USA Today celebrated the prospect of increased crowding and worse problems with global warming today. That's right, it told readers that a rise in the fertility rate in the United States is good news because: "A high fertility rate is important to industrialized nations. When birthrates are low, there are fewer people to fill jobs and support the elderly." Okay, let's think about this one for a moment. Do we have a problem that there are too few people to fill jobs? I haven't heard about that one. It seems to me that we could do with more jobs for the people we already have. What does it even mean in a market economy to say that we have too few people to fill jobs? Seriously, this is complete nonsense. If there are too few people, then the wage rises. If the employer doesn't want to pay the wage necessary to attract a worker, then the job doesn't exist, so what? As far as not having enough workers to care for our elderly, again this is nonsense. Productivity is growing at least 1.5 percent a year and possibly as much as 2.5 percent a year if we can get back to 1995-2004 rate. Even the slower rate of productivity growth will swamp the impact of a higher ratio of retirees to workers. In other words, even if our working age population falls relative to our retired population, we will still be much wealthier on average. This piece belong in the opinion section, it has far more misinformed assertions that actual news content.
--Dean Baker
