The Next Hundred Million; America In 2050

Introduction

Changes in population affect everything. Whether the topic is long-term assessments of energy consumption and its by-products, such as greenhouse gases, or government administered entitlement programs, like the U.S. Social Security and Medicare systems, or the not-so-simple basics of healthy food and clean water, a nation's population - big, small, growing, shrinking, moving or staying put - has to be part of the discussion. Fluctuations in fertility rates, mortality and morbidity rates, retirement ages, and, not least, immigration and emigration policies are driving forces behind projections of many important ingredients that determine our standard of living. For the forecaster, population dynamics are easier to incorporate into long-term prediction models than are some other critical components, such as technological changes and the nature and timing of scientific, engineering, and regulatory changes, like increased energy-efficiency standards and more stringent controls on the emission of greenhouse gases. Regulations are mandated and enforced through the public-policy process, which is influenced by the pendulum swing of national electoral cycles and global political initiatives. Those of us who observe, study, and analyze social and economic trends have been richly rewarded with a bounty of recent publications on the dynamics of national and global (http://www.wnd.com).

Discussion

Those of us who observe, study, and analyze social and economic trends have been richly rewarded with a bounty of recent publications on the dynamics of national and global rates of population growth and decline. Two examples are “A Slow-Burning Fuse,” a special report on aging populations that appeared in The Economist (2009), and the book The Age of Aging (2009) by George Magnus, the respected London-based chief economist of UBS. Both provide a much-needed overview of the great population transitions ongoing in the world today and the challenges these changing demographic profiles pose to politicians and policy makers. They point out the limits to policy options for exploiting the upside of ”favorable” future demographic profiles and present feasible menus of political, social, and economic policy choices that can mitigate the downside of “unfavorable “demographics (www.articles.cnn).

You may add to this list Joel Kotkin's The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. Kotkin, a leading expert on urban and regional issues, makes his book's point of departure the prospective demographic profile of the United States over the next four decades, focusing on the likely changes in American living patterns through 2050 with an emphasis on geographical trends, rather than the changing urban-sub urban rural population distribution. Kotkin believes that the addition of another 83 million people to the U.S. population in the next 40 years will result in a large shift away from the renowned metropolitan centers of the East and West coasts to continued in-migration to the Sunbelt cities of Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, and their surrounding areas. More importantly, he thinks that many of the smaller cities of the heartland and mountain regions Boise, Charlotte, Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Tucson are becoming increasingly desirable destinations as the nation's population tracks to reach 400 million by 2050, mainly ...