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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (128029)	7/28/2005 12:01:06 AM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793887

The best way to sustain a growing economy is to have mild sustained population growth through a consistent means. Birth is probably preferred, but gaps can be supplemented with immigrants thirty years later. When called for, I prefer legal immigration with a path towards citizenship. I would say that is a nice summary of mainstream economist's views. But it begs the question of what growth really is. Most economic metrics normalize to population, so although increasing population grows the economy in absolute terms, the normalized effect is less so. More to the point, this is where biology intrudes and forces some sanity checks. First, there clearly comes an end to population growth although people will argue ideologically over the limitations that force it. Further there are clearly quality of life issues that become unavoidable at some point before that. Through intelligence and hard work, our species can extend the population growth way past what other species can (BTW, largely at their expense) but we cannot eliminate the barriers. Further, although most modern humans have been well schooled in considering all other humans as equals, there is still some link to ones kin, tribe, etc. Although I don't consider myself racist at all, I still can feel this. I live in a small ag community, heavily tilted towards labor intensive crops. Starting about 20 years ago, migrant Hispanic labor began displacing the local anglo's. Now, almost half the kids in HS are Hispanic, thats within one generation. Given the respective birthrates of the two cultures, a single generation of farmers (less than 10% of the original population) in this community have largely given the future to a different culture. They did it because of short term economic reasons, namely a supply of labor willing to work for minimum wage. Oddly enough, the wages paid did not cover the cost of housing & schooling, and providing medical care for these workers. Instead, that money came from tax on the rest of the population, shifted through various governmental agencies. So in essence, a small segment of the population derived economic benefit from the larger population while giving the future to a different culture. In some sense, it is the American way, but it strikes me as a muddied understanding of economics at best. The key problem is this: If we cannot craft steady-state economic systems without a chocking population, what makes one think we can when forced to under much higher stress?