Starting from quotes that were written in another thread...
Two points there:
1. No, it doesn't. It might have in the past, but total overall productivity per worker is up by about 4-5 times in just the last few decades, which was after an upward trend of centuries already, and it's even more drastic in agriculture than other sectors; the percentage of the population that are farmers has gone from practically everybody to practically nobody while still making more food and feeding more people. A given work force can now support many times the unproductive population that it could have supported before. And even the fastest upward shift in population age is only gradual (and temporary; when the population levels out, so does the age distribution).
2. Even if it did, maintaining population growth for that purpose would be a losing proposition anyway. The growth will stop at some point, because we can't pile the Earth's surface up with more human bodies than it has food, oxygen, & water to sustain, nevermind adding more layers to the pile until some of them start falling to the moon instead of the Earth and then still continuing the "growth" to start to fill up the rest of space after that. So the questions are not whether to stop the growth (because avoiding that is impossible) but when (how long before hitting an absolute limit) and how much damage to let it do to the planet and our own quality of life first before we finally face the fact that it has to stop. One country keeping potential immigrants out and hitting zero or negative internal growth won't fix the global problem, but it will keep that country in better condition than other countries that keep looking more & more like Soylent Green.
Economic growth is only desirable/required because of population growth. Without a growing population, a non-growing (or, in reality, merely slower-growing anyway) economy is fine. It doesn't mean individual people get less, and can even mean they get more.
A nation's or planet's overall economy that shrinks while its population does so as well is not necessarily losing anything. In fact, with such high productivity per worker as we have now, it can have direct benefits. For one thing, Japan's housing costs have been famously nightmarish (think 100-year mortgages) and this finally puts some downward pressure back on that. Also, our surplus productivity has already led to a previously absurd & unimaginable phenomenon called "unemployment", so any additional demand on productivity can start by going against that. And dividing the wealth of a country (or planet) among fewer people means more wealth per person overall, whereas dividing it among more means less per person. And our environmental damage is primarily based on population, so the sooner we cut back on population & growth, the lower the damage is.
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Originally Posted by Delvo (Post 13426213)
I'm against immigration in general just for the sake of controlling population growth
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Bob001 (Post 13426254)
Unless you want to sentence old people to starve to death, the nation requires an influx of young workers to support retirees.
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1. No, it doesn't. It might have in the past, but total overall productivity per worker is up by about 4-5 times in just the last few decades, which was after an upward trend of centuries already, and it's even more drastic in agriculture than other sectors; the percentage of the population that are farmers has gone from practically everybody to practically nobody while still making more food and feeding more people. A given work force can now support many times the unproductive population that it could have supported before. And even the fastest upward shift in population age is only gradual (and temporary; when the population levels out, so does the age distribution).
2. Even if it did, maintaining population growth for that purpose would be a losing proposition anyway. The growth will stop at some point, because we can't pile the Earth's surface up with more human bodies than it has food, oxygen, & water to sustain, nevermind adding more layers to the pile until some of them start falling to the moon instead of the Earth and then still continuing the "growth" to start to fill up the rest of space after that. So the questions are not whether to stop the growth (because avoiding that is impossible) but when (how long before hitting an absolute limit) and how much damage to let it do to the planet and our own quality of life first before we finally face the fact that it has to stop. One country keeping potential immigrants out and hitting zero or negative internal growth won't fix the global problem, but it will keep that country in better condition than other countries that keep looking more & more like Soylent Green.
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Originally Posted by Bob001 (Post 13426254)
Population growth equals economic growth.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Bob001 (Post 13426254)
The countries that limit immigration, especially including Japan and Russia, are facing economic stagnation, if not decline, as their populations age.
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via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/38IY5dc
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