View From a Height

Demographics are a Moving Target

One of the capstone courses at DU Business School is something called the Integrative Challenge. Teams of students do research projects for local businesses and governmentes, evaluating expansion plans, marketing schemes, student-researcher compensation, and so forth.

This year, one of the teams drew a local amusement park/water park equipment company, who wants to expand into Europe. Their presentation was a case study - in missing Hannibal's elephants in the living room.

While dutifully noticing that while each European country has children, they also pointed out that the populations were aging and eventually, declining. Of course, the inconsistency goes away once you realizing that it's North African immigrants who are having all the children.

It's one thing to suggest putting a water park in a country where the Great Winter Pastime is skating on the canals. It's quite another to entirely miss the fact that 50% of Dutch children born this year will be learning the Koran in a few years.

There are obvious business implications here. After all, this is a massive cultural shift, which suggests that Marseilles might not be the ideal place for a water park that it was when the last group of fascists moved in. You'd hate to put up a nice water slide, only to find the next morning that someone had been tossing grenades at the supports.

Certainly there's risk for the team that someone from the company's management is going to notice this. Those of us who read Mark Steyn on a regular basis already knew about it. But this team spent a lot of time on these countries. Could it be that there's greater risk to the company that they won't notice?

One of the benefits of the blogosphere's explosion is that information like this is available. It's evidence of its continuing limitations, as well as the MSM's ongoing failure, that it could be completely missed by a team researching those countries.