08-02 Population

The Trump presidency is chaotic. The US seems to be a nation on magic mushrooms. Good things happening? Sure. But his presidency has nothing to do with anything really. The United States is just a strong economy. And the future is even better. It’s the growth of its population. That is the real story.
Thanks to the growth in its Hispanic population, the US population and its economy is growing. That means taxpayers to pay for social programs like Medicare. Soldiers to fight their battles. Money for foreign assistance. A growing domestic market. Young entrepreneurs to start new companies. And all the other good things associated with a healthy growing economy. And yes, the US can be fussy about the kinds of immigrants it allow into the country.
For the big US rival, China, it is a different story. Their one child policy is catching up with them. They are facing an aging population without the young taxpayers to pay their bills. And another challenge? Prosperity associated with the cities in the coastal areas and massive poverty in the country-side. They are a nation faced with dangerous challenges. Not the great threat we talk about.
It takes an average of 2.1 children per woman in a population for it to be stable. That is births making up for deaths. Well the statistics in Europe, Japan, China and Canada are in the order of 1.6.
Canada is dealing with its problem through immigration, and in Canada the growth of its Asian and Hispanic citizenry is not seen as threatening, by the Canadian majority. We are lucky. We must have these young immigrants to pay for our pensions.
It was really moving up the learning curve when I was the President of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and was given access to the same kind of private briefings provided to the Cabinet.
The big briefings were always about changes in Canada’s population and what that means for immigration, the economy and the tax base. Demographics are politics and economics all rolled into one.
Travelling around the world and meeting government leaders was another education. Because if there are population declines in the developed nations there is the opposite problem in underdeveloped nations.
In many of these underdeveloped nations undergoing a population explosion, like Nigeria, efforts to control population growth have not been successful. You just cannot dictate smaller families.
Certainly, distributing birth control devices is helpful. But it is affluence and security for women that results in smaller families.
I learned that visiting Singapore in the 1980s and participating in a debate on the need for more immigrants to offset their shrinking population.
On balance the world’s population is still growing from 7.6 billion people today to 10 billion by the middle of the century. So, the pressure on the supply of resources such as clean water and energy will get worse. And the dangers of a polluted environment and diseases will also get worse.
Here is a population issue for you to ponder. It is 50 million men without wives in China and India because of the abortion of young girls. It looks like the world’s oldest profession is going to become the world’s largest profession. Of course, sex robots might be the growth industry of the future.
And, how many people have visited Russia, as my wife and I did in 1987. It is a society of two economies with government funding poured into national defense and space. But for the economy that impacts on the consumer, it is another world. Doors that are not square in a four-star hotel. Chairs too uncomfortable to sit in. Bad food. Ugh. An awful place to visit, and a nation with no future.
Its population decline is like something you read about in history books, when the black plague of the middle ages killed millions of people throughout Europe. That is Russia today, a nation that is dying.
If we care about the future, then the dangerous challenges facing governments must become everyone’s challenges. And that is about accepting massive immigration of all kinds of people into our communities.
We should remember that large scale immigration is part of the history of North America. I love to visit the old church grave yards in the country-side of Ontario. Those tombstones tell the story of immigrants from Ireland during the potato famine of 1845-1852. They were considered the lowest of the low at the time.
Population growth and demographics is about politics. It is about coping with a world in which half the population is shrinking and the other half exploding.