Truth in world affairs is not a single expert-narrated story.

National Politics

In our ‘official’ ‘United Nations’ world – the world referenced by the expression the international rules-based order – there are about 200 sovereign nation states (ie ‘countries’) which are equal members of the global community of nations. We mean equal in a juridical sense, not an economic or demographic sense; as recognised by ‘one nation, one vote’ in the United Nations General Assembly. Further, in this sanctioned and sanctified view – using the verb ‘sanction’ in its original old-fashioned sense – neither history nor geographical proximity matter; Mexico is as independent of the United States as it is of India.

Before moving on to geopolitics, there are four exceptions allowed within this official view. First is that there are numerous pieces of territory which are understood as too small – in population and/or land area – to be viable independent sovereign nation states. Second, some sovereign nation states – usually neighbours – may form a voluntary Union, whereby certain aspects of their sovereignty are ceded to centralised institutions. Third is that many citizens do not reside in the territories associated with their nationalities. And three exceptions not allowed for, but acknowledged to varying extents: countries that don’t exist but do exist; territories subject to internationally tolerated military occupation; and territories within recognised nation-states pushing for secession, though falling well short of either self-government or union with similarly-placed neighbouring territories.

An example of the first type of exception is Greenland, accounted for as a ‘realm’ territory of Denmark. (Other familiar realm territories are: Cook Islands [in the realm of New Zealand], American Samoa, and New Zealand’s closest foreign neighbour [Norfolk Island, in the realm of Australia].) The second exception is the European Union (noting that, in some circumstances – consider FIFA – the United Kingdom is also a Union of [four] nations). Might Canada join the European Union this century?

The third exception – the diaspora exception – applies to a degree to all nation states; and it applies particularly to New Zealand. New Zealand possibly has more citizens resident outside of New Zealand relative to citizens resident inside New Zealand; at least if we only consider countries with resident populations in excess of one million. Is New Zealand its citizenry or its territory? Given the realities of dual-citizenship, it is probably better defined as its territory along with its residentcitizens and denizens.

The fourth generally accepted exception is territories that are formally non-sovereign. Our example here is Antarctica. We may add the Moon.

Re the unsanctioned exceptions, Taiwan is the obvious example of the first type (other examples include Abkhazia and Somaliland) and Palestine is the obvious example of the second type. For the third (secessionist) type, I would cite Eastern Congo in which substantial domestic forces are in reality more aligned to nearby Kigali than faraway Kinshasa; I would also mention Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to the Rohingya people.

Geopolitics

While the above ‘national politics’ narrative is real and contains a legal structure satisfying to its liberal architects, it is overlaid by an equally real (and quite different) geopolitical layer. Conflicts of big ego and big ideology can neither be understood nor resolved without substantial reference to geopolitics. Geopolitics is tied to both contested histories and geographical proximity. More than anything geopolitics is about empire (formal and informal), the unequal coalitions and powerplays among and between identities of people beyond and within territorial boundaries.

Geopolitics is about the centres of political power – the ‘great powers’ to use an expression from World War One – and their rival claims over the planet and its people. Geopolitical texts commonly refer to cities that are power centres, such as Washington and Berlin, rather than the countries in which those cities are located. Most conflict in the world can only be understood with recourse to geopolitics, which is largely the sociopathic politics of power masquerading as a set of struggles of ‘Good versus Evil’.

At least the president of the United States, DJT, is in a sense more honest than most ‘democratic’ leaders of powerful countries, in that he frames his acquisitive sentiments in the name of America rather than in the name of Good or in the name of God. Coveted Greenland looms larger in geopolitics than in national politics; in national politics it successfully hides in plain sight, as a large appendage of a semi-sovereign nation with a population barely larger than New Zealand.

Greenland: History

Greenland presently – at least formally – lies within the realm of Denmark, noting that ‘realm’ is itself a sanctioned rules-based exception. Denmark, as a member of the European Union, has delegated aspects of its sovereignty; from Copenhagen to Brussels and Paris and Berlin.

The first question to ask about Greenland is: why is it in the possession of the Kingdom of Denmark? Greenland was never conquered or colonised by Danes or by Denmark. Over 1,000 years ago, Greenland was colonised by Norse (ie Norwegian) Vikings. Greenland’s first people were Inuit, and the present population is substantially an Inuit/Norse mix. Around 500 years ago, Norway and Denmark formed a political union – a kingdom in which Denmark was the dominant partner – which lasted around 300 years. In that age of imperialism, Greenland became formally subject to that kingdom. This was a marriage between Denmark and Norway during the constrained period of the Little Ice Age. Greenland was ‘matrimonial property’ in this Union.

In 1814, Norway was passed on to Sweden through the Treaty of Kiel, in an era in which the wife was regarded as the property of the husband. Thus, Denmark formally gained Greenland as part of the divorce settlement. That remains the historical basis for Denmark’s claim over Greenland today. Though we remind ourselves that today’s reality is that Denmark is a somewhat junior partner in the polyamorous European Union. (Would Denmark get to keep Greenland if Denmark was to do a ‘Dexit’? Or would Greenland be passed on to the other husbands and wives?)

Greenland: Geography

Functionally, at least in geo-environmental terms, Greenland is the northern land-analogue of Antarctica. Arctica. While it doesn’t literally cover the North Pole (except that a large sheet of sea-ice extends from northern Greenland), it is near enough; and its land ice-sheet is certainly the northern analogue of the West Antarctica ice sheet. Based on this analogy, Greenland could become subject to a similar extranationalism to that which governs Antarctica. The difference of course is that Antarctica has no formally resident population; almost nobody was born there. The model could be adapted, with authentic Greenlanders becoming limited-power-landlords over an essentially international territory.

When I was a child, it was very common for families to have a globe in their living rooms, somewhere between the mantlepiece and the piano. About 15 years ago, I was lucky enough to have acquired a 3D jigsaw puzzle of the world; indeed, a small self-assembly globe. To see Greenland in perspective, it’s necessary to look at a globe. Short of that, see this satellite picture of North America from the Turtle Island page on Wikipedia.

(I was privileged to learn about Turtle Island when I visited Winnipeg in May 2019. When I walked through the Peace Park at The Forks, I learned for the first time about Turtle Island. See on YouTube: Winnipeg – the heart of Turtle Island. [And note this 16 December 2025 BBC story FBI foils New Year’s Eve terror plot across southern California, officials say relating to the Turtle Island Liberation Front.] I have a personal story about Greenland. While never having set foot there, I remember having a window seat flying from London to Los Angeles one October day. I saw the sun set somewhere northwest of Scotland; then a couple of hours later I saw it rise again, from the west, over Greenland. This was only possible because at such polar latitudes, an east-west flight is fast enough to be able to reverse the sunset.)

The map, in correct perspective, very much shows Greenland as a not-very-green part of North America. Its closest neighbour is of course Canada; indeed since 2022 Greenland has shared a land border with Greenland, on Hans Island in the Kennedy Channel, following the resolution of the Whisky War between Canada and Denmark. (It is unknown whether the Kennedy Channel was named after a Canadian fur-trader and politician, or the guy who was United States Secretary of the Navy in 1852 and 1853. If the latter, this might give false credence to DJT’s claim on Greenland for the United States.)

Greenland certainly looks to be geographically American – just as Norfolk Island geographically connects to New Zealand (on the Zealandia continent). But a geographical argument must also based on the connectivity between population centres. The flight distances from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to other capital cities are: Reykjavik, Iceland (1,430 km); Ottawa, Canada (2,560km); Dublin, Ireland (2,800km); Oslo, Norway (3,150km); London, UK (3,250km); Washington DC, US (3,260km); Brussels, EU (3,520km); Copenhagen, Denmark (3,530); Berlin, Germany (3,820); Moscow, Russia (4,630km); Beijing, China (8,400km).

Washington is closer to Nuuk than is Copenhagen. Dublin is the closest EU capital city to Nuuk, and is a more economically connected city to the North Atlantic than is Copenhagen. Brussels, formal capital of the EU is the same distance from Nuuk as is Copenhagen. Berlin, the geopolitical capital of the EU, is nearly 4,000 km from Nuuk (whereas New York, the power capital of the US is less than 3,000km from Nuuk). Moscow and Beijing are both much further from Greenland, have had no geopolitical influence there, and constitute no plausible geopolitical threat; future security issues in Greenland are more likely to emanate from piracy than from power centres in Asia.

While there is no argument in favour of the United States annexing or otherwise acquiring Greenland, the case for European Union control of Greenland is even weaker than that of the United States. The only European countries with credible claims to form a Union with Greenland are Norway and Iceland, on the basis of shared history and shared maritime geography.

Greenland: Demography

Greenland’s population of just under 60,000 is only slightly higher than the populations of the American realm territories of American Samoa and the Northern Marianas Islands. Guam has three times more people than Greenland. The American Virgin Islands, with 100,000 people, is more populated than Greenland. The largest American realm territory, Puerto Rico, has 300 times as many people as Greenland. Of these ‘countries’, only Puerto Rico is a serious candidate to become the 51st state of the United States. The Virgin Islanders don’t even drive on the same side of the road as the rest of the United States.

I suspect that the DJT vision for Greenland is for it to become something like the former Panama Canal Zone; a former American territory that existed when I sailed through the Panama Canal in 1974. Of course we are aware that DJT would like to re-acquire that Panamanian territory for the United States.

Greenland is different though, in the same way that Antarctica is. It has many potentially valuable mining resources; and it lies on economically significant sea channels which are becoming more navigable thanks to climate change. And it has global environmental values. A collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet would drown all of Manhattan and most of the rest of New York; as well as much of other cities mentioned above such as Dublin, London and Copenhagen.

Greenland as Arctica

Greenland’s people can become landlords – but not landlords with monopoly power – able to procure citizens’ royalties (public property rights) from both extractive industries and the use of its sea-lanes. Greenland requires a Treaty of Nuuk, with a limited concession of sovereignty in return for those benefits; but a concession that leaves property rights in Greenland essentially the same as property rights in Antarctica.

Antarctica today represents geopolitics done quite well.

The Greenland question needs to be addressed. It is not sufficient for it to become a de facto territory of Europe – which eventually means Berlin. And it is too large a landmass to be independent in the way that Iceland is.

Warning

By understanding Greenland essentially as an inhabited Anti-Antarctica – as Arctica – we have to realise that the present United States regime may seek to undermine (literally and metaphorically) current arrangements for Antarctica. And when DJT turns his gaze southwards, he may look upon independent sovereign countries in the South Pacific as parts of his growing fiefdom. The South Pacific is America’s gateway to McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica. A number of ‘independent’ and proud countries in the South Pacific – Tonga, for example – already dutifully vote largely according to the United States’ say-so in the United Nations.

If Antarctica becomes a template for Greenland, that’s a definite improvement on the present accidental and unsustainable arrangement; but only if Antarctica’s present governance arrangements are preserved.

Watch what happens if Nasa’s Artemis Program successfully re-lands American men on the Moon. The Washington regime may lay claim to privileged property rights over the Moon – much as Wentworth acquired New Zealand’s South Island in 1839, requiring a treaty (Treaty of Waitangi) to repudiate that claim. If the United States believes it owns the Moon, it may stake a similar claim on Antarctica; and also seek to extend its Pacific realm. Citing America’s security! And breaking the Seventh and Tenth Commandments.

While current American-led geopolitics poses a deeply problematic story for resource-rich and low-populated territories, the expert-led official story of international politics is problematic too. The status-quo is not necessarily the best solution.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

RNZ Pacific

Papua New Guinea’s population has passed the 10 million mark, according to the final figures from the 2024 Population Census released by the country’s statistics office.

The PNG census began on 16 June 2024 and concluded in late October, more than three months after its original deadline. The process was marred by a host of administrative and logistical issues.

A PNG academic said in October 2024 that the 2024 Census, which included only six questions, failed to meet the United Nations benchmark standards for reliable census data.

“Without timely and accurate census data, it will be impossible to create a reliable common roll or implement the planned biometric voting system by 2027 for the national election, which will require even greater coordination and efficiency,” wrote Michael Kabuni, a PhD student at the Australian National University and a former lecturer at the University of PNG.

The PNG National Statistical Office reported that there were 10,185,363 people in the country on census night.

According to the 2024 National Population Census Final Figures booklet, this represents a 40 percent increase compared with the previous population count in 2011, when the population was 7,275,324.

The report stated the average population annual growth rate since the 2011 Census was 2.6 percent.

“Annual growth rate since the 2011 Census is higher (3.1 percent) but is likely to be artificially inflated because of non-demographic factors such as higher undercounting in 2000 and improvements to the 2011 and 2024 Census coverage methods.”

The census figures also reveal that there are more males (5,336,546) than females (4,848,546), representing approximately 110 males for every 100 females.

The average household in PNG was five people.

“Since the first official census in 1980, five years after independence, there have been an additional 7.2 million people added from 3.0 million in the last 44 years.”

The census found that, of the 22 provinces that make up PNG, Morobe recorded the highest population with almost a million people, followed by the Eastern Highlands province with 800,072 people.

Of PNG’s four regions, Highlands account for 35.7 percent of the total population, followed by Momase (27 percent), then the Southern and Islands regions.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

An increasing proportion of New Zealand’s immigrants are foreign citizens. In the 2010s – especially the later 2010s – a critical driver of immigration had been returning New Zealand citizens. As the headlines have indicated, that process of sourcing immigrants from the New Zealand diaspora has long finished.

Where have New Zealand’s post-covid immigrants come from? The following table shows immigration from the 31 countries which Statistics New Zealand follows. The estimates for the years-ended-August have just been released.

We note that not all intended migrations to New Zealand are successful. Most immigrants arrive on non-residence visas, and then have to apply for permanent residence or other long-stay visas. Unsuccessful immigrations arise both from failures to secure the desired permission, or from immigrants themselves having second thoughts. There are two possible outcomes of unsuccessful immigration: return migration, or onward migration.

Onward migration may take place following immigrants’ success in gaining New Zealand passports. But that is not unsuccessful immigration, and it’s not shown here. The data below looks at the 12-month period ending August 2023, and deducts the migrant departures for each nationality in the following 12 months (ending August 2024). For comparison, the table also shows 12-month period ending August 2024, deducting the migrant departures for each nationality in the 12 months ending August 2025.

These data are estimates for successful immigration (as defined above) by migrants’ nationalities:

It turns out that Philippines is the 2023 ‘winner’. Philippines consistently has few return or onward migrants. We note that the Philippines’ number dropped more in 2024 compared to India, probably reflecting the larger numbers of Indian migrants who arrived as tertiary students.

Two other stand-out immigrant countries – relative to their source populations – are Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The dominant groups of countries are our Pacific neighbours (Oceania); and South and East Asia. In this context we should note that a substantial majority of immigrants from Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia are ethnic ‘Austronesians’, the same broad ethnic group as our indigenous Māori and most of our Oceanian immigrants. Immigrants from Philippines are a particularly good fit, because of their similar Christian culture and because they are ethnic cousins of indigenous Aotearoans.

That’s not to say that any other national group is a bad fit. Most of our immigrants seek to integrate sufficiently to become Kiwis, without being under pressure to assimilate into Euro-Kiwi norms. Interestingly, of the six top immigrant-source countries, New Zealand only has direct flights with two: China and Fiji.

We note that the richer Asian nations feature well down the list. And we note the disproportionately low representation of nationalities with mainly Muslim populations. Indonesia, with 2½ times the population of Philippines has only 2½ percent of the Philippines’ successful immigration. Indonesia, our near-invisible near-neighbour, is the fourth most populous country in the world, and may well have more people than the United States by 2050.

With slightly more immigrants than from Indonesia is Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, and a country with strong sporting links to New Zealand. But Pakistan is way below India in the above table. A surprising omission from the table is Bangladesh, the world’s eighth most populous country, with more residents than Russia (the world’s number nine). Bangladesh does have a significant community in New Zealand, including my GP doctor. I suspect that Bangladeshis feature strongly in the ‘other Asia’ category, along with Cambodians who continue to operate small bakeries in Aotearoa New Zealand. Another country of importance missing from the list is Singapore, whose airline does bring many if not most of our South Asian immigrants.

Other countries not mentioned so far in the world’s top-ten by population are Brazil, Nigeria, and Mexico. Of these only Brazil features in the table above, although Nigeria may well have a significant presence in ‘other’, and Mexico has had some high-profile immigrants to Aotearoa New Zealand. Brazilian immigration, which appears to be dropping off, may return once China Eastern commences flights from Auckland to Buenos Aires.

We see the richer countries in Europe and the Americas (traditional sources of immigration), and Australia, feature in the bottom half of the ‘Top-31′; much more so for 2024 than for 2023. We note that the negative numbers in 2024 mean that more people with those countries’ passports departed in 2025 than arrived in 2024.

Ukraine doesn’t feature, though it might be a major part of ‘other Europe’. Czechia, which I am surprised Stats NZ have included, may be taken as a proxy for Eastern Europe. Also, ‘other Africa’ has held up while South African successful immigration has halved.

The data all reinforces the fact that New Zealand is a demographic turnover country, with the momentum of immigration coming from much poorer non-Muslim countries, and with a significant outflow of richer-country migrants.

For some up-to-date perspective, the table below shows estimated immigration for the featured countries in the year to August 2025. It shows an increase in migrant arrivals from some richer countries, such as United States, Australia, Japan, Germany and France; however, it is likely that similar numbers of these nationalities will leave New Zealand in the next 12 months as arrived in the previous 12 months. Many from France will actually be from New Caledonia; from Oceania rather than from Europe.

Finally, total arrivals of foreigner immigrants were 201,950 in the year to August 2023; 142,661 in the year to August 2024; and 112,591 in the year to August 2025; much lower than immediately post-covid, but still high. Total departures of foreigner immigrants were 35,972 in the year to August 2023; 46,099 in the year to August 2024; and 54,092 in the year to August 2025.

So, in the last year, foreigner migrant departures from New Zealand had reached almost half of foreigner migrant arrivals. This suggests that, for many, immigration to New Zealand is a fraught and often unsuccessful experience.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The following tables represent an update of mortality by sex in relation to Table 2 from Decennial Increases in Deaths by Birth Cohort, in Aotearoa New Zealand.

By looking at deaths registered in February to May only, it is possible to extend trends into 2025, avoiding fluctuations arising from winter illnesses.

The numbers look at people born over a ten-year period and the percentage increase in deaths in a given recent year compared to ten-years earlier. I am most interested in the ‘generations’ born between 1935 and 1990. The oldest generation/cohort shown will not have many more deaths than ten years earlier, because more than half have already died before the age of ninety. For younger generations, only a small minority have already died, meaning that a population can be readily compared with its younger self.

Results are unreliable for people under 25, because too few of them die to reveal any patterns.

Typically, at least for working-age adults – defining working age here to mean about 25 to about 75 – a birth cohort will normally have about 100% more deaths in a given year (eg 2020) compared to ten years previously. We can see that in the Male table below, by looking at the 2010-2020 column, and by looking at the 1935-45+ row.

If we look at the first highlighted figure of 98.3%, it means that 98.3% more men born from 1945 to 1954 died in 2020 than in 2010. The next figure in that row says that 100.2% more men born from 1946 to 1955 died in 2021 than in 2011. The last figure for that row says that 119.4% more men born from 1950 to 1959 died in 2025 than in 2015. (Noting again, that these data are for February to May only.)

This decade we have observed some problematic increases in deaths for men born between 1955 and 1980. (I would rate any number over 120% as ‘problematic’.)

For Females, these increases in death numbers over ten years for a generation/cohort are even more concerning; though it remains true that fewer working-age females are dying than working-age males. It’s more that women are catching up to men. As with men, it is those women born between 1955 and 1980 where the greatest concern lies.

While I’ll leave these data for others to interpret further, the numbers tend to bely the mantra we hear from the finance industry and many politicians that “we are all living longer”. The aging process seems to be coming earlier for people born after 1955 than for people born before that year. (It’s too early to say whether this conclusion about ‘Gen-X’ will also apply to ‘Gen-Y’. While Gen-Y men, born after 1975, seem to be doing OK so far, data for Gen-Y females is not looking too good.)

A final point to note is that Aotearoa’s working-age population is particularly affected by immigration and emigration. The numbers given here will be distorted if, for any cohort within that ten-year period of comparison, there was a marked difference in emigration compared to immigration. We should note, however, that both immigrants and emigrants (to and from Aotearoa New Zealand) tend to be healthier than average for their birth cohorts. Thus, data of this type – which does not rely on population denominators – can reveal subtle truths which may otherwise remain hidden.

Ultimately, societal problems – such as inequality, insecure housing, over- and under-work – all do have an impact on average lifespan at least as much (if not more) than the state of a country’s healthcare services. Actuarial methods of measuring lifespan are lagging indicators of the health of a national population. And they can be problematic in this country, because so many people who will die in New Zealand were not born here; and vice versa.

My tables are forward-looking rather than backward-looking. They warn of trouble ahead, especially in relation to those people born in the 1970s and 1980s. We may note the following: What researchers suspect may be fuelling cancer among millennials (Washington Post article, published in NZ Herald on 30 September 2025).

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Data is from Statistics New Zealand, Births and deaths: Year ended June 2025. That data series only begins in 2010.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In the wake of the recent release of labour force data (Household Labour Force Survey, HLFS, Nicola Willis bemoans ‘glass half empty’ view of unemployment figures, RNZ 6 August 2025), 1918-1920 National Party Leader Simon Bridges, has called for economic “stimulus” to rescue in particular the dire Auckland economy. (See Call for government to help Auckland as unemployment rises, RNZ; contrast the Minister of Finance Nicola Willis’s retrospective and ongoing advocation of fiscal suffocation Dangers of Excessive Spending Highlighted, Scoop; both 7 August 2025.)

My focus here is to look at the historical and recent employment rates of older women (aged over 55), and to consider the importance of their spending to the health or otherwise of the New Zealand economy. My reference is the first chart highlighted in Employment in New Zealand – especially of women – at the Age Margins, Evening Report, 7 August 2025.

The chart shows that there is a huge increase in the percentage of older women who meet the official definition of employment. (This generous definition includes wage/salary workers – fulltime or part-time – self-employed workers, active employers, and people working without wages in a family business.) The data reveals a huge increase in the ‘participation rate’ of older women in the labour market.

The age group 60-64 had a particular impetus to retire later, namely the rise in the early 1990s of the age of entitlement to New Zealand Superannuation from age 60 to age 65. But the pattern is essentially the same also for women in their late fifties and in their late sixties.

The appropriate benchmark year is 1987, by time the HLFS was bedded in and before the economic consequences of the financial crash in late 1987. While the high period for employment of older women is 2022 or 2023, when jobs were plentiful, we can be sure that the actual participation rate has not fallen since 2022, and has probably continued to rise. (We can disregard participation rates published in the HLFS; they are based on definitions of unemployment which only realistically apply to men aged 30 to 60. There is much ‘hidden unemployment’ amongst older women.)

For women aged 55-59, we see a rise in labour market activity from 43 percent to 80% in 2018 and 2023. For women aged 60-64, we see a rise in labour market activity from 18 percent to 70% in 2022. (The dip for this early-sixties age group in the late 1980s and early 1990s is unemployment masquerading as ‘retirement’.)

For women aged 65-69, we see a rise in labour market activity from 8 percent to 44% in 2022. For women aged over 70, we see a tenfold rise in labour market activity from 1995 to 2025. (We desperately need a ’70-74′ age category in the published data; this ‘early-seventies’ cohort is likely to now be New Zealand’s fastest growing employment demographic.)

Overall, this truly massive labour force participation of older women in the last thirty years has been a barely noticed social revolution. The increase of employed older women is even more dramatic than these figures look, because New Zealand’s highest birth numbers were in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. These women are now in their sixties, and born with higher life-expectancies than their parents.

It seems unlikely that this increased labour force participation is a result of the rise of feminism in the 1970s; an increased advocacy for paid work was one plank of that feminism. Though feminism may have played a significant but lesser role in this huge social change. It seems far more likely that the main driving force is economic pressure upon households; stresses that have increasingly required all adult household members to be attached to the labour force, rather than the pre-1980s’ emphasis on an individual (typically male) ‘breadwinner’.

The stresses initially hit households hardest in the late 1980s through massive rises in mortgage interest rates, and in the more frequent revision of interest rates by banks during the lifespans of home loans. To that we can add an increased reliance on other forms of personal debt, such as credit cards. The ongoing stresses relate to both the increased precarity of paid work for men and women – meaning women increasingly having to make significant contributions to household budgets – and the failure of hourly wages to keep up with gross domestic product per capita. In order to be able to buy the goods and services which made up our GDP, we needed ever more hours of household labour.

Older households were able to hold out for longer against these pressures, but not forever. Hence, most of the increases of labour force engagement for these households have taken place in the last thirty years.

Older Women’s Spending

What all this means is that, in the 2020s, a critical component of consumer spending is done by older households, and in particular older women. Their spending is a major source of ‘stimulus’ in the 2020s’ economy. It is already apparent that suburban cafes, for example, survive very much with the help of patronage from groups of older women.

By and large, most policymakers worldwide have now forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the most important lessons was that countries which had inbuilt means to keep incomeless households spending suffered much less in the peak years – the early 1930s – of that Depression. (These countries included the United Kingdom and Sweden; they contrast with France and the United States, which were still in Depression in 1939.)

France in particular could not get out of that Depression. In part because of World War One deaths and injuries, it relied very much on immigrant labour (mainly from North Africa). It also relied on female and male urban labour from people with rural connections. So, when the Depression hit, the redundant workers – having no access to benefit incomes – simply returned to either Africa or to their parents’ small farms.

Most of Aotearoa’s older women cannot emigrate if they lose their incomes. But most of them will not be able to draw on a benefit to offset their lost wages. Some are already receiving New Zealand Superannuation, and that will rise a little as the marginal tax rates on their ‘Super’ will come down. What of those under 65 who lose their incomes, noting that many employed women age 55-64 live in households which pay mortgages or rent? Most will not qualify for an MSD benefit; they will be fully reliant on their partners’ or adult children’s wages. Some, who do qualify for benefits, will face stand-downs of several weeks or months; and time engaging with MSD that would be better spent with their grandchildren or elderly parents.

One particular group of older women is those, mainly in their early sixties, who used to be able to get a ‘non-qualifying spouse Superannuation benefit’, ie if their partners were superannuitant pensioners with minimal other income. (With zero fanfare, one of the first things the Labour Government did, in October 2020, was to cancel these women’s entitlement to what was an important form of transitional income support.) These women, grandmothers in large part, are the ‘breadwinners’ in their senior households. If they lose their jobs (or their ‘roles’ as we are now supposed to say), that means a potentially catastrophic loss of household income. (We should note as an example that the New Zealand Polytechnic sector, currently undergoing significant restructuring and financial downsizing, has a particularly important portfolio of older female employees; many of these workers have substantial institutional memory, keeping their organisations functioning more than many of the younger managers appreciate.)

MSD should be focussed on helping young people to find paid work, and not having their resources logjammed by older women who would have previously had access to income support without red tape.

The Laws of Stimulus

The First Law of Holes, is ‘stop digging’. (We note that a ‘depression’ is, literally, a hole.) Finance Minister Nicola Willis is digging furiously, burying alive suffocating Kiwis.

The first law of stimulus is to stop public-sector retrenchment. That is the main single lesson from the near-forgotten Great Depression. The second law of stimulus is to have rights-based alternative sources of income that individuals of all ages can fall back on. The third law of stimulus is to stop pursuing a monetary policy that jacks-up interest rates; the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ is substantially a ‘cost of jacked-up interest rates’ crisis. (As I have already noted, debt is something that drives more people into the labour force; it’s not just the amount of debt, it’s also the cost of that debt.)

We may note that New Zealand got out of the Great Depression by adopting all three laws of stimulus. And a fourth law, by using the cheap money to embark upon a very successful ‘state housing’ program, New Zealand recovered in 1936 to 1938 with double-digit economic growth and near-zero inflation. Some of those houses, well-built, are worth a fortune now. Fletchers and other capitalists made a fortune, too; this is the kind of stimulus which would meet Simon Bridges’ business-perspective criteria. Homelessness was not acceptable to New Zealanders back then, as it seems to be now. Are we looking at a coming decade of escalating homelessness for older women?

When just about every adult is ‘in the labour force’ – unhidden or hidden – desperately needing income while employment ‘roles’ are in decline, the social stresses cannot be contained forever. Younger people may revolt, turning to the underclass-politics of the street. Older people are more likely to die unseen, as too many did in July 2022 (many denied desperately-needed second-booster vaccines) when the Covid19 pandemic really hit Aotearoa New Zealand.

Do any groups of influential people out there have the imagination and capacity to answer the call for humane economic revival? Or is it a case of those who would can’t, and those who could don’t?

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The above chart shows – in red – the annual percentage increase (since 1988) in numbers employed of women aged 65-69, based on Household Labour Force Survey employment data. (And it shows, for comparison, males aged 30-34; in blue, their percentages are shown on the right-hand side of the chart. I explain below why I contrast older women with younger men.)

The employment growth of older women is particularly variable. But there are some clearly discernible patterns. To help show these, I have used “vertical gridlines” 33 months apart; 2¾ years is the persistent period of New Zealand’s trade cycle.

There are several reasons why employment may go up or down. First is simply the growth of the population for the demographic portrayed. For the latest data, the most recent women portrayed (the 2025 data point) were born around 1957 (ie born in 1957±2). Birth numbers in New Zealand peaked in the decade from 1955 to 1964; so, there will be many more women still alive in this birth cohort than in previous cohorts, and recent international migration will be low for that age group. Especially as life expectancy has been rising, population growth is a major reason for an increase in women aged 65-69 who are employed. So, growth of employment in this demographic should be well above the zero showing for the last two years.

Another reason for higher employment numbers is ‘labour force participation rates’. Charts that I posted recently from the same dataset show participation rates for women aged 65-69 having risen to 44% in 2022, the last peak of the cycle. (See my Employment in New Zealand – especially of women – at the Age Margins.) It’s unlikely that the actual participation rate has fallen since 2022; more likely it has risen in line with the trend this century (participation up from 10% to 44% of the available population); although the official participation rate has fallen. The difference between the actual and official participation rates is known as ‘hidden unemployment’)

The third reason for changing employment for ‘retirement-age women’ is the ‘added-worker effect’. This effect, highly apparent for this demographic, means that employment and actual labour force participation move essentially counter to the economic cycles (including the 33-month trade cycle). This countercyclical effect, similar to the enrolment patterns for tertiary education, is particularly apparent from 1988 to 1997. And it’s understated by the employment data, because the times when more older women want to be employed will be times of generally high unemployment. The data peaks here – eg in late 1988 and mid-1991 – reflect both the increased desire for paid work, and the reduced ability to secure paid work.

The ‘added-worker effect’ operates when other sources of household income are reduced, or when major costs such as mortgage interest or rent are high and/or rising. For this demographic there is also a ‘subtracted worker effect’, meaning that these women choose to retire whenever they can afford to retire.

It is apparent that, for the most part, the peak increases in the employment of older women follow the 33-month trade cycle. The red peaks are on or close to the charts’ vertical gridlines. There were however disruptions to the cycle caused by the 2008/09 Global Financial Crisis, and in the 2020s thanks to the Covid19 pandemic.

Males aged 30-34

The blue graph for males aged 30-34 shows the economic cycle as we would expect. This is a demographic with a very high and stable labour force participation rate. As is apparent, the blue plot is to an extent countercyclical to the red plot. The main male employment cyclical peaks were in the mid-1990s, the mid-2000s, the late 2010s, and in 2023.

We particularly note that employment growth for youngish men was weak in the late 1990s and the late 2000s. Rising young-male employment was particularly strong between 2024 and 2018, reflecting strong immigration for this demographic.

Since the present government has been in power – ie from November 2023 – employment growth for youngish men has plummeted, despite high levels of net immigration, and despite this being the baby-blip generation born in the early 1990s. Basically, the economy ‘tanked’ in 2024 and 2025.

Female birth cohorts

The second chart shows women’s employment/participation for different ‘generations’. For women born around 1957, employment peaked at just under 80% of the available population, when they were aged about 47. For the next generation, that peak is even higher, at about 83% of available women; and this is despite more women having babies later in life.

Generally, younger generations of women have had markedly higher participation rates, especially between ages 25 to 40.

Finally

Once upon a time ago we ‘worked to live’. Since the neoliberal and feminist revolutions, we have ‘lived to work’. I am not convinced that this is progress. Progress is supposed to be productivity growth; more outputs per unit of (labour and other) inputs. What we have seen is much more input – with labour inputs being shown here – yet economic growth if anything seems to have slowed.

To have a sustainable future, we should be stabilising output, while contracting inputs. Employment counts, as defined by the HLFS, are crude measures of inputs. It is perfectly possible to have more people employed, wanting and getting fewer hours per week on average. That’s not what we have here. Rather, we have more and more people desperate for employment to pay the bills, and a substantial decline in time committed to the other non-income-focused aspects of life. Women have been on the frontline of this seek-more-work play-less zeitgeist.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Quarterly Labour market data in Aotearoa New Zealand was released today. Much of the data is functionally useless, because of definitions which disguise rather than reveal important trends and turning points.

I have focussed on employment data (although the definition of ’employment’ is too generous to be optimally useful) relative to estimated populations for age groups at the younger and older margins of the ‘working age’. (For me, ‘active in the market economy’ means meeting the official definition of employment. Unlike the International Labour Organisation, I am not classing unemployed people as ‘active in the market economy’.)

The first chart focuses on older women, a group particularly impacted by recent and ongoing economic changes. Many of these people neither qualify for benefits when they become redundant; nor do they even make the official unemployment data because, compared to people aged 25 to 55, they are more often regarded as withdrawing from the labour force when they lose their jobs.

We can see that the post-1980s’ trend for all depicted age groups is one of rising ‘participation’ in the labour market; much of this is for financial reasons (eg needing to pay mortgages or rent), rather than for lifestyle or feminist reasons. Some of the change of course is linked to the increase of the age of entitlement to New Zealand Superannuation, from 60 to 65.

We see that recent (ie post-2022) data shows a flattening of the trend, or a fall against the trend for 65-69-year-old women. Most of these are actual unemployed people who are counted as ‘discouraged workers’ or ‘retired’. In reality, the financial pressures on older women to stay working are stronger than ever. 2022 represented the year of peak-grandmother-labour.

The second chart shows the trend fall in older men and women NOT employed. We note that New Zealand Superannuation – a Universal Basic Income for Seniors – incentivises people to stay working after age 65. (Australia has a substantially lower proportion of people over 65 in employment.) The trend in falling non-employment has been arrested by the greater difficulty since 2022 in finding paid work.

For younger people, the trend is for more employment and less higher-education (although many people in higher education also meet the definition of being employed). It would appear that many New Zealanders in their twenties have returned to higher education in lieu of being employed, looking to live from student allowances or student loans.

The third chart compares the teenage workforce with workers of peak working age (45-49). For peak working age we see convergence of male and female participation, despite more women in their late forties with children aged under 10 in their care.

For teenage workers, the male data fluctuates more than the female data. In this decade, more teenage males are not employed than teenage females; a clear change from the 1980s. There was a dramatic ‘flight to employment’ for teenagers after covid; a return now reversed as the job market clams shut.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Recently I have published charts showing how people born around 1960 are already placing huge burdens on New Zealand’s healthcare system (Death Frequencies in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Birth Year, 26 Sep 2024) and how big falls in age-specific death rates have plateaued since 2010, and may now be reversing upwards (Death Rates of Older Working Males in Aotearoa New Zealand, from the late 1970s, 17 Oct 2024).

Here I look at decennial increases in total deaths by ‘generation’, where each generation is a ten-year birth cohort centred on a zero year. Featured generations are the ‘lucky generation’ (b. circa. 1940), post-war baby-boomers (b. circa. 1950), generation Jones (b. circa. 1960), generation X (b. circa. 1970) and generation Y (b. circa. 1980).

In Table 1 above we see that in 2020, 109% more people born around 1970 died than in 2010. The main reason for the increase is that these ‘Gen-X’ people were ten years older in 2020 than in 2010. Secondary reasons could relate to the net-immigration between those years for that age cohort, or could relate to the underlying health attributes of generation-X.

(Note that the ‘+’ in the labels arises because, due to data limitations, the definition of the generations used varies slightly for each year. Thus, for 2021, Gen-X is 1966-1976.)

We see that all of the followed generations show marked increases in the increases of deaths as we progress from 2020 to 2022, with the younger age cohorts showing increased increases in 2023 as well. Generation-X is highlighted as having the biggest increases in each of these four years: 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024. This suggests underlying health issues in this generation, or greater increases in net immigration for Gen-X (compared to say Gen-J or Gen-Y), or both.

On the matter of Gen-X net immigration, we note that immigrants must undergo health checks, so it’s likely that the death rates of Gen-X immigrants since 2010 are lower than the death rates of Gen-X non-immigrants. So it’s looking like there are significantly problematic health issues being experienced by Gen-X Aotearoans.

Table 2 focusses on just February to May data. These are the months in which death numbers are generally lowest. Older people tend to die more in winter, and younger people in summer. These are mainly autumn data. We also note that Table 2 allows us to access 2024 mortality data.

This is more worrying for Gen-X, because the data show higher rates of death increase from 2022, with an especially problematic number – a 170% increase in deaths – for 2024. These data definitely suggest there’s an underlying health problem, especially for that generation. The problem may be in two parts: underlying health status (eg incidence of chronic illnesses), and increased inadequacy of healthcare (including inability to access life-saving drugs).

Table 3 focusses on July and August only, the two main months for deaths attributable to respiratory infectious diseases. As we would expect, the older generations come out ‘tops’ in 2020 and 2021. But in 2022, the year the pandemic hit in New Zealand, it’s Gen-X again which has copped the biggest increases in deaths from infectious causes. Further, in 2023, it’s the younger generations – Gen-Y as well as Gen-X – that are showing the greatest increases in winter deaths. (Lack of access to Covid19 boosters might be part of the problem here.)

So, while yesterday’s charts might have showed that life-expectancy improvements have bottomed out after 2010, these table suggest that very recent mortality data is showing definite signs that life expectancies are starting to fall, with Gen-X – born around 1970 – taking the lead in this new development.

From the point of view of funding the healthcare system, not only is the aging of the population not being properly accounted for, but also substantial swathes of the bulging generations (generations J and X) are seemingly less healthy. We remember that deaths are only the ‘tip’ of the disease ‘iceberg’; mortality increases indicate underlying morbidity increases, and it is morbidity that places the greatest demands on healthcare.

(Is there a ‘sound’ fiscal argument for expanded access to euthanasia in the coming decades?!)

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Data is from Statistics New Zealand, Births and deaths: Year ended June 2024.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

This chart shows how death rates have fallen since the 1970s, emphasising the higher male death experience. The principal finding is that dramatically falling death rates have plateaued since around 2010, especially for men aged 50 to 64. Yet the starkest fact portrayed is the much higher death rates of males than females, in each of the age groups shown.

While this chart shows the differences in death rates clearly, the arithmetic plots used have an inbuilt visual bias with respect to changes over time; they exaggerate the slowing down of the improvements in death rates and the narrowing of the gaps. The second chart uses a ‘logarithmic scale’, which corrects this bias. For this second chart it is the slopes that matter, not the gaps between the groups.

The ‘plateau-effect’ still clearly shows. What it means is that it is no longer credible to say that “we are all living longer” (as many people urging us to save more for retirement say). Essentially, since about 2010, older working-age adults were dying at the same rates in the late 2010s as in the early 2010s. For the 2020s there is a small Covid19 effect. It seems unlikely that the declining age-group death rates of the millennial period will resume.

The data used shows some other things that are not easy to chart. First, the large gap between male and female death rates is closing (but remains large). Second, males aged between 15 and 35 had disturbingly higher death rates in the late 1980s ‘Rogernomic period’ compared to the early-1980s ‘Muldoon period’. Though females aged 20-24 did have markedly rising death rates in the early 1980s. In recent years, the death rates of younger people has risen significantly, especially females; though female death rates remain significantly lower than male death rates for all age groups. The biggest improvements in death rates in the millennial period were made by younger people, and by males aged 50 to 74. Those improvements slowed or reversed after 2015.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Generally, more people die in winter. Not surprising, though some years have significantly more deaths than others, and the timing of ‘peak death’ each year varies between the wintery months. These charts show the deaths, determined from weekly data, of people named Smith, New Zealand’s most common surname last century.

The numbers shown are nine-week moving totals, meaning that for the last week of July the data runs from the beginning of July to the end of August. The next datapoint drops the first week of July, and includes the first week of September. (This method addresses the randomness of death, and the randomness associated with the Smith sample.)

Secular Trend?

It is somewhat surprising that the numbers of deaths in 1973 were not much higher than in 1950. The population of New Zealand in 1973 was 3.0 million; in 1950 it was 1.9 million. More people should mean more deaths. But the age structures were quite different. In 1950, there were relatively many older people – thanks to the 1870 to 1895 baby boom. In 1973, there were fewer older men thanks to both World War One, and to the deceleration in birth numbers from the 1890s. With the partial exception of the early 1920s, that reduced birth rate lasted from around 1900 to 1945; though there was variation, with say the early 1940s having many more births than the early 1930s.

But, what goes around comes around. There was another baby boom from 1945 to 1975; a boom that is only just starting, in the 2020s, to markedly influence death tallies. So, as annual death numbers have been only on a slow incline in the lifetimes of those alive today, annual death numbers are set to increase dramatically. Just as individuals die, so do generations. And big generations die bigly.

(We also note that, in the 1940s and 1950s, infant mortality was much higher in New Zealand than in the 1970s.)

Mortality Peaks

The higher peaks in these charts can be attributed to influenza outbreaks. In addition, the winter seasonal highs are linked to the set of viruses – including coronaviruses – which we collectively know as the ‘common cold’.

Superficially, these charts suggest that ‘the flu’ and ‘the common cold’ are New Zealand’s grimmest reapers; are, together, New Zealand’s biggest public health nuisance. Further, the peaks in these charts seem to be getting higher relative to the troughs in the more recent data. Should this be a matter of concern? Didn’t we, by the 1970s, reach a state of hubris about infectious diseases?

Old Age

Death and taxes are (allegedly) the two principal certainties of life. If we don’t die of one thing, we die of something else. So, an increase of deaths triggered by ‘minor’ respiratory viruses can be explained, mainly, by a relative decrease in deaths from other causes such as heart disease and cancer.

And there may be more to it than that. The seasonal circulation of non-novel respiratory viruses may represent a kind of natural vaccination programme. So, at least for otherwise healthy working-age (and younger) people, the presence of these viruses in our temperate ecosystems may be contributing to our increased longevity. Less smoking and sugar, combined with more (not less) exposure to respiratory viruses, may be the essence of why life expectancies have risen in recent decades.

If so, then, the presence of highly seasonalised death patterns may represent a collective solution rather than a collective problem. On balance, influenza may be our friend, not our enemy. It may determine the timing of death in old-age rather than be a significant cause of premature death.

(Tactfully, Queen Elizabeth’s death certificate in 2022 simply attributed her death to ‘old age’. Old Age is a real thing, and not an expression of casual ageism. Indeed, ‘old age’ was the most important and truthful part of her death story; though, as is usual, a single attribution is not the whole story of a person’s death.)

Dry Tinder

Outbreaks of influenza (and other respiratory) viruses work like forest fires. Thus, after years with relatively few winter seasonal deaths, there is a build-up of ‘fuel’ meaning that there will soon be a year or two of higher numbers of seasonal deaths. Followed by years of below-average winter deaths. This is a normal pattern. When there is a large build-up of people of advanced age, there will be more deaths from old age. That’s the normal cycle of life. How do people die of old age? More often than not, such deaths are triggered by a seasonal infection.The aim of public health policy is to maximise the numbers of people who die of old age; minimising the numbers who die prematurely.

These charts, to a large extent, represent deaths due to old age. They also indicate years of more virulent strains of influenza.

The Charts

In the purple 1946-1955 chart, we see 1950 and 1953 as the years of elevated winter deaths, suggesting more dangerous influenza strains. We also notice secondary death peaks in late spring, early summer. In 1949 and 1952 these secondary peaks were higher than the primary winter peak for that year. Presumably, the end of the year is a time when people circulate more; and there will be more vulnerable people if the winter death tally was unusually low.

Looking at the red 1955-1964 chart we see 1956 looking much like 1950, suggesting two low-mortality years would be followed by a higher mortality year, presumably the ‘dry tinder’ effect.

1957 and 1958 were the years of the ‘Asian Flu’ pandemic (a novel strain of influenza), and it shows in the New Zealand data for both years; higher death tallies in years which would otherwise have had significantly fewer deaths. Many of these additional deaths will be of people who would otherwise have lived a few years longer. (Unlike the extremely lethal 1918 strain, most non-elderly people with good general health seem to have weathered this pandemic OK.)

As is normal after a respiratory pandemic (and this is certainly true in Eastern Europe after Covid19, where public health measures substantially subsided in the latter part of 2020), the death tallies for the next couple of years (1959, 1960) is significantly down. 1961 and 1964 were higher winter mortality years, as per the three-year pattern. (1963 had a sharp mortality peak, probably a nasty flu strain, followed by unusually low spring mortality.)

Looking at the blue 1964-1973 chart, 1968 to 1970 reflects the ‘Hong Kong Flu’ pandemic. Whereas the 1957 influenza strain was first reported around January of 1957, the 1968 pandemic strain was first reported in the middle of that year. There was no sign of it in New Zealand in 1968, or in early 1969. Then, in mid-1969, with a mix of ‘dry tinder’ and a lethal influenza strain, there was a longer than usual mortality peak. Then, after a short pause, the pandemic really hit in December, and lasted until August 1970. Like the 1918 pandemic influenza peak, and some of the Covid19 peaks, this was a summer shock.

1971 and 1972 were also high mortality years, suggesting that many who died from influenza in the early months of 1970 had been of working age rather than old age. There were still many frail old people in the population after 1970; people born during the first baby-boom era.

By 1973, we start to get the impact of diminishing relative numbers of older people; a combination of Word War and falling birth rates around the year 1900.

Prognostication

These charts show pandemic and substantial epidemic influenza outbreaks in New Zealand. And they show how ‘old age’ deaths follow a seasonal pattern; commonly triggered by a respiratory virus which would be weathered by the vast majority of people who did not have the characteristics of old age. These viruses are part of the wider ecosystem of which humans are very much a part. Further, the ecosystem of seasonal viruses is maintained by periodic appearances of virulent novel viruses.

There is no reason to believe that life expectancies could be raised by taking public health measures to eliminate influenza and ‘cold’ viruses. Rather, these viruses fine-tune our immune systems, and without that fine-tuning, average life-expectancy would probably fall. Indeed, one cannot imagine the possibility of healthy populations in the crowded metropolises of the world without regular exposures to non-lethal respiratory viruses; exposures tantamount to natural vaccination.

Note

From 1974, not all historical deaths can be accessed online. The rule is that, for today (13 February 2024), only deaths of people born on or before 13 February 1944 will be accessible. This means that 1974 data will not be comparable with 1973 data, because it will miss about a half of infant deaths. We should also note, however, that by 1974 infant mortality rates were substantially lower than they were in the 1940s and 1950s; meaning that late 1970s’ Smith data will remain broadly comparable. A substantial majority of the ‘Smithometer’ Smiths after 1973 will be older people.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In the absence of more detailed recent data on deaths in New Zealand, the Smithometer acts as a good proxy for older New Zealanders’ mortality. The Smithometer includes all New Zealand deaths where the persons’ surnames are Smith, including women with birth surnames of Smith. So, the Smithometer most reflects the mortality of older women. The historical data-source only gives access today to the deaths of people born on or before 10 January 1944.

In the above chart, the seven-week moving total is the most informative, as it better smooths out random variations.

The chart clearly shows the three Covid19 peaks of 2022: February/March, June/July, and December.

2023 is different. The usual seasonal peaks are missing. Deaths for this demographic have been consistently high from April to November, with recent peaks in early September and late October.

The new pattern is partly because Covid19 is a ‘seasonal’ illness that’s proving to be far less seasonal than we originally expected. The second reason is likely to be related to a more general deficit in immunity to a whole range of conditions, but especially conditions like Covid19 for which immunity tapers off relatively quickly. Put another way, there are likely to be more problems of tissue ‘inflammation’ in the community in our populations, and that is almost certainly partly due to decreased exposures to the regular minor bugs which used to keep topping up our general immunity.

Prolonged facemask mandates have almost certainly been part of the problem. Facemask mandates should only apply to exponential growth phases of a new respiratory virus. We need to discard the facemasks as soon as possible to bring ourselves back to a normal environmental interaction between humans and microbes.

An important point to note about 2022 is the death peak in June/July of that year was almost certainly due to many older vulnerable people being refused second booster vaccinations, on account of there having been ‘only’ five months between the well-predicted June wave of Covid19 and their first boosters in January and February. This finding is reinforced by the relatively small mortality peak for this demographic in March 2022, the month of peak infections in New Zealand. In March 2022, the vulnerable population had been recently vaccinated.

Younger New Zealanders

My suspicion is that younger demographics – for which good data is harder to find – will be showing greater increases (compared to the over-80s) in mortality relative to their 2010s’ norms. While younger people are more ‘vigorous’, their immune systems are generally less-well trained. Indeed, that’s probably why younger people are more likely than older people to get ‘long-coronavirus’ symptoms. In saying this, I am putting out the hypothesis that many pre-Covid19 cases of chronic fatigue syndrome may have been lagging symptoms of the other four circulating human ‘common cold’ coronaviruses.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The three components to the crisis are churn, aging, and the increasing predominance of births into disadvantaged households.

Churn

Yesterday the main release from Statistics New Zealand was Record net migration loss of New Zealand citizens. ” There was a record net migration loss of 44,700 New Zealand citizens in the September 2023 year. This net migration loss was made up of 26,400 migrant arrivals and 71,200 migrant departures.”

Today the main release was the National population estimates at 30 September 2023. Radio NZ reported at 1pm today that “New Zealand’s population has grown by almost three percent in the last year. Stats NZ has released its most recent population figures showing there are now 5.27 million people living in Aotearoa. For the year ending September 2023 the population grew by 138,100 people. Of that, the natural increase, the number of births minus deaths was 19,300 people, with the rest being made up of net migration.”

That gain of net migration was 118,800. A quick calculation tells us that the gain of non- New Zealand citizens was 163,500, in one 12-month period. 163,500 is 3.1% of Aotearoa New Zealand’s entire population. (If that continues, New Zealand will have 10 million people before 2050, with Māori plus New Zealand born Pakeha – tangata whenua and tangata tiriti – being as few as one-third of the total.)

New Zealand is perhaps the world’s most significant churn economy/nation, experiencing simultaneous record net emigration and record net immigration!! Multiculturalism will matter most. Though we have spent too much effort in recent years navel-gazing about biculturalism.

Aging

Here I will emphasise the role of historical births. In 2022 the age with the greatest number of deaths was 89. That’s people born in 1933, when births were close to a low for the last 100 years. The lowest three years were 1933 to 1935, with a total of 81,574 people born. From 1943 to 1945 there were 114,255 births From 1952 to 1954 there were 157,789 births. From 1961 to 1963 there were 194,931 births, a 139% increase compared to 1933‑1935. From 1970 to 1972 there were 189,725 births.

The number of people aged 87 to 89, will in fact be closer to three times higher in 2050 than it is in 2023, even if there is no further emigration or immigration. That’s because, in addition to the abovementioned 139% increase in births, New Zealand’s population grew substantially since the 1960s, with a significant amount of that net immigration being people born in that 1961 to 1963 period. (It’s also because of much higher infant mortality in the Depression years of the 1930s.) This coming population peak are people now in their early sixties; people who are already boosting New Zealand’s mortality statistics.

A significant number of the people reaching their late eighties in the 2030s and 2040s will be retired (ie no longer practicing) healthcare doctors, nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

It is most likely that there will not in fact be as many people in their late eighties in 2050 as my projections suggest. Many of the “late-boomers” will most likely died prematurely; I confidently predict that there will be a substantial fall in life expectancy over the next 25 years.

Births in disadvantaged households

It is not fashionable today to keep data about socio-economic disadvantage. Instead, we rely on two fashionable proxies for such disadvantage: Māori and Pasifika. A third useful proxy for disadvantage is ex-nuptial births.

Neither being Māori or Pasifika, nor giving birth ex-nuptially, are direct indicators of disadvantage; after all our Prime Minister last year gave birth ex-nuptially in 2018. Yet, all three of these birth measures correlate with disadvantage. And Aotearoa today has pockets of substantial disadvantage, much of it barely acknowledged.

I will note these statistics about 2022 births:

• 30,009 ex-nuptial births; highest since 2010 (31,236) and up by 1,461 since 2021
•  28,875 nuptial births; lowest since the 1930s, and down by 1,236 since 2021
• 12,948 births of Asian ethnicity; down from a peak of 13,188 in 2019
• 9,609 births of Pasifika ethnicity, highest since 2012 (9,897) and up by 645 since 2021
• 17,712 births of Māori ethnicity, highest since 2010 (18,459) and up by 570 since 2021

We should note that 2022 is the first year ever in Aotearoa New Zealand that ex-nuptial births exceeded nuptial births.

In 2050, those born in 2022 will be turning 28. Will they have the skills, education and training, and motivation to be providing high quality services to that huge cohort of people who will then be in their late eighties? Will it be acceptable if only the elite-elderly are able to afford an acceptable level of life-sustaining and life-enhancing services?

Maybe we will have 10 million people in 2050, mostly people themselves or with parents or grandparents born in Asia? And maybe those people will continue to provide the high-quality services to which our older people have become accustomed.

Or maybe not? Those young people from Asia, Africa and Latin America – too many of whom are dying these years as boat people or in Mexico, or stuck in immigration-visa-limbo – will be a precious international ‘commodity’ in 2050.

We can address these problems. But not with mainstream policies of dour fiscal probity.

One final matter to note. Thanks to New Zealand’s universal pension system (New Zealand Superannuation), an exceptionally large number of people of ‘retirement age’ are still in employment or running businesses. Universal benefits enable employment. The worst thing any government could do in the next decade would be to create disincentives for older people to work, by moving towards means-tested retirement-income options.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The above chart looks rather noisy, and so it should. Life and death are messy, and subject to random variations. But this chart, for females, and those that follow, are important charts. It’s worth looking through the ‘random noise’. These charts suggest that the cliché ‘we are all living longer’ is incorrect. Also, this representation of New Zealand’s mortality data highlights the experience of younger people, something hidden by most death and life expectancy data.

First, some technical information. Triennial death increases are three-yearly percentage increases in the actual number of deaths; in this case, the numbers of deaths for an age-cohort (aka. for a generation). These are 11-year age-cohorts; eg the 1970s’ age cohort here is made up of people born from 1969 to 1979. Hence it is listed as 1974±5 (where ± means ‘plus or minus’).

Consider the plot for people in the 1974±5 cohort who died aged 21. The number shown is 23%. Essentially, that means there were 23% more deaths of females in this 1970s’ birth cohort who died aged 21 compared to the number from that birth cohort who died aged 18. (This is equivalent to an annual increase in deaths of 7%. We note that the incidence of death among 18-21 year-olds remains very low, even if the numbers of deaths are increasing.)

The data has been ‘smoothed’ in the following way. The deaths of those aged 21 have been compared with the annual average of deaths for those people when they were aged 16 to 20. The reason for this smoothing is to remove distortion arising from random single-year impacts on comparison populations.

We note that, in the absence of immigration and emigration, each year the population of a birth cohort falls; the fall is slow when the birth cohort is young, and accelerates from middle-age. Certainly, from about age 30, the likelihood of death from natural causes increases, as the cohort population falls. Again ignoring net immigration for the time being, death increases with age should be positive (ie above zero percent); and approximately stable as the increased likelihood of death offsets the reduced cohort population size.

Adding emigration and immigration to the picture, for New Zealand at least, is likely to reduce the numbers of deaths of people aged in their early twenties (an age which typically features net emigration) and to raise the numbers of deaths of people in their thirties (an age which features net immigration).

A further point of interpretation. Where there are ‘spikes’ in the chart, it does not necessarily mean that death rates are falling in subsequent years. The spikes essentially show acceleration of death incidence. If death rates are high, then zero percent increases indicate that death rates are still high.

So, what does this first chart tell us?

First, we see that from age 30 onwards, each birth-cohort (ie each generation) has experienced about 20% more deaths every three years; this amounts to about a 6% annual increase in death numbers. The greater variability for women aged 30 to 50 most likely reflects variations in the rate of immigrant arrivals; and we should bear in mind that immigration in this age group includes large numbers of returnees, immigrants to New Zealand who were born in New Zealand.

There is no obvious sense that more-recently-born women are living longer or shorter than their elders. Though women born in the 1930s do seem to have been more likely to die age 35 to 45 than their daughters and granddaughters; probably a mix of aftereffects of childhood poverty in the Depression years, and of the high rates of smoking amongst that generation.

Second, all generation show at least one age from 20 to 25 where there were fewer deaths than three years previously. Emigration – in particular, extended ‘overseas experience’ – will have been one reason, though probably not the only reason.

Third, and perhaps most worrying, are the high increases in teenage death rates showing for people born after 1980. This will be partly due to falling death rates for people aged around ten. But is also likely to reflect the emergence of a growing underclass; child/teenage poverty in times in which underclass births have become a larger proportion of total births. While this data is for females, we’ll look at males shortly.

This second chart shows the same data as the first chart, though it’s plotted by year-of-death rather than age-at-death. This chart shows particular high-death or low-death years. 1957 and 1968 were influenza pandemic years, and it shows, especially for the 1930s-born age cohort. We can also see death peaks in 1977, 1980, 1987, 1995, 2003/04, 2011, 2017, and 2022.

We note the big fall in the late 1990s in deaths of the 1970s’ born. This will be due to particularly heavy emigration of young people in the 1990s; emigration resulting from the record-high unemployment levels in the early 1990s.

The other feature prominent in this chart is the experience of teenagers born from 1979 to 2009. These are most likely to be due to increased mental health issues faced by teenagers born from the 1980s, perhaps combined with other issues around childhood immunity to pathogens. Anecdotally, we do hear about increasing incidences of conditions such as asthma and allergies; conditions possibly due more to over-cleanliness than to exposure to pathogens.

Comparing males with females, we see that the ‘teenage issue’ is substantially more prominent with males, and more clearly extends back to older generations. In the case of teenage males, we note a greater propensity to risky behaviours, and also the greater likelihood of death by suicide. On the matter of risky behaviours, the most prominent feature of risk-taking was vehicle crashes.

(A particular note re my own memories. 1973 was the worst year ever for road deaths in New Zealand, and one group overrepresented were motorcyclists aged around 18 to 20. Look at the green 1950s’ birth cohort. While I neither died nor got injured from such a crash, that was me; born in 1953, and an active student motorcyclist. I knew a number of people who did have serious crashes. And I attended two funerals in 1973; both born in 1952, one in a mountaineering accident and one suicide.)

In the final chart, we again see no evidence that the younger generations are healthier – or more likely to be long-lived – than their parents’ generations. Further, those born in the 1990s are not showing the decline in deaths in their early 20s which characterised previous generations. Though this may be due to less emigration; ie to changes in the culture of ‘overseas experience’ with more young people taking short trips rather than an extended or indefinite period of absence from New Zealand.

The last year of data is 2022, the year of high Covid19 mortality in New Zealand. New Zealanders born in the 1970s appear to have been hard-hit by Covid19, whether by the infection itself, or as a result of other circumstances associated with the pandemic. A 40% triennial increase in deaths in 2022 cannot be explained entirely by immigration.

Finally, in terms of the charts, we see that for older people, cohort death increases have been less for males than for females. This is because there are fewer older men than older women; meaning that more ‘past deaths’ of older men means relatively fewer ‘present deaths’ of older men.

Explanatory Context

Finally, I should mention the work of prominent (and still living) twentieth-century demographer Richard Easterlin (b.1926). His central insights were that baby-bust generations have more successful life-outcomes, on average, than baby-boom generations. (This may be modified, by the conclusion that ‘trailing baby-boomers’ – eg Gen X – would do less well in life than ‘leading baby-boomers’.)

And that the advantages/disadvantages of each age-cohort would show up in death rates, and would persevere throughout their cohorts’ lives.

The recent data that I have shown here modifies the first insight. Young people born in the 1980s – a baby bust period – have higher teenage death rates than those born in the 1960s and 1970s. My modification to Easterlin’s conclusion is that increasing inequality and poverty within a nation-state will also have an adverse impact on the life outcomes of a generation; especially given that, for today’s younger generations, children are overrepresented in the poorest households.

On Easterlin’s second insight, it’s too early to tell if unusually high teenage death rates for recent birth cohorts will also translate to unusually high death rates for these generations when they reach middle-age and old-age. But it’s looking likely that triennial death toll increases for people born in New Zealand after (say) 1970 will continue higher than for people born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

This means that I am questioning current official life-expectancy projections as too optimistic, given that they are biassed by the experiences of people born before 1970. Not only are we not all living longer, as the purveyors of retirement savings’ schemes claim, but my prediction is that true life-expectancy (an average) for people born after 1970 is actually lower than it is for people born between 1940 and 1970. Indeed, some United States data already shows this for that American country. I can see every reason to believe that New Zealand will follow this turning trend already apparent in official United States’ mortality data.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The chart above looks at the changing numbers of deaths for New Zealand’s seven adult generations. The numbers are ‘triennial’ – three-year percentage increases. For example, in 2020, twenty percent (20%) more Generation-Y people died than three years earlier; with ‘three years earlier defined as the average for years 2015 to 2019, and ‘Generation-Y’ is defined as people born from 1976 to 1986.

Deaths in a given year increase because of the aging process, because of population increases for that age cohort, or because of adverse health outcomes (eg epidemics) particular to the years concerned.

We may consider 2016 a baseline of sorts, though each year has its quirks. 2016 was a year of low death rates in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In 2016, there was a small fall in Gen-M deaths (‘millennials’.) But deaths rose in the next three years. The main driving factor here will be net immigration, with there being a significant outflow of New Zealanders in their 20s. From 2017, the impact of New Zealanders returning from overseas will have been important. Also, we note that Gen-M (shown in blue) probably had less of the risky behaviours (compared with older generations) typically associated with males in their early twenties. We also note that for Gen-M, death numbers are very low, so random fluctuation will be present.

In the 2020s, Gen-M deaths fell, and then increased more slowly than other generations. Net migration will have played a large part here, as well as the Covid19 public health measures keeping people at home more.

Gen-Y (shown in orange) and Gen-X have substantial increases in mortality in the years at the end of the last decade. Net immigration will be the major reason; noting that net immigration probably peaks for people aged in their thirties. We should note that 2017 was the year that the global influenza epidemic struck New Zealand, affecting people of all age groups with pre-existing conditions of poor health.

Gen-X (shown in black) is of particular concern, because it shows substantial increases in death numbers throughout the period, even in 2020. For people born from 1966 to 1976, while death numbers are still low, they are not insubstantial. There was a marked increase in Gen-X deaths in New Zealand’s ‘year of covid’, 2022, despite high death numbers already registered in 2020 and 2021.

Generation Jones (Gen-J, shown in yellow) is the generation which most reflects the very high birth rates in the early 1960s. Boosted by immigration – but not as much as generations X and Y – death increases have been consistent for this generation, boosted in the final year by a mix of Covid19 and the natural aging of each generation.

Gen-B – postwar baby-boomers (in green) – are not much affected by net immigration since 2010. So, their deaths have reflected both the natural aging process and the behaviour changes (partly enforced) in 2020 arising from the Covid19 pandemic. We also see an impact of the 2017 influenza epidemic.

I am calling the generation who were babies or young children during World War 2 ‘Gen-W’. Shown in purple, Gen-W were clearly and adversely affected by the 2017 influenza epidemic. In 2021, many Gen-W people died who would have died in 2020 had 2020 been a normal year. We also note that death increases in 2022, while marked, are less marked than the three younger generations. This is because Gen-W is a diminishing generation, with deaths in previous years impacting substantially on the living Gen-W population.

This last impact is most prominent for Gen-D (children of the Depression), who saw substantially fewer deaths in 2020 and 2021, largely because of there being fewer of them, but also because of the pandemic public health measures.

In coming years, most likely the main determinant of increasing numbers of deaths in each birth cohort will be that natural aging of that cohort/generation. But high levels of both immigration and emigration will continue to play a role, as will ‘health crises’ arising from both changes in the health statuses of the generations, and arising from compromised health-care services.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In this the seventh episode of A View from Afar podcast for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning examine the strengths and weaknesses of democracy around the world.

In particular Paul and Selwyn consider how and why democracy in many countries around the world is on the slide.

They examine the causes of democratic backsliding and also test why the erosion of high democratic ideas have, in many cases, popular support.

First, Paul offers a context, and defines democratic backsliding. He identifies the countries that are decisively eroding their own democracies of principles that were once embraced by both power elites and citizenry.

The Questions include:

• Why are we seeing more democratic backsliding in recent times?
• Is it just a political phenomenon or does it extend beyond the political sphere?
• Where has democratic backsliding been most evident?
• What do Chile, Guatemala, Israel and Thailand have in common when it comes to backsliding?
• What is occurring in the United States?
• If a democracy “backslides,” what does it slide into?

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