It's too late for a New Year's review, but I'm still thinking about two articles I read in 2024.
One is about the far future. It's from the New York Times -- perhaps the only good thing in the Times this past year; what a sad excuse for a "liberal" newspaper it has become -- is a long article about the world's demographic future" "What Happens When the Global Population Peaks?" Here's the link -- it's from 2023, though I only saw it this year.
Short version: the world has already set itself on a course of very rapid depopulation after a peak that will occur as soon as the 2070s. How big a depopulation? The article speculates that the extension of existing trends could take world population down from 10 billion people to fewer than two billion over a couple of hundred years.
"Current trends" never continue forever. And no one alive will be around to check the accuracy of these predictions -- though some of today's younger people are sure to see the unavoidable beginnings of an absolute decline in world population being charted maybe fifty years from now.
I have to say I see this as an almost unmitigated good thing. Obviously the GDP of a decline population would have to decline, and our society is geared for constant growth. But other than that, everyone who wishes can continue to have children as long as they collective keep the reproductive rates below 2.0 per woman. And what a relief for the world to have fewer people cramming themselves onto its surface and crowding out every other species -- and nature itself. Amiwrong? The same or more resources and fewer people to consume them -- what's not to like?
The other great article I keep thinking of came from the New Yorker: veteran journalist Nicolas Lemann's October article Joe Biden’s Economic Plan Is Investing Trillions of Dollars in America | The New Yorker makes the argument that, all unsold, unnoted, and unappreciated, the Biden administration undertook an unprecedented change in American economic policy. "What would you call these policies?" writes Lemann, "One apt label might be “post-neoliberal."
Lemann argues that the Biden economic projects made a break with the Reaganoid neo-liberal consensus that prosperity was best assured by having the government step back, reduce taxation and regulation and let markets shape and direct the economy.
Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. ....
Bidenomics has overturned a number of unwritten rules that you previously had to follow if you wanted to be taken seriously as a policymaker: economic regulation is usually a bad idea; governments should balance their budgets, except during recessions and depressions; subsidizing specific industries never works; unions are a mixed blessing, because they don’t always promote economic efficiency; government should not try to help specific regions of the country or sectors of the economy.
The thing about this: this version of Bidenomics not only sound good, it sounds like a lot of Canadian economic policies over the years. Even during the free trade era that started in 1988, Canadian governments have often invested directly in infrastructure, and even making direct investments to secure automobile production, etc.
Even more, it seems to describe much of the Trudeau government project since 2015. The Trudeau government has been unapologetic about accepting deficits and investing in electric car and battery plants, buying "the last pipeline," funding infrastructure (in partnership with provinces and cities and businesses), cooperating with unions, assisting specific regions and sectors, and so on.
Lemann, however, argues Bidenomics relied more on "predistribution" rather than "redistribution" --meaning it wanted to design the right kind of economy rather than to redistribute support to the needy and neglected. If I understand these things, the Trudeau program -- Child Tax Benefits, pension increases, CERB, expansion of pharma- and denticare, and so on have been broadly redistributive (and successful)
I can see it is odd to celebrating the policies espoused by Biden and Trudeau just as each of them is leaving office more or less in disgrace and humiliation. Lehmann sees to be suggesting that Pete Buttigieg may be the one to revive Biden's economic thought. Who might carry the Trudeau torch?
Who knows? But I suspect that Trudeau's current unpopularity -- like Biden's -- involves a lot of hysteria and crowd-mania, and that in the not-so-long run their their reputation will begin to rise.
