Cam's Blog

These are my cycles on a few different views on poverty.

2. The dependency ratio is 49.9%. So it is really close to 50% of the population supporting the other 50%.

3. Based on my population Pyramid, Switzerland is in stage 4 and starting to transition into stage 5. The country is fairly stable in its population. There was a big spike for the baby boomers and now the population is leveling out after that spike.

4. Switzerland should start preparing to transfer to stage 5. They could start implementing rewards for the more kids you have to try to keep their population up or they could accept immigrants to level out the population. This should happen because the population could be starting to decline. This would present problems because There would be less and less people supporting the baby boomer spike and it cold make the country unstable. If they needed to reduce the population they should do it more gradually to keep from too little of the population supporting a much bigger portion of the elderly and kids. They could gradually tone down the birth rates to keep the pyramid looking almost perfectly straight up and down. This would provide a perfect balance and be able to transition the population to the perfect amount to not have overpopulation. They could do this buy analyzing statistics on where they would like the population to be at the end of each year. And if they would like the population to slowly decrease they could use the average death rates and calculate the amount of births per person and restrict the rates accordingly.

Pressure groups/lobbyists, and petitions, civil disobedience all have some advantages and some disadvantages. There is sometimes better ways to do things.

A pressure group is a group that believes in change and tries to influence the government to make that change. They usually do this by appointing a lobbyist to argue for them. These can work really well when trying to change what happens in government because the lobbyists that get appointed often were former people in power so they have strong high up connections. They can fail however, because these pressure groups don’t actually make the decisions, so the government can just choose to ignore them all together. They also may lack the publicity that they need to actually make any change. This is where civil disobedience could help.

Civil disobedience is where you disobey the law or rule you are trying to protest. There are a couple principals to doing this. The first is you cant be violent about it or it could convey the wrong message and might alienate people from the cause you are fighting for. The second is that you take any punishment willingly and fully. They don’t seek to undermine the law – simply to repeal unjust laws. This way people are much more likely to notice what you’ve done because you’re actually breaking a law. One problem with civil disobedience is that you could just end up going to jail and they don’t look at the problem at all, so getting a petition signed could be your best bet.

Getting signatures for a petition is a great way to show people want change. A petition is where you suggest change and have people that agree with that change sign your petition. A few of the good things about petitions is that if you get enough signatures the government has to take a look at your suggestion. Again they really don’t have to do anything about it but they are required to task a group a people to look into it.

These are three of the ways that you can get change in the government and laws. None of these are guaranteed to work but if the government doesn’t listen to some serious concerns then it isn’t representing its people very well and that is a big problem.