
U.S. Population Growth Has Been Driven Exclusively by Minorities - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-04/u-s-population-growth-has-been-driven-exclusively-by-minorities
======
voisin
You could increase population growth by not screwing millennials at every step
of their life. If housing, school, food, cars didn’t cost substantially more
in inflation adjusted dollars than it did for their parents, or if their
incomes at least caught up to inflation.

~~~
danaris
In general, taking long-term views toward priorities of incentives would help
a great deal, as opposed to the "gotta-meet-next-quarter's-numbers" priorities
we have now.

I don't know how exactly to get there (I have a variety of ideas about things
we should be doing differently as a society, but none that specifically
address the level of short-term thinking we are plagued by), but we definitely
need to do _something_ about it.

~~~
voisin
I’d love to hear your ideas. Side note: is there a subreddit or other forum
for people to share and debate big picture ideas about what we should be doing
differently as a society? Seems different ideas are debated in different
places but I haven’t found a single place where ideas can be debated, voted
upon, ranked, etc.

~~~
danaris
I mean, honestly, they're nothing particularly new or noteworthy; they're a
collection of progressive ideas you've probably heard a lot, starting with
universal basic income and single-payer universal health care.

As far as fixing our corporate culture, I think making judicious but
expressive use of the corporate death penalty, combined with aggressive
enforcement of antitrust laws, using a much broader metric of harm than has
been used in the past few decades, would be a good start.

I also think that a true universal basic income—one that would allow someone
with no other source of income to live safely, if not luxuriously, in most
parts of the country—would slowly but surely start having huge effects on
nearly every aspect of work, as removing the constant fear of homelessness and
death from poverty made the "labour market" much more like a genuine free
market. I can only begin to imagine the shifts in our society that that would
result in, and it's really hard to say just what other measures would be
rendered unnecessary by them.

------
H8crilA
Immigration is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to
deflation. Just ask the Europeans or even more so - the immigration hostile
Japanese (yes, I know Abe is turning things around, this is an
oversimplification).

It's amazing how it is basically impossible to influence birth rates, one way
or the other, up or down. I am yet to find a convincing example of a concerted
effort at increasing or suppressing birth rates by a centralised authority.
Please share one if you know it, I find birth rates to be far more mysterious
than any other commonly talked about "macro" rates, such as riskfree rates or
various risk premiums.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> I am yet to find a convincing example of a concerted effort at increasing or
> suppressing birth rates by a centralised authority.

China suppressed its birth rate with its one child policy.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
The policy existed but, after talking with some Chinese friends about this
very topic, they said the system was corrupt. Anyone who want to get around
the system just had to bribe a local official, and there were zero
consequences.

Take this as anecdotal, of course.

~~~
bilbo0s
It wasn't even a bribe, It was worse than that. It was literally, "You can
only have one child unless you pay for each extra child you want." I mean,
getting around the policy, was actually written into the policy. Which is kind
of insane if the purpose was to control birth rates.

~~~
booleandilemma
But wouldn't even require paying for extra children discourage people from
having children?

~~~
astronautjones
aren't you doing that by having children anywhere?

------
fatcatdogfat
I dont have any reference to support this, I think Thomas Sowell or someone
else on one of the Hoover Institutes youtube videos, said this, Israel is the
only first world country that does not rely on immigration to support
population growth, so i would assume all other first world countries
population growth is due to minority immigration

~~~
mc32
? I guess it depends on what you classify as immigration. Israel has depended
on a far flung diaspora returning, but I don’t know the numbers, so I’d prefer
to see native born growth versus “returnees”.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Israel’s Jewish fertility rate and Arab fertility rate are in a dead heat at
3.05.

~~~
mc32
I had no idea -that's quite amazing in an advanced economy (as most are
aware). I'm sure Singapore is jealous. They've been trying for ages to get
their pop to grow internally but always fall short.

~~~
javaIsGreat
I was surprised to see that many of the eastern European/Russian immigrants
moving to Israel over the last 40 years don't supply any evidence of Jewish
heritage (i know USSR and other European countries discriminated against Jews
so it would make sense that there are a lot of Jews who don't really have the
papers to prove it for a few generations).

An article I read said many French jews immigrated to Israel (due to rather
recent French anti-semitism sentiment) but immigrated back to Europe once
economic advancement for them wasn't attained.

Looks like Israeli society has had kind of an open door policy to Europeans
who are able to attain employment (i assume in the tech scene there).

------
someusername99
The referenced report is much more informative
[https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-census-data-shows-
the...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-census-data-shows-the-nation-
is-diversifying-even-faster-than-predicted/)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
One thing to keep in mind is that “white” many times absorbs the other
populations. In the past, for example, Italians and other Southern Europes
were not considered “white”. Now they are. Add to that intermarriages, and
likely the proportion of people who identify as “white” will be likely be
constant or grow in the future.

~~~
sir_bearington
This is an important point, especially with respect to the Hispanic
population. It's often referred to as a race, when it's more like a cultural
category - individual Hispanic people often identify as white, indigenous, or
black though racial identity tends to be more fluid due to greater historic
rates of intermarriage. I come from a Hispanic family, my grandparents more or
less exclusively speak Spanish. My parents who were born a couple years after
my grandparents immigrated would only be recognized as Hispanic if they made
that part of their identity known. If I were asked to identify myself racially
I'd say white, not Hispanic. I see myself as Cuban-Americans not as a racial
identity buy as an ancestry - the same way people are Irish-American or
German-American. 65% of Hispanics in the US identify as white:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans#Race)

~~~
Balgair
I would not be surprised if by the 2060s (40 years, ~2 generations) that Asian
Americans and Hispanic Americans get rolled up into being 'white'. Rates of
intermarriage between groups seem to be on the rise [0] though Hispanic data
is not well represented in my quick googling.

More hopefully, people will simply not care and diversity will be celebrated,
not denigrated as we've awoken to since George Floyd.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States)

~~~
dragonwriter
> I would not be surprised if by the 2060s (40 years, ~2 generations) that
> Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans get rolled up into being 'white'.

Hispanics are predominantly White by the standards by which race has any
meaning at all (though also several other races are represented), Hispanic is
an ethnic rather than racial category.

> Hispanic data is not well represented in my quick googling.

It's not going to show up in data on race because it's not a race.

> More hopefully, people will simply not care and diversity will be
> celebrated, not denigrated as we've awoken to since George Floyd.

The people marching in parades with Confederate flags haven't awoken to
anything. And each of America's periodic awakening on this issue has been
accompanied by exactly that kind of reaction and a hardening of White
supremacist ideology. It may be a shrinking minority each time, but it's also
increasingly committed, or at least renewing it's commitment each time.

------
sys_64738
We need immigrants of working age so they can pay taxes to support SSA and
Medicare recipients. That's the group who are most conservative and anti-
immigration.

------
unsignedchar
Is minority a shorthand for not white or black? Why is that the dominant axis
for parsing the population growth difference? Is the correlation with racial
distribution more pronounced than with other axes, or is this article aimed at
people too stupid to understand that people differ in more ways than race?

------
wpdev_63
One would think with automation on the horizon the government would
aggressively curb immigration. The people already here responsibly having
children are having a hard enough of a time with the cost of everything.

~~~
aaomidi
Another one would think with automation doing most of our jobs. Why can't we
share the spoils more?

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/VOxD0](https://archive.is/VOxD0)

------
bergstromm466
> Census data indicate White population has shrunk since 2010

Why is this the first bullet point? Why a focus on White people? Why do you
care HN?

The only other place I see stuff like this is when it’s used as an alt-right
talking point, or by white-supremacist mass-shooters who write about ‘The
Great Replacement’ [1]

[1] [https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/white-
supremacist-...](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/white-supremacist-
great-replacement/)

~~~
crocodiletears
Back in high-school, I had a (white) history teacher that made it a whole unit
in her class. Her thesis was that white people were the only thing in America
holding back progress, and that when the US was majority minority we'd reach
an inflection point where 'we' (progressives) would be able to implement
policies that might absolve the country of its sins, and tied it all into the
MLK arc of history quote.

Looking back now, I can't help but wonder if it didn't drive a few of my
classmates to some of the more reactionary and racist politics on the right.

~~~
rayiner
This is the progressive “demographic destiny” fever dream. Non-whites aren’t
that progressive. For example, non-whites are much more religious than whites.
Just 35% of white people say that belief in God is “necessary to be moral”
versus 55% of Hispanic people and 63% of black people. That’s particularly
remarkable because the median white person is 42 the median black person is
30, and the median Hispanic person is just 28. Religious belief increases with
age, so black and Hispanic people in the age groups that vote heavily are
likely even more religious compared to whites.

Hispanic people, meanwhile, are quite conservative on criminal justice issues.
They are consistently more conservative than white people when it comes to
ending things like mandatory minimums for drug crimes. Again, this is
remarkable considering the age distributions. It’s very interesting to look at
polls of Hispanic people’s’ opinions with respect to policing and the George
Floyd protests:
[https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/7msyzunum9/tabs_HP_Police_Reform...](https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/7msyzunum9/tabs_HP_Police_Reform_20200608.pdf)

8% of both Hispanic and white people say the system needs “no improvements”
compared to 3% of black people. Just 21 and 22% of Hispanic people and white
people, respectively, say the police system is “not sound” and “needs
significant changes” versus 45% of black people. On nearly every policing
issue, Hispanic people are a bit more liberal than white people, but I’m not
even sure that difference would remain if accounting for age differences.

On the economic front, asians and Hispanics are close to white people in
capitalism versus socialism, with just about a third of each group supporting
socialism: [https://www.cato.org/blog/59-americans-have-favorable-
views-...](https://www.cato.org/blog/59-americans-have-favorable-views-
capitalism-59-have-unfavorable-views-socialism). Again, an interesting result
given that support for socialism goes down significantly with age, and both
Hispanics and Asians are significantly younger than whites.

Right now, a lot of conservative people of color are forced into a coalition
with increasingly radical white progressives due to real and perceived
Republican racism. When that pressure disappears, I think you’ll see a
reshuffling of the coalitions. I can already see the seeds of this happening.
My parents are Bangladeshi immigrants. They’ve voted Democrat in every
selection since they became naturalized citizens. They voted for Hilary
Clinton not because she was the lesser of two evils, but because they liked
her. They’re the people who overturned the Sanders/Warren applecart when they
got around to tuning into the Democratic primary. My mom explained to me today
what _she thinks_ makes America great. “You can drive to an intersection at 1
am and if there is a red light, people will stop. Even if the streets are
totally empty, people will stop and wait for the green light.” She is worried
about the protests and said “if we aren’t going to have law and order in
America why shouldn’t I go back to Bangladesh?”

My dad is the more progressive of the two. He’s a Clinton Democrat who likes
that Bill cherry picked the best parts of the Republican agenda. He is alarmed
at the Warren/Sanders wing and was very nervous when everyone thought Biden
was done. His take on the idea that billionaires shouldn’t exist: “that’s
stupid.” He’s upset that people are lobbying to change the name of the high
school I went to (Thomas Jefferson in Virginia). But he is convinced that the
Clinton/Biden/Obama camp will hold, and says “America is an established
country, you won’t see radical change.”

~~~
tptacek
Where by "forced into a coalition with increasingly radical white
progressives", you probably mean "are running the table in a a party with a
noisy but politically ineffective faction of radical white progressives". Did
we not just watch the same 2020 Democratic primary? In the primary I watched,
two small, white, disorganized primaries created a brief and embarrassing
media blip of Sanders inevitability, followed by an unholy whupping in every
subsequent primary state. Sanders lost Washtenaw County Michigan to Biden.
Washtenaw is Ann Arbor. He lost the Berkeley of the Rust Belt. To Joe Biden.

A lot of what you have to say about politics is well-taken. From everything I
understand, you're right: people of color are indeed more conservative than
Very Online White People. But then it seems like you go a little off the
rails: the (relative) conservatism of Hispanic and black voters is reflected
in the Democratic party. If there's a shuffling of the party, it's going to be
angry DSA people to a long trip to the political wilderness of the Green
Party.

~~~
rayiner
I agree with you, and at least I meant to say the same thing. I read OP’s
teacher as saying that when the US became majority-minority, that would
eliminate the remaining roadblocks to a progressive remaking of America. And I
think that’s premised on the misunderstanding that because people of color
vote Democrat, they agree with progressive white Democrats that such a
remaking would be desirable.

As you observe, the 2020 Primary is an example of this phenomenon.
Progressives try to explain it away by saying suggesting “people of color
really agree with Warren, they’re just more concerned about electability.” But
my guess is that for the most part they, like my parents, actually _like_
Biden. And that should give anyone who believes in “demographic destiny”
pause.

