Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The young will inherit the Earth...
...and that is why the United States will remain a powerful economic force in 2050.
Unless, of course, we go out of our way to destroy our economy by mimicking the policies that have slashed birth rates elsewhere.
9 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Mar 31, 05:37:00 PM:
I wonder what a similar chart would have looked like for Argentina at the beginning of the Peron years.
By 
TigerHawk, at
Wed Mar 31, 05:44:00 PM:
By , at
Wed Mar 31, 05:53:00 PM:
I have my doubts. Workforce quality is also important. Will these guys be MIT grads?
By , at
Wed Mar 31, 07:16:00 PM:
Let us hope that there will be more breeding amoung the tax payers than the tax eaters.
By , at
Wed Mar 31, 07:28:00 PM:
Not to be a prude, but we've had an alarming growth in the percentage of kids born out of wedlock. It's the best single "macro" predictor of whether a kid will mainstream in our society. YMMV
By , at
Wed Mar 31, 08:20:00 PM:
India.
Palestine, Pakistan, Iran, others also, hves a huge growth rate,
By Don Cox, at
Thu Apr 01, 03:21:00 AM:
I find the curve for Europe hard to believe, considering the constant flow of immigrants, most of whom are young and soon settle down to rear families.
Certainly the population of Britain is rising.
And if there is really ba shortage of skilled workers, the retirement age can be raised to 70. 65 is very early to retire nowadays, and there is a whole new generation of non-smokers approaching that age.
By Brian Schmidt, at
Fri Apr 02, 10:58:00 AM:
I think it's strange that conservatives can consider Social Security to be a Ponzi scheme, while at the same time deny that the strategy of having more young people than old people is also a Ponzi scheme.
By , at
Fri Apr 02, 01:44:00 PM:
"consider Social Security to be a Ponzi scheme"
SS needn't be, but it started with Ponzi-ish favorable demographics. That made it easy for FDR to sell it back in the 1930s. The favorable demographics have reversed -- we can't ignore this -- it's ineluctable.
That said, we can afford SS. What we can't afford are open-ended Healthcare entitlements.
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To pass Constitutional muster back in the 1930s, SS was drafted to come under Congress's taxation power -- it was expressly argued to the Supreme Court at the time that SS wasn't a funded insurance program and that beneficiaries had no vested rights.
We may revisit this point in the context of challenges over the individual mandate in Obamacare. Read against this precedent, the Individual Mandate has to be called a tax to pass Constitutional muster. Thus, there's a reason the Individual Mandate was drafted as an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code. Former Constitutional Law Professor Obama should know this: If it ain't a tax, it ain't Constitutional.
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"strategy of having more young people than old people is also a Ponzi scheme"
I don't know that "strategy" fits with how we manufacture babies -- at least not in the Free World.
My Dad was #15 of 15. My Mom was #2 of 5. They had four kids. I have two. That's been happening all over the World, when there's been economic progress. Brian, reread that last sentence slowly.
