An increasing aged population a long-term challenge for Greece

(Older people sitting on a bench at the beach of Thessaloniki, Unknown photographer)

Blog Post by Allen Bryan.

This article, as the title suggests, talks about the aging population in Greece, and the possible ramifications such an aging population could have. The subtitle immediately makes a bold claim that within 20 to 30 years the growth rate of the earth (not just Greece) will slow down. No explanation of how, but that will be made clearer in the next section. The article begins by talking about Greece and how demographic developments within the next 40 will have repercussions on growth, bank deposits, wealth, the standard of living, and much more. It then states how these changes are underestimated by investors, governments, and the business world as they view the issue as a “hot potato”. It then brings up the concern of who will foot the bill for senior citizens. The article then shifts its focus from the economic repercussions to the dwindling population specifically. Here the article brings up a study conducted by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development which projected that Greece’s population will dwindle from 10.6 million people today, to a mere 8.9 million by 2050. Next, the article talks about the fertility rate of Greece which is 1.33. It then makes a statement that Greece has one of Europe’s most aged populations at 21% of people being older than 65. The article ends by talking about a study by the Laboratory of Demographic and Social analysis which states that there is a disproportional increase in Greece of the “overage” population (people 80 and older).

Oh boy… I want to give this article the benefit of the doubt but when it comes to evidence it is riddled with issues. First, I will go through the multitude of things wrong with it, and then I will try to give an explanation the best I can. The first thing wrong with this article is that the author’s name is nowhere to be found. It does have a date, that being 3 days ago, but this is the only real piece of credibility this article has. As mentioned in the previous section the subtitle of the article makes a pretty bold claim pertaining to global population growth. This claim has no evidence to back it up, and unfortunately, this seems to be a constant theme with many of the claims and “data” throughout the article. The article “cites” two studies by so-called institutes and laboratories but gives no link to either study which is deeply troubling. Within the article, the author (whoever they may be) reference an individual with the name “BlackRock” but gives absolutely no context to whom this person may be or why they are relevant to the article. Similar to a previous Global News Post this article does not give any information about who the photographer of the picture within the article is. Lastly, even though there are still a few more, the article is very short and has a few grammatical and punctuation mistakes, leading me to wonder about the origins of the author.

Okay, I know that was a lot to sift through, and you may be wondering “Allen, if this article was so terrible then why did you even chose it in the first place?”, but hear me out. I believe that while, contextually and in its credibility, this article is almost worthless, I believe that this article actually shows us more about the news site and English news in Greece as a whole. This reminds me of the Wikipedia lecture we had in class in how the majority of the information on the internet is in English, and how there are a number of bots “translating” information from one language to another. I believe this is the exact thing we see here with this English version of To Vima. In fact, I right clicked in the photo to do a Google search to see if there were any other articles that used the image so I would be able to properly cite the photographer and give them due credit. What I found is that after going picture by picture in Google’s “images” section and sifting through about 30 Greek news sites, not one of them cited the image. What I found funny about all of this is that I actually stumbled upon To Vima’s actual (Greek) site which was the only place I was able to get any information at all about the picture (listed underneath the photo). So to bring this overly long section to a close I believe this article and cite (since all of their articles are laid out this way) is more useful in the way we understand how news in English is being distributed throughout Greece, and how it seems that the quantity of the articles is far more important than the quality. Whether that is for monetary purposes, a bot is translating Greek articles, or a number of different reasons, I know not. All that I know is that it is pretty disturbing, to say the least.

Lastly, and far quicker than the previous few sections is the perspective of the article. Even this was pretty difficult to pin down as it can be seen as outside looking in on Greece, or even from the inside looking in; in both regards looking towards the future. The lack of continuity throughout the article is what, to me, makes the perspective hard to distinguish. As an example, as mentioned earlier the article references a “BlackRock” individual. Is this from their perspective? Could it be from an academic perspective given the two studies “conducted”? Unfortunately to myself and I’m sure you, I am unable to give a clearer picture on the perspective of the article, but as mentioned earlier I don’t believe that the context or even the perspective of this article is what should be taken away, but “why” this article has so many issues in the first place.

P.S.

Thank you very much. understand this article is a stretch in that it is vastly different from the other four I have done, but I actually found it very interesting as to how an article such as this (and suspiciously every other article on this site (but not on the actual Greek version)) has so many problems with it. The first thing I thought of, as mentioned earlier, was the “JSbot” (or whatever it was called) issue in the Wikipedia lecture and I thought that this has to be the explanation. But it’s the “why” they would use such a thing that really fascinates me. Thank you once more, and I hope that by taking this approach I was still able to enlighten you about this Greek news source, even though there isn’t really any ‘news’ takeaway from this (that you should truly believe, that is).