Tag Archives: population decline

Less People?

What if less and less people are born, leading to the buying of less and less things?

Some observers suggest that after centuries of population growth, the earth could be entering a time of population decline.

What would population decline mean to our economic systems? For centuries, the goal of many of those systems has been to sell more and more things to more and more people.

What happens if merchants and businesses have less customers?

What happens, for example, if our purpose for buying housing is not to build an investment but only to have shelter and perhaps create a home?

How do we build a successful society in such radically changed circumstances?

Such a time might be awful, of course, with economic depression and empty houses.

Of course, we might decide to use such a time to build better communities. We might begin programs to buy empty houses and replace them with community gardens or even farms. We might emphasize inter-generational housing and smaller, close-knit neighborhoods. We might encourage small businesses, many of them family owned.

Change could be seen as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe.

We Need Immigrants

The United States, like many developed nations today, is facing population decline within its native born population. Fortunately, lots of people would like to immigrate here. Many of them have skills we need, such as nursing skills for an aging population and agricultural workers for our farms. Some have computer and other skills for higher level jobs.

Meanwhile, paths for legal immigration are narrow. The desire to immigrate, with no meaningful legal line to join for many, feeds irregular migration, leading to its control by gangs and sometimes drug dealers.

“States that focus on border restrictions, mass deportations, or the abrogation of legal protections for asylum seekers will fail to solve the problem. They will simply redirect it while creating a new host of problems that will, in the long term, feed the problem rather than solve it. They will empower criminal networks and black markets while leaving their own economies worse off. The system will continue to decay.” (“Migration Can Work for All; A plan for Replacing a Broken Global System,” Amy Pope, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2025.)

Our current system feeds irregular migration, as family members migrate irregularly to stay with those already in the U.S. “That so many migrants who are undocumented find jobs in the informal markets of their destination countries signals an imbalance between legal immigration pathways and economic need . . .”

The author suggests one approach is for countries with labor shortages, such as the United States, to set up programs within the refugee sending countries to train would be immigrants for jobs needed in the receiving country. This would include preparing them for legal migration.

If reasonable pathways to migration are in place, countries will have more justification for shutting down the illegal ones. The idea is not to stop migration but to channel it, then work to shut down illegal migration traffic.

Migration from places with less possibility for improving one’s life to ones of greater possibility has been the norm since civilization began. Better to work with it for good.