U.S. Population Growth, an Economic Driver, Grinds to a Halt

True, but the US is in the enviable position where it has enough resources to support a substantially higher population. The US has the second highest amount of arable (cultivated land) in the world, second only to India. However, its population is only one quarter of India's.

I'm not arguing that the US should increase its population to that extent, and I'm not arguing that having 1.3B people living in a country the size of India is a good thing. However, the US could maintain population growth for significantly longer than other countries.

You can see this on the world population growth graphs now.

If you look at it stricly statistically, Earth's population will plateau at around 10-11bn people. We can easily feed that many people, and it won't be massively more than now in terms of environmental impact.

Yes, we need to learn to be sustainable more, but the trends are good and I'm pretty sure we will find a way to sustainably live as 10bn people on Earth.

We will most likely run into huge societal problems from declining populations very soon, rather than from growing ones.

You give humans too little credit.

There is no idea too stupid for humans to strive for and murder/subjugate each other over.

Have a look at any history book of any culture in any century for some ideas.

Population growth is influenced by other factors than reproduction, namely immigration. I don't think it makes much sense to consider the environnmental aspect of population growth on a national level.

But sure, we can move on from that. At one point, the strength of a nation was counted in coal and sulphuric acid output, and investing in factories was all the rage.

There was also a cultural side to it. Instead of being a linear relationships, it's more that technological development removed a population bottleneck and antiquated old family planning practices.

Population growth is iirc highest in agricultural areas that experience significant increases in health care access and overall life expectancy. Instead of having to have 6-8+ children to ensure that 1-2 male heirs live to adulthood, suddenly you're faced with the burden of having to care and feed for every single child until they become self sufficient. This eventually drives the birth rate down to an economically sustainable level.

Another option was delay retirement by about 10 years or work to 73 to expand the labor force and continue keeping people employed past (or into more) peak earning years. More income = more spending = higher GDP. Or, force labor participation to pull those out of the workforce in.

And the third option was to enable 2 side by side dot-com capital purchasing booms or develop a new technology (like desktop/personal computers) that enables spending capital and increasing worker productivity at 2x the rate during the dot-com boom.

Between those 3 options, immigration is a clear winner. We have the space though we need to invest in infrastructure/schools to build it out. The jobs are mostly there esp. after the last 4 years drove immigration, legal or not, way down. We trashed the Irish, Italians, Polish, Chinese, even put Japanese into internment camps about 70 years back before normalizing most of those groups into American Culture (at least in decent parts of the country).

A taco truck on every corner is just a new variation of the American Dream. Immigrant turned small business owner/employer making a buck off the entrenched population to buy (or build) a home with 2 car garage and a covered section for the truck itself, maybe an RV down the line. 100 year old research by Thomas on Polish immigrants shows it takes less than 3 generations for an immigrant family to follow local customs, language, and other norms. In 40-60 years we'll be a more robust, wealthier, stronger nation thanks to a taco truck on every corner.

Thomas has an odd career (and love life) but did develop a few neat theorems including how immigrants become part of the local culture over just a few short generations. His Thomas Theorem, "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.", is not only profound but evergreen. How one interprets the situation will alter ones reaction like an oncologist always seeing cancer or a network admin always faulting DNS (usually correctly so). We have a sect of the US population that considers election meddling/fraud and more as real although experts, leaders, and many more note how insane those conspiracy theories are. But they are real in their consequences with immense division on topics as straightforward as vaccinations or the existence of the pandemic. It's kid of silly how even as technology advances, people stay pretty much the same. In large groups we're still just monkeys with quality tools.

Planet Money Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531956234

Thomas and the Polish Peasant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polish_Peasant_in_Europe_a...

Subsidized higher education, universal healthcare, and higher taxes on the wealthiest are still all fine ideas, ideas I fully support. But the world needs less people regardless of those policies. We overshot global carrying capacity, and you can't socialized economic system your way out of that.

Population growth expands general demand and markets, and really sustains some industries (construction, for instance), but is not sustainable, indeed.

If population growth stalls or even if population shrinks then the overall economic output will do the same. But IMHO that is not important, what is important for people is the economic output per capita and as such I think it's possible for people's lives to continue to improve.

In order for the pyramid to grow in size, the people at the top consonantly need more people at the bottom, consuming, to keep it growing.

If the economy was "rounder" and more directly beneficial to everyone, it would be less necessary to have more consumers / population growth.

It's extremely difficult. Progress is almost always related to new products and services. Imagine developing those under the constraint of no economic growth. "We can't grow economically, so we can't develop this new vaccine unless we close all the coffee shops in town."

> Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth.

That's a different thing. In theory, one can have economic growth without population growth, at least for a time and in certain range. The economists call it "productivity"[1]; it measures how big is the lever that each worker uses to produce. I guess that we could, with the current population of Earth, have sustained economic growth without population growth for centuries, just by equalizing-up productivity across all population sectors and countries.

With that said, even the current human population of Earth is quite a stress on the planet. In the best world, we would find more and better places to live, so that we can leave our planet be and have the freedom to have families as big or small as we like.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity

No, no, it’s about this hedonistic godless culture that’s eating away at our “precious bodily fluids”.

Bah… never expected such a comment here

Well it has to provide some, it is a market for people's attention nowadays after all.

Our paychecks seem to grow much more slowly than our healthcare costs, housing prices, university tuition, etc.

Finances are a huge factor in whether or not people have children.

And speaking as someone who was raised evangelical, there's not much in that religion specifically encouraging people to have children.

Thank God!

It seems irreligious people are slightly more rational about these things. Raising a kid is a huge undertaking, and a lot of work.

But a huge part of the problem with low fertility is religion. Western religions advocate for a fixed family structure: one man, one woman. Even most irreligious people still abide by that precept, we haven't been free from dogma for long enough. The end result is that the work of raising a kid falls into a family which is way too small and stretched, living alone and relatively isolated in a suburb. If a couple needs to commit 95% of their time together to their kid, it's going to be a hard sell for those two people. Grandparents can help, and they do, but the generational divide makes it so that most grown-ups don't want to live with their parents.

Maybe this is why some hardcore fundamentalists are against birth control? Because deep down they inherently recognize that given a free choice nobody would like to have kids in their dream world?

One cannot on the one hand claim to be for "family values" and on the other hand take every political decision that makes it harder to plan a family: social security, health care, liveable wages, state paid day-care centers, birth control — these are all things that increase the number of families being created, yet coincidentally they are all things a significant number of (american) christians hate.

Sure it does. But, secular (and open-minded religious) worldviews are more adaptable to present circumstances, adapting high-investment-per-offspring low-cardinality reproductive strategy in a stable environment near comfortable carrying capacity; whereas blind tradition-bound approaches to religion and culture more generally continue to apply low-investment-per-offspring high-cardinality strategies adapted to either sparsely populated or highly-insecure environments when not in such environments.

This is also true for almost any species.

I don't think this is it. Religious opposition to family planning is something of an artifact of the counter reformation. You can also find news articles from the 19th century America complaining about low birthrates irt other ethnic classes.

It's a single observation, but I've noticed that a lot of behaviors and best practices that were originally propagated by religion are coming back into vogue in Millennials and Gen Zs through other venues. For instance, the financial independence movement is essentially a modern extension of Protestant thrift, and recent push to counter sexualization also has religious counterparts.

I think it might be a lack of education. People are still having children out of wedlock, without the resources to properly raise and care for their children. When scientists speak of needing population growth, I presume they mean responsible childbirth and rearing, and not just creating babies. Unfortunately people do not take proper care to insure that the children they are creating will be provided and cared for.

As Hans Rosling pointed out, children are sort of migrating to poorer areas of the world where fertility rates are still high.

On a more serious note I really believe that only the "poor hustlers" strata of society is not having kids, i.e couples that have good jobs but would be poor if any of them stopped working, so they have a dog for now and pretend they will have kids after they're 40.

If you go up on the ladder you probably don't have the same growth problem, take N=1 Ellon Musk with 7 kids as example.

Reminds me of how having real animals on Blade Runner was a privilege of the ultra rich :).