So then things will be slightly less worse when robots are doing all the jobs? maybe we need to invent some robot consumers.

Oh crap, fewer people, tighter labor market, cheaper housing. Greater ability to demand higher wages or better conditions or worker-determined fluidity (i.e. 90’s style take this job and shove it) not groveling interviews. Perhaps we will see decreasing wage gaps, predatory industries like student or payday loan sharks less profitable. Not good at all. Luxury goods will be rotting in the boutiques.

But, at this point, one must ask, does the middle-class deserve this possible salvation? Will they be able to appreciate it, reflect on it and take advantage of it. Will younger workers take the breathing space this will allow and become more politically savvy or engaged (at least vote) or will this not stop the onrushing dystopia of Boomer gerontocratic tyranny and the growth and consolidation of the adult diaper-industrial complex, exacerbated by minority and LGBT cry babies and the ongoing economic clout of female tennie-boopers? A time in which the Gen X and Millenial middle class turn on each other ever more viciously as they struggle to make their student loan payments and pay their tax, which will mostly provide aged (because it ain’t welfare if the recipient is old!), obese WV smokers with knee replacements or enable their tithes to John Hagee ministeries, subsidize retired doctors in FL buying new toys or Thai hookers or keep up real estate prices in McLean, Va., maintain large, parasitic, mostly female HR departments for defense contractors. Internet comments on most news sites, trending tv commercials, shows and cartoons don’t bode well for the future. People earned their medicare, blast it! Police Unions aren’t unions, not really. Planned parenthood is the crisis of our age. I wish person of the opposite political persuasion could switch places with a more deserving foreigner (Kurd or Yazidi or immigrant entrepreneur (because they are always a positive force)- per Gopers; Guatemalan or Syrian- per leftists and Center-leftists).

Another excuse for big business, government and the suicidal left to import more foreigners, of course.

Better to build lots of robots.

We need another Mao?? Mao’s Glorious Mother policy encouraged Chinese women to have more children during the 60s to defend China from a potential nuclear attack from her enemies. The attack never happened but the population growth was responsible for much of the worldwide economic growth in past decades. We need another Mao?? Greg Ip and people like him need to stop writing and start planting a lot more seeds, world growth depends on it.

“economists have groped for reasons to explain why growth in the U.S. and abroad has repeatedly disappointed”

because our “leaders” thought it was a good idea to have corporations export all the well paying jobs to enrich the CEO and the shareholders so that now many people in developed countries can’t afford the product and or service that said corporation creates or provides.

AND most certainly can not afford $600K starter homes.

this is not rocket science, it’s just math, and most economists only seem capable of telling you tomorrow why what they said today was wrong.

Indeed, several studies have found that older workers are as, and often more, productive than their younger colleagues. As the Bundesbank’s Mr. Weidmann notes, “The young can run faster, but the old know the shortcuts.”

This has to be the key.

Somehow we need to find a way to defeat the arguments arising out of these demographic changes, that the greedy and the corrupt (the usual suspects referenced in my previous post) will try to use to promote yet more mass immigration. Robots and extending useful working life are key. We need to put incentives in place now to encourage these changes, rather than letting the pressure for yet more mass immigration build up further.

the main problem is the loss of workers to pay into the various Ponzi schemes set up by the governments like social security.

we are not running out of workers to produce our goods and services, as productivity continues to increase each year less workers are required…which is one reason less Americans are employed today than in 2007 and we use less oil and gasoline today than 10 years ago.

Ip may not be able to get it up.

Most idiotic article since the days of Walter Duranty. Unemployment everywhere, and low skill jobs being eliminated at warp speed by automation and outsourcing to the 3d world…..but Ip thinks we need more useless mouths.
Meanwhile, farmland, topsoil, and fresh water aquifers are disappearing everywhere. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, only a journalist could be dumb enough to write something like this….

YES – European countries and Israel are worried very much about their “white” demographic decline – which the supremacist groups blame on Muslim and Black immigrants and refugees instead of high-rate on broken families, LGBT, same sex marriage and hatred of marriage institution.

Last week, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán during his address at Budapest Demographic Forum, advised European nations to produce more babies than accepting non-white or Muslim refugees.

The female population in most of western countries is higher than the male population. In Russia, there are 11 million surplus women (fertility rate at 1.3%), in the US (4 million, fertility rate at 1.3%)), Britain (1.1 million, fertility rate at less than 2%), Germany (1.6 million, fertility rate at 1.4%), France (1.7 million, fertility rate at 2%), Canada (320,000, fertility rate at 1.5%) and so on. On top of that add over 30 million non-child-bearing gay and lesbian population in Europe, the US and Canada.

Contrary to that, female population in majority of 57 Muslim states is less than the male population.

Many Russian politician and journalists are of the opinion that the best way to solve this extra women and declining demographic white population is to bring back polygamy which is allowed in the Bible.

http://rehmat1.com/2011/04/24/polygamy-and-wests-demographic-decline/

I cannot stand reading all these articles saying the world needs more people. It does not.

While we need to figure out is how to respond to the robots and computers making hundreds of millions of jobs in the world obsolete in the next few decades.

We need to figure out how to remake our societies and economies to accommodate a world in which most adults won’t have a fulltime job.

I need to mention again here something I’ve mentioned before on other threads, but it bears repeating.

Everybody seems to only want to consider the effects of immigration on the destination countries, (i.e. the Western, developed world), and to that end they talk about the replacement of ageing, white-European natives with immigrants from the third world who are poorly educated and have no loyalty to their adopted country, and how this is tearing up the fabric of Western societies, etc.

That’s all well and good. I fully share those concerns. I hate, lament, and condemn the recent wave of “Syrian” refujihadis pouring into Europe. But I will point out yet again that the number of immigrants recently arrived in Europe amounts to less than one half of one percent of Europe’s current population. There is not enough of them (yet) to effect a demographic transformation of Europe. If such a small population desired assimilation, Europe could readily assimilate them; as they do not desire assimilation, Europe ought to close its borders and deport them, but that is still entirely doable given the numbers, provided that Europe acts swiftly. Speaking strictly economically, the effect of such masses of new welfare cases moving into Europe will certainly be a net negative, and those who are touting this as a “invigoration” of European stock are seriously deluded. However, the effect will be quite small for a long time to come.

So while the effects of mass immigration on the destination countries are negative but minor, the effects on the source countries are negative and major. Consider the situation of countries like Syria (exporting people to Europe) or Mexico (exporting people to the United States). These countries have smaller populations to begin with and are starting from a much lower relative economic base. Now on top of that, a significant fraction of their young, able-bodied population decides to leave the country. Who now is going to do the work that needs to be done back home? Who is going to provide the labor, pay the taxes, care for the elderly, and beget the next generation in Mexico or Syria?

Everyone assumes that the undeveloped world is merely a source of endless waves of human beings ready to stream into America and Europe without cessation, but this is not the case. All it takes is a generation or two of emigration and the source countries will be left with demographic profiles resembling those of the infertile Western nations who are now literally sucking the blood out of them. Once that is accomplished, there will be no place left to turn for bodies. Then the entire world will enter upon a terminal population decline with no way to reverse it until global population stabilizes at a much lower level.

Looked at from a deep historical perspective, mass immigration is simply the supernova of a dying civilization as it burns off the world’s human capital in one last orgy of expenditure. The same thing happened during the decline of the Classical Era. There are three factors involved.

1) Low fertility among the civilized peoples, resulting in sub-replacement birth rates, aging populations, and economic decline, leading to increased hopelessness and even lower fertility.

2) The replacement of the civilized stock by “barbarians” from the provinces, which depresses economic activity even more while at the same time denuding the provinces of their best blood.

3) The new arrivals abandon their primitive fecundity and adopt civilized rates of childbearing, leading to the same problem, only this time there is no other source of humanity to turn to.

Also, given the fact that the only regions of the world where birthrates are still well above replacement levels are places like sub-Saharan Africa, whose vast hordes of humanity are completely dependent on Western technology, Western medicine, and Western developmental aid to maintain themselves, and that this assistance will no longer be forthcoming as the world begins to spasm from its political and economic woes, we can expect the “source countries” to descend into famine, disease, and chaos even faster than the developed countries, thus drying up the stream of potential immigrants at the source.

Mass immigration is bad for everybody. It is a herald of the end of organic growth and the dawn of a new Dark Age.

Maybe we just need to redefine “growth”. I would call it growth when I have more free time to pursue what I want to do instead of making even more widgets for some company.

the main problem is the loss of workers to pay into the various Ponzi schemes set up by the governments like social security.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes waste assets. The Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that there are no assets to waste. That’s why Mrs Nestor wasn’t entitled to Mr Nestor’s check.

Indeed. And thank you: applauding your sentiment allows me to resist the urge to lash out at other commenters who, for assorted foolish or ugly reasons, bemoan waning growth, or immigration, or both.

Thanks also to MarkinLA for this.
“Maybe we just need to redefine “growth”. I would call it growth when I have more free time to pursue what I want to do instead of making even more widgets for some company.”

Good comment, but there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, even for the questionably salubrious drink of non-white immigrants converting to a white condition of depressed fertility in the countries they invade. Often they reproduce their native environment in the new setting and continue to outbreed their hosts. It’s bad enough to be part of universal decline, but to be side by side with your supplanter is worse.

If there are somewhere near 7 billion people on the planet today, I’ll wager it’s a lot closer to 2 billion in 50 to 100 years.

We’re coming off a very long period of rising living standards, and for the last 50 years have instituted policy after policy that will eventually lead to a period of the Four Horsemen running rampant.

From nuclear power plants having no capital set aside for decommissioning (much less dealing with the “spent” fuel) to growing citrus in deserts, to shuffling large numbers of immiscible people together during a social mood high, all the ingredients exist for one cataclysm after another.

The IOU-issuance party is almost over. When the Hivemind’s manic optimism naturally changes to pessimism the “future value” of most of those IOU’s will be deemed zero.

Then the real party begins.

any financial firm which set up a pension scheme similar to social security would be prosecuted. The government does not set aside any funds for social security, the money is immediately spent along with other tax receipts… In the 1960s Congress and Treasury began raiding the Social Security fund, to finance general outlays, while leaving behind an ever-rising pile of non-tradable treasury IOUs (now worth $2.6 trillion). Most inflows were spent immediately on current beneficiaries, a method basic to any Ponzi scheme, and U.S. politicians gave it the cute-sounding name PAYGO (“pay-as-you-go”). So the politicians spent all2.6 trillion of social security inflows and left a ledger of IOUs…

In 1935 there were 9 working-age Americans per retiree, but the ratio has since declined to 6 in 1960, 5.2 in 1985, and 4.8 in 2010. The Social Security Administration itself predicts the ratio will fall to 2.8 by 2035. Put another way, in 1935 each worker had to support 1/9th of a retiree, but by 2035 he’ll have to support roughly three times that load, or 1/3rd of a retiree.

like any Ponzi scheme the early participants made out well, paying just 2% of their income…while today it has increased to 14%. Given in-built demographic trends, to preserve currently-promised benefits yet prevent Social Security and Medicare from becoming more insolvent, the payroll tax would have to be increased and eventually doubled from today’s rate to roughly 30%, by 2035.

What is this Europe you speak about? They are headed mostly for Germany and Sweden. Just for the sake of argument, consider 800 thousand young men arriving in Germany. Just one percent of the population, but 10% of the 20 to 30 age bracket, exactly when most people start families. In one year. In a country that is already less than 100% German. The age pyramid makes all the difference when establishing whether or not there is a replacement going on.

Meanwhile, legal immigration and chain immigration through family reunification has been going on for 50 years in some places. London is less than 50% British, and barely majority White because of intra-EU migration.

Steve Sailer has already talked about how unassimilated Mexicans in the US actually experience higher fertility than in Mexico, because of the availability of medical care and other resources, when compared to Mexico, where an Amerindian woman actually gave birth on the lawn in front of the hospital. This assumption that the developing or undeveloped world will automatically experience lower birthrates is unwarranted. Look at Niger, where people actually say that, if they had more money, they would have more children than they already have (TFR=7).

http://www.irinnews.org/report/75801/niger-population-explosion-threatens-development-gains

Look at Gaza, of all places http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/gaza-growing-population-challences.html

Only Eastern Europeans are poor and childless at the same time. It takes a certain subgroup of humanity to have very strong elasticity of fertility downwards in relation to perceived resources. Everybody else outside the European bubble still thinks about their posterity, in one way or another. The African strongman has plenty of kids, the Arab who can’t get a bride because of polygamy is moving to Europe to attract a bride from back home, most countries don’t let people move in willy-nilly, Mexico included. The Japanese aren’t having babies, but neither are they replacing themselves with other and are welcoming their robot overlords, so they’ll still be Japanese in 50 years.

In the 1960s Congress and Treasury began raiding the Social Security fund…

What fund? “Pay as you go” is welfare, not a “fund”. Don’t talk about a fund, until you can show me one. (Other than general revenues.)

Howard Ruff put it best: you pay taxes all your life, then retire and go on the dole. Whether you paid more or less than you receive is not the point, anymore than when millionaires collect unemployment insurance.

In other words, it’s social, not individual, security. Keeps the old folks from rioting.

It’s striking how the word “demographics” has come to be used only to refer to age, because that’s all you are allowed to talk about anymore.

Then why does one of the two major parties use it for its name?

Oh, wait… they’re the Democratic Party.

As Emily Natella said, “Never mind…”

Fertility Rates are not percentages. Fertility rates are the mean number of lifetime births (as in being the mother giving birth) per woman.

At the end of the day the concern of the the establishment filth is to keep the various Ponzi schemes running for as long as possible.

Is there anyone with a brain who really believes this shit? One of the most heartening things I can say that has developed in the Right in the last two decades is a real critique of “growth”. Might as well, since it’s something the Left left behind. Start pushing it more. You might be surprised by the traction you might get.

Absent mass immigration … pretty much a non-problem.

Yeah, there’s a short term squeeze of old people, with pensions and medical care.

But longer term, higher wages, cheaper housing, more open space, less environmental pressure, no need for more and more infrastructure … young people will find it easier to afford family life and find it more pleasant and populations will stabilize and recover naturally. Basically selection will select for more traditional family oriented folks who can maintain a population a given density. (Population drops, you get a bit more breeding, population\density rises a bit less.)

However the key phrase here–“absent mass immigration”. Mass immigration keeps populations growing, holds down wages, keeps housing prices rising, keeps up stress on the environment and infrastructure, while making cities foreign, society more balkanized, life less friendly and more unpleasant. And makes family formation–finding a job suitable to afford a place you’d want to live with schools you’d want your kids to attend–much, much less affordable and suppresses native fertility.

Mass immigration is a nation killer. But without it, this temporary population recession is no biggie.

It goes without saying that high IQ native Westerners need to start having large families again. The problem is how to get them to choose to do this with so much anti-white and anti-marriage propaganda in the media. My suggestions would be for whites to move away from mixed areas into Whitopias where they can more easily find mates and for whites to not care that mainstream society will demonize you if you have more than 2 or 3 kids. I don’t recommend too many going overboard like the Duggar family, but 4 to 6 children for a couple starting in their 20s would be great. It might also help if whites began to return to religion, as the religious are much more likely to have large families. Family life also gives a purpose to life that may help cut down on the terrible drug and suicide epidemic among unmarried middle aged whites. Maybe even gays could be encouraged to use surrogates to produce their own children. Europe also has a chance to cut down on immigration that I think is past in the United States. In the US, I think whites should completely abandon largely nonwhite areas and move to those cities and towns where we will be allowed to thrive on our own. By this I mean whites shouldn’t be anywhere near places like Detroit or Atlanta and should overtake the populations of nicer ,whiter cities in the Northeast and Northwest. We can make it through this. We don’t need to be a huge percentage of the population of the world, we just need enough space in our own lands to survive into the future.

well i’ll certainly be gone in 50, if that’s of any help. =)

Well yes. Concentrating on gdp per capita (what matters to ordinary people) rather than gdp (what matters to government and other establishment figures, who measure their willy size against foreign peers by it) would be a good start.