I have been doing a lot of listening, watching, and thinking lately. Tom Friedman wrote in his June 17 column, “During the past eight years, in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, spaces were opened for more democratic elections. Good news. Unfortunately, the groups that had the most grass-roots support and mobilization capabilities — and the most energized supporters — to take advantage of this new space were the Islamists. That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the various Sunni and Shiite Islamist parties in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The centrist mainstream was nowhere.”
But now, in the past few weeks, “Hezbollah was defeated in the Lebanese elections. Hamas is facing an energized Fatah in the West Bank and is increasingly unpopular in Gaza. Iraqi Sunnis have ousted the jihadists thanks to the tribal Awakening movement, while the biggest pro-Iranian party in Iraq got trounced in the recent provincial runoff. And in Iran, millions of Iranians starving for more freedom rallied to the presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, forcing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to steal the election. (If he really won the Iranian election, as Ahmadinejad claims, by a 2-to-1 margin, wouldn’t he invite the whole world in to recount the votes? Why hasn’t he?)”
With all of this happening in our increasingly interconnected world, I can’t help but keep coming back to the thought of what is at the core of all of this action, change, movement, whatever you want to call it. And that to my mind is people. And no, I’m not talking about individuals, although there are thousands of inspirational individuals leading and participating in this change, but I’m talking about the greater population – demographic dynamics.
I became a student of demographics because I believed, and I still do, that demographics is the base of everything, be it economics, politics, social mores, etc. Without an understanding of your population and the composition of it, it is impossible to understand the more “complicated” fields of economics and politics. If you don’t know characteristics of voters, you won’t be able to intuit how they’ll vote. If you don’t know if you have a young (think India) or an aging (think China) population, how will you calculate future growth trajectories? If you are an entrepreneur, and you don’t understand the characteristics of your market, how will you know if they will want to buy your product? Everyone needs a market, and what is a market, if it isn’t demographics at its core?
What we have seen in the Middle East is a direct result of people voting for change, people who belong to certain demographic groups wanting something new, something better. And this force cannot be ignored. So when you look at the world around you, I urge you to look beyond the headline, beyond the individuals, beyond the apparent, and think of the people, the popular force, behind the movement for change.
