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US Workforce Population Maxed Out
- tharne 4y agoArticles and analyses like these are incredibly dumb, to the point of being worse than having nothing at all to say. The x-axis on the graph shown in the article goes to the year 2100, 78 years into the future. This would be like making predictions about the year 2022 back in the 1940's. Back in the 1960's and 70's, books like the "Population Bomb" predicted unstoppable population growth leading to widespread famine and death by the 1980's. In fact, the opposite happened. Birth rates declined worldwide and food production went up. Ironically, this result in junk articles like this one now making silly predictions in the opposite direction. Turns out predicting the future is really really hard, if not impossible. To have any meaningful idea of what the population or country (or the world) is going to look like even 30 years from now one would have to know what all or most of the following things are going to be three decades from now: - Cultural attitudes on religion, birth control, abortion, and family size - Frequency and severity of future pandemics - Frequency and severity of large-scale natural disasters - Frequency and severity of wars and terrorist attacks - Changes in fertility due to age and environmental factors - Immigration policy - Medical advances or lack thereof - Changes in personal behaviors at a population level (smoking, drinking, drug use, exercise, etc) Try predicting even one of those things with any sort of accuracy - you can't. This doesn't even get into the idea of "Unknown Unknowns" that could affect population size in the future. The fact that people get paid to produce these types of garbage analyses is a joke.