The statistics are in for the growth of population between July of 2020 and July of 202- the latest
full year data that I could come to, and we've had the smallest growth of our population
in over a century. Wow. Something remarkable is happening. Total growth in the United States (we
are a country of 330 odd million people)- was 395, 000 people. That's how we grew over that
year. What's going on is very important both to know and then to analyze how it came to this.
Pandemic, aging, opioid: all important but none of them [is] the dominant cause.
Here comes the dominant cause of the decline. It's the fertility rate,
the birth rate in the United States. That's what's come down. I'll give you just one statistic.
Population experts believe that we have to have 2.1 births per woman in our culture
to stay even in our population. Not grow, not shrink but to stay even. In 2007, we had 2.12.
Just enough to keep growing, in terms of our birth rate, our intrinsic ability to grow our
population. In 2020, we had dropped from 2.12 to 1.64. That, historically, is the killer here,
the thing that drops our population. So, I want to talk about what it means and why it happened.
First, why it happened. The story has to start with a decision of American capitalist businesses,
starting particularly around the 1970s, to move out of the country in a big way: to drop their
factories, their offices, their stores in this country and move to where economic growth was
faster and wages and other costs were lower. That was a one-two punch most capitalists
could not resist because profits looked better over there to say it simply. And they closed
down their facilities. Whole towns shut down when they were dependent on one factory, or one office,
or one big store, and now, it was gone. All Americans know this story because it has happened
literally in every part of the country. Visit your nearest dead mall and you'll get a sense,
just like if you look at the inside labels on your clothes and your appliances. It's all made
someplace else, and you know when that happened, it dealt a real blow to our working class.
They lost the jobs, and you know which jobs left first? The ones where the wages were highest here,
because if you move them to China where the wages are very low, it would be the biggest
add to your profit. You don't move the job of a worker who earns a little because then you're not
gaining that much by moving to China which has its costs. So, you move first the wages of the white,
American male worker, typically in the union, who's fought hard, and had a good wage,
and benefit package. That's what the employer saves most on. So, that's why the employer moves.
It's crushing for the white, male working class, perhaps more than for anyone else, this departure
of the good jobs. So, it should come really as no great surprise that that part of our population,
a huge part of our population, men and women, start having fewer children.
The jobs they can hold on to aren't very good. The factory job is gone, and being a greeter at
Walmart will not pay anything like it. So, you can't have children. It's too expensive. It's
too difficult. It's too uncertain. Now, enter into this reaction of our working class and
particularly our white, but not only our white working class in cutting back on having babies.
By the way, cutting back on getting married and a lot of other things that go with that,
but now ask yourself the following question: did people understand what I've just said? That is:
the link between the profit driven moving of our jobs out of the country and replacing
workers with machines (because that was going on too) all driven by profit maximization
and the declining birth rate. No. You know how we know it wasn't understood? Because the right wing
politics in our country got people to believe that their economic difficulty wasn't primarily the
decisions of big business. Kind of everyone knew a little of it, but no. We got really excited,
especially if we were on the right wing, by scapegoating immigrants. And you have to,
here, appreciate the irony. So, we scapegoated the immigrants as if they were the cause of our
economic difficulty: those poor people coming from central America. What a crazy idea, but it worked.
It focused the anger away from the profit-driven decisions of corporations to immigrants.