Population Policy for a Depression
- Lindsey Grant
- February 1, 2009
- Forum Papers
- Forum Paper
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The country is presently absorbed in the financial crisis. We have, as usual, pretty well forgotten all the other issues that had been or should have been worrying us: fossil energy decline and the coming energy transition; climate change and its impacts; a growing water crisis; threats to U.S. food production; the on-going destruction of the non-human world; our spiraling budgetary and trade deficits; the stagnation of wages and the near disappearance of private savings for 30 years, and the threats to our health care system, magnified by rising unemployment.
The thesis of this article is that the population and immigration policies needed to deal with those fundamental systemic issues are the same policies needed to mitigate the current financial crisis, and they are made more urgent because of that crisis. And our government does not yet recognize the connections.
Lindsey Grant is a retired Foreign Service Officer; he was a China specialist and served as Director of the Office of Asian Communist Affairs, National Security Council staff member, and Department of State policy Planning staff member. As Deputy Secretary of State for Environmental and Population Affairs, he was Department of State coordinator for the Global 2000 Report to the President, Chairman of the interagency committee on Int’l Environmental Committee and US member of the UN ECE Committee of Experts on the Environment. His books include: Too Many People, Juggernaut, The Horseman and the Bureaucrat, Elephants in Volkswagen, How Many Americans?