There are about 10 Million Native Americans in the US alone.
The US should do that, and also get rid of the ceiling where wages are taxed for Social Security.
A continually declining birthrate will tank the economy. If there are fewer consumers to buy goods and services, that means fewer workers will be needed, leading to a spiral of decline as those workers consume less in order to stretch their lost wages. That’s before we even consider the demographic problem that a healthy society needs a certain ratio of workers to non-workers (children, the elderly, caregiving parents, the disabled, etc). All of those needs get slighted if the birth rate continues to fall. The retirement age has been getting pushed up for years for exactly this reason, the demographic imbalance.
To be clear I do not support forced-birth and forced-fertility solutions here. I feel like most of the pearl-clutching about “omg the birth rate” is really about 2 things: first, the managerial class got a taste of a tight labor market in the late COVID years, and did not like it At All. Second, the plain fact that a lot of the carping is about women having reproductive choices.
But regardless of the underlying motivation, social stability depends on its ability to produce enough workers to meet consumer demand and social obligations. We will need to figure out a way to incentivize this non-coercively, or else the risk of economic depression and social upheaval becomes pretty acute. AI can’t be the whole answer either, because AI isn’t really an economic consumer of anything but high-end electronics and water.
What fraction of the world’s current population buys those chips (directly or indirectly.) i think a smaller, richer population could easily keep the factory in production.
And about racism. A lot of it is sexism and racism.
Honestly, a major reason young adults aren’t having kids is that they feel they can’t afford it. If the labor market gets tight enough, and wages rise in a way that feels like it will stick, young adults will have more babies. I doubt that many women with other choices will have seven kids, but 1-4? Yeah, a lot of people who aren’t comfortable doing that now will do it.
Meanwhile, if the US weren’t stupidly trying to keep out immigrants, we could have a nice cushion as the birth rate drops. A bunch of well-paid immigrants would likely have enough kids for another generation to work out sustainability.
Japan and South Korea and Italy may have a more immediate problem. The US could coast if we weren’t being stupid assholes.
Absolutely. While immigration can’t be the whole solution, there is no whole solution that doesn’t include immigration. America is uniquely positioned to benefit from a motivated global workforce and we’re just throwing all of that into the woodchipper because of racism.
That is not necessarily true. Our current system prioritizes growth, where the economic surplus is allocated to those portions of the economy that contribute most to growth. Instead we can send more of the surplus to things that directly improve the standard of living. Things like clean water, nutritious food, decent housing, attainable healthcare, and useful education, which although they don’t directly improve economic growth, they do improve the human capital that ultimately makes the economy better (which is not the same as larger).
To put it in simple economic terms, we’ve reduced investment in human capital and now it’s time to rebuild.
So there are plenty of habitable houses free for the taking in Detroit? I don’t think residential real estate works that way. Apartments and other rental properties get abandoned and fall to ruin when their owners can’t find renters anymore.
Could you now explain how a continually diminishing population will supply any economic surplus at all? Can you point to real-world current or historic examples of this?
I view this as pseudo-libertarianism. Libertarians define reality as “if everybody in the world thought exactly like me then everybody could be freely individual.” You are merely rephrasing that as “if everybody in the world thought exactly like me then everybody could be freely communal.”
Wishful utopias are the problem, not the solution. Those who propose them never give a route from here to there. It’s always “poof” - done.
Look at local municipal power, water, and sewage facilities. They provide their services well enough, because there’s no expectation of growth. They don’t need to expand their coverage areas or increase their customer demand to stay in business. They charge enough for operations and maintenance, and that’s all they need.
If the demand goes down, then by definition there’s a surplus of supply. That surplus can then be used for something else.
Likewise, doomsaying is a problem, not a solution.
And we already know the solution: tax structures that capture more of the economic surplus for the public good instead of letting it be accumulated by those who don’t effectively use it. This is how we rebuilt the country after the Great Depression and during the post-war years. The Baby Boom generation benefitted from that investment in human capital. And has not continued that investment for the following generations. We can now capture that economic surplus to build an economy that is more sustainable.
Except that for something like a water utility or sewage treatment plant, there are fixed costs that then are spread over fewer customers, who will object to the increase in their bills.
This is totally divorced from reality. As I said above, declining cities in the Rust Belt face devastating budget problems yearly because there is no tax base to properly fund even fundamental services. I lived in such a city my entire life and worked for city government when Reagan cut federal funds and the bottom dropped out. That was 40 years ago and services have gotten worse every decade. (Interestingly, rapidly growing cities often face the problem of expanding their services quickly enough to meet new demands.)
I defy you to show me examples of these declining cities that “provide their services well enough.”
As I also said above, only a gigantic artificial disaster produced the rise that took place. Consumption and birthrates were artificially depressed for two decades, and the boom that followed was from something unprecedented in all history: a war that didn’t touch one country and devastated all others. That will never be duplicated and is the exact opposite of a declining world population producing lowered consumption and birthrates.
There is no “economic surplus.” You’re confusing current paper wealth inequalities with true underlying national growth. China is the closest country to having that and is itself confronting enormous barriers that it may not overcome. America is a failed country according to younger generations who can’t afford housing or to have families. I’d like to see changes in current tax structures, but no future can depend on taxing money that doesn’t exist.
Refusing to recognize economic reality will doom us as thoroughly as refusing to recognize climate change. A reality one dismisses can’t be changed, even with the equivalent of magic.
You’ve lost me with this. The world’s wealth has been increasing faster than the world’s population. That is the economic surplus.
Americas economy was possibly at it’s strongest in the 1950s, with a population about half that of today. It was also very strong in the 1990s, with a population of about 250Million, as opposed to today with 342 million.
Why is more people- who have to share declining resources and limited housing- better than less people?
Good point.
There is quite a gap between “declining number of tenants, no profits” and "the property is just a ruin now.
I haven’t done any due diligence on this, and maybe it doesn’t fit “continually diminishing” but there were notable long-term economic effects of the Black Death in Medieval Europe. Those who survived inherited the assets of the deceased, meager or otherwise. Their labor also became much more desirable, and land got cheaper. As a general rule, social mobility and wages increased, food was more plentiful and of higher quality, and overall everyone did better, it seems.
The idea that the economy will only work if it’s growing is a very capitalist-focused mindset. What one person calls stagnation, another would call stability. Similarly, what one says is inefficient, another says is resilient. So yeah, I can absolutely imagine a much less populous world that’s also more prosperous because of it. How many people in the world meaningfully impact the economy as it stand right now anyway? 50%? How much would it affect the world if they disappeared tomorrow? There’s more to it than just “line go up = good”.
You’re looking at one side of the equation. One should expect a GDP to grow when population increases, which is why the Fed considers 2% growth to be the desired rate rather than 0%. Inflation therefore must be considered when GDP growth is mentioned. The Fed has a chart of the world inflation rate. Once you subtract inflation from GDP, the growth rate is not as impressive. An associated issue is that the world population growth rate is itself slowing down, to under 1% a year. As I said above, China is already past peak population, and is confronting the issues that are already lowering GDP growth rates.
Redistribution of wealth does not have a known solution. Pikatty in Capital needs to resort to an imaginary future in which every jurisdiction on the planet conforms to a common wealth tax to prevent the inevitable movement of wealth to non-taxed areas. You don’t need to look to the future to see this. Loud-mouthed tech billionaires are already leaving California just because such a tax has been mentioned rather than imposed. Florida is gaining them because of its lack of an income tax, but growth there is slowing because of the myriad disasters it suffers, from hurricanes to unaffordable housing to an insane government.
Wishing that capitalism in its present form will vanish just because it feels good to you is not a rational plan for the future. I keep asking you how exactly will we get to your future world. I see no answers.
The wiki page has numbers adjusted for inflation.
I don’t disagree that there is a “constant growth” culture in business but it’s not universal and it’s not driven by banks. I’m an owner of a medium sized business that has continued for deceades providing a reliable product in sustainable numbers to a loyal customer base. We’ve been bigger at times and smaller at times. We have no difficulty at all borrowing money. The only thing the bank cares about is whether we can make the payments. Not whether we can make bigger payments next year.
And the rest of my post goes totally unanswered.
I’ll try one more time. How in our real current world do we get to the result you want?
I would hope its because the people there know that life under the kim regime is a horrific nightmare and don’t want kids to be subjected to it.
Doing a quick search, supposedly a big factor is that parents have food shortages so they can’t afford more than 1-2 kids. Also women in north korea have high levels of literacy and education, and women are heavily involved in the black market economy. Being educated and having a full time job reduces the number of children that women have.
There’s no point if you don’t accept the fact that there’s an economic surplus.
Repeating:
Given the fact that the world will have fewer people, each person needs to become more economically valuable. Hence the need to invest in human capital.
Because it was growing. Obviously countries with smaller populations can be quite prosperous, this is never in dispute. Countries with a shrinking or plateauing population have a worse time of it for several reasons. The first is that the ratio of workers to non-workers (retirees and disabled) gets worse. The second is that investors chase profit, and enterpreneurs need credit, and both of these sources of capital get tighter when there’s not enough growth to create the expectation of profit. Without that, people don’t invest, and the economy suffers. Not only that but it’s fewer minds to create innovation which arguably is the real engine of growth.
There’s no disputing that a falling birthrate becomes more economically concerning the farther it falls. The only real argument is what interventions are realistic and justifiable. For conservatives it’s a no-brainer, make sure women have no options other than to birth more workers. For non-conservatives, we have to not only opppose that project but come up with a better one.