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"Wonky" Article in the Atlantic re: Population Decline

"America’s bias against immigration is self-defeating in almost every dimension. “Immigration is a geopolitical cheat code for the U.S.,” says Caleb Watney, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a new think tank in Washington, D.C. “Want to supercharge science? Immigrants bring breakthroughs, patents, and Nobel Prizes in droves. Want to stay ahead of China? Immigrants drive progress in semiconductors, AI, and quantum computing. Want to make America more dynamic? Immigrants launch nearly 50 percent of U.S. billion-dollar start-ups. The rest of the world is begging international talent to come to their shores while we are slamming the door in their face.”

Finally, yes, Americans are having fewer babies—like basically every other rich country in the world. Since 2011, annual births have declined by 400,000. Two years ago, I wrote that “the future of the city is childless,” and the pandemic seems to have accelerated that future. Just look at Los Angeles: L.A. County recorded 153,000 live births in 2001 but fewer than 100,000 in 2021. At this rate, sometime around 2030, L.A. births will have declined by 50 percent in the 21st century.

Declining births get a lot of media coverage, with mandatory references to Children of Men, followed by mandatory references to Matrix-style birthing pods, followed by inevitable fights over whether it’s creepy for dudes like me to talk academically about raising a nation’s collective fertility. My personal opinion is that wanting and having children is a personal matter for families, even as the spillover effects of declining fertility make it a very public issue for the overall economy.

The fact that declining fertility is a global trend suggests that it’s not something we can easily reverse by mimicking another country’s politics or culture. Around the world, rising women’s education and employment seem to correlate with swiftly declining birth rates. In just about every possible way you could imagine, this is a good thing: It strongly suggests that economic and social progress give women more power over their bodies and their lives.

But I should stress that declining fertility isn’t always a sign of female empowerment, as indicated by the large and growing gap between the number of children Americans say they want and the number of children they have. There are many potential explanations for this gap, but one is that the U.S. has made caring for multiple children too expensive and cumbersome for even wealthy parents, due to a shortage of housing, the rising cost of child care, and the paucity of long-term federal support for children.

The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast. Higher education is already fighting for its life in the age of remote school and rising tuition costs. Imagine what happens if, following the historically large Millennial cohort, every subsequent U.S. generation gets smaller and smaller until the end of time, slowly starving many colleges of the revenue they’ve come to expect.

Even if you’re of the dubious opinion that the U.S. would be better off with a smaller population, American demographic policy is bad for Americans who are alive right now. We are a nation where families have fewer kids than they want; where Americans die of violence, drugs, accidents, and illness at higher rates than similarly rich countries; and where geniuses who want to found new job-creating companies are forced to do so in other countries, which get all the benefits of higher productivity, higher tax revenue, and better jobs.

Simply put, the U.S. has too few births, too many deaths, and not enough immigrants. Whether by accident, design, or a total misunderstanding of basic economics, America has steered itself into the demographic danger zone." Why U.S. Population Growth Is in the Danger Zone - The Atlantic

Clearly locked into the neoliberal misconception of what constitutes economic growth (nb. economic growth is characterised by increasing efficiency not increasing “surplus value”).

"““unsustainable economy” is an oxymoron” No? I thought about this…many would argue (and many on the “left” also), that “short-term” “profit-taking” exploitative economies exist…but do they? Can we truly call them “economies”? For one thing; “how long is your piece of string?” We define economies by describing relationships (they are “relative”), there is a chronological imperative concerned, one cannot (surely), argue that a 5 year “un-sustainability” is an economy whilst a 3 month one is not!

Economy, of-course, also can be “of effort”, in other words efficient…there is no “economy of effort” in an inefficient system, therefore, we can argue that any economy that is not sustainable does not exist!
If one “economises” one makes one’s actions more efficient…literally one creates an economy.

One can argue that the economy existed for a five year period…but one cannot say it was “un-sustainable” for the same period…period…

…and, therefore, sustainability is a necessary component of economy…

The system is “open ended” (#opensource), it is emergent…

Quote; "Words Based on the Eco- Root Word

Following is a list of words based on the Eco- Root Word:

  1. Ecoactivist: One who actively opposes the pollution or destruction by other means, of the environment.
  2. Ecobabble: Using the technical language of ecology to make the user seem to be ecologically aware.
  3. Ecobiology: The study of the relationships of organisms to their natural environments.
  4. Ecobiosis: The conditions pertaining to a mode of life within a specific habitat
  5. Ecocatastrophe: Major damage to the environment, especially when caused by human activity
  6. Ecocentric: Centering on the environment
  7. Bioecological: A reference to the interrelationships between plants and animals and their abiotic enviro ments.
  8. Bioecologist: Someone who favors, or specializes, bioecology; such as, an ecologist.
  9. Bioecology: The science of organisms as affected by the factors of their environments.
  10. Ecocidal: Designed or tending to destroy the environment.
  11. Ecocide: Destruction or damage of the environment
  12. Ecoclimate: The climate as an ecological factor; the climate of a habitat.
  13. Ecocline: Reflecting ecological conditions in general.
  14. Econometrician: A student of, or specialist in, econometrics.
  15. Econometrics: The branch of economics concerned with the application of mathematical economics to economic data by the use of statistical methods.
  16. Economics: The study or the social science of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and with the theory and management of economies or economic systems which include material goods and financial resources.
  17. Economist: Someone who studies, works, or is an expert in the field of economics." https://wordpandit.com/eco-root-word/ Here we can see how closely related the notions of ecology and economics really are, this seems to indicate that the Industrial Revolution (esp.), saw a perversion of the language describing transaction/exchange in order to underpin a Socially Darwinistic notion of human evolution, allow this exploitative model to gain ascendency and fulfil (esp.), capitalism’s imperial “manifest destiny”. It may, therefore, be the case that a misapprehension of the nature of economic theory has stemmed directly from the exploitation of non-renewable resources." "Arafel": A Dangerous Conflation, Socialism = Communism, Divide and Rule! #Socialism #Communism #Capitalism #Anarchism #Bolshevism #Schumacher #G7Summit #TropesandMemes #CryptoCurrencies #Emergence #Economics #LoS