🇺🇸 Hegseth meets with Jake and Logan Paul.

📎 Clash Report

📝 🇧🇴 🇩🇪 When will Bolivia become a German-speaking majority country? Given current trends, in around 90 years.

Bolivia’s estimated total fertility rate of 1.56 hides a big asymmetry: a small minority group, the Mennonites, who speak Low German, has a much higher one. Although it is hard to get exact figures, their fertility rate is probably around 7. Given that Bolivian Mennonites are about 150,000, but very young, there are around 6,500 new Mennonite births a year in Bolivia, or 4.2% of the total of 153,204 births. This also means that the total fertility rate of the rest of Bolivia is around 1.51.

Let’s imagine that current trends continue. This is a big “assumption” and I will come back to it soon. That is, the total fertility rate of Mennonites is 7, the total fertility rate of the rest of Bolivians is 1.51, and the net emigration rate of the rest is 3.5 per 1,000. Also, for simplicity, let me assume there are no transfers between the two populations.

The table in the post shows how the Mennonites will grow from the current size of 150,000 to around 5 million in 2116, when they will become the majority of Bolivians. This growth rate is fast, but not unprecedented. In 1986, 40 years ago, there were only around 17,500 Mennonites in Bolivia, and the net immigration of Mennonites, as far as I can tell, has been small.

Now, of course, this calculation is just a slightly tongue-in-cheek scenario, not a forecast. First, the fertility of the rest of Bolivians can recover (or fall further, accelerating the process). Second, as Mennonites become a larger group, their ability to keep their fertility rate at 7 might collapse. And many Mennonites may abandon the denomination.

My calculation only makes a very simple point: take two populations in a country with different fertility rates. Keep the differences for 100 years, and you have a totally different country. People just don’t get that fertility is like an interest rate: it compounds over time.

📎 Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

📝 🇪🇹 🇸🇩 Woofers on X: We are on course for a terrible war in Ethiopia with dramatic regional consequences and I feel like it’s hardly getting any attention. The Tigray War saw the TPLF cut off from the outside world, smashed between Eritrea and the Ethiopian federal government. Now, the relationship has changed and the TPLF has friends in Asmara. The Sudanese Armed Forces are also eager to lend support, part of a longstanding relationship only strengthened by Ethiopia’s blatant support for the RSF.

Should the alliance between the TPLF, Fano and OLA hold together and should they be able to coordinate their actions (both in doubt long term) then there is a serious possibility that Addis Ababa loses control over vast portions of the country. If the ONLF can muster forces, it can throw the Somali region into disarray.

Though the OLA’s capacity to hold ground is in question, their widespread presence across Oromia means that federal forces are stretched thin.

Should a full war be launched, it will be the most serious crisis in Ethiopia since the civil war during the Cold War period. More serious than the Tigray War of just a few years ago.

📎 Woofers

🇺🇸 🇸🇦 🇾🇪 Trump decided against ordering U.S. airstrikes on Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis for now, after briefly telling the Pentagon to prepare strikes following a personal appeal from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to administration officials cited by the New York Times. Most of Trump’s inner circle reportedly opposed opening another front in the war.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/us/politics/trump-yemen-houthis-red-sea-iran.html

https://archive.ph/nMIsQ

📎 Faytuks Network