Migration, Finance, Demian

Hein de Haas at U of Amsterdam, writing for Der Spiegel on the myths of migration:

"The magnitude of migration is far too low to offset the effects of population aging. A United Nations study has shown that, to achieve such a result, levels of migration would have to reach levels that are both undesirable and unrealistic. In order to counter its aging population, this study found that Germany, for example, would require net immigration of 3.5 million people per year - 12 times higher than the annual average of 280,000 from the years 1991 to 2015. …
Currently, about 0.4 percent of the total EU population is a refugee. That figure hovered around 0.5 percent between 1992 and 1995.”

John Kay:

"The market had changed from one in which the process was primarily one of mutualisation of risks to one in which risks were being transferred from people understood a lot about them to people who knew little. ...
both investment and risk transfer are unavoidably heterogeneous, idiosyncratic transactions. In consequence, algorithmic scoring can never replace, although it may be able to assist, a qualitative and quantitative assessment of an experienced loan officer or shrewd investor ... the future of peer-to-peer lending is that the institutions which survive fraud, losses and increased regulatory scrutiny will increasingly resemble the organisations which we used to call banks."

Colin Marshall at LARB, on Hermann Hesse's Demian in Korea:

"Any story of “old Europe struggling with modernity” will resonate with a Korea doing plenty of modernity-grappling of its own. Demian in particular, Sellar writes, also taps inadvertently into the particular Korean storytelling sensibility: “They are much more enamored of sad endings, and they tend to be much more patient with stories that unfold in such a way that the protagonists never had a real hope of changing the outcome.” This has introduced certain difficulties into the marketing of Korean literature to Westerners, who “have little patience for stories that feature characters who can’t take some hand in their fate” and “tend to be less patient with melodramatically sad turns of plot,” but it means certain strains of anguish-oriented German fiction, best exemplified by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (from the object of whose unrequited passion one of Korea’s biggest conglomerates took its name), have grown popular indeed here.”