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America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
- throwitaway222 2y agoIf the strength of population growth, hard work attitude and morals ever come back from the 50s we'll be ok. Since the internet seems to want the opposite, I guess we're just going to burn.
- nh23423fefe 2y agopretty meaningless. the past doesn't repeat and you never bothered to prove the implication anyway
- decremental 2y ago[dead]
- rayiner 2y ago“We” will be fine no matter what. The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Whether it has secular humanists or not isn’t our problem.
- baby_souffle 2y ago> The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Do you want Idiocracy[0]? Because that's how you get Idiocracy [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
- tomjakubowski 2y agoDid you leave out Catholics (20% of the US population) on purpose?
- sdsd 2y agoCatholic fertility is very low compared to the other groups listed. Whatever secret sauce for resisting modernity is built into evangelicalism, mormonism, etc, appears to be absent from high church denominations. Except for the hardcore traditionalists. We can expect to see more of them, as the others are bred out of existence.
- skissane 2y ago> Except for the hardcore traditionalists. We can expect to see more of them, as the others are bred out of existence. I would say conservative Catholics rather than just traditionalists. Both SSPX and Opus Dei have larger families, and both have a strong conservative streak. But SSPX is traditionalist, whereas Opus Dei is more "modern conservative". Opus Dei is officially enthusiastic about Vatican II (provided it is "interpreted correctly"), SSPX refuses to accept it. While both celebrate Mass in Latin, SSPX insists on using the old (pre-1970) Tridentine Mass in Latin, whereas Opus Dei's Latin Masses are the contemporary Mass in Latin. Opus Dei emphasises obedience to the Pope (although Francis makes that painful in a way that his predecessors never did), SSPX insists on a duty to disobey papal decisions it believes to be erroneous
- saalweachter 2y agoYou say that like those groups aren't great at producing non-religious people. Like a third of Mormons leave the church. Ditto for Catholics. Probably similar for the rest, but I haven't looked up all the statistics. I'd go so far as to wager that in America today most non-believers come from religious households, with second-generation-non-believers in the minority.
- rayiner 2y agoBut even with that phenomenon, the world’s population of non-religious people is shrinking: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is-faith-growing-and-what-happens-next https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is....
- skissane 2y agoSome religious groups are much better at retention than others. Ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidic/Haredi) and Old Order Amish have very high retention rates, by some measures >90%. Mainstream Catholicism has very poor retention rates – there is a quip that ex-Catholic is one of America's largest religions. However, if we look at highly conservative/traditionalist groups like Opus Dei or SSPX, the retention is much better (although I don't have exact figures). Mormons are definitely showing signs of transitioning from growth to decline, at least in the US. However, given other religious groups I mentioned appear to be avoiding that, it may be more a story of mistakes of the Mormon leadership than anything else.
- partitioned 2y agoTwice the people are working now than then, unless you count children
- stemlord 2y agoThis reads like a boomer shitpost. Like something you see in the comments section of clickbait tabloid news sites like the guardian or dailymail, not necessarily here.
- helpfulfrond 2y agohttps://archive.is/jP4Ru https://archive.is/jP4Ru
- spacecadet 2y agoThat change in population map is cool...
- chaostheory 2y agoThe US and Canada can better handle a falling population because we are better at handling immigration compared to the rest of the world. Sure, there’s been recent pushback but no one is better at assimilation than the US and Canada. Maybe Australia and NZ are also close to us given their history? I didn’t see any good argument how we’re worse than the rest of the world, especially compared Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China. Ghost cities will not be unique to the US.
- 48864w6ui 2y agoLook at the map: not ghost cities, ghost hinterlands.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoWell then, aren't we lucky that there are so many people who want to come to America? It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work. This is such an easy to solve problem. If only we would decide to solve it.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThere is a maximum rate that people can incorporate before the system struggles and populism inevitably rises.
- mostlysimilar 2y agoIt isn't the immigrants. The wealthy business owners outsourcing the jobs overseas are doing more to fuel populism than any immigrant is.
- ipaddr 2y agoThere is no current problem just another media attempt to push the narrative.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago>”It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work.” There is no need to be glib. The United States already has the world’s most generous immigration policy. And, what is likely the most lenient stance towards illegal immigration and foreign labor of any developed nation.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoThen why are we discussing population decline? I'm just saying, if we need more people, we know where to get them.
- decremental 2y ago[dead]
- throwusx 2y ago[flagged]
- gretch 2y agoThis is only loosely related to the article - I always hear people talking about how disastrous a falling population is. But I visited Japan last year which has had a falling population for a while and was in a long term recession for decades, since the 80s. I gotta ask, is that what “bad” looks like? Because I thought it was a pretty amazing experience and society did not seem like it was crumbling. I understand they have their problems as a country (so do we all), but if Japan is a future indicator, I’d say we don’t really have to worry about falling pop too much?
- aprilthird2021 2y agoVisiting Japan and making your life work as a resident in Japan are two wholly different things. It's wonderful to visit Iran as well. Japan's economy has stagnated and declined, so too have real wages. Many Japanese people can't afford to enjoy or even spend time seeing the things you saw on your vacation in their own country.
- oarla 2y ago"Death spirals tend to be worse in America because of the remarkable level to which the government is decentralised." Difference between USA and Japan. Japan is far more centralized than USA. Not saying that is a better system, but it may be advantageous to handle declining population.
- solidsnack9000 2y agoIn Japan, they are in fact closing down public services, including schools, because many towns are depopulating. Even if taxation and administration are centralized, when the population of an area decreases, it is hard to spend the same amount of money on services there, since the other areas have relatively more people and more costs. The article actually doesn't make much of a case for its claim about America being ill-suited to handling a declining population and it doesn't actually examine other countries and how they've coped.
- jwells89 2y ago
- taeric 2y agoI... can't bring myself to trust doomerism from economists at the moment. It would further help if America wasn't doing particularly better than... most everywhere else right now? I'm not confident enough to say this is obviously wrong. I am fairly confident in saying it is almost certainly oversold. "Uniquely ill-suited," per the headline, reeks of bullshit.
- smitty1e 2y ago...or a Civil War... ...or a Great Depression... This Tower of debt-Babel has been a century in building. The resources[1] and ideals are present. The rot at the top is the challenge. If America is "exceptional", then another exception will be thrown, and we'll struggle onward. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Ten-Years/dp/1538767341/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Ten-Years/dp/15...
- vondur 2y agoThe US will import people from other countries. We are doing it now.
- emseetech 2y agoThere’s a limit to that because almost every other country save a few exceptions is seeing the same demographic decline. But the US for all its faults is very good at assimilating its immigrant population. Everyone in the end becomes mostly American. No other country manages to do that nearly as well. Not countries in Europe and definitely not China or Japan. So that means the US will have a softer landing in the transition to a post-growth economy.
- grotorea 2y agoWill that fix the issue in the article? New immigrants presumably are some of the people that are the most free to pick anywhere in the country to move to, so they will be even more prone to going to big cities that are already growing.
- michelsedgh 2y agoI strongly believe this is very wrong. Just a $3500 tax deduction for children brought an increase in levels of 5-10% more children if im not wrong and it didn’t cost the states anything. Imagine if it was a $10000 reduction and so many people will have kids. Prove me wrong “shrugs”
- aetherson 2y agoI don't believe that effect size. What's the case you're thinking of?
- solidsnack9000 2y agoThe article doesn't actually walk us through a comparison with other countries to show us how, exactly, the USA is worse off than other countries when it comes to handling a falling population. In Japan -- a country that is much more centralized than the USA -- closures of local services and funding cuts due to declining populations have been widely reported on for many years. In fact, there are small localities in Japan that are doing things like offering new residents free houses to get them to move there, which is not so dissimilar to small cities in the USA offering people incentives to move.
- Uw7yTcf36gTc 2y agoThe U.S. is actually one of the best in terms of demographics in the western world. We make up for it with immigration. Most of the western world is declining much faster than the U.S.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 2y agoCairo, Illinois (mentioned in the piece) is an interesting town to visit, recommend driving through during daylight hours if your travels take you near there.