Losing Population and Loving It

• Mark Cromer
• August 5, 2024
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

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Don’t let the perpetual growth addicts fool you, population decline is hardly synonymous with societal decay and can actually be symptomatic of an improving quality of life.

An NPG Forum Paper
by Mark Cromer
August 2024

ABSTRACT

Human population statistics have long been portrayed in devoutly binary terms, through a black and white lens that holds population growth is fundamentally good and population decline is indisputably bad. Simplistic to the point of being dangerously delusional, platitudes praising population growth have helped propel the world past the planet’s carrying capacity through environmental catastrophe and toward the cusp of civilizational collapse. In the United States, however, there are locales that offer snap shots of the promise that depopulating communities hold and demonstrate in real world terms that decreases in population actually augur improved quality of life and hope for the future.

This past April, discerning television viewers across the United States were treated to an eight episode interpretation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, a reboot that was offered up by Netflix as a noirish departure from previous cinematic adaptions of the work.

The starkness of the black and white cinematography and the slow-brewing pace of the plot development throughout the story arc of Ripley, as this rendition was titled, was wrapped around another understated but ever-present feature of the landscape that con man-turned-killer Tom Ripley finds himself navigating: depopulated cities, towns and villages that speak of a glorious past amid a present pleasantly sparse of humans.

The series opens in New York City at the dawn of the 1960s, where Ripley finds himself hunkered down in the gritty room of a tenement building and surrounded by the ever-present symptoms of densely populated environs; from the grime of the big city to constant noise pollution and privacy intrusion. But when fate steers his path into a golden opportunity that puts him on a steamship crossing the Atlantic and then on a train to the southern Italian coast, Ripley arrives in a land of gorgeous architecture and glorious landmarks. A land that’s uniquely populated by a leisurely yet seemingly precious few people.

From the stinking sardine can of NYC to the breezy balconies, empty courtyards and deserted beach fronts of Atrani, San Remo and Palermo in the Mediterranean and Venice on the Adriatic, it’s a jarring juxtaposition for Ripley, a sparseness that seems both mildly ominous at times and yet seductively refreshing in its space.

As they watched American expats Ripley, Dickie  Greenleaf and Marge Sherwood drift in and out of hauntingly beautiful locations large and small and in places where a minimalist population keeps things running just fine and at a comfortable pace, many of them certainly pondered at least for a moment how lovely it would be to have such landscapes easily accessible here in which to live, not just visit occasionally to ‘get away from it all.’

For the millions of American viewers who watched the critically acclaimed Ripley, the baseline level of relative societal tranquility the series captured – presented primarily as a semi-surreal backdrop to mimicry, manipulation and murder – undoubtedly caught their eye as well and perhaps raised the question in their minds: Why can’t it be like that here today?

With America’s Great Cities now in states ranging from chronic crisis to civic rigor mortis and as many mid-sized cities and towns also find themselves reeling from crime, poverty, addiction and other social ills such as affordable housing shortages often exacerbated by grim economic conditions and diminishing resources, the axiom that population decline is a surefire symptom of decay is once again being bandied about as evidence of societal failures.

Southern California, a region that as of December 2023 was home to more than 23 million people, experienced a net loss of population among nine of its 10 counties between 2022 and 2023, marking the third consecutive year of population loss among the three coastal contiguous counties of Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura that are home to more than 13 million people.¹

Among the punditry class across the ideological spectrum, Southern California’s now consistent population shed (like the state at large, which has seen net outbound migration hit nearly 1 million residents since 2021²) has been interpreted in stark political terms. The Right sees it as Exhibit A on the roster of evidence that the deep blue state’s progressive politics have finally led to a nuclear-grade societal meltdown, fatally polluting the quality of life for famously laidback Californians as crime explodes on its streets even as a vast tide of homelessness surges in spite of the tens of billions of dollars Sacramento has thrown at the problem.³

For the Left, the exodus out of California as well as other high population blue states such as Illinois and New York, which have also charted successive net losses in population since 2020⁴, is the result of pandemic-related issues that have been amplified by a shortage of affordable housing and a spiking cost of living driven by corporate greed…Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.

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