I brought this up as a question in class on Tuesday but I wanted to post the article here on the topic. Essentially, it details how falling birth rates will have long-term economic implications in developed countries as the number of people who are able to join the workforce decreases, despite the short-term benefits of decreasing fertility rates.
Dropping birth rates threaten global economic growth (Nancy Strumwasser)
As a further discussion on this article, we seem to be in a moral conundrum in terms of our Earth's future. On one hand, we cannot continue to sustain our development and destruction of the world's resources, but on the other we are causing human society a different type of long-term harm by forcing the remaining population to shoulder the economic burden of decreased economic growth. One needs to look no further than Japan and Russia to understand the strain this could possibly cause future generations once the large working-class population retires and leaves a smaller group behind.
What do you think? Is there a way we can go beyond the birth rate problem to simultaneously allow us to lower birth rates to conserve resources while keeping our economies large enough to sustain us? Or will we have to choose one of these two options and be left wondering which one would actually have caused less overall loss of welfare?
I think that especially in this country, there is a severe problems with the combination of slowing population growth and radically increased growth in the elder population. For one, Social Security and Medicare costs will skyrocket (to the point where there will be 5 people taking out for every 1 putting money in). If our population doesn't grow and the working population doesn't grow in relation to the elder population, there is no way we are going to be able to pay for those entitlements. The happiest medium for our country would probably be to increase population growth a little bit (in order to support the baby boom elders) and then decrease it slightly again.
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