Question

Rabbi, you studied at the university and you also teach and are exposed to wisdom and to scholars of research and analysis. I’m not, but maybe you’ll agree with an assumption of mine.
 
The assumption is that, broadly speaking, Israeli statisticians and demographers aren’t really such; they’re just a plain calculator.
3 examples
1
In 1977 there was the political upheaval: Likud came to power and the Alignment went down. Since then, for many years, I heard that every day one Alignment supporter dies and two new Likud supporters are born.
Meaning, within a generation Likud was expected to rule and the Alignment to disappear.
In practice, in the test of almost 50 years, although the descendants of Alignment voters today vote for Lapid, Gantz, and the like, and the descendants of Likud voters vote for Likud and Shas, the picture has not changed substantially.
Most of those who voted in 1977 are no longer alive today; most of those living in the country today were not here in 1977. Meaning, the turnover was absolutely complete, but the results are more or less the same. Here too, in the last election, most of the public in the country voted not-Bibi (Bibi and his satellites won only 48.3% of the vote; all the others were against him, though thanks to 2 parties that were short a few thousand votes and therefore didn’t pass the electoral threshold, he has a legal majority in parliament). And also the election before that and the one before that—in the end it’s once a small majority this way, once a small majority that way, and the demographic change remains on paper…
2.
Israeli Arabs: the number of seats they have, and seats on their behalf, has for 75 years hovered around the same numbers. A rare achievement is 15; the routine achievement is around 10–12. It doesn’t especially go up and doesn’t especially go down, even though they give birth much more, and there was a generation when they gave birth more than double, maybe even more than triple, the Jewish population. True, there is immigration, but there is also family reunification, and percentage-wise the picture shouldn’t change dramatically because of that.
 
3.
The Ashkenazi Haredi party Gimel has 7 seats today, which is what it had (though in a split form and with maximization of potential) in 1988, and in the last 10 election cycles maybe they went up by one seat. And the black forecasts about their doubling every roughly 25 years don’t really come true. This is a good place for a model, since as long as a Gimel voter identifies himself as Haredi, and as long as he sees himself as Ashkenazi Haredi, then he’ll vote, and only for Gimel. There are no significant fluctuations in voting patterns within that sector.
 
All 3 examples indicate that it is not necessarily the case that a tribe that gives birth more, even double the other, will have its power doubled a generation later—not at all.
I’m reminded of an article by Haim Walder in Yated Ne’eman from about 25 years ago, saying that within 20 years, according to the forecasts, there would be a Haredi prime minister, and have we really prepared the people for the leadership of a state… Well, 25 years and more have passed, and Ashkenazi Haredi power hasn’t changed all that much. (Shas is not internal Haredi demography vis-à-vis the secular, but a kind of generational shift of the Likudniks of 1977 in the direction of Shas, more or less today.)
 
Each one of the 3 examples can maybe be forced into an explanation,
but I have one answer that seems more sensible for all 3.
 
Demography is divided into 2 parts:
1. The simple arithmetic part. For that you don’t need to be especially learned; a good calculator does the job. Group A gives birth at such-and-such a rate, group B gives birth at such-and-such a rate, and after a generation the ratio between the groups will move to such-and-such.
2. Identifying trends and early signs in advance—for example, emigration from the country and immigration to it, family reunification, individual but broad migration from sector to sector, migration of communities and sub-communities from sector to sector, decline in the importance of ethnic/tribal affiliation, dramatic changes in voting patterns, and more. For no. 2 you need a lot of research and wisdom; that’s not just a calculator.
Israeli statisticians and demographers are strong in no. 1 and weak in no. 2, and therefore their forecasts are not worth much.
It sounds simple: arithmetic they know; depth and identifying processes and trends, not at all.
Am I right?