US Population Growth at Lowest Rate in Pandemic's First Year (bostonglobe.com) 117
Already declining US population growth dipped to its lowest rate since the nation's founding during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a report: That's because the coronavirus curtailed immigration, delayed pregnancies, and killed hundreds of thousands of US residents. Figures released Tuesday by the US Census Bureau show the US grew by only 0.1% with only an additional 392,665 added to the US population, from July 2020 to July 2021.
Carbon Footprint (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot: Sure China is the biggest polluter, BUT the US per capita carbon footprint is one of the highest!!1
Slashdot: The US only grew by 0.1%!!!
Shouldn't we be happy? We created less high carbon footprint generating people this year.
Re:Carbon Footprint (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Population growth is the road to hell, especially in the West where people consume and pollute much more per capita. Of course, we need to get this under control globally and _then_ reduce to acceptable levels again. Or nature will eventually do it for us, via the excessively unpleasant way of killing the overpopulation.
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More so, our entire economic model is based on the population growth. Without population growth you would actually have to pay out you share of the national debt. I think it is now up to 100K/person levels.
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> Considering that India, that has much greater population density that any Western nation, have yet to collapse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Despite India's 50% increase in GDP since 2013, [1] more than one third of the world's malnourished children live in India. Among these, half of the children under three years old are underweight."
If total collapse is your only metric than these other issues will fall under the radar. But malnourishment and the constant threat of famine aren't things I'm inter
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Exactly. Thanks for pointing that out.
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It takes 1% of the US population to produce food both for ourselves and for export. The black death could hit us 10 times over and we'll still be able to feed ourselves.
India has it under control (Score:2)
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Indeed. Population growth is the road to hell, especially in the West where people consume and pollute much more per capita. Of course, we need to get this under control globally and _then_ reduce to acceptable levels again. Or nature will eventually do it for us, via the excessively unpleasant way of killing the overpopulation.
Really the reproductive function depends on how needs are being met. If you live in abject poverty with no real social safety net it pressures people to create their own, the oldest kind, a large family. When you meet peoples needs, population growth slows or even falls negative. But when needs are barely being met, with at least some mediocre social safety nets and there are still intense financial pressures, particularly when the older generation is much better off and or the younger generation does no
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Indeed. Also general availability of affordable and safe contraception.
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Really the reproductive function depends on how needs are being met. If you live in abject poverty with no real social safety net it pressures people to create their own, the oldest kind, a large family. When you meet peoples needs, population growth slows or even falls negative.
I hear about how great negative population growth is, how everyone will enjoy a better standard of living, education, and it will be just great.
What that tells me is that some folks need to brush up on math or the actuarial tables.
The problem is that humans are not immune from aging. And despite a weird modern narrative that seem to think that we won't age, that we'll start families when we hit our mid 40's we do age, we do not escape biology.
So if people are dying off without new ones to take their
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Indeed. Population growth is the road to hell, especially in the West where people consume and pollute much more per capita. Of course, we need to get this under control globally and _then_ reduce to acceptable levels again. Or nature will eventually do it for us, via the excessively unpleasant way of killing the overpopulation.
The problem is our Ponzi system of an economy relies on cheap labour, in fact an ever increasing pool of that. So if poor people aren't producing more poor people to work poor jobs, the economy needs to either outsource or import. Both upsets "real " because they like to lose uncompetitive industries that realistically left years ago and they don't like seeing funny faces or hearing funny accents at the store.
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"via the excessively unpleasant way of killing the overpopulation."
Maybe.
If the singularity comes when most people expect it (the mid-2040s) that might be before nature cuts the population.
Of course, it's not obvious that any physical state humans will exist beyond that point.
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We'd be happy if our economy wasn't predicated on continuous growth to hide our money problems. As long as the next generation is bigger than the one that came before, the insolvency of social security hopefully keeps taking care of itself - but it's far from the only house of cards built on our population growth.
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Good? (Score:3)
Am I only one who thinks it good. The world is plenty fucked up as it is.around relatively steady state for a few years sounds super but maybe some economist wants to home in on how this is other terrible.
Perpetual growth of an economy, population and etc, is simply untenable when we consider we live on a rock with limited resources.
Going steady for awhile is possible the best outcome for America... but meh, whatever...
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You are not the only one. Stability on present levels may already not be sustainable. Hence any reduction in growth is good.
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You are not the only one. Stability on present levels may already not be sustainable. Hence any reduction in growth is good.
Providing people a stable comfortable life where they believe they will be able to live out their later years well cared for tends to sharply lower population growth. It is the inequality and inability to reasonably spread resources that drives population growth, doubly so when most of the time it provides a strong incentive to have a large family.
Of course everyone having a reasonable and comfortable life is so pie in the sky and would never last on a global scale if it even ever happens. So wars, st
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Of course everyone having a reasonable and comfortable life is so pie in the sky and would never last on a global scale if it even ever happens. So wars, starvation, and plagues it is.
Indeed. It would be doable, but there are too many people that fear "the other" and too many people that want to dominate others, keep them down, get rich or otherwise sabotage any effort to make it a good world for everybody. As a group, the human race is doing it to themselves, because there are just too many people of low quality in the mix, many of them at the "top" of society.
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You are not the only one. Stability on present levels may already not be sustainable. Hence any reduction in growth is good.
The middle ages were pretty stable. A very few people holding all the wealth, and everyone else in serfdom.
I am actually not kidding. I'd surely not want to live that way (although I suspect that most young people today believe that they will all be the few wealthy ones.
But as for sustainable life, people growing their own food in subsistence lifestyle, no modern medicine, and when you couldn't work any more, you died.This would enable people to raise a couple replacement humans starting at puberty. Then
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But you never heard anyone complaining that we were depleting natural resources.
Because they weren't to anywhere near the degree we are today? We are talking orders of magnitude. While they used wood, deforestation was not a huge issue. Their usage of oil was rather miniscule. Coal I believe was being already exploited but again not to the same scales and I believe they also produced a lot of charcoal for this usage which is a bit more sustainable if I am not mistaken.
It's mainly the industrial revolution which is the most significant inflection point though I think before the middle a
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But you never heard anyone complaining that we were depleting natural resources.
Because they weren't to anywhere near the degree we are today?
Exactly. Here's the problem with sustainability. Everything we do ends up adding population.
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CO2 etc. was not a global problem in the middle ages, simply because world population was lower by a factor of around 15 (!). And CO2 production per capita was not on industrial levels either. There are regulation mechanisms on this planet that can deal with quite a bit of CO2 and other greenhouse stuff, just not on the level we are putting out today. Reduction to zero is not needed in principle, it is needed because the human race has been overdoing it so badly for the past 100 years or so.
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I am aware. It is called "the dark ages" for a reason. This is unfortunately the situation we may well be going into if we do not get climate change under control.
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I am aware. It is called "the dark ages" for a reason. This is unfortunately the situation we may well be going into if we do not get climate change under control.
We indeed might. There are a lot of physical problems like atmospheric energy retention, and there are some social ones as well.
I'm impressed by how we are handling the energy issues. In my area, we've got a lot of wind power now, we're lucky having the Allegheny escarpment nearby. The wind never stops. They've been putting solar arrays at substations now - turns out to be a perfect injection point. Now we're doing standalone arrays.
And we're doing this in an area that is pretty cloudy.
Next up, we hav
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Much more accurate now.
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Illegal immigration has been party of basically any culture for a long time with the most significant difference between now and then, is that those individuals were either made slaves or whores and thus didn't create any significant burden on economic or other social systems.
Either way, you cannot really stop this but a certain amount of policy to reduce it is fair. I try to generally avoid these politics because they are stupidly partisan and a major talking point for partisan politics.
Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
Specifically if your population is declining that means an overall reduction in consumption and production which means fewer sales for businesses. As sales decline businesses cut back on spending which has a knock-on effect to reduce employment. Remember the companies hire to meet demand, not because they have revenue. If this keeps up you can enter into a deflationary spiral and recession. This is partly why Japan is trapped in a permanent recession. Not at the right other reasons but declining birth rates are having a significant impact.
None of this is necessary. But working around it would require a significant change to our economy and our society. And people tend to be very conservative in economic matters. Don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with a bit of conservativeism when dealing with the consistent is complex and potentially destructive as a national economy. But it's to the point where changes that are needed to maintain capitalism on being made.
The Analogy I've made before is that it's like waiting until you can hear your engine knocking to change your oil.
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Deflation doesn't necessiarilly help (Score:3)
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Deflation doesn't help with debt. If you're in debt during deflation, the real value of your debt increases. If you're in debt during inflation, the real value of your debt decreases.
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They won't allow deflation because it helps poor people.
Deflation does not help poor people, who generally have lower net worth and proportionately higher debt and require a thriving economy for work.
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Maybe a few big near-monopolies will fail. And we can solve droughts with the tears from near-monopoly executives.
We could balance the books. We treat all income like income and make taxes fair. Growth cannot be sustained forever, our current model does not work.
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I think rsilvergun agrees with your conclusion and I agree a large solution would be taxing the rich better. It's amazing how much resistance there is to this though but if the economy gets a bit more screwed up, that will probably evaporate with the only question being how many off-shored their wealth by then.
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When we get old enough to need assisted living, there won't be any young-uns to do the job! Or at least, not nearly enough to go around. So the cost of assisted living will rise significantly from what it is today, and many people making retirement budgets today are going to be very unpleasantly surprised at what they can't afford once they get there and encounter the new prices.
Even apart from the immigration restrictions, our culture is broken and that is destroying our population growth. Parents strug
It's not just costs (Score:2)
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When we get old enough to need assisted living, there won't be any young-uns to do the job! Or at least, not nearly enough to go around. So the cost of assisted living will rise significantly from what it is today, and many people making retirement budgets today are going to be very unpleasantly surprised at what they can't afford once they get there and encounter the new prices.
I think the Millennials are hoping we kill ourselves.That way all their problems will go away.
They are hoping we kill ourselves early so they can inherit our money.
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In theory this is what the federal reserve should handle as the "supreme bank" in coordination with social services but living longer in general from advances in medicine makes this difficult -- besides the politics of "socialized" care. I would argue the advent of American Social Security was itself a recognition of the problem on the horizon. However, as long as a culture is advancing technologically as the birthrates drop, some amount of the advances can improve effective care of the elderly and retired.
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You can maintain demand with a shrinking population if the remaining population has more disposable income per capita.
You can maintain economic output with a shrinking workforce if you invest in capital goods, infrastructure, and education.
In other words to avoid economic catastrophe while reducing your population, you need to get rich first. Wealth equals choice. A poor, or even a middle-income country that needs electricity and has coal is going to burn that coal even if it causes apocalyptic air pollut
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The point is we need to reduce the demand, not people, if had twice as many people but half the consumption we would be better of. We are consuming to much as it is ruining the planet, once that happens demand will decrease because most people will be dead.
We do not need to generate new wealth, we need to either be much more efficient at what we produce or simply consume less, probably a combination of both. The west has an excess of consumption, we need to be happy with the things that we have, not constan
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I think you're conflating "demand" with "consumption of environmental capital", and "wealth" with possessing physical resources that have been extracted and converted into goods. While demand for oil, say, *is* a form of demand, but so is demand for a music download which has very little marginal resource use impact. Services like health care are also something that have supply and demand.
If you gave everyone a billion dollars, we *couldn't* spend it all on that stuff, because the resources would not have
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I agree with your counter-points but I do not think they negate hey!'s points. Your point focuses more on world consumption, not individual economies. It's a much harder issue to address because of this because it requires international co-operation when many western countries have enough of a hard time dealing with their own internal politics.
The west does have an excess of consumption and it's conditioning as you have stated. Changing this is non-trivial but it's also only part of the problem and in itsel
Welcome to inflation. (Score:2)
If you gave everyone 1 billion real dollars, we would all spend it on trips into space and holidays, jewelry, luxury yachts etc and not be that much happier, and still want more.
Except you haven't increased the numbers of rockets or the places to take holidays. Or the amount of jewelry and yachts being made. Inflation will just raise the prices of all those things until we are back in balance again. With the trillionaires still able to do those things and the mere billionaires still going without.
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You can maintain demand with a shrinking population if the remaining population has more disposable income per capita.
Actually the myth of infinite demand is a myth. Half the population can't demand the same amount of food, entertainment, transportation or professional services as the original. You can't eat 6 meals a day, sleep in 2 beds, watch 2 movies at the same time, or visit the dentist twice as often.
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Well, citing *specific* commodities is a straw man. You can easily consume twice the *total* dollar value of *mixed commodities* that someone with half your income does. That's how American consumers in total spend almost 10x as much as Indian consumers, even though there are far fewer of us.
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So why aren't all these billionaires spending a thousand times more than normal people? They're not dropping 25% on a 30-year mortgage on a house. Plenty of people spend 100% of their income, how many billionaires have you heard that spent all of theirs?
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You said myth twice. Notice what he said has nothing to do with infinite demand. He stated a demand (x) can be steady even when the population (y) is shrinking and this is done by increasing y's disposable income, thus allowing them to continue to buy x number of goods. Infinite demand is basically taking the x-axis to infinity for any type of elastic demand graph. This of course clearly cannot relate to the demand of all goods though it can relatively relate to certain goods. Consider a CS:GO skin, they ar
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There is not in fact infinite demand for CS:GO skins, only an artificially limited supply. In other news, some NFT which cost $20 bucks to make was sold for $60 million. Just like other collectible items such as art, they are mostly a money transfer instrument.
What is actually being sold is recognition, not any particular good or service. What's interesting about that market is the supply is nearly constant. Throwing more money into that market is only going to generate inflation, while removing money from
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Your points are fairly valid with the major distinction I think being the wealth needs to be understood in terms of national wealth versus individual wealth. National wealth is an equalizing factor where as individual wealth is often a factor that can lead to stratification. There are countries in Europe we can likely argue have better median wealth because they have done more to establish national wealth. Sure we have more average wealth but when examined more thoroughly that's from the stratification of w
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If I understand your points right, I agree. We do need to change the economic structure to address this pressure but I would argue that the solution there is the naughty word, more socialization.
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I pointed this out on the last thread about underpopulation but the issue is our economy is built to require population growth in order to support it.
No, it's built to require economic growth, which doesn't necessarily require an increasing population.
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Out of pure curiosity as someone who hasn't thought much about economics up to now, can you provide pointers as to how an alternative would work?
Maybe, if you will as a thought experiment, if
Re:Good? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well there's also the Idiocracy [imdb.com] argument that the only people reproducing are the ones too stupid or irresponsible to figure out how birth control works leading to a nation of morons, but looking around I think we may already be past that point.
It's a funny movie (Score:2)
I think you're tongue in cheek though, but it's amazing how many people don't realize that Idiocracy isn't real.
but... (Score:2)
but, humans didn't evolve in a world with reliable, on-demand birth control. That's UN-natural selection, and it's been around less than 100 years, so who knows what long-term effects it will have on us as a species.
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I for one have no problem with this.
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I agree. Can you send your Mexicans to Qinghai China?
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Conservatives are shitting themselves because their voter base is dying off and all those pesky brown people are increasing in population.
Did you pay attention to the 2020 election results?
The "Blue Wave" failed to happen because record numbers of 2nd generation "brown people" voted for Republicans.
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Yeah, well did you? Remember when Trump called the governor of Georgia begging to please "find" him 10,000 votes? Turns out those votes were in the cemetery because that many voters had died from the presdient's covid policy.
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Perpetual growth of an economy, population and etc, is simply untenable when we consider we live on a rock with limited resources.
The Malthusian perspective is oversimplified and misleading. Neither the carrying capacity of the planet or resources are fixed quantities. They change with human behavior.
There are zero credible projections of population growing out of control. If you ignore migration the US population is actually shrinking.
When you contrast the natural resource utilization of the average person in a rich company with a poor country hard to blame population when the differential is somewhere between one to two orders of
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If you studied economics, you'd know that everything is bad, although some bad things are good.
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I studied economics. I watched a lot of win Ben Stein's money...
24/7 kids (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody who was spending 24/7 with their kids in lockdown had any interest in making more.
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Didn’t work out so well for the Duggars.
Re: 24/7 kids (Score:1)
Inbreeding rarely does.
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It's only fitting that parents weaponize their children against the state: have more kids, play the long game and outnumber the lockdowntards in 20 or 30 years.
The catch to that is, those kids might not vote the way you expect them to since the party of status quo screwed them out of the American dream. As a member of an older generation (I'm assuming), you're probably thrilled that your house is worth a mint and you're sitting on a nice fat retirement portfolio, but someone who is just entering the workforce and is barely making their rent might see things differently.
Besides, both political parties want the population to keep popping out kids to feed the econom
Re: 24/7 kids (Score:1)
I'm 36. And I've come to the conclusion that *not* having kids is the opposite of a "fuck you;" it is very much a "fuck me however you like when I'm old and frail and dependent on the system to take care of me."
The government will cut the legs out from under you and demand gratitude.
Your employer will cut you loose on a whim.
Your friends and neighbors will turn on you in a heartbeat if the going gets tough and you going down means them staying afloat.
But your own blood...that's not a guarantee of loyalty bu
COVID-19 lowers sperm count. (Score:1)
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Good. It is not deadly enough to reduce the idiot part of the population enough. This will help a bit more. And it seems pretty likely anybody non-vaccinated will get Omicron in the next 12 weeks or so. And then possibly again a few months later. Or the next variant at that time. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this crap is far from over.
Thanks for the link!
Sounds like a good thing to me (Score:2)
This country is so overpopulated as it is.
Re: Sounds like a good thing to me (Score:2)
Yeah. Sitting on my 1 acre lot, 100 to 200 ft away from the neighbors, in the middle of a "dense" metro area that's a sea of undeveloped green on satellite photos is really stiffling.
Get out of the city. Live life.
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Re: Sounds like a good thing to me (Score:1)
Considering how much undeveloped land there is even in "dense" metropolitan areas, it can remain a viable option at double our population level and then some, provided of course that the political will exists to declare that maybe 10 or 20% of the former army supply depot that used to be intensively farmed farm land no longer be deemed virgin wilderness beyond the pale of human settlement.
Good! (Score:3)
Re: Good! (Score:1, Flamebait)
Let's legalize assisted suicide for Democrats who are worried about their carbon footprint.
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We Democrats are no longer worried. Anti-vaccination Republicans seem to be lowering the population for us.
Re: Good! (Score:1)
You Democrats who like to Follow The Science surely realize that it's not people of childbearing age of either political persuasion who are thinning themselves out.
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We Democrats are no longer worried. Anti-vaccination Republicans seem to be lowering the population for us.
Most anti-vax Republicans are past the age of reproduction, so their deaths won't have a long-term effect on population growth but will help with Social Security solvency.
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Social Distancing reduced unplanned pregnancies (Score:2)
Social Distancing reduced dating and spontaneous hookups at bars and clubs. It also reduced dating among couples, so a lower chance you & your wife had a great time at the bar and come h
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so what you're saying to be clear is the 'culture' advanced by the wealthy who are largely insulated from the consequences of their actions has negative impacts on the well being of the rest of the population.
Hopefully you are teaching the children in your extended family to not make the mistakes their parents made!
Other trends (Score:2)
It has always been about housing (Score:2)
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*If* the girl survived to look after them for you.
Good! (Score:2)
Immigration (Score:1)
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What starry-eyed idealists invariably fail to understand is that while "in the eyes of the creator," "all men are created equal," later on they are not all equal. The assumption that the members of the Taliban are just like the Quakers has a few flaws. Same thing assuming that it's just a question of the distribution of interchangeable equivalent hominids.
uh, because? (Score:2)
Because very few people came to the US illegally?