ABSTRACT
Two additional aspects of population are of particular interest. The first is age distributions within a country: If it has a slowing birth rate, where are the workers going to come from and how many will be available? Part of our basic current economic model is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme. We require ever more young workers to supply the energy and productivity to keep our economic machine running and to support an ever-growing retired cohort. The other part of our economic model is the dependence on technology to constantly increase our productivity so that a proportionally smaller workforce is required. We still need young people, just not as many as in other countries. Second is the concept of sustainability. Remember that we discussed Malthus and his theories earlier in this book. If the geometric growth of population and the arithmetic growth of the food supply are to bring catastrophe as he forecasted, for how long are we going to be able to increase our food supply at a rate necessary to match the population growth? It looks like we need to be able to support approximately 10 billion people as we level off toward 2070. Then the question arises as to how many people this planet can really support when we take into account the location of population growth and depletion of nonrenewable resources. We will return to this discussion later in this chapter in the section titled “Sustainability: Carrying Capacity.”
