if productivity keeps going up so much, we do we still need to keep growing the population?
In: Economics
We probably stopped needing to grow the population a while ago as a species. For individual economics, it’s more a matte rod competition with the other countries. So you’re not asking if it’s enough at a certain point, you’re asking if you can do better than the rest, and keep doing it.
The dynamic of population may change with the dramatic innovation in automation we’ve been seeing recently
We don’t, but maintaining the population at exactly 2.0 children per woman is very difficult.
We don’t. However, an aging population without enough young people to pay for social security and Medicaid (or other similar programs outside the US) can be a problem. Also, an aging population means a smaller percentage is contributing to the economy as a whole to support the needs of the entire population.
Productivity really ISN’T going up very quickly. It’s actually increasing much slower than during a lot of the industrial revolution and especially during the electrification of the world. The notion that technology is advancing at am accelerating rate is just factually untrue. Indeed it’s the slowdown in productivity growth (along with population growth) that is causing much of our current generations feelings that things aren’t as good as they used to be.
Growing the population is one reason productivity can increase. Instead of being a jack of all trades, people can specialize. And micro specialize. With so many people, it can be easy to lose track of specialization and how it affects you. But it’s why some restaurants can serve hamburgers and others pizza. It’s why some can serve quick cheap pizza and others gourmet pizza. You can’t do that if there’s only one person around to manage the village restaurant.
The financial and social systems baked it in as a fundamental assumption. Forcing growth is easier in the short term than putting in the work to fix the existing systems.
The population that is too old to work can keep getting getting older as medicine advances, but you can’t get younger than 0.
Because the system requires growth. Its not made to be stablez if next year there isn’t more revenue, more taxpayers, more workers, then there won’t be enough resources to pay for all the people aging, or opting out of the workforce.
Money. It grows the economy, the myth of eternal economic growth. We don’t need more people to produce necessary resources like food and clean water.
Infrastructure cannot be scaled down. If you have a city that has grown to accomodate one million people, you can’t just shrink it down.
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