Size also yields vast economies of scale. As population grows, through fertility and immigration, a healthy housing market is inevitable. It's either that or tens of millions of Americans sleeping on the streets. Bet on the boom.
There's corporate growth too, across industries. Imagine an American corporation, XYZ, that wants to start doing business in Thailand. Only in a polyglot nation like America can XYZ search out and find the adult children of Thai immigrants who know America inside and out but also know Thai customs and language.
Few if any nations have all these advantages. The demography in play guarantees that the 21st century, like the 20th, will be an "American Century."
Demographic phooey. No counrty $17T in debt will be leading anything. Except the fall.
Does Wattenburg get around to describing how 1 in 7 Americans now receive food stamps? And that would mean that somewhere around 1 in 5 working aged adult American heads-of-household, depends on the government (59% taxes and 41% new debt) for their and their dependents support?
A nation with $16 trillion of debt and such a large portion of working age adults not involved in productive, economic activity is not so well situated as Wattenburg seems to think.
Wattenburg has always sung the praises of immigration and open borders, and seems to comprehend little else.
In reality Gomez, Sanchez, Ramirez,...
The problem with population growth in America today, and for the last 47 years, is that much of it is Bottom-Of-The-Barrel emigration from Africa, the Mideast, Mexico and other countries to the south.
The author places a lot of value on quantity of people and economy of scale but quality seems to be overlooked. What benefit is population growth from emigration if it does not add to our quality of life and if it is mostly takers, not makers?
For almost half a century our politicians have passed emigration laws without regard for the effect on our quality of life, our way of life, our traditions, or our economy (other than to supply cheap labor). By those criteria, the America they have created is certainly not better than the America they have destroyed.
Not among the middle class. This is BS.
You'll find NOBODY who's more up on America's future than I am. I keep an eye and track on where science and technology is going and I'm here to tell you, America's future is going to be GLORIOUS! Yeah, we may fall on our collective a$$e$ at times, but consider some of the following.
Even discounting the outrageous strides that our military is making, have any of you looked at what we're doing with stem cells?
We can change a skin cell into a stem cell and change it back into a heart muscle cell! Or a brain cell! Or a nerve cell! We're learning to understand how they operate to the extent that we now can hold out TRUE hope to repair spinal cord injuries and amputations and blind or burn victims for TOTAL repair of any of these ailments. And not in the next 100-200 years! In the next 10-20 years!
We've also figured out the 5 stem cell lines that make up the human lung system and think that we can repair damage like emphysema and other lung and heart conditions.
We have a lab here in the States who decided to try and create a human bladder using nothing but stem cells. So they built a scaffolding and started to bathe it with bladder stem cells. Over and over day after day they did this until lo and behold, they had a bladder! But that could be a fluke. So they thought they'd do it again and again, *POOF* they came out with a human bladder made to order. And they did it again and again and again until they came to the conclusion that they'd better do something with it or find a new line of work.
The upshot is that there are hundreds of people walking around with artificial bladders made of human cells instead of some plastic composite that could be rejected.
Any of you ever here of 'Shapeways.com?' Go check it out. You can design a product using a CAD program like Google sketch-up and submit it to them and they can build you your product using a special desktop printing technique that you can sell! Just like a replicator on Star Trek.
Speaking of printing, do you realize that we're learning to print human organs on printers? And solar panels sheets that are flexible and can be pasted on anything?
Our business world is disappearing into our desktops and the US govt isn't able to comprehend this. There isn't a problem with American's there's a problem with politicians.
Shotguns have been around since the 1600's or so? British hunting weapon? Well, they're still the same thing as they were back then. It took an American to sit down and rethink their design. There's now a beast called an AS-12 that's an automatic shotgun. It comes in drums of 20 or 30 shells that can fire on full automatic. They've also redesigned the shells for them. A grenade that can be shot out of one with fins of it's own for stability. And that's one of 40 new kind of shells that they developed for it!
You people may not be interested in it but there are millions of people making a living doing nothing but internet businesses. Ebay leaps to mind but there are hundreds of other ways to earn an income on the internet.
And that's only a slight touch of what America's future looks like. It's going to be bright and glorious and I have little respect for you doom and gloomers!
Godspeed,
HoA