Egypt has not been able to put its growing population to work in productive industry. Egyptians leave the country to seek work elsewhere, whence they can send remittances home. Remittances now rank second only to tourism as a foreign-exchange earner for Egypt: $9.5 billion in the last full fiscal year before the 2011 revolution. That one income source covered more than one-third of the country’s 2010 trade deficit.

At home, though, the Egyptian economy languishes. More than one-third of Egyptians who work for wages – that is, who are not peasant farmers – work for government in one way or another. The Egyptian government has since the 1950s used government employment as a social welfare program, multiplying especially civil service jobs in order to create appropriately dignified work for its over-abundant and under-qualified university graduates…

Back of all the troubles is the continuing ticking of the population bomb. Islamist ideology is hostile to family planning – and (even more!) to the female education and empowerment essential to making family planning successful. Despite worsening economic conditions, the birth rate is rising. Egypt remains a significantly more advanced country than, say, Pakistan, with higher incomes and longer life expectancies and more availability of such basics as electricity and clean water. On the present course, however, the two large Islamic states seem to be converging on a similarly dismal future.