(Comstock)
A recent editorial in The New York Sun argues that all this political bickering about immigration among Republican candidates misses an important truth: America is actually underpopulated. From the article:
[N]ot a single Republican candidate has spoken up for the idea that America is an underpopulated country. In terms of population density, it is, at 83 persons a square mile, an impoverished country, barely a quarter of the rich density of China, which is running way behind India. America just has enormous room for population growth.
And a desperate need.
What do you think, readers? Is America under-populated? Would Montana and Wyoming, for example, benefit from a few more people?
(HT: Paul Kedrosky)
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It depends on what exactly your teleology is.
Are you interested in average standard of living? Gross standard of living? Ability to win wars? Ability to dictate global political policy? Ability to not radically change the earth ecologically?
You will get very different answers for population targets depends on your weighting of various possible goals.
We certainly could cram a lot more people into the US, I am not sure we could do so at the current standard of living growth curve for very long though.
Personally I think a lot of our global problems would go away if we kept the population at 100 million, but I am looking at things on century based scales where avoiding nuclear war, not destroying the earths ecology, and managing our resources are important problems.
100 million is still enough to have a robust and diverse global society, and many resource/scarcity issues would evaporate.
If at some later date we decide we need numbers (from exo-colonization, increase scientific difficulty, hostile alien species, or whatever), we could balloon the population back up to whatever level we wanted extremely quickly.
With modern medicine you could probably get to 25 billion people from 100 million in less than 100 years if shaped policy around it. Just move from 2.2 children to 9.
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Getting down to 100 million would be the challenge there.
Also, who wants 9 kids?
Well changing US immigration policy is a challenge and that is what we are talking about here. As long as we are talking about broad scale population policy you might as well lay all the cards on the table.
People over the vast majority of human history loved having 9 kids, I don’t think changing incentives so that it became common again would actually be that difficult.
Surely if that were true then wealthy low-fertility countries like Germany, Italy or Japan would easily flip back to high fertility. Instead we see low fertility rates persisting, and the beginning of population decline.
So I suspect it is extremely difficult for governments to determine how many children their people choose to have.
No “people”. Women.
One of our ancestors had 21 children. He ran through 3 wives in the process.
The Baby Boom ended about 9 months after the Pill was legalized.
Yeah…if I get a rare form of cancer I generally like the fact that there’s a whole fleet of doctors, support group and a research charity there to help me out. You’re just not going to have much support for the long tail with only 100 million people globally…let alone the necessary infrastructure to support full utilization of the planet.
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I don’t think you would find the costs of the cancer specialist worth it. Also that was the point of the caveat regarding increasing scientific difficulty. I think you are really underestimating how small the long tail really is. There is a ton of redundancy.
100 million is a completely arbitrary number, isn’t it? Why not 111 million or 243 million or 27,432,649? What is magic about 100 million?
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Has any society ever reversed the drop in fertility ushered in by modern contraception? It doesn’t appear so. Individual incentives run counter to societal incentives. Society needs robust GDP growth to fund the welfare state. People have much more disposable income if they don’t have kids (plus more time to enjoy it). The only thing that I see as capable of encouraging higher fertility would be the collapse of the welfare state and a return to dependence on one’s own children for one’s retirement needs. Without that personal financial incentives to have more kids, there is just too much incentive to free-ride on the welfare state (i.e., on the taxes paid by other people’s children) during one’s retirement years.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7123
I would say so. Specially because it is a consumer driven economy. This is the model that gave the United States it´s successful, or not so successful now, economy and prosperity. In fact that is a phenomenon that happens also in other developed countries, that achieve a level of maturity in which people stop having so many children, the workforce and consumer market starts to diminish and programmes of immigration// offshore recruiting start to show up.
In a nutshell, yes, if there´s space for growth, the United States should embrace it (economically speaking, not enviromentaly)
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Maybe some of the other countries should take a leaf from Americas book then. What exactly does under-populated mean? Does it mean they have the capacity to feed, fuel and house more people? If so – for how long?
I am all for reducing populations world-wide. But as a father I understand they desire to bear offspring. but I would not recommend any more than 2 children to any family – as that is juts expanding! and very difficult to provide for.
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Overpopulation in any given region is a matter of perspective. I think comparing population density in the US to India or China is like comparing apples and oranges given differences in the respective cultures. Just because the US has a lower population density than India or China does not mean that the US is necessarily underpopulated. There is something to be said for having some “living space”.
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It’s not even about “living space”, but space worth living in. When flying from one coast to the other I am constantly amazed by how much of this country is just inhospitable wasteland. That’s not a knock on the mountain west, its beautiful and has a lot going for it, but mountains and deserts can not (and should not) support large populations. Those parts of this country with a mild climate, access to water and flat land for building are packed with people. Is there room for growth? Of course, but why fill up the tub now and have no room for overflow. As India and China burst at the seams we can stand ready to welcome their best and brightest as the newest wave of immigrants, making out country stronger in the process.
BTW I should mention that I am from New Jersey that has the highest population density in the US (over 1000 ppl/sqmi), but also has 500,000 acres of preserved Pinelands that have population densities on the order of single digits. It’s remarkably refreshing that even in the state most people deride for its urban sprawl I can drive 40 minutes and be in the middle of nowhere.
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“…I am constantly amazed by how much of this country is just inhospitable wasteland.”
You know, I absolutely agree! Except I’d consider the “inhospitable wasteland” to start at Manhattan, include most of New Jersey, parts of Pennsylvania & West Virginia that have been devastated by mountaintop removal coal mining, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa with the smoke from the coal plants rising through the cloud deck… Made me glad to get back to the honest desert of Northern Nevada.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Until you need water, or food…
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What about natural resources? China has to import chopsticks, as they have no wood. More doesn’t necessarily mean better.
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I think China imports wood and other resources because it´s more interesting. There is very likely an economical strategy behind that action. As an example, why does the US import oil?
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Err… Because we already pumped most of the oil that used to be in places like Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, & California out of the ground and burned it?
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Well, then, look at my country, Canada. We export most of our oil southward, and import it from Venezuela for our Maritime provinces. And yes, we do have some East-West pipelines.
Seriously? Western Colorado has as much oil as Arabia. We import oil because it is cheaper.
As soon as we have so much food in the world that we don’t know what to do with it, THEN we can talk about underpopulation. If anybody is starving anywhere, we are populated beyond our means. Just because China and India have ridiculous population density doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
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We will never bother to produce dramatically more food than we can use. It’s wasteful from both the ecological and economic perspectives.
We are currently perfectly capable of feeding a larger population than we currently have, using the current mix of foods that we currently are producing. Nobody is currently hungry for lack of production: we deliberately destroy or refuse to harvest many millions of dollars of food every season. All of our food insecurity and hunger is about distribution failures: only people (or countries) with money get to have what they want.
If we decided to curtail meat consumption, then we could feed far more people than we currently need to.
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“We are currently perfectly capable of feeding a larger population than we currently have, using the current mix of foods that we currently are producing…All of our food insecurity and hunger is about distribution failures: only people (or countries) with money get to have what they want.”
Yes and no… our short term food insecurity may be for those reasons, but in the long term… those techniques we are using to produce the amounts we are are wrecking our soil, causing it o be infertile, as well as damaging the food productivity of the oceans… That sounds like insecurity to me, just not short term.
“If anybody is starving anywhere, we are populated beyond our means.” That’s pretty much the stupidest thing I’ve read all day.
Anorexics starve themselves. Does that mean we’re “populated beyond our means”, or does it mean some of us may have “issues”.
Starvation haunts Africa again. Is this due to overpopulation, or political foolishness? I say the latter.
Get a clue.
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Both China and India have been capable of feeding their populations for a few decades now, in part due to the Green Revolution of the 50s and 60s, in part due to population control (yes, in India too).
Although there are famines in Africa, these seem to be caused by civil wars driving farmers off the land and into refugee camps, rather than an inability to grow food if the farmers are left in peace.
Depends where immigration is directed. More people in NY or LA would be silly, but if certain states could have immigration allowances…
There’s an element of truth in Agent Smith’s words to Morpheus from the movie The Matrix.
“Agent Smith: I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realised that humans are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern… a virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague, and we… are the cure.”
Hot debate. What do you think?
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At that point, you can tell the Matrix doesn’t simulate rural areas, or else Agent Smith would’ve known about deer population booms followed by mass starving. Or stray organisms being transported to a new environment and absolutely wrecking it. There is no instinctive natural equilibrium, there is just a point where resources are spread out so much there’s more deaths than births. And humans are -extremely- good at finding new resources.
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Well, except that both of the things you mention there are caused by humans.
I guess Agent Smith never bother traveling to Russia, Japan or Southern Italy. Having large numbers of children only makes sense under very specific economic conditions. Change those conditions and humans stop having children. Also from a technical perspective we have been able to fully decouple the biologically driven act of mating with the side effect of procreation. Humans CAN have their sex and enjoy a non-crowded world too.
Some parts of Kansas actually have so few people living in them that it meets the geographical definition for a “frontier” (if memory serves, less than one or two people per square mile). That’s fewer people in those counties than when Kansas became a state.
(How much do you want to bet that most of the “obviously overpopulated” people have never lived in any of “the square states”, so their sole point of reference, is, say, the overpopulated LA basin?)
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I’ll take the bet, ’cause I AM one of the “obvious overpopulated” people, and live in a state (Nevada) that would be pretty square if we could just cut off the overpopulated Clark County (which contains Las Vegas).
North Dakota also no longer qualifies on a population basis under the rules as they were at the when it entered, but I think they also got exemptions originally, so it is possible they just never actually qualified to be something other than a wilderness area according to the official process.
The population of North Dakota has only gone up 15% since 1910.
Oh, totally. Let’s start filling up the Grand Canyon with people. Heck, it would be totally practical and affordable to put up developments on the Rocky Mountains and all across Nevada so we can be more like China. ‘Cause we have the natural resources to do this, right????
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