Common Sense with Paul Jacob

“London, which now has 215,700 millionaires, is one of only two cities in the top 50 — the other being the heavily sanctioned capital of Russia, Moscow — that has fewer rich individuals than a decade ago,” states The Epoch Times.

Changing demographics is a subject taking some popular notice, as populations worldwide get older and are replaced (so to speak) by immigrants as well as the young.

The city famed for its bridges and Big Ben, and for surrounding the peculiar financial center, the “City of London,” has recently “dropped out of the top 5 cities for millionaires around the world, with New York, the Bay Area, Tokyo, Singapore, and Los Angeles all ranking higher, according to a report commissioned by Henley and Partners, a United Kingdom-based investment migration consultancy,” explains The Epoch Times.

The article by Guy Birchall mentions a couple of causes, including high taxes and rising crime rates. What it does not mention is the changing demographics of the city. That is, the cultural and racial make-up of London. Actor and comedian “John Cleese has been called out for suggesting the number of immigrants in London means it ‘is not really an English city anymore,’” a Huffington Post UK article explained a few years ago. Cleese was merely noting the big change in the kind of people who live in London. “‘I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King’s Road and say, “Where are all the English people?”’”

It is not absurd to think that a rise in numbers of one group could effect a decline in another.

Apropos of yesterday’s subject, population decline, China’s population collapse was a focus but not the focus. On YouTube, however, many “content creators” are focusing more acutely on China’s version of the problem. The ‘This Thread’ podcast claims, for instance, that China’s situation is much worse than compared to that of the U.S.:

A number of YouTubers are concentrating on a much bolder claim: that the CCP has been lying about its population for years, and that the total population is a tiny fraction of what officials claim. This presenter argues, for instance, that the country’s population is probably less than half a billion:

Look around on YouTube, and you’ll find video after video portraying China’s biggest cities as seemingly empty! Where did they all go? That’s their question. These YouTubers also suggest that Chinese pandemic deaths have been extraordinarily high, persistent, and consistently covered up.

Caution: most outside observers consider this YouTube trend a species of folk fiction, something like the dreaded “conspiracy theory”: false, hyperbolic, crazy — not to put too fine a point on it. But we do know that governments lie; we know that communists lie with more alacrity and out of greater necessity — so maybe there is something to the notion that 1.4 billion people is not just a small statistical fib, but the grandest example of the Big Lie.