Impact of Declining, Aging, Rural Populations

 “The shift from global population growth toward population decline is emerging as one of the least appreciated forces that is, along with urbanization and digital disruption, upending the political and economic status quo.” A major factor in such decline is “all of East Asia, all of Europe, and all of North America are experiencing birthrates that are below replacement level — which means, simply, were it not for immigration and longer life spans, all of these regions would be experiencing year-to-year population decline.” (Emphases in original.) So say Philip Auerswald, associate professor at George Mason University, and Joan Yun, the president of Palo Alto Investors.[1]

“In the world’s largest cities, where populations are densely concentrated and growing, economies are generally thriving and cosmopolitanism is embraced. Where populations are sparse or shrinking, usually in rural places and small cities, economies are often stagnant, and populism sells.”

The appeal of populism, they say, is caused by “Nativist, nationalist rhetoric — “Make America (or Whatever Other Country) Great Again” — [which] appeals because it promises to restore the rightful economic and cultural stature of ‘common people’ in relation to a decadent urban intelligentsia.” This especially is true in “rural, remote places [that] have been disproportionately losing not just jobs and opportunities, but people, elementary schools and confidence in the future.”

The Russian Federation is “in the vanguard of both demographic decline and the political exploitation of the frustrations it engenders,. . . , it is a country whose population began to shrink 15 years before Japan’s; a country whose leader declared in a 2006 address to the nation that the demographic crisis was “the most acute problem” facing his land; a country in which the battle between the rural “narod” (the common people) and the urban intelligentsia was a defining feature of political life for most of a violent century.”

Other blog posts have discussed various aspects of this problem in the U.S. and the resulting need, in this blogger’s opinion, for increasing , not decreasing, immigration.[2]

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[1]  Auerswald & Yun, As Population Growth Slows, Populism Surges, N.Y. Times (May 22, 2018)

[2]  See The World Faces Demographic Challenges (April 3, 2018); U.S. Needs More Immigrants (April 14, 2018); Other Factors Favoring U.S. Immigration (May 17, 2018); Wall Street Journal: U.S. Immigration Debate Disconnected from Economic Realities (May 21, 2018).