Ford Motor Company recently announced key global leadership changes. Jacques Brent, currently president, Ford Middle East and Africa, is appointed to the new global position of director, Product Marketing, effective June 1. This move is part of Ford’s push to transform its marketing organisation to drive greater efficiency, effectiveness and customer insight – leveraging the latest tools and technology.
The company also announced that Mark Ovenden, currently vice president, Marketing, Sales and Service, Asia Pacific, will succeed Brent as president, Ford Middle East and Africa, effective June 1. In this role, Ovenden will be responsible for driving growth in the company’s Middle East and Africa operations across more than 70 markets.
“We are making key leadership changes that will help us accelerate our growth in Middle East and Africa and reshape our global marketing organization,” said Jim Hackett, Ford Motor Company president and CEO. ”
Brent, 48, will assume responsibility for Ford’s global product marketing activities, working to improve the product planning process, representing the voice of the customer and closely aligning with Product Development. He will report to Joy Falotico, group vice president, The Lincoln Motor Company and chief marketing officer.
Ford names new leaders for Middle East & Africa, and global product marketing
The paranoia of population decline
For two centuries, overpopulation has haunted the imagination of the modern world. According to Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, human population growth would always surpass agricultural production, meaning “gigantic inevitable famine” would “with one mighty blow level the population with the food of the world.”
Later, eugenicists like Margaret Sanger in the 1920s fretted over the wrong people reproducing too much, creating what she called “human weeds,” a “dead weight of human waste” to inherit the earth. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” because of the “population bomb.” These days, environmentalists worry that too many people will overload the natural world’s resources and destroy the planet with excessive consumption and pollution, leading to catastrophic global warming.
A strain of anti-humanism has always run through population paranoia, a notion that human beings are a problem rather than a resource. This is exactly what the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi argued. Regarding this, if my memory is serving correctly, once he said that the newly born are coming in to the world not only with the mouth to eat, but also with two hands to work.
But as Jonathan Last, a senior writer for the Weekly Standard documents in his new book entitled “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting”, it is not overpopulation that threatens the well-being of the human race, it is under-population. As he writes, throughout recorded human history, declining populations have always been followed by very bad things. Particularly for our modern, high-tech, capitalist world of consumers who buy, entrepreneurs who create wealth and jobs, and workers whose taxes fund social welfare entitlements, people are an even more critical resource.
Jonathan Last in his book provides a reader-friendly but thorough analysis of the demographic crisis afflicting the West and the very bad things that will follow population decline. The facts of population decline are dramatic. Women must average a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 2.1 children apiece for populations to remain stable. But across the developed world, and increasingly everywhere else, except few countries including Ethiopia, fertility is quickly declining below this number. All developed countries are already below the 2.1 line and the rates of decline among developing countries are, in most cases, even steeper than in the developed ones.
Japan and Italy, for example, have a 1.4 TFR, a mathematical tipping point at which the population will decline by 50 percent in 45 years. As for the rest of Europe, by 2050 only three countries in the EU, which today has an average rate of 1.5 TFR, will not be experiencing population declines. Those countries are France, Luxembourg, and Ireland.
Immigration from developing countries will not provide a long-term solution, as fertility rates are declining there as well. The average fertility rate for Latin America was six children per woman in the 1960s; by 2005, it had dropped to 2.5. At that rate of decline, within a few decades, Latin American countries will likely have a fertility rate lower than that of the United States.
According to Jonathan Last, the most general cause of population decline is modernity itself. Birth-rates started declining in the nineteenth century when industrialization and technological advances began to accelerate. Better nutrition, sanitation, and health care, for example, have reduced infant mortality in America from about 300 babies dying out of 1,000 live births in 1850, to about six today. More babies surviving lessened the need for multiple pregnancies, which in turn reduced family size.
During the Industrial Revolution, migration to cities made children less useful than they were on farms and more expensive. Easier divorce, reliable birth control, cohabitation replacing marriage, and women entering the workforce in greater numbers since 1990, about 70 percent of women have been working at any given time, have all contributed to the decline in marriage and the diminishing centrality of children in people’s lives. These forces have created disincentives to reproduction, not the least being the USD 1.1 million price tag for rearing and educating a child today.
Two larger cultural trends have reinforced the effects of technological developments and industrialization. As Last points out, fertility rates among the educated classes began falling in the middle of the eighteenth century, which was about the same time as the rise of capitalism. The pursuit of individual initiative and self-interest contributed to the erosion of community and family. Economic advancement requires mobility and fewer obligations. Constraints hamper self-improvement and risk-taking, after all. Having children, perhaps the greatest constraint of all, became less and less a factor in people’s calculations of their self-interests. Something else would be required to get people to procreate.
That imperative to reproduce used to be grounded in religion, but during the eighteenth century, secularization began to loosen the hold that religious practice, actually going to church rather than just self-identifying by sect, used to have on people’s behaviour. The effect of religious practice on fertility is obvious from statistics. Indeed, the effects of religion on fertility can be so powerful that even if people are not the churchgoing type themselves, they will be affected if their parents are.
The dire economic and social effect of plummeting birth-rates reminds that marriage and childbirth are not just private lifestyle choices. A country with fewer children becomes, on average, increasingly older. Cities and towns begin to empty, while the cost of caring for retirees and elderly sick people skyrockets. Old people spend less and invest less, shrinking capital pools for the new businesses that create new jobs. Entrepreneurs do not come from among the aged. Countries with a higher median age have a lower percentage of entrepreneurs.
Most important, a shrinking labour force means fewer workers contributing the payroll taxes that finance old-age care. According to the latest ILO data, the Social Security program is already beginning to be impacted by the decline in the worker-to-retiree ratio.
Finally, foreign policy will increasingly be impacted by the global decline in fertility. Those who fear China as a future superpower threat to their interests should remember that by 2050, China’s population will be declining by 20 million every five years, and one out of four people will be over the age of 65. China’s public pension system covers only 365 million people and is unfunded by 150 percent of GDP. Jonathan Last in his book argues that what we need to prepare for is not a shooting war with an expansionist China, but a declining superpower with a rapidly contracting economic base and an unstable political structure. It’s not clear which scenario is more worrisome.
Solving such a complex problem as declining fertility is not going to be easy. As with many social problems, government intervention isn’t very successful. Bonus payments to expectant mothers, paid paternity leave, public holidays, “Motherhood Medals,” and tax incentives and subsidies have barely moved the needle in Russia, Japan, and Singapore. People cannot be bribed into making babies.
The best governments can do is help people have the children they do want. A college degree doesn’t prepare people for specific jobs, but rather gives employers an idea of their intelligence and work habits, something that can be done more cheaply and efficiently. Making child-friendly housing more affordable, letting workers telecommute to lessen the career-costs of having children, welcoming more fecund immigrants, and ending the hostility to religion and the faithful, “if for no other reason than they’re the ones who create most of the future taxpayers,” are some of Jonathan Last’s solutions. Unfortunately, they are as unlikely as they are sensible.
PEOPLE & PARTIES
People and traditional political parties are going their own separate ways, so it seems. Why? Politicos pontificate about all and sundry during election campaigns only to end up delivering next to nothing, once voted in. Increasingly and more importantly, these parties have become insincere/superficially committed to their own avowed principles & policies. Blatant disloyalty (to the collective electorate) defines the very temperament of modern politicos! What then do they respect? It seems their allegiance, more than anything else, is to the throne of monopoly capital and its downstream institutions! The people be damned, is their unstated slogan. Establishment politicos reckon what people want/demand is not actually good for them. As far as they are concerned, it is prescriptions from the citadels of monopoly capital that must be honored before anything else!
The Bretton Woods, BIS (Bank of International Settlement, the central bank of central banks), EU, WTO, ECB, and many other subsidiary entities of the global inter states system form a formidable collective, which is able and eager to thwart almost all major alternatives coming from the global sheeple (human mass)! Even in the advanced industrialized countries of the west, this trend has become a dangerous frequent occurrence. The PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) have been under the direct diktat of the above institutions since the last global economic crisis. New initiatives by committed citizens of the respective countries were not allowed to form part of the economic restructuring process. For instance, the Greeks even though they voted to power a far left government, (by western standards) they were not allowed to have their desired policies. They were told they will be forced to leave the EURO as well as the EU (Grexit). The slightest attempt to reform economies outside the logic of monopoly capital will be shot down immediately. The finance minister of Greece had to resign and go back to teaching, lest the proposal of the maverick professor becomes an inspiration to other suffering nations.
Italy lost a quarter of its manufacturing capacity since it joined the EURO. Unemployment is very high and thousands of young Italians flee the country monthly. To add insult to injury, Italy’s demographic is not in tune with the prevailing greed system. Italy is depopulating, i.e., its population is in decline. There is nothing wrong with that, given the finiteness of our planet, but the stupid global system that is based on continuous growth has no clue as to how to deal with this positive reality. The Italian sheeple is now fed up about the ongoing economic regime and wants change. To this end, the Italians voted to power non-traditional parties who find themselves at opposing sides of the political spectrum. The ‘Five Star Movement’ (M5S) leans to the left while the ‘Lega Party’ leans to the right. As we have been saying all along, the traditional classification of ‘left’ and ‘right’ has become literally invalid. Extremes entities are joining at their ends to form a circle of political discourse whose articulations tend to emphasize nationalism (old right), workers equity (old left) and the new agenda of planetary health (both right and left). Traditional political differentiation is becoming increasingly superfluous!
The two new Italian parties are, first and foremost, anti-establishment. This is the crucial commonality between them. These parties, even though they have their own differences, have agreed on a coalition government whose economic policies will concentrate on the well being of the Italian Sheeple. This implies a slight subversion of the Brussels’ diktat. For example, one proposal of the coalition is to have an alternative currency, besides the EURO to be used for domestic purposes. Obviously, this caused the rejection of the coalition government by the president. The president refused to bless the government, unless the 82-year-old economist (eurosceptic), who proposed the idea of a local currency is dropped from the position of Ministry of Finance. This refusal by the president of Italy clearly demonstrates the real power behind many of the nation states of the modern world system. Those who are benefitting from the current arrangement (Brussels, Germany, etc.) were not willing to accept the new initiative, as this will be a stealth devaluation, which might spur economic activities outside of the EU mandated universe. Of course, this was a no-no and the prospective coalition government had to go back and rework its cabinet positions. See the articles next column, on page 44 & 46.
As the existing global system moves from one crisis to another, radical changes, likely to be accompanied by increasing violence, will become inevitable. The problems with the various global systems are now obvious. What is chronically lacking is enlightened leadership to stir the global sheeple into action, with a view to install a more resilient, a more democratic, a more egalitarian world system. Our reigning politicos should revisit the old saying: “You can fool all of the people some of the time or you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Abraham Lincoln. Good Day!
PM Abiy removes Vice Governor of NBE
Yohannes Ayalew (PhD), Vice Governor and Chief Economist of the National Bank of Ethiopia, has been relieved of his position and relocated to another institute after a meeting with the new Prime Minister. The relocation took place after a meeting at the Office of the Prime minister of Wednesday May 30.
Some reports said that he has been appointed as executive director of the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI).
Yohannes was recently appointed by the Board of Directors of the African Trade Insurance Agency as their new Chairman.
Yohannes serves as Vice Governor and Chief Economist of Ethiopia’s Central Bank NBE for the last 28 years. He is also an Alternate Governor of the IMF and Alternate Steering Committee member of East AFRITAC.
He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.
