Mainstream Awareness: 400 Million People Is SO Wrong

Train in India or DC Metro in 50 years?

Last week’s Newsweek article by Joel Kotkin, 400 Million People Can’t Be Wrong: Why America’s new baby boom bodes well for our future, praised America’s startlingly massive growth trajectory:

With a fertility rate 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany, or Japan, and well above that of China, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and virtually all of Eastern Europe, the United States has become an outlier among its traditional competitors, all of whose populations are stagnant and seem destined to eventually decline.

Evidently if there are more of US than THEM, it must be a fantastic outlook for us.  Now that we have moved beyond an arms race with the former USSR, it seems we have filled the void with — a baby race.  This new drive to out-populate our global frienemies is not comforting.

While over-populated countries like India and China are finally curbing their unsustainable growth in an effort to clean up their polluted, carcinogenic environments, here we come with a solution that does little more than delay bankruptcy to that All-American ponzi scheme Social Security:

Between 2000 and 2050 the U.S. population aged 15 to 64—the key working and school-age group—will grow 42 percent, while the same group will decline by 10 percent in China, nearly 25 percent in Europe, and 44 percent in Japan. Unlike its rivals, America’s economic imperative will lie not in meeting the needs of the aging, but in providing job and income growth for our expanding workforce.

Oh, right, we currently have nearly 10% unemployment.  The job climate is the worst for graduating seniors in decades.  Aging infrastructure in major cities is crumbling as population growth in urban centers outpaces the ability to adapt.  And Kotkin’s solution is MORE BABIES!

Long ago, a group of settlers had many offspring to help them tend to their land and maximize their crop.  Eventually the settlement reached a critical mass.  All the arable land was sewn, maximum crop yields were realized, and natural resources were abundant.  Everyone worked.  Everyone ate.  Statues were even built in gratitude to the gods.  Life was good.  But then the settlement growth continued unchecked.  More land and resources were unavailable, so competition for resources became fierce.  The over-exploited land stopped providing, children starved, and the population plummeted until hardly anyone was left.  All that remained were barren grasslands and giant stone heads.

Hopefully our country and the planet will avoid the same fate as Easter Island.