At least they looked pretty young to me — maybe that’s just my getting old.

And I thought — can a country with such a substantial growth rate, and such a low median age, have any hope of being civilized and functional, economically and politically? We often speak metaphorically of “the grown-ups in the room” — but what if there are simply, proportionately, very few grown-ups in the country? What if every business is like that Enterprise car rental?

Maybe, for the most part, it’s not a big deal. Maybe 20-somethings are fully capable, not just of running a car rental branch, or, for that matter, a Silicon Valley startup, but a country. And demographers do speak of the “demographic dividend” — a “baby boom” type scenario in which a rapid transition from high to low fertility rates creates a bulge of young people but, at the same time, a declining number of children to be cared for — but that’s not the case here because Gaza still has a persistently high fertility rate/population growth rate.

Some rates and ranks:

Gaza has a TFR of 4.24, which puts them at 34th in the world, a population growth rate of 2.91% (13th in the world), 63.8% of the population under age 25, and a median age of 18.

The West Bank has a much lower TFR, 2.83, ranking 66th, a population growth rate of 1.99% (52nd), 55.4% of the population under age 25, and a median age of 22.4. (These numbers seem to include the Israeli settlers, who now comprise 17% of the population of the territory.)

Israel itself: 2.62 TFR (75th), population growth rate of 1.46% per year, 42.8% of the population under age 25, median age of 29.9.

Egypt: TFR 2.87, population growth rate of 1.84%, 49.9% of population under age 25, median age 25.1.

Jordan: TFR of 3.16, growth rate of 3.86% (which seems to be driven by a high migration rate — perhaps this is simply reflecting refugees from Syria?), 56.2% under age 25, median age 21.8.

And, for comparison, the U.S.: TFR 2.01 (this is higher than the stats I read the other day from the World Bank, and I don’t know if the year or the methodology differs), growth rate of 0.77% (including the effects of immigration), 33.1% under age 25, median age 37.6 years.

So what do you make of these numbers?

The first thing that’s clear is that, while all these Middle Eastern countries have high growth rates/fertility, Gaza is an outlier among them, and it’s not clear to me why that should be. I don’t think it’s likely that Gazan women lack contraception to a greater degree than elsewhere, knowing that the UN and other NGO’s pump aid of all kinds into the territory.

Is this an indicator of a difference in culture between Gaza and the West Bank? I couldn’t really find anything online about this.

But in any case, these numbers make the prospects for peace all the more unlikely. There’s a big difference between running an Enterprise branch and bringing peace, stability, and prosperity to a chaotic country.

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