5-4-06 Demographics
I ran across an interesting observation today at TCS daily...
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050406H
...all about a climate change report being released on the net for people to comment on, prior to its release next year.
It was an interesting piece, but what prompted me to write this piece on demography was a sentence down near the end of the linked article, to wit, "One of the big things we've found out about demography in recent decades is that as societies become richer, population growth slows, stabilizes, and then goes into reverse."
This is what's happened in America.
The demonstration of the above statement is America during the past 50 years. As our middle class rose to prominance, population growth rates slowly fell, and are now stabilizing. At this rate, the population growth in America will go into reverse.
But there's more to this, because what we're going through at this point is a change in the numbers of people who are working, producing members of society, versus the numbers of people who are either too young or too old to work. In years past, this was somewhere on the order of six or seven people working, versus one person too old or too young to work. Six or seven to one is economically viable.
In other words, you can support those unable to contribute to the economy when you have that six to one ratio. In recent years this has slipped down to 5 to 1, and is now heading down to around 4 to 1.
What we have happening in this country is a lowered birth rate, and a generation of baby boomers starting to go into retirement. The median age in this country is going up fast. It has been projected that the ratio will probably slip down to 3 to 1 within the next five or ten years, and 2 to 1 within the next twenty years.
Those ratios are economically unviable.
It is, unfortunately, where we're headed as a nation.
It's very difficult to get this subject across to people these days, because the prospects for the future economic viability of our culture and society depend upon one thing, and one thing only: new blood. But you can't come at the subject from that angle these days. You have to start with the numbers, and the projected demographics, just to broach the whole subject of immigration.
We're a nation of people that come from other nations. What we have today in American society is the mixture of other cultures, fused into what we experience in our lives now. Our heritage is mixed, every one of us. Somewhere back along the ancestral lineage, every one of us ultimately has their family tree tracing back to someone who came here from somewhere else. (Yes, I know, the native americans... but you can even trace them back from somewhere else. The anthropoligists are still trying to figure out from where and when they came from. But we have to admit, they were here first.)
The simple fact is, however, that this society cannot survive economically without a huge influx of immigrants over the next twenty years. You can worry about global warming, and asteroids hitting the earth from outer space all you want. These things have some credibility, and we can agree that someday there's definitely going to be an asteroid hit, and someday there's probably going to be effects of climate change that will be undeniable. The big question is when. But as far as our future economic viability is concerned, we're talking about a very definite "when". It's only twenty years away. It's a statistical fact.
We can have discourse on how to do something about global warming, and we can have discussions about what we might be able to do about an asteroid that may be headed our way, but these are all things that are somewhat hazy, somewhat ill-defined, and off in some indistinct future that nobody seems to be able to specifically nail down.
This one, however, is just a plain, simple fact. No huge influx of immigrants over the next twenty years means that this country will be tanked economically. Only two short decades to go.
I could suggest that, as an alternative, we could all get real busy making babies... But you know and I know that this is not a solution that anybody could ever realistically plan on actually working. What's the congress going to do? Pass laws mandating baby quotas?
No, it's much more realistic to get America's head out of its ass on the subject of immigration. We have a ready made solution to the problem, just chomping at the bit to get in. In fact, there are so many of them eager to come here, that millions of them are by-passing all the immigration laws to get here!
Well, at any rate, I just thought it might be helpful to anyone talking about immigration these days to learn about this one simple fact, and what bearing it might have on the current immigration hoopla.
All those people who demonstrated across the country on May first... well, there just weren't enough. We need a whole heck of a lot more than that. We need them real fast, too.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050406H
...all about a climate change report being released on the net for people to comment on, prior to its release next year.
It was an interesting piece, but what prompted me to write this piece on demography was a sentence down near the end of the linked article, to wit, "One of the big things we've found out about demography in recent decades is that as societies become richer, population growth slows, stabilizes, and then goes into reverse."
This is what's happened in America.
The demonstration of the above statement is America during the past 50 years. As our middle class rose to prominance, population growth rates slowly fell, and are now stabilizing. At this rate, the population growth in America will go into reverse.
But there's more to this, because what we're going through at this point is a change in the numbers of people who are working, producing members of society, versus the numbers of people who are either too young or too old to work. In years past, this was somewhere on the order of six or seven people working, versus one person too old or too young to work. Six or seven to one is economically viable.
In other words, you can support those unable to contribute to the economy when you have that six to one ratio. In recent years this has slipped down to 5 to 1, and is now heading down to around 4 to 1.
What we have happening in this country is a lowered birth rate, and a generation of baby boomers starting to go into retirement. The median age in this country is going up fast. It has been projected that the ratio will probably slip down to 3 to 1 within the next five or ten years, and 2 to 1 within the next twenty years.
Those ratios are economically unviable.
It is, unfortunately, where we're headed as a nation.
It's very difficult to get this subject across to people these days, because the prospects for the future economic viability of our culture and society depend upon one thing, and one thing only: new blood. But you can't come at the subject from that angle these days. You have to start with the numbers, and the projected demographics, just to broach the whole subject of immigration.
We're a nation of people that come from other nations. What we have today in American society is the mixture of other cultures, fused into what we experience in our lives now. Our heritage is mixed, every one of us. Somewhere back along the ancestral lineage, every one of us ultimately has their family tree tracing back to someone who came here from somewhere else. (Yes, I know, the native americans... but you can even trace them back from somewhere else. The anthropoligists are still trying to figure out from where and when they came from. But we have to admit, they were here first.)
The simple fact is, however, that this society cannot survive economically without a huge influx of immigrants over the next twenty years. You can worry about global warming, and asteroids hitting the earth from outer space all you want. These things have some credibility, and we can agree that someday there's definitely going to be an asteroid hit, and someday there's probably going to be effects of climate change that will be undeniable. The big question is when. But as far as our future economic viability is concerned, we're talking about a very definite "when". It's only twenty years away. It's a statistical fact.
We can have discourse on how to do something about global warming, and we can have discussions about what we might be able to do about an asteroid that may be headed our way, but these are all things that are somewhat hazy, somewhat ill-defined, and off in some indistinct future that nobody seems to be able to specifically nail down.
This one, however, is just a plain, simple fact. No huge influx of immigrants over the next twenty years means that this country will be tanked economically. Only two short decades to go.
I could suggest that, as an alternative, we could all get real busy making babies... But you know and I know that this is not a solution that anybody could ever realistically plan on actually working. What's the congress going to do? Pass laws mandating baby quotas?
No, it's much more realistic to get America's head out of its ass on the subject of immigration. We have a ready made solution to the problem, just chomping at the bit to get in. In fact, there are so many of them eager to come here, that millions of them are by-passing all the immigration laws to get here!
Well, at any rate, I just thought it might be helpful to anyone talking about immigration these days to learn about this one simple fact, and what bearing it might have on the current immigration hoopla.
All those people who demonstrated across the country on May first... well, there just weren't enough. We need a whole heck of a lot more than that. We need them real fast, too.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 7:17 PM
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