The geographer Joel Kotkin has a new book out, The Next 100 Million, about demography. Specifically it concerns the implications of the relatively high birthrate and the greater willingness and ability to absorb immigrants of the United States compared to many other countries. The book is optimistic about the US in 2050, which is a rather contrarian perspective at present.
It's been admiringly reviewed in the New York Times by David Brooks, who likes the upbeat message. Kotkin highlights the creativity and dynamism, contributing to productivity growth, of the growing population and the American melting pot. In line with his long-standing interest in suburbs, he also argues that:
The majority of additional hundred million Americans will find their
homes in suburbia, though the suburbs of tomorrow will not resemble the
Levittowns of the 1950s or the sprawling exurbs of the late twentieth
century. The suburbs of the twenty-first century will be less reliant
on major cities for jobs and other amenities and, as a result, more
energy efficient. Suburbs will also be the melting pots of the future
as more and more immigrants opt for dispersed living over crowded inner
cities and the majority in the United States becomes nonwhite by 2050.
(I enjoyed a previous book, The New Geography, which looked at the impact of technology on the shape of urban and suburban America.)
Kotkin's prediction about the consequences of American demography is, however, exactly the opposite conclusion to that drawn by French demographer Emmanuel Todd in his 2004 book After the Empire. He rather presciently brought in the likelihood of debt implosion and military over-extension as well as demographic factors.
Very little of the comment about the relative strengths of the US and China, and especially that which predicts China's inexorable dominance, considers the demographic issues. China's one child policy means it has one of the most acute problems of supporting a dependent elderly population anywhere in the world. As so many parents have aborted or murdered baby girls, it also has an extraordinary imbalance of men over women in young adulthood. Xinran's recent Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother documents the terrible human cost of this policy. This tendency to overlook the economic impact of demography is an error; both size per se and dynamism of the population matter greatly for economic growth, as I described in the growth chapter of The Soulful Science. But I'm not aware of many good, accessible books about the general economics of demographic change, as opposed to the specifics of say the effects of aging on pensions in certain countries.
I happened to be in a demographics seminar — it was something to do with one of our customers — and I heard a similarly bright view of the US from a Scandinavian researcher. He said that that the crucial difference between US and Europe is that immigrants to US (particularly from Latin America) actually want to be Americans, whereas a substantial number of migrants to Europe don't want to be Europeans. I noticed that in Prospect this week there are some projections for the Muslim population of Sweden that might account for his perspective.
He also made a very interesting point about Mexicans: Mexicans in the US send too much of their money back to Mexico, where the capital is deployed very inefficiently, and so unlike other immigrant populations they do not progress to the middle class. Fascinating stuff, this demographic malarkey.
It is fascinating and we know so little about it – not even basics like why birth rates are higher in northern Europe than in southern Europe, or why there are baby booms and busts. Yet it's the fundamental economic resource especially in the world of the 'knowledge economy'.