Supply And Demand

According to various pundits, my generation is the first one that is predicted not to have a quality of life that exceeds that of their predecessors. Quality of life is ill-defined, but what has been presented in these arguments seems to revolve around cost of living vs. compensation, amount of leisure time, job satisfaction, and feeling of control over one's own destiny. Clearly, this is a rather American definition of what constitutes a quality life. Being an American, it resonates with me.

I feel that if the pundits are correct about the effect, the cause they are always claim to be seeking is fairly obvious. It is not some mysterious conflation of economic subtleties. It isn't globalization, global warming, or even wage deflation, per se. Those things are all symptoms of what I think is the larger issue: the supply of people exceeds the demand.

It is not popular to talk about population control. Many people feel it is their God-given right to reproduce as prolifically as is conceivable. They forget that with rights come responsibilities, and that the world's excess supply of people is leading to compensation deflation and resource contention as there are more people than jobs and resources in our current markets. New jobs can indeed be created the by new demands placed on the global resource system by new people, but there is a tipping point beyond which this benefit is exceeded by the detriment of trying to incorporate many new people into the economic system. I don't know if we're past that tipping point, but it is obvious to me that our current economic and social structures, when coupled with this population boom, put us at least dangerously close to it.

Related to this issue is longevity. I am in favor of longevity, since I myself would like to live a nice long time, but with these increases in longevity come extended stays in the workplace for a large number of people and this taxes the economic system. The market is not expanding at a rate which creates quality, desirable jobs for younger people who are unable to fill existing positions, because those positions are held by Baby Boomers who are neither retiring nor dying. With increased longevity either needs to come an economic system in which opportunity expands proportionally to population growth (and given that the world is not infinite, there is a tipping point here also beyond which that is impossible), or a decrease in fertility. If we haven't passed the tipping point, the market could in theory expand in this way -- but it currently is not.

But don't just blame the so-called third world, or "foreigners" in general. Sure, many jobs (not just blue collar ones) in the U.S. and Europe are experiencing wage drag due to competition from China, India and other developing nations. Never mind that American and European companies owned by American and European investors also encourage this competition in order to increase their profit margins by stifling compensation gains -- right here at home we have a different kind of disparity based on job displacement by population.

The Baby Boomers, that 60's generation who thought they would save the world, are actually a population bubble whose longevity, fertility, and expansive lifestyle (and concomitant resource usage) is in fact a population spike which is causing (or at least stoking) a number of the economic and social justice problems they claimed were of utmost importance to them. Despite America's youth-centric culture, the Baby Boomers are the largest population of any generation to cling to power, authority, and money so late into life.

Someone who was 20 in 1968 is now 60. With current projected lifespans, these people are likely to live another 20-40 years. Those who do retire will strain the Social Security system, requiring my generation to pay an unprecedented amount for their upkeep, for an unprecedented length of time. Those who do not retire are ensconced in all the jobs that my generation would like to have, which might make it possible for at least some of us to own our own homes, and destinies, and at the same time chip in for the care and feeding of aging Boomers.

It is possible that growth will increase, and certainly folks like myself who have attempted to help create new markets such as computing and biotech are trying to make that happen. However, should sufficient growth not come to pass, the "correction" to compensate for Boomer-inflated markets will fall squarely on the shoulders of me, you and a lot of folks just like us. This would be a much bigger correction than the ones after either the Internet or housing bubbles, and it's already starting to happen. In order to curtail this economic slide, many more people need to become involved in opening up new markets and expanding existing ones -- especially those who benefit from the current system and might not see the benefits to adjusting it, as they control the resources needed to do it.

Even if we can stimulate sufficient economic growth, we also, as a global community, still need to start looking seriously at population. No matter how sensible new policies and how robust new markets may become, the planet is a finite system and therefore there is some number of people beyond which there will simply not be enough resources to go around. In order for a maximal number of people (all around the world, not just in the US) to live a good life, there must be fewer people than this limit. I certainly don't support either genocide or eugenics, but rather I'd like to see sensible population planning policies which use education and economic incentives to encourage birth control and responsible family planning. Fecundism at any cost is a dead-end path, and it's about time the human race let go of this misguided ideology.