A paradigm shift has begun in markets - ‘Greatest Credit Bubble’ | Page 2 | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

RetireEd, I don't agree with your views and your insinuations about "right wing proponents", etc. You cite right wing proponents and also Quebec (definitely not right wing) both encouraging large families so you can leave your politics out of it, thanks. And I'd disagree that gov'ts give money to parents to promote population growth, you can just as easily posit it's because parents (voters) demand public money to help them financially while raising kids so it's a way of buying votes (like the gov't subsidized daycare some provinces already have). But USA politics and "financial pundits" have very little impact on global couples' decisions re family size.

People, globally, are not having kids not because they want future people to pay off gov't debts. What is co-related to family size is global population movement into cities, female education levels, access to birth control, female liberation and access to good jobs/careers, and resultant increased affluence, i.e. they all drive down the birth rate drastically. It's why the first world has very low birth rates and why poor countries (aside from dictatorship China which for a long time forbade families from having more than one child, though now is facing population decline due to resultant few baby-producing age couples) have high birth rates.

When I say right-wing, I refer to political philosophies; partisan actions can be affected by other pressures in what actually happens. Restrictions on birth control, sex education and abortion are very direct interventions to boost births.

Certainly Quebec, usually on the left side of the political spectrum, is currently governed by one of the most right-wing (relative to its norms) administrations in quite a while. But that government - and more traditionally lefty ones of the past - have their policies shifted by the strong ultramontagne nationalism they use for popular support. Traditional socialists (from Marx on) have stressed alignment by class, not artificial cultural divides.

Subsidies to raise children out of poverty, like the Canada Child Benefit, are distinct from subsidies for HAVING a child, which are a direct incentive. I was talking only about the latter.

It's certainly true that there are increased social pressures on potential parents to have fewer or no children. That's why I noted that it's not largely the choice of individual couples to have more children; it's socio-political pressure. And it doesn't necessarily work.

CBC News just ran a piece on their noon broadcast today about the stresses Canada faces with about a million added to our population this year. They also noted the increases in non-permanent residents.
RetirEd

There are a lot of caveats to start with, but the important part of this post in near the end, where population comes in. I have been unable to find an on-line link to this July 28 piece; if anyone finds one, they may want to share it with us.

Friday's Vancouver Sun ran a piece on the first page of its National Post insert titled "Why our standard of living is sinking." The author is Tristin Hopper, who I will admit is considered a very strong conservative voice in Canadian media. (Though I will note that he wrote one of the most cautious, fair and balanced discussions of media hype on the Indian Residential Schools topic.)

Hopper roots the issue in the "Per Capita Gross Domestic Product," a statistic we almost never see mentioned in economic policy discussions or announcements. (Much of the argument cites a report for Policy Options by Gagne and Deslauriers.) He asserts that this is a deliberate act my our government to cover up the standard of living issue, though to be fair nobody else uses it either.

He lays blame on Canadian businesses for not investing enough and not innovating and competing enough; he cites "protected oligopolies" such as airlines, grocery giants and telcoms. That's true enough, but often those companies are allowed to concentrate ownership to protect against foreign economic powers - which often then buy the Canadian monoliths. Innovation in this sector often focuses on increasing fees and prices, rather than productivity - unless that's done in reducing staff or benefits.

There's also the fact that much of our economy is in export-driven resources, meaning that world markets make a lot of our economy reactive to forces we don't control.

THE BIG POINT of his thesis, though, is that our increasing population causes per-capita GDP to fall, as it dilutes our output per person. And he places the blame for that squarely on immigration - which has been running at unusually high rates in recent years due to epidemics, wars, famine, flood, fire and the like. That's true, but he neglects the overall effects of population growth, which affect not just Canada but the world. (Well, Russia has had lots of population shrinkage for decades, but that's largely due to emigration!)

Canada does have a sufficiently low birthrate to moderate the excesses, but all parties in parliament look to immigration to boost our work force and not let the people who are living on borrowed cash have the responsibility to pay it back. It's an ethical conflict where short-term political needs for labour and low tax rates prevent us from acting. Canada has always been welcoming to immigrants - including ancestors of mine and most of our fellow forum members, probably - and is understandably unwilling to shrink the door opening for what can be portrayed as selfish reasons.

Which is why I want to see population control be treated as a universal issue, not just a reason to bash immigrants who are predominantly not white, English-speaking and bringing lots of cash along.
RetirEd