31–40 of 79 posts
Well then, aren't we lucky that there are so many people who want to come to America? It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work. This is such an easy to solve problem. If only we would decide to solve it.
There is a maximum rate that people can incorporate before the system struggles and populism inevitably rises.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pretty meaningless. the past doesn't repeat and you never bothered to prove the implication anyway
More that in the 1950s other countries were recovering from bombing each other into rubble for the second time that century...
Well then, aren't we lucky that there are so many people who want to come to America? It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work. This is such an easy to solve problem. If only we would decide to solve it.
There are two problems with this take: * The people who immigrate have declining TFR after a couple of generations, if not in the first generation. * The rest of the world has declining TFR. So hey, you might gain a couple of generations, but maybe not even that much. Populations all over the world are rapidly gaining in education and, with it, undergoing the "demographic transition" -- later entry into the work forc…
(And, personally, I think it would give us much more than a couple generations.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“We” will be fine no matter what. The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Whether it has secular humanists or not isn’t our problem.
Did you leave out Catholics (20% of the US population) on purpose?
Well then, aren't we lucky that there are so many people who want to come to America? It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work. This is such an easy to solve problem. If only we would decide to solve it.
>”It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work.” There is no need to be glib. The United States already has the world’s most generous immigration policy. And, what is likely the most lenient stance towards illegal immigration and foreign labor of any developed nation.
I'm just saying, if we need more people, we know where to get them.
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"Death spirals tend to be worse in America because of the remarkable level to which the government is decentralised." Difference between USA and Japan. Japan is far more centralized than USA. Not saying that is a better system, but it may be advantageous to handle declining population.
In Japan, they are in fact closing down public services, including schools, because many towns are depopulating. Even if taxation and administration are centralized, when the population of an area decreases, it is hard to spend the same amount of money on services there, since the other areas have relatively more people and more costs. The article actually doesn't make much of a case for its claim about America being…
In the US, if the federal government wants to put similar programs in place, in many ways they’re at the mercy of the states. Certainly out of 50 states some will be cooperative, but even that is subject to rotations of state politicians. This means that any measures to counter depopulation are going to be spotty in the short term and unstable in the long term, greatly limiting efficacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“We” will be fine no matter what. The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Whether it has secular humanists or not isn’t our problem.
> The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Do you want Idiocracy[0]? Because that's how you get Idiocracy [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
This is only loosely related to the article - I always hear people talking about how disastrous a falling population is. But I visited Japan last year which has had a falling population for a while and was in a long term recession for decades, since the 80s. I gotta ask, is that what “bad” looks like? Because I thought it was a pretty amazing experience and society did not seem like it was crumbling. I understand the…
There is a long lag between below-replacement fertility and actual population decline. Because of how compounding growth works and the length of human lifespans, sub-replacement fertility won't result in population decline (for a previously fast-growing country) until 40+ years after the fact. Japan is only just now seeing the effects of lowish fertility from the 70s and 80s.
Note that one of the other consequences of population math is that if a country has been previously declining in population for a while, it'll continue to decline for decades even if the current fertility rate is at or slightly above replacement rate. This means that population decline is essentially an inevitability for most East Asian and European countries for the next several generations.
None of us knows what will happen when populations are falling by 5%+ per decade which is now the inevitable future of many countries the next few decades..it's totally unprecedented in human history (excluding cases like war/disaster).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“We” will be fine no matter what. The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Whether it has secular humanists or not isn’t our problem.
> The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Do you want Idiocracy[0]? Because that's how you get Idiocracy [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/