A traffic jam in New York City. Increased highway congestion is an offset of population growth – usually regarded as a boom for the economy – which may actually incur high costs for the society as a whole.
(Mike Segar / Reuters / File)Photos (1 of 1)
ECONOMIC SCENE: Is population growth a Ponzi scheme?
The profits go to the few, and everyone else picks up the tab.
By David R. Francis | Staff Writer/ August 17, 2009 edition
Forty-five nations face a population “bust” that has some leaders wringing their hands. They worry about the costs of supporting an aging society and the loss of national and economic power.
When US Vice President Joe Biden spoke of Russia’s “withering” population last month, Russian leaders bristled.
But notions that population growth is a boon for prosperity – or that national political success depends on it – are “Ponzi demography,” says Joseph Chamie, former director of the population division of the United Nations.
The profits of growth go to the few, and everyone else picks up the tab.
Here’s a look at the numbers: By 2050, countries as diverse as Cuba, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, South Korea, and Russia will lose at least 10 percent of their people, UN estimates suggest.
This trend toward fewer births is accelerating.
In the rich, developed nations, the average age is rising at the fastest pace ever, UN demographers note. Today they have 264 million aged 60 or over. By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 416 million.
By that time, the world’s population should stabilize, if UN predictions are correct. The population surge in poor countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East would be offset by declines in much of the developed world.
Some nations facing decline are fighting back with incentives for families to have more children. The United States is bucking the trend with its relatively high immigration rate.
Growth, whether through immigration or natural increase, is a plus for some groups. For business, it means a boost in the demand for products. It also means a surge in low- and high-skilled workers, which can keep a lid on wage pressures. Religious and ethnic groups want more immigrants of their own faith and ethnicity to raise their political and social clout. The military regards young immigrants as potential recruits.
But the public pays a cost for a bigger population.
Mr. Chamie speaks of more congestion on highways, more farmland turned into housing developments, more environmental damage, including the output of pollutants associated with climate change.
In the current healthcare debate in the US, one costly question is whether the insurance covers some 11 million illegal immigrants.
Of course, there are also costs for countries with stable or declining populations.
They will need to spend more looking after older citizens and, yes, some industries like housing will shrink. But governments won’t have to spend as much on children. And any labor shortage would fade if increasingly healthy older people worked an extra year or two before retiring to maintain their standard of living.
Raising the average retirement age does far more to increase the working population than increasing immigration levels, says Steven Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank opposed to high immigration. Industrial nations with large service industries have plenty of employment opportunities for seniors, as opposed to poor countries where many jobs – say, planting rice or other crops – are hard work.
The goal should be gradual population stabilization, Chamie says. The costs of an aging but stable population would be more manageable than those of a population boom.
He asks: Does America really need more than its current 309 million people? With immigration at present levels, it will have 439 million by 2050.
A stable or falling population, he says, “is not a disaster. It is a success.”
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Comments
2. Douglas Ostrom | 08.17.09
First, a big thank you for Mr. Francis’ continuing good work.
I teach college in Japan and my daughter goes to a Japanese high school. By complete coincidence, on the same day a Japanese student in her class and one in mine gave talks on–you guessed it–the problems of Japan’s birth death and population decline. It is a huge issue here, talked about constantly, but never in anything like objective terms. The idea that there might be benefits to a smaller population is not even mentioned.
3. chris | 08.18.09
To anticipate the effects of societies birthrate in the year 2050 is just rediculus. The changes in society are incresing at such a fast rate. I think people should get married and have children. Having a family is a natural part of life. I think the American birthrate is healthy for America.
4. James Corbin | 08.19.09
A nation that takes in a lot of immigration from countries unlike itself runs the risk of losing its identity. This is happening in Europe which let millions of Turks and North Africans in, only to have them not assimilate, but stay to themselves. Often even the third and fourth generations have no attachment for their adopted country and are openly hostile to Western culture. This is where the US is going as well, allowing Hispanic immigrants in that have no desire to become Americans. They want the American dollar and the free American welfare benefits, but they still consider themselves Mexicans, Cubans, etc. This does not bode well for the future.
5. James Sinnamon | 08.19.09
In a letter to me in which she justified her Government’s fire sale of our ports, roads, forests and railways (see http://saveourpublicassets.org), Queensland Premier Anna Bligh stated: “… a State with a rapidly growing population can’t afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community”.
In April 2007, Anna Bligh, then deputy Premier defended population growth, stating:
“The only way we could really do that (stop population growth) is to put a fence up at the (Queensland) border, or to cancel or freeze all new home building approvals. That would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs.” (see “Qld govt rejects population cap” at http://www.theage.com.au/news/NATIONAL/Qld-govt-rejects-population-cap/2007/04/22/1177180460654.html)
In other words, according to Anna Bligh, we are selling the family silver, being made to pay ever higher council rates, water, electricity and gas charges, endure traffic cngestion, crowding, threatening the Koala, the lungfish, the Mary River Cod, and the Mary River Turtle, etc. with extinction, etc., etc. in order to keep construction workers employed.
Clearly this is plain stupid and any teenager should be able to understand that, but our highly paid political leaders and their advisers would have us believe that they cannot.
The Queensland Government and the minority whose interests they serve, are clearly cynically corrupt beyond anything that I could have, until recently, been able to conceive of in a supposedly enlightened and advanced society such as Australia.
They are not only conspiring to transfer wealth from the majority to themselves, but they are also making each member of our society on average necessarily poorer and therefore causing there to be even less to go around for the rest after they have grabbed their own increased share. On top of that the many are made to bear the cost of the inevitable economic inefficiencies of adding extra people well beyond what is our society’s optimimum population level. They are knowingly causing additional enviromental destruction and additional consumption of non-renewable resources that rightly belong to future generations as well as our own.
My article “How the growth lobby threatens Australia’s future” of 24 January 2009 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8485 http://candobetter.org/node/1002 may be of interest.
6. Frish | 08.21.09
Population growth is supported by our technology. “Human nature” is to eat everything we can find, spoil our nest, and then move to another feeding ground.
We have grown to inhabit every ecological niche. There is no where left to grow (we’re the ultimate “invader species” after all.)
Human culture has been used to overcome natural boundaries. That’s how we eventually came to inhabit even places like the Arctic, and competed well with the Polar Bear.
Now, technology is not just overcoming natural limits, it is OVERWHELMING nature itself.
There is NOTHING wrong with the world that wouldn’t improve with fewer humans.
The bad news: Nature will prevail. No other specie, of animal or plant, has ever had our trajectory of population growth without restraint.
Therefore, the thoughtful amongst us refuse to procreate. It is the ONLY moral choice, since procreation brings into the world more people who will suffer at the end.
http://www.vhemt.org - It may seem far out, but it’s the ONLY moral choice.
7. Cecily | 08.22.09
It is not true that a decline in population through decreased fertility and/or decreased immigration will be harmful to a country. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. was 180 million in 1960, is about 300 million today, and will reach 439 million by 2050. The trouble with citing total fertility rates is that the information about optimum population size is often not included in discussions. A better (but not best) gauge of population growth is birth rate minus death rate. The current U.S. birth rate is 14 per thousand, and the current U.S. death rate is eight per thousand. In short, we are growing way too fast. Although some of this population increase is due to immigration, the Population Reference Bureau reports that more than 50% of this continuing increase is due to fertility. Programs to assist the elderly can be–and should be–based on systems that due not require continuous population growth
8. Ellew | 08.24.09
Frish has it right - but I’d say that the emphasis needs to be on quality of life for the kids out there, instead of quantity of kids. So you have a stable home and want a kid? Adoption is one of the most selfless and compassionate actions, providing an existing child in need with a secure home. Having a kid might as well be selfish if there’s a child in need that can be helped. Adoption paperwork is ridiculous, and that should be addressed, but VHEMT makes a great point with “live long and die out.” Also, “Critical Masses” is a marvelous book that covers some of the social issues involved in healthy populations (full disclosure: the author is a highly respected former mentor).
9. Mark S. Meritt | 09.22.09
Population growth is a Ponzi scheme in a much more profound way as well, inasmuch as it is, in reality, a special cash of economic growth, which is itself unsustainable. My masters thesis explores these and related phenomena in detail: I believe it would be of interest here: http://potluck.com/2001/01/the-unsustainability-and-origins-of-socioeconomic-increase/
10. Dr. Gene Nelson | 09.22.09
Bravo to Mr. Francis for stating the obvious regarding overpopulation being a Ponzi Scheme. However, the sinister side of overpopulation is that the main beneficiaries are the economic elite. Elites benefit from wage depression that results from workforce gluts. This is true even at the high-skill end of the job spectrum where there is an “alphabet soup” of U.S. work visa programs. As my 2007 article, “The Greedy Gates Immigration Gambit,” notes, there were an astonishing 25,172,533 visa admissions in just five high-skill work visa programs between FY 1975 and FY 2005. http://tinyurl.com/37l8ry Since there are only about 8 million high-tech jobs in America, high immigration has had a huge adverse wage impact for most native-born technical professionals. The price of the necessaries of life are increased as a consequence of increasing demand. So, bloated immigration numbers represent a substantial tax on the American middle class.
The U.S. Census Bureau has been tracking income inequality via an economic tool called the GINI ratio. The GINI ratio rises with greater income inequality. My 2005 article includes a graph of the GINI ratio. http://tinyurl.com/nn28sp The GINI ratio shows increasing income inequality after immigration was liberalized by the wealthy Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1965.
In summary, immigration’s economic benefits are largely privatized while its costs are socialized.
11. jgo | 09.22.09
But then how do we arrive at an optimal world population, or optimal population density?
GMU economist Walter E. Williams likes to point out locations in the world that have extremely high population densities where the economy is thriving (measured as GDP per capita). Does that project out to an optimal world population of 400G? 5T? Or 500M (i.e. we passed optimal a long time ago)?
But I have to confess I’m a lot more at ease in Montana, where, even though there are always the encroaching sounds and sights of other people, they’re not stacked on top of each other.
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1. Kevin | 08.17.09
the ideal for any country would be to keep to 2.1 children per couple.. USA is at 2.05 so needs very little immigration.. Japan is 1.34.. so needs a lot… Uganda has 6.3 so needs to let prople emigrate.